Just like every Chinese fab is making electronics accessories for laptops and cell phones and such, expect that, if these things get cheap enough, we'll start seeing adapters to clip onto the bottom of phones that will take power from the pad.
Shortly after that, expect to start seeing universal adaptor kits at Radio Shack with a switch-selector voltage output, and 87 plugs, to connect to a generic charger. Maybe a charger base with 3 outputs.
The application for such a pad is MUCH larger than the article implies. It won't require manufacturers to integrate such receivers until well after their acceptance, which will drive down the price per unit to incorporate them into devices.
The problem with bank sites and such isn't that the sites themselves get hacked - seriously, when's the last time Wachovia or Capital One's website itself was hacked and your account info stoplen from the site itself?
No, the problem is things like Phishing scams and XSS vulnerabilities and stupid users who can't tell the difference between http://www.paypal.com/ and http://www.paypal.com.scammer.cn/ or who rea and follow emails from people they've never even heard of to claim their $500 gift certificate to Cracker Barrel or something equally ridiculous.
a.SAFE TLD won't make the sites any more safe, and will make them less safe, because people who don't know better will just assume that, because it's a.safe domain, it MUST be safe, otherwise it wouldn't be a.safe site, so they just go on entering all their private personal data into some bogus site.
.SAFE won't make things more safe, it will make them less, because <SPACEBALLS> Evil will always win, because Good is Dumb </SPACEBALLS>.
...is to use your account for perusal, buying, etc etc etc, and use a browser/profile with no account on Corbis to actually download the for-public-consumption images. The visible watermarking is already done for you.
The other option would be to just mogrify(1) the entire image directory to overlay your watermark on everything on the mockup.
As an app engineer for a major web services company (if you've ever bought software or ringtones for your cellphone or handheld, there's a good chance you've used our software), I guarantee that no testing/QA process will effecively exaust the space of possible real world examples. There's just too make devices with too many configurations in too many places for a test cycle to even be able to test all the permutations.
We have binders full of test cases...that are run across multiple devices, or through automated testing tools. And we still see, on the day after a code upgrade, code and device issues that "could" have been caught but weren't because that wasn't one of the primary test cases.
Unless your target audience is using a specific device in a specific configuration for a certain task, you'll never be able to replicate your real-world use cases in a manner that provides you'll be able to exhaustively test them. You test for the largest volume of potential use cases, and hope that your decided-upon "edge cases" really are edge cases and dodn't fall under the bell of the curve..
Also, many IT pros may be occupied with the switch to daylight saving time, which at the behest of Congress, is happening three weeks earlier this year.
Windows admins can't install patches next tuesday, because they're too busy installing patches which have to be done by this Saturday to be of any use.
What, are they going to go on a 4-day bender after the DST upgrades?
Do you really imply that in order to develop a suitable network management solution you must pay big cash to your bandwith provider or else your product must be shit?
You don't talk to managers much, I see.
You understand the difference. Most of people here understand the difference. PHBs don't understand the difference.
If you showed that to 95% of the non-technical managers who control puchase orders, they'd say, "If they can't keep their own website up, how can they be making a useful program to help you keep our network up?"
First of all, if your friend isn't savvy enough to set up his own proxy server....I mean, come on, it's a proxy server....he doesn't know enough to be safely gaming the system while he's at school.
Second of all, unless you set up the proxy to only be MySpace, it will be a matter of hours before someone realizes they can surf to AnimalSex.com or something else...and minutes after that before someone like a teacher or administrator walks by the computer, sees it, and gets your server address, where upon you'll be charged with Contributing to the Deliquincy of a Minor, if not worse.
Don't do it. Seriously, if he's smart enough to know he needs a proxyserver, he should be smart enough to apt-get install simpleproxy or squid or something else on a shell account somewhere, or even just run the binary on a nonpriv port.
...some sort of mechanism to have a computer automatically read the contents of a page that was in the Tubes of the Intarweb, and then create indexes on the words contained therein, and then allow users to access those indexes via another page on the Interweb, and look for pages which contain those words.
I'll be back later, I need to go to the Patent Office.
In the beginning, the Web was created by a bunch of http servers, serving a bunch of static pages. Then we got CGI and SSI. But all of this was still essentially static content served by a configured-and-let-run server.
Today, even "static" free sites aren't just static sites - they're powered by some application running inside or behind the web server, doing additional parsing and on-the-fly editing of pages. Most corporate sites are full three-tier environments with some sort of middleware sitting between the web presence and the databases in the back end.
The WebMaster is an obsolete job. Todays web environments are too complex and large, in most cases, for a single "WebMaster" to run himself. Since I've been "in the field", in 1998, the only "WebMasters" I've worked with are the IT guys who run the internal sites. They are part of the same team of people that do desktop support and take help desk calls. The Production web environments are managed by a team of people...systems people who run the hardware, and configure web servers. Applications people who run the middleware - WebLogic or WebSphere or PeopleSoft or the CMS systems or whatever. And DBAs who run the databases. These are teams of several people, all of whom have enough to do in their silo that they don't have the bandwidth to be able to manage all the pices of everything.
The WebMaster is gone - he's not been obsoleed, he's been overwhelmed and overrun by the technical requirements of the "New" Web and replaced with several teams to do what one person used to be able to manage himself.
If you want to insert political metaphors for how a technological solution works, then the entire Internet, by design, is Communistic.
Peers are peers. Neighbors talk to and shre with their neighbors their access, because when they need it back, their neighbors will share their access. Any peer is free to talk to any other peer, and arrange to share access between them, irrespective of what other peers they are talking to.
It's exactly this "communism" philosophy that makes the Internet work as well as it has for more than 20 years. Calling it "communism" is simply McCarthyism brought into the discussion about whether "Two legs bad Four legs good" is an appropriate business model for a system designed to be "Any legs good".
Market and business decisions, and local legislation and access rules aside, the reason people in China can look at servers in the US or France or Istanbul, is solely because the internet is unbiased in how it handles traffic. A packet is a packet, and on it travels to and from where it needs to go. There is no (in most cases, shaping is another discussion) "Paid" flag on the packet that lets routers know this packet is coming from or destined for a service which paid the protection fee and now gets to run roughshod over the network.
The Telcos who are whining about net-neutrality are whining because they're trying to double-dip, and they're being called on it. I pay my service provider for access. Bob's Widgets pays their access provider for their uplink. Everyone is paid up. The Telcos are upset that market forces have deemed that access is not worth as much money as they _want_ to charge for it, so they're trying to charge for both ends of the transaction from one side of the pipe, when the other end has already been paid.
This isn't about some large user being subsidized - my end has already been paid for at what the market has deemed the "proper" price. This is about Common Carriers trying to come along after the fact and say "We didn't charge you enough for the last 10 years, here's a bill for what you should have been paying".
If Net Neutrality is true Communism, then what the Telcos want is what Communism turned into in post-USSR Russia - the Haves and the Have Nots.
...The point is to create (or buy and free, in this case), a complete MMORPG gaming system. It's the MMORPG version of the Unreal Engine, for comparison's sake.
So the game wasn't that great. It's open source now, get a group of people together (a la Legend of the Green Dragon), and make a new world system based in the engine.
So it might take several servers and people to run the system. Set it up distributed, get someone to contribute the services of their 3DNS server somewhere, and now not only are you distributed, but you have geographical load balancing.
Commenters are talking about this as if the idea that a group of people on the IntarWebs can't democratically organize a large distributed server environment and keep it running the latest code and staffed with admins. I wouldn't mention that to the people at all ofthe variousirc networks, who have been doing exactly that for years, you might discourage them and make them shut down networks that have been running for longer than a decade.
And even if the whole Massive part of the game doesn't take off, who's to say specialty environments won't crop up, with admin tools and pre-formed game world content, a la AD&D or GURPS Modules and Expansions, letting players run actual 3D immersive campaigns on a single server somewhere for relatively small groups of people. For that matter, the idea of online 3D Battletech with the whole army of people that I used to play with years ago, instead of going through all the work to build huge tables, seems like a pretty fun concept.
The fact that such a beast could be released to the public is a good thing, even if you didn't like what the front end (Ryzom) was; the backend is what's important here. It's like the Unreal engine - there's a lot of games using it. Some of them suck, some of them are pretty good, but the content, and the engine to support the content, are two separate things. Yes, the bad (in the opinion of some people) content comes with it, but so does the engine that will let people drive whatever content they want.
Here at our shop, there is a gradual transition of ownership. I'll replace IT with Operations for us, because we're actually a tech company, and our IT department is the internal computers-on-desks group, where as the Operations team is the group that manages all fo the customer-facing money-making production sites.
Development owns their development environments. We provide as-can-do support for them, during business hours, when nothing else is going on. From there, a build manager (development does not do code builds eventually destined for Production) starts building code, and it deploying it with our pre-production team. In the first QA environment, Development and Pre-Prod work to make sure the release notes are complete, that all environmental and configuration changes are documented, so that the code will deploy to a downversioned environment. Development has significant, but not full, access to this environment. There is at least 1, and in some cases as many as 3, additional QA environments for each customer we have. Dev loses access at each step, until we get to Production, where they have a normal user-type account that isn't in any of the group IDs that the application install runs as, but still has access to view logfiles and such. In Production, Operations owns the install and the application.
There are a few assumptions that lead to "Dev owns Dev, Ops owns Prod". The biggest one is that, for each new release, the Release Notes HAVE to be complete. If we can't bring in a monkey off the street (OK, a technically oriented, slightly trained monkey...) to install the new code from the directions, then it doesn't get installed.
In addition, for the customer teams which run smoothest, we have several meetings each week. Just an hour, but we get people from Dev, QA, Operations, DBAs, Project Management, and Client Services in a room, and just go over the current issues. Sometimes the meeting is fast and over in 30 minutes, sometimes it runs long, but it gives everyone a chance to talk about what's going on and keep in the loop of current and pending releases. It seems that projects that have more problems don't have as much communication between teams have more problems in the transition from Development to QA to Production.
So, the answer you're probably lokoing for is that there needs to be a transition from Dev to Production. Dev needs to document, document, document. Dev can't be involved in the actual release of code. And the more often you can sit down with everyone involved, the more smoothly things will run.
Some say that good managers should not be technical at all.
As one poster says, who cares what "some people" say.
A technical manager isn't a good manager because he's not technical. He's a good manager because he trusts the other technical members on his team, and deflects "management" stuff from them, leaving them free to be technicians.
A techcnical manager, by definition, has to be technical in order to successfully serve as the wall between management and rank-and-file. If he can't understand what his people are doing, you'll be required to feed information to management, which gives a tacit line of communications between the workers and some higher level of management. A technical manager doesn't need to be a rock star, but they need to know what's going on and understand it sufficiently to be able to "translate" it to "Managerspeak", removing names from all the lackeys and putting his name and the name of his group, not the individual contributors.
I've had 3 good managers in my career. In one of those places, a manager was replaced later be someone who was not nearly as good. In all three cases, the common denominator wasn't that the manager wasn't technical; one wasn't, two were. The common trait was that they trusted that the people they hired knew their stuff, let them do what needed done without trying to micromanage or drive outside goals through it, and insulated us from the upper levels of management who wanted status updates, or timelines, or wanted to ask stupid questions. At my first job, when that manager left to be replaced by a less useful one (who was a much nicer guy, but a less effective manager), when I moved onto a document storage and retreival project, I got stuck dealing with umpteen different departments and representatives, all of whom had a stake in the project, none of whom I was able to address their concerns, since they were business level issues and concerns, not technical ones I was able to deal with.
So, the idea that good managers can't be technical is ridiculous. Anyone who's had more than one knows that a manager's technical inability has much less bearing on their ability to be a good manager than does their ability to assemble and trust their team of technicians.
If you were hiring MS grads outside the game industry for visualization work, am I worth more to you with the more specialized program or would you be more interested in me if I had more exposure?
If I were hiring people for visualization work, I'd probably hire...an art major with concentrations and experience in computer graphics.
Getting a Games degree instead of a CS degree is sorta like getting, say, a Masters in Medieval European History instead of the more general Masters in History. Yes, it shows you have a specific interest, but so would activities outside of school like internships and part-time positions where your interest was the focus, and it wouldn't limit you so much on paper.
Of course, I don't even specify what my degree is in on my resume, just that I have it. So take that with a grain of salt.
I don't know that, if non-Republicans ake over the House and Senate, and the Whitehouse in 2 years, that all of this will be undone.
I'm almost positive, though, that if the current crop of "Republicans" (quotes intended, as many of our parent's Republican friends will tell you that these people are not Republicans) stays in office, this type of "If you're not with us, you're for the terrorists" mentality will only get worse.
This is nothing like the fact that we already are required to use a passport for a number of these same reasons.
A passport is documentation to foreign countries that you are a documented U.S. citizen.
Being required to "check out" of the country with DHS, despite all the calls of "Godwin rule" invocations, is exactly like Soviet Russia, Communist Cuba and China, and Nazi Germany, in recent history.
Seriously, if you people don't get out and vote these facists out of office, you're going to be just like the guy from WWII who wrote the poem about how, when there was no one else left, they came for him, and there was no one left to stop them. Enough with the "But I don't have anything to hide". When are you going to realize it's not about, and never has been about, "hunting the terrorists" and "making us safe", it's about "controlling the people", through fear, and travel restrictions, and spying? The more people say "But I dont have anything to hide, let them go ahead", the more they win.
For instance, it might be perfectly legal to buy a fully automatic AK-47 in Russia (I suspect not, but it makes a simple example) , but importing such a weapon into the US would require jumping through numerous hoops.
An AK-47 isn't legal in the U.S. Digital music is legal in the U.S., despite RIAA's attempts to limit the channels through which they feel you should be allowed to purchase it through. No one is going to label you a felon for having an MP3 file. This is such an overextreme and bad comparison.
The current loophole works around that situation. It's legal to buy it in this method in Russia, and it's legal to own it in the U.S. (ok, technically you're supposed to pay duty tarriffs when you import things you personally buy, but that's an aside, the act of owning it is legal). It's legal to purchase such things overseas and import them to the US for your own use. There is technically no legal block here for disallowing AllOfMP#, other then the legal block that RIAA wants your Congresspeople to believe, that anyone who has non-endorsed digital audio files must have stolen them, and therefore is a felon.
Slashdot Mirror
Just like every Chinese fab is making electronics accessories for laptops and cell phones and such, expect that, if these things get cheap enough, we'll start seeing adapters to clip onto the bottom of phones that will take power from the pad.
Shortly after that, expect to start seeing universal adaptor kits at Radio Shack with a switch-selector voltage output, and 87 plugs, to connect to a generic charger. Maybe a charger base with 3 outputs.
The application for such a pad is MUCH larger than the article implies. It won't require manufacturers to integrate such receivers until well after their acceptance, which will drive down the price per unit to incorporate them into devices.
If this was the case, you could account for them like Capital Gains...
Make money, pay tax.
Lose money, get tax break
Looks like everyone wins!
The problem with bank sites and such isn't that the sites themselves get hacked - seriously, when's the last time Wachovia or Capital One's website itself was hacked and your account info stoplen from the site itself?
No, the problem is things like Phishing scams and XSS vulnerabilities and stupid users who can't tell the difference between http://www.paypal.com/ and http://www.paypal.com.scammer.cn/ or who rea and follow emails from people they've never even heard of to claim their $500 gift certificate to Cracker Barrel or something equally ridiculous.
a .SAFE TLD won't make the sites any more safe, and will make them less safe, because people who don't know better will just assume that, because it's a .safe domain, it MUST be safe, otherwise it wouldn't be a .safe site, so they just go on entering all their private personal data into some bogus site.
.SAFE won't make things more safe, it will make them less, because <SPACEBALLS> Evil will always win, because Good is Dumb </SPACEBALLS>.
Seriously, this is news? People who are early adopters of tech pay more than the people who wait 6-12 months to buy similar tech.
Move along, nothing to see here...
...is to use your account for perusal, buying, etc etc etc, and use a browser/profile with no account on Corbis to actually download the for-public-consumption images. The visible watermarking is already done for you.
The other option would be to just mogrify(1) the entire image directory to overlay your watermark on everything on the mockup.
As an app engineer for a major web services company (if you've ever bought software or ringtones for your cellphone or handheld, there's a good chance you've used our software), I guarantee that no testing/QA process will effecively exaust the space of possible real world examples. There's just too make devices with too many configurations in too many places for a test cycle to even be able to test all the permutations.
We have binders full of test cases...that are run across multiple devices, or through automated testing tools. And we still see, on the day after a code upgrade, code and device issues that "could" have been caught but weren't because that wasn't one of the primary test cases.
Unless your target audience is using a specific device in a specific configuration for a certain task, you'll never be able to replicate your real-world use cases in a manner that provides you'll be able to exhaustively test them. You test for the largest volume of potential use cases, and hope that your decided-upon "edge cases" really are edge cases and dodn't fall under the bell of the curve..
...they could charge $10 for a pack of corn in New York City, and it would sell like hotcakes.
Super Twins
Windows admins can't install patches next tuesday, because they're too busy installing patches which have to be done by this Saturday to be of any use.
What, are they going to go on a 4-day bender after the DST upgrades?
You don't talk to managers much, I see.
You understand the difference. Most of people here understand the difference. PHBs don't understand the difference.
If you showed that to 95% of the non-technical managers who control puchase orders, they'd say, "If they can't keep their own website up, how can they be making a useful program to help you keep our network up?"
First of all, if your friend isn't savvy enough to set up his own proxy server....I mean, come on, it's a proxy server....he doesn't know enough to be safely gaming the system while he's at school.
Second of all, unless you set up the proxy to only be MySpace, it will be a matter of hours before someone realizes they can surf to AnimalSex.com or something else...and minutes after that before someone like a teacher or administrator walks by the computer, sees it, and gets your server address, where upon you'll be charged with Contributing to the Deliquincy of a Minor, if not worse.
Don't do it. Seriously, if he's smart enough to know he needs a proxyserver, he should be smart enough to apt-get install simpleproxy or squid or something else on a shell account somewhere, or even just run the binary on a nonpriv port.
...some sort of mechanism to have a computer automatically read the contents of a page that was in the Tubes of the Intarweb, and then create indexes on the words contained therein, and then allow users to access those indexes via another page on the Interweb, and look for pages which contain those words.
I'll be back later, I need to go to the Patent Office.
...that the petition is the PITR petition?
I wonder how much user freedom Pitr would want people to have once he takes over Google...
In the beginning, the Web was created by a bunch of http servers, serving a bunch of static pages. Then we got CGI and SSI. But all of this was still essentially static content served by a configured-and-let-run server.
Today, even "static" free sites aren't just static sites - they're powered by some application running inside or behind the web server, doing additional parsing and on-the-fly editing of pages. Most corporate sites are full three-tier environments with some sort of middleware sitting between the web presence and the databases in the back end.
The WebMaster is an obsolete job. Todays web environments are too complex and large, in most cases, for a single "WebMaster" to run himself. Since I've been "in the field", in 1998, the only "WebMasters" I've worked with are the IT guys who run the internal sites. They are part of the same team of people that do desktop support and take help desk calls. The Production web environments are managed by a team of people...systems people who run the hardware, and configure web servers. Applications people who run the middleware - WebLogic or WebSphere or PeopleSoft or the CMS systems or whatever. And DBAs who run the databases. These are teams of several people, all of whom have enough to do in their silo that they don't have the bandwidth to be able to manage all the pices of everything.
The WebMaster is gone - he's not been obsoleed, he's been overwhelmed and overrun by the technical requirements of the "New" Web and replaced with several teams to do what one person used to be able to manage himself.
Communism?
If you want to insert political metaphors for how a technological solution works, then the entire Internet, by design, is Communistic.
Peers are peers. Neighbors talk to and shre with their neighbors their access, because when they need it back, their neighbors will share their access. Any peer is free to talk to any other peer, and arrange to share access between them, irrespective of what other peers they are talking to.
It's exactly this "communism" philosophy that makes the Internet work as well as it has for more than 20 years. Calling it "communism" is simply McCarthyism brought into the discussion about whether "Two legs bad Four legs good" is an appropriate business model for a system designed to be "Any legs good".
Market and business decisions, and local legislation and access rules aside, the reason people in China can look at servers in the US or France or Istanbul, is solely because the internet is unbiased in how it handles traffic. A packet is a packet, and on it travels to and from where it needs to go. There is no (in most cases, shaping is another discussion) "Paid" flag on the packet that lets routers know this packet is coming from or destined for a service which paid the protection fee and now gets to run roughshod over the network.
The Telcos who are whining about net-neutrality are whining because they're trying to double-dip, and they're being called on it. I pay my service provider for access. Bob's Widgets pays their access provider for their uplink. Everyone is paid up. The Telcos are upset that market forces have deemed that access is not worth as much money as they _want_ to charge for it, so they're trying to charge for both ends of the transaction from one side of the pipe, when the other end has already been paid.
This isn't about some large user being subsidized - my end has already been paid for at what the market has deemed the "proper" price. This is about Common Carriers trying to come along after the fact and say "We didn't charge you enough for the last 10 years, here's a bill for what you should have been paying".
If Net Neutrality is true Communism, then what the Telcos want is what Communism turned into in post-USSR Russia - the Haves and the Have Nots.
Knock Knock.
Who's There?
Falcon.
Falcon Who?
Now we're Falcon with Oracle!
...The point is to create (or buy and free, in this case), a complete MMORPG gaming system. It's the MMORPG version of the Unreal Engine, for comparison's sake.
So the game wasn't that great. It's open source now, get a group of people together (a la Legend of the Green Dragon), and make a new world system based in the engine.
So it might take several servers and people to run the system. Set it up distributed, get someone to contribute the services of their 3DNS server somewhere, and now not only are you distributed, but you have geographical load balancing.
Commenters are talking about this as if the idea that a group of people on the IntarWebs can't democratically organize a large distributed server environment and keep it running the latest code and staffed with admins. I wouldn't mention that to the people at all of the various irc networks, who have been doing exactly that for years, you might discourage them and make them shut down networks that have been running for longer than a decade.
And even if the whole Massive part of the game doesn't take off, who's to say specialty environments won't crop up, with admin tools and pre-formed game world content, a la AD&D or GURPS Modules and Expansions, letting players run actual 3D immersive campaigns on a single server somewhere for relatively small groups of people. For that matter, the idea of online 3D Battletech with the whole army of people that I used to play with years ago, instead of going through all the work to build huge tables, seems like a pretty fun concept.
The fact that such a beast could be released to the public is a good thing, even if you didn't like what the front end (Ryzom) was; the backend is what's important here. It's like the Unreal engine - there's a lot of games using it. Some of them suck, some of them are pretty good, but the content, and the engine to support the content, are two separate things. Yes, the bad (in the opinion of some people) content comes with it, but so does the engine that will let people drive whatever content they want.
...be able to extract new pain releivers from their dead carcasses.
Here at our shop, there is a gradual transition of ownership. I'll replace IT with Operations for us, because we're actually a tech company, and our IT department is the internal computers-on-desks group, where as the Operations team is the group that manages all fo the customer-facing money-making production sites.
Development owns their development environments. We provide as-can-do support for them, during business hours, when nothing else is going on. From there, a build manager (development does not do code builds eventually destined for Production) starts building code, and it deploying it with our pre-production team. In the first QA environment, Development and Pre-Prod work to make sure the release notes are complete, that all environmental and configuration changes are documented, so that the code will deploy to a downversioned environment. Development has significant, but not full, access to this environment. There is at least 1, and in some cases as many as 3, additional QA environments for each customer we have. Dev loses access at each step, until we get to Production, where they have a normal user-type account that isn't in any of the group IDs that the application install runs as, but still has access to view logfiles and such. In Production, Operations owns the install and the application.
There are a few assumptions that lead to "Dev owns Dev, Ops owns Prod". The biggest one is that, for each new release, the Release Notes HAVE to be complete. If we can't bring in a monkey off the street (OK, a technically oriented, slightly trained monkey...) to install the new code from the directions, then it doesn't get installed.
In addition, for the customer teams which run smoothest, we have several meetings each week. Just an hour, but we get people from Dev, QA, Operations, DBAs, Project Management, and Client Services in a room, and just go over the current issues. Sometimes the meeting is fast and over in 30 minutes, sometimes it runs long, but it gives everyone a chance to talk about what's going on and keep in the loop of current and pending releases. It seems that projects that have more problems don't have as much communication between teams have more problems in the transition from Development to QA to Production.
So, the answer you're probably lokoing for is that there needs to be a transition from Dev to Production. Dev needs to document, document, document. Dev can't be involved in the actual release of code. And the more often you can sit down with everyone involved, the more smoothly things will run.
As one poster says, who cares what "some people" say.
A technical manager isn't a good manager because he's not technical. He's a good manager because he trusts the other technical members on his team, and deflects "management" stuff from them, leaving them free to be technicians.
A techcnical manager, by definition, has to be technical in order to successfully serve as the wall between management and rank-and-file. If he can't understand what his people are doing, you'll be required to feed information to management, which gives a tacit line of communications between the workers and some higher level of management. A technical manager doesn't need to be a rock star, but they need to know what's going on and understand it sufficiently to be able to "translate" it to "Managerspeak", removing names from all the lackeys and putting his name and the name of his group, not the individual contributors.
I've had 3 good managers in my career. In one of those places, a manager was replaced later be someone who was not nearly as good. In all three cases, the common denominator wasn't that the manager wasn't technical; one wasn't, two were. The common trait was that they trusted that the people they hired knew their stuff, let them do what needed done without trying to micromanage or drive outside goals through it, and insulated us from the upper levels of management who wanted status updates, or timelines, or wanted to ask stupid questions. At my first job, when that manager left to be replaced by a less useful one (who was a much nicer guy, but a less effective manager), when I moved onto a document storage and retreival project, I got stuck dealing with umpteen different departments and representatives, all of whom had a stake in the project, none of whom I was able to address their concerns, since they were business level issues and concerns, not technical ones I was able to deal with.
So, the idea that good managers can't be technical is ridiculous. Anyone who's had more than one knows that a manager's technical inability has much less bearing on their ability to be a good manager than does their ability to assemble and trust their team of technicians.
If I were hiring people for visualization work, I'd probably hire...an art major with concentrations and experience in computer graphics.
Getting a Games degree instead of a CS degree is sorta like getting, say, a Masters in Medieval European History instead of the more general Masters in History. Yes, it shows you have a specific interest, but so would activities outside of school like internships and part-time positions where your interest was the focus, and it wouldn't limit you so much on paper.
Of course, I don't even specify what my degree is in on my resume, just that I have it. So take that with a grain of salt.
I don't know that, if non-Republicans ake over the House and Senate, and the Whitehouse in 2 years, that all of this will be undone.
I'm almost positive, though, that if the current crop of "Republicans" (quotes intended, as many of our parent's Republican friends will tell you that these people are not Republicans) stays in office, this type of "If you're not with us, you're for the terrorists" mentality will only get worse.
This is nothing like the fact that we already are required to use a passport for a number of these same reasons.
A passport is documentation to foreign countries that you are a documented U.S. citizen.
Being required to "check out" of the country with DHS, despite all the calls of "Godwin rule" invocations, is exactly like Soviet Russia, Communist Cuba and China, and Nazi Germany, in recent history.
Seriously, if you people don't get out and vote these facists out of office, you're going to be just like the guy from WWII who wrote the poem about how, when there was no one else left, they came for him, and there was no one left to stop them. Enough with the "But I don't have anything to hide". When are you going to realize it's not about, and never has been about, "hunting the terrorists" and "making us safe", it's about "controlling the people", through fear, and travel restrictions, and spying? The more people say "But I dont have anything to hide, let them go ahead", the more they win.
An AK-47 isn't legal in the U.S. Digital music is legal in the U.S., despite RIAA's attempts to limit the channels through which they feel you should be allowed to purchase it through. No one is going to label you a felon for having an MP3 file. This is such an overextreme and bad comparison.
The current loophole works around that situation. It's legal to buy it in this method in Russia, and it's legal to own it in the U.S. (ok, technically you're supposed to pay duty tarriffs when you import things you personally buy, but that's an aside, the act of owning it is legal). It's legal to purchase such things overseas and import them to the US for your own use. There is technically no legal block here for disallowing AllOfMP#, other then the legal block that RIAA wants your Congresspeople to believe, that anyone who has non-endorsed digital audio files must have stolen them, and therefore is a felon.
Astronomers should look into Anal Bleaching, I hear Tabitha Stevens endorses it to remove unsightly dark spots on her anus...