It would have been nice if the article had delved more into licensing programmers as engineers and the associated affects on liability. In the absence of licensing, liability would be a nightmare.
However, you could create a legal (ie, government-granted) license to engineer software. If the design, as well as some proportion of the testing and coding, of a program were done by licensed engineers, that program would be able to carry a certificate to that effect. You could also exempt from liability programs that made the source code available for review before user purchase of the product.
The government would require, as part of the law, that after some date all government software purchases would be of certified software only, or of open source software that had been reviewed and tested by a licensed engineer, who accepts liability for the product.
The market would quickly take care of the issue. Since only software carrying the certificate would be subject to legal liability, companies would simply not deploy software in critical areas if it did not carry this certification, and software that did carry the certification would be forced by the liability to get better. Also, developers would only be subject to liability if they claimed the certificate, so that amateur projects would not be subject to liability.
These rules in combination, and better thought-out than I have presented them here in outline, would tend to make software better, as either the program would be open source (and thus peer reviewed) or it would be subject to liability or it would be unable to make a reasonable profit (since corporate and government customers wouldn't buy software that was not subject to liability).
Further, there would auxiliarty benefits as well. There would be more of a push for standard components, because there would be no reason to reinvent them. (Right now, there are profit and market control reasons to do so in many cases.) There would be more examples available for new programmers to learn from. There would be less testing required by companies that purchase software (my company spends about one fourth of its project budget testing the off-the-shelf software used in the project).
Every entertainment medium is going digital, some (broadcast TV, broadcast radio, movies at the theater) more slowly than others (music, cable/satellite TV, Internet radio, movies for home use). Eventually, there will be a box available which has a radio tuner and a digital cable (or satellite) TV tuner, PVR functionality, music recording to the same internal hard drive as the movies, and a CD-R/DVD-R drive for dumping out content in a portable fashion. Heck, with the iMac, you are 75% of the way there on hardware (need the tuners) and the software wouldn't be difficult to put together.
Anyway, my point was that with entertainment going digital, all of the analog formats will be relegated to the back shelves, if they continue to exist at all. I suspect that this will be a falling-off-the-shelf phenomenon, like how vinyl disappeared in the US in a year or two after a critical mass of the public had a CD player; rather than a gradual slipping away of the format.
About the only thing that can hold this change back is legislation or excessive lawsuits. Seems that ??AA were ahead of the curve on the reasoning, since they are focusing on both lawsuits and legislation in their attempt to gain and maintain control of the audience.
My current plan is to read all of C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower books. I'm halfway through the third, and figure I'll finish all 11 in about a month. After that, I'll reread the Federalist Papers. After that, no telling.
people shouldn't get paid to do anything, and we should have a society without money.
Good idea. We could go back to the way it was before money was invented. I do directory services consulting for a living. I could get paid in pigs, fresh fish, computers and the like. Then all I'd have to do is figure out how to transform the pig I got in Chicago to an airline ticket plus some thing of value that I could both take with me on the plane, and use when I get home to convert into food for my family, to compensate the electric company with, and so forth.
Maybe we could set up exchanges, so that when I'm in Chicago, I could go to the local exchange and give my pig to someone who needs a pig and has an airline ticket and other goods useful to me, or some more complicated transaction that an exchange could facilitate. In any case, the exchange would only have value proportional to the number of people using it and the diversity of goods being exchanged. This system would work better if we could link all of the exchanges together, so that I could give my pig, in Chicago, to someone in New York who has the airline ticket I need and some other goods, and the other goods could go to someone in California in exchange for some goods useful to me to be delivered to my home in Texas. The linking of exchanges would increase the number of users and diversity of goods and services available.
This would be an even more useful idea if we had the ability to assign a value to a good or service, based on how in demand that product or service was, or how much work was used to make it, or how necessary it was to life (fresh water is far more needed than, say, a computer, but it's also more available, and easier to obtain). That way, we wouldn't have to actually move my pig to New York, and wait for the airline ticket and goods to come from New York to Chicago. We could just give our pig to someone in Chicago in exchange for the appropriate units of value, which we could then send (much more simply) to New York. The person in New York could give his airline ticket to the exchange there, and the excess units of value could be kept on account so that he could get something else from the exchange later. Heck, we could even eliminate the entire idea of exchanges, and just pass the units of value back and forth. Oh, damn! I just invented money.
Well, let's try again. Perhaps we could have a moneyless society where all production was given freely to whomever needed it. For example, I could consult on computers for free, but I could also help myself to whatever food, toys, computers, airline tickets, or whatever I needed. There would be plenty for everyone, and everything would be free. Of course, if I could get all of my needs and wants met for free, I could stop working. In fact, retirement is my goal, and this would speed this up very nicely. Of course, then my consulting services wouldn't be available, but that's OK because someone would do it for free, just for the love of it. Certainly, there would be enough people who would generously give of their time cleaning public toilets and such to make it possible for the rest of us to still get our food and toys and such.
Well, OK, I admit that this isn't a good deal because in reality the majority of people are not willing to work if they don't have to, or more than they have to. This can be fixed, though. For example, I could get a work ticket that showed I had worked 10 hours today, and by presenting that ticket to the local food vendor, I could get my food. I could present the ticket to the local computer vendor and get my computer. Of course, it takes a lot more time to make a computer than to, say, clean a house. So we'll have to have some unit of value assigned to each product, based on, say, the amount of time that it takes to make it. A computer could have a value of 100 hours, and cleaning a house could have a value of five hours. Now, to get my computer, I could present 100 hours worth of my directory services consulting tickets. Hmmm...but anyone can clean a house, and not very many people can do directory services consulting. We need a way to add value to the hours of work based on how much effort was put into being able to do those hours of work. Using house cleaning as a base, let's say that it takes 40 hours of education, plus the attendant living costs during that time, for a total of, say, 50 hours, for each hour that it takes to learn to clean a house. In that case, I could buy a computer with two hours of my labor, since it would be two hours with a value of 100 hours of house cleaning (or whatever the base labor task was). Wait a minute, I've invented money again.
Perhaps you could enlighten us on how this would work? I seem to be out of ideas.
Give the admin a set of tasks that is within the skill level of the position (not make-work; things that really need to be done). The original paperwork of the admin's hiring should demonstrate both what the position required, and that the application claimed to have those skills. Give the admin a deadline to complete the tasks satisfactorily. Document the results. Counsel the employee if necessary. Repeat.
After a few repetitions in which the employee has not met expectations, and has had documented failures to do so, and has had documented counseling sessions, then you can fire them with next to no risk.
If, on the other hand, the employee is meeting your expectations in doing the tasks correctly and on-time, then either you don't really want to fire them, or you want to fire them for the wrong reason.
We have 5 unix sysadmins (major transportation company). Not one of them could write a shell script if their life depended on it.
Hire better admins. They are out there, and a lot of them are unemployed right now. Any problem in an organization that persists past a few days or at most a few weeks is a management problem.
Generally, this is not difficult to do, as long as your admins understand the bases of UNIX. (Vendor-centric admins sometimes don't, as they get dependent on their vendor's tools.)
The problems can arise with:
1. vendor-centric admins who aren't willing to learn 2. different service contracts creating differing expectations of uptime between systems 3. added costs from maintaining multiple service contracts and training on multiple platforms 4. finger-pointing, if the systems interact 5. rewriting in-house tools which are needed on the new platform, but were not written generically before 6. 3rd party licensing costs may differ (if you are licensing the same product on both OSs) 7. dilution of expertise, since your admins will have to be more generalists (this is often overbalanced by the expansion of perspective in problem-solving that comes from broader experience)
Other than that, I can't think of anything off the top of my head which would make this hard. Generally, it is not a problem to do.
Thats 7 too many companies for a monopoly! People say monopoly way too much.
Perhaps they do say monopoly way too much, but the word is still appropriate here. In the US, it is generally the case (in fact, always the case, as far as I am aware) that each local market is a monopoly. There are 8 companies in the US for cable, but only one in any given service area.
The idea with platform competition - that is to say, that cable broadband competes with DSL - is that it's only partially true. There are high costs to get equipment, so that once you have cable, for example, you are unlikely to switch to DSL (with the attendent $200 installation if you can't find a deal). Also, since all of the broadband services look at their competition only within their platform when it comes to services and prices, the services tend to be poor and the prices high, since most broadband providers have no competition within their platform and service area.
On the other hand, I suspect that this will drive the community network connections forward, which is a good thing. Many developers in my region (DFW) are now building their developments with the homeowners' association controlling a preinstalled network with usually at least a T3 out (for about 100 houses), and sometimes more. All the houses are pre-wired, and you pay for the service monthly, at generally very low rates.
Boy, do I not want to be the pilot finding the bugs! That said, there's been a lot of discussion of this system over the past couple of years within the aviation community, and it appears that once the system is ready, it will be a great productivity boost to the controllers, while reducing their stress and strain in trying to track high-density, high-speed traffic.
I'd be more concerned about Teletubby viewing habits getting out.
I used to wonder why Teletubbies was shown on our local PBS station at 2am. I figured that it was for really drunk people. Now that I have a toddler who sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night, I understand.
Could someone take government 101 before posting about the subject? Lawyers don't post about CS, so why should CS majors feel they have a grasp (that they lack) of a subject like public policy or government.
Because we are citizens, and are required by that fact to take an active role in our own governance. I cannot imagine the horrors that would await if we turned the law over to lawyers and politicians without the moderating powers of judicial and jury nullification.
The court decides a case in a certain way, based on its interpretation that the law is unconstitutional. Assuming you are correct, the law is not overturned, and all that happened was that a case was decided.
Let's say another case is later brought. The lower court, knowing that it must either decide the same way as the Supreme Court earlier did, or get overturned on appeal, decides the way that the Supreme Court earlier did. If they don't, they get overturned on appeal (possibly not until they get to the Supreme Court, but at least when the case gets there).
Given that this is known in advance, after the first decision, people generally stop bringing similar cases. In effect, the law is unenforcable.
Let's face it: there is simply no political motive for going to Mars; science is fine as far as it goes, but not many people would pay US$30 Bn to know if there really is life on Mars.
Eventually, though, some group of very rich people or companies are going to realize that Mars has the land area of Earth, and most likely has similar mineral content. There is no one there to contest the land, and for a few tens of billions of dollars, a 1500% or better return could be anticipated, if the investors are willing to look at it over a 20 year or longer term. And, hey, we happen to already know how to make a colony work there, to some degree - at least, well enough to determine and quantify the risk factors. And there are plenty of qualified people who'd go for room and board.
Once that calculation is made by the right people (those with the money), the colonization of Mars is inevitable.
And if this had been developed open source, how many contributors would there have been? This kind of software is more like an internal development project for an organization, albeit outsourced, than it is like a general release application. The companies developing this gain none of the benefits of open source development (wide expertise available to the project, many eyes to review, etc) whilst giving up all of their development effort to their competitors bidding for the next, similar, project for some other country.
A terrorist is a person who kills civilians to advance a political aim. Yes, this means that Dresden was a terrorist act (since military aims are inherently political) and the murder of Pim Fortuyn was a terrorist act and so on. The US is theoretically attacking terrorists with "global reach", which would rule out the domestic variety of political murders and such. A freedom fighter, presumably a person whose political goal is to remove the influence of a government over a particular geographic area or some population subgroup, can still be a terrorist, if they kill civilians. Not all terrorism is bad, and not all freedom fighters are good, and the whole thing is mixed up together. What we are currently engaged in is the routing out of terrorists who target people across borders or in some way contrary to our interests.
As to gun control, I believe that Switzerland has a higher per capita gun ownership than does the US. Oh, and the US also has the most murders by knife, defenesration and a number of other methods.
OK, please go read (I would say re-read, but most Americans have for some reason not read them) the Federalist papers. Madison, Hamilton and Jay lay out the reasoning for the Constitution very well, and I'm certain that your take on this is quite off.
For example, in Federalist 84, Hamilton writes concerning the (lack of any) necessity of the Bill of Rights:
I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers not granted; and, on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? I will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulating power; but it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretense for claiming that power. They might urge with a semblance of reason, that the Constitution ought not to be charged with the absurdity of providing against the abuse of an authority which was not given, and that the provision against restraining the liberty of the press afforded a clear implication, that a power to prescribe proper regulations concerning it was intended to be vested in the national government.
It is clear that Hamilton wanted no government decisions on what constitutes "the press" or what freedoms it should have. Instead, the power to regulate the press in any way was simply withheld from the govnernment. Indeed, throughout the Constitution there is a presumption that all rights and duties are the part of the people or of the States (and this is expressed directly, in fact, in the Constitution, although that particular amendment is generally ignored). Only expressly granted rights and duties accrue to the government.
In one of the early Federalist papers, this is discussed quite thoroughly. In essence, it is the historical need for standing armies and fortified borders, and the concommitant need to take away the rights of the people who lived in those border areas, that over time accustomed the Europeans to being deprived of liberties to the point where they don't realize that they are so deprived.
When I was in a management job, I hired people in situations like yours. What I always looked for were people who could understand what was going on conceptually, and could do something basic on the board, such as code a bubble sort, in any language they desired. Job experience and education are important, but not critical. Understanding and ability are critical.
Be prepared for a lower salary to start with, though, than a programmer with a background or education in the field. After all, your employer will be taking a risk on you.
Slashdot Mirror
It would have been nice if the article had delved more into licensing programmers as engineers and the associated affects on liability. In the absence of licensing, liability would be a nightmare.
However, you could create a legal (ie, government-granted) license to engineer software. If the design, as well as some proportion of the testing and coding, of a program were done by licensed engineers, that program would be able to carry a certificate to that effect. You could also exempt from liability programs that made the source code available for review before user purchase of the product.
The government would require, as part of the law, that after some date all government software purchases would be of certified software only, or of open source software that had been reviewed and tested by a licensed engineer, who accepts liability for the product.
The market would quickly take care of the issue. Since only software carrying the certificate would be subject to legal liability, companies would simply not deploy software in critical areas if it did not carry this certification, and software that did carry the certification would be forced by the liability to get better. Also, developers would only be subject to liability if they claimed the certificate, so that amateur projects would not be subject to liability.
These rules in combination, and better thought-out than I have presented them here in outline, would tend to make software better, as either the program would be open source (and thus peer reviewed) or it would be subject to liability or it would be unable to make a reasonable profit (since corporate and government customers wouldn't buy software that was not subject to liability).
Further, there would auxiliarty benefits as well. There would be more of a push for standard components, because there would be no reason to reinvent them. (Right now, there are profit and market control reasons to do so in many cases.) There would be more examples available for new programmers to learn from. There would be less testing required by companies that purchase software (my company spends about one fourth of its project budget testing the off-the-shelf software used in the project).
-jeff
Every entertainment medium is going digital, some (broadcast TV, broadcast radio, movies at the theater) more slowly than others (music, cable/satellite TV, Internet radio, movies for home use). Eventually, there will be a box available which has a radio tuner and a digital cable (or satellite) TV tuner, PVR functionality, music recording to the same internal hard drive as the movies, and a CD-R/DVD-R drive for dumping out content in a portable fashion. Heck, with the iMac, you are 75% of the way there on hardware (need the tuners) and the software wouldn't be difficult to put together.
Anyway, my point was that with entertainment going digital, all of the analog formats will be relegated to the back shelves, if they continue to exist at all. I suspect that this will be a falling-off-the-shelf phenomenon, like how vinyl disappeared in the US in a year or two after a critical mass of the public had a CD player; rather than a gradual slipping away of the format.
About the only thing that can hold this change back is legislation or excessive lawsuits. Seems that ??AA were ahead of the curve on the reasoning, since they are focusing on both lawsuits and legislation in their attempt to gain and maintain control of the audience.
My current plan is to read all of C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower books. I'm halfway through the third, and figure I'll finish all 11 in about a month. After that, I'll reread the Federalist Papers. After that, no telling.
Good idea. We could go back to the way it was before money was invented. I do directory services consulting for a living. I could get paid in pigs, fresh fish, computers and the like. Then all I'd have to do is figure out how to transform the pig I got in Chicago to an airline ticket plus some thing of value that I could both take with me on the plane, and use when I get home to convert into food for my family, to compensate the electric company with, and so forth.
Maybe we could set up exchanges, so that when I'm in Chicago, I could go to the local exchange and give my pig to someone who needs a pig and has an airline ticket and other goods useful to me, or some more complicated transaction that an exchange could facilitate. In any case, the exchange would only have value proportional to the number of people using it and the diversity of goods being exchanged. This system would work better if we could link all of the exchanges together, so that I could give my pig, in Chicago, to someone in New York who has the airline ticket I need and some other goods, and the other goods could go to someone in California in exchange for some goods useful to me to be delivered to my home in Texas. The linking of exchanges would increase the number of users and diversity of goods and services available.
This would be an even more useful idea if we had the ability to assign a value to a good or service, based on how in demand that product or service was, or how much work was used to make it, or how necessary it was to life (fresh water is far more needed than, say, a computer, but it's also more available, and easier to obtain). That way, we wouldn't have to actually move my pig to New York, and wait for the airline ticket and goods to come from New York to Chicago. We could just give our pig to someone in Chicago in exchange for the appropriate units of value, which we could then send (much more simply) to New York. The person in New York could give his airline ticket to the exchange there, and the excess units of value could be kept on account so that he could get something else from the exchange later. Heck, we could even eliminate the entire idea of exchanges, and just pass the units of value back and forth. Oh, damn! I just invented money.
Well, let's try again. Perhaps we could have a moneyless society where all production was given freely to whomever needed it. For example, I could consult on computers for free, but I could also help myself to whatever food, toys, computers, airline tickets, or whatever I needed. There would be plenty for everyone, and everything would be free. Of course, if I could get all of my needs and wants met for free, I could stop working. In fact, retirement is my goal, and this would speed this up very nicely. Of course, then my consulting services wouldn't be available, but that's OK because someone would do it for free, just for the love of it. Certainly, there would be enough people who would generously give of their time cleaning public toilets and such to make it possible for the rest of us to still get our food and toys and such.
Well, OK, I admit that this isn't a good deal because in reality the majority of people are not willing to work if they don't have to, or more than they have to. This can be fixed, though. For example, I could get a work ticket that showed I had worked 10 hours today, and by presenting that ticket to the local food vendor, I could get my food. I could present the ticket to the local computer vendor and get my computer. Of course, it takes a lot more time to make a computer than to, say, clean a house. So we'll have to have some unit of value assigned to each product, based on, say, the amount of time that it takes to make it. A computer could have a value of 100 hours, and cleaning a house could have a value of five hours. Now, to get my computer, I could present 100 hours worth of my directory services consulting tickets. Hmmm...but anyone can clean a house, and not very many people can do directory services consulting. We need a way to add value to the hours of work based on how much effort was put into being able to do those hours of work. Using house cleaning as a base, let's say that it takes 40 hours of education, plus the attendant living costs during that time, for a total of, say, 50 hours, for each hour that it takes to learn to clean a house. In that case, I could buy a computer with two hours of my labor, since it would be two hours with a value of 100 hours of house cleaning (or whatever the base labor task was). Wait a minute, I've invented money again.
Perhaps you could enlighten us on how this would work? I seem to be out of ideas.
HAHAHAHAHAHA...Cough...gag...splutter.
That's the funniest thing I've read all day! You are either an exceptional comedian, or have never met an academic.
Yes, I've fired sysadmins.
Give the admin a set of tasks that is within the skill level of the position (not make-work; things that really need to be done). The original paperwork of the admin's hiring should demonstrate both what the position required, and that the application claimed to have those skills. Give the admin a deadline to complete the tasks satisfactorily. Document the results. Counsel the employee if necessary. Repeat.
After a few repetitions in which the employee has not met expectations, and has had documented failures to do so, and has had documented counseling sessions, then you can fire them with next to no risk.
If, on the other hand, the employee is meeting your expectations in doing the tasks correctly and on-time, then either you don't really want to fire them, or you want to fire them for the wrong reason.
Hire better admins. They are out there, and a lot of them are unemployed right now. Any problem in an organization that persists past a few days or at most a few weeks is a management problem.
Generally, this is not difficult to do, as long as your admins understand the bases of UNIX. (Vendor-centric admins sometimes don't, as they get dependent on their vendor's tools.)
The problems can arise with:
1. vendor-centric admins who aren't willing to learn
2. different service contracts creating differing expectations of uptime between systems
3. added costs from maintaining multiple service contracts and training on multiple platforms
4. finger-pointing, if the systems interact
5. rewriting in-house tools which are needed on the new platform, but were not written generically before
6. 3rd party licensing costs may differ (if you are licensing the same product on both OSs)
7. dilution of expertise, since your admins will have to be more generalists (this is often overbalanced by the expansion of perspective in problem-solving that comes from broader experience)
Other than that, I can't think of anything off the top of my head which would make this hard. Generally, it is not a problem to do.
Perhaps they do say monopoly way too much, but the word is still appropriate here. In the US, it is generally the case (in fact, always the case, as far as I am aware) that each local market is a monopoly. There are 8 companies in the US for cable, but only one in any given service area.
The idea with platform competition - that is to say, that cable broadband competes with DSL - is that it's only partially true. There are high costs to get equipment, so that once you have cable, for example, you are unlikely to switch to DSL (with the attendent $200 installation if you can't find a deal). Also, since all of the broadband services look at their competition only within their platform when it comes to services and prices, the services tend to be poor and the prices high, since most broadband providers have no competition within their platform and service area.
On the other hand, I suspect that this will drive the community network connections forward, which is a good thing. Many developers in my region (DFW) are now building their developments with the homeowners' association controlling a preinstalled network with usually at least a T3 out (for about 100 houses), and sometimes more. All the houses are pre-wired, and you pay for the service monthly, at generally very low rates.
Boy, do I not want to be the pilot finding the bugs! That said, there's been a lot of discussion of this system over the past couple of years within the aviation community, and it appears that once the system is ready, it will be a great productivity boost to the controllers, while reducing their stress and strain in trying to track high-density, high-speed traffic.
So MS has a study with the same name as the AdTI's study, and on the same topic? Hmmm....
Light bulbs must be really expensive in N. Korea!
I used to wonder why Teletubbies was shown on our local PBS station at 2am. I figured that it was for really drunk people. Now that I have a toddler who sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night, I understand.
Where can I find the guy who asked you those two questions? I'd like to hire him.
Because we are citizens, and are required by that fact to take an active role in our own governance. I cannot imagine the horrors that would await if we turned the law over to lawyers and politicians without the moderating powers of judicial and jury nullification.
Consider:
The court decides a case in a certain way, based on its interpretation that the law is unconstitutional. Assuming you are correct, the law is not overturned, and all that happened was that a case was decided.
Let's say another case is later brought. The lower court, knowing that it must either decide the same way as the Supreme Court earlier did, or get overturned on appeal, decides the way that the Supreme Court earlier did. If they don't, they get overturned on appeal (possibly not until they get to the Supreme Court, but at least when the case gets there).
Given that this is known in advance, after the first decision, people generally stop bringing similar cases. In effect, the law is unenforcable.
-jeff
Ah, but will it be possible for me to edit years 21 and 22 out of my life retroactively?
-jeff
Let's face it: there is simply no political motive for going to Mars; science is fine as far as it goes, but not many people would pay US$30 Bn to know if there really is life on Mars.
Eventually, though, some group of very rich people or companies are going to realize that Mars has the land area of Earth, and most likely has similar mineral content. There is no one there to contest the land, and for a few tens of billions of dollars, a 1500% or better return could be anticipated, if the investors are willing to look at it over a 20 year or longer term. And, hey, we happen to already know how to make a colony work there, to some degree - at least, well enough to determine and quantify the risk factors. And there are plenty of qualified people who'd go for room and board.
Once that calculation is made by the right people (those with the money), the colonization of Mars is inevitable.
And if this had been developed open source, how many contributors would there have been? This kind of software is more like an internal development project for an organization, albeit outsourced, than it is like a general release application. The companies developing this gain none of the benefits of open source development (wide expertise available to the project, many eyes to review, etc) whilst giving up all of their development effort to their competitors bidding for the next, similar, project for some other country.
A terrorist is a person who kills civilians to advance a political aim. Yes, this means that Dresden was a terrorist act (since military aims are inherently political) and the murder of Pim Fortuyn was a terrorist act and so on. The US is theoretically attacking terrorists with "global reach", which would rule out the domestic variety of political murders and such. A freedom fighter, presumably a person whose political goal is to remove the influence of a government over a particular geographic area or some population subgroup, can still be a terrorist, if they kill civilians. Not all terrorism is bad, and not all freedom fighters are good, and the whole thing is mixed up together. What we are currently engaged in is the routing out of terrorists who target people across borders or in some way contrary to our interests.
As to gun control, I believe that Switzerland has a higher per capita gun ownership than does the US. Oh, and the US also has the most murders by knife, defenesration and a number of other methods.
-jeff
I actually did use that exact test (bubble sort) with one applicant, who quickly wrote:
cat | sort
He was hired.
OK, please go read (I would say re-read, but most Americans have for some reason not read them) the Federalist papers. Madison, Hamilton and Jay lay out the reasoning for the Constitution very well, and I'm certain that your take on this is quite off.
For example, in Federalist 84, Hamilton writes concerning the (lack of any) necessity of the Bill of Rights:
It is clear that Hamilton wanted no government decisions on what constitutes "the press" or what freedoms it should have. Instead, the power to regulate the press in any way was simply withheld from the govnernment. Indeed, throughout the Constitution there is a presumption that all rights and duties are the part of the people or of the States (and this is expressed directly, in fact, in the Constitution, although that particular amendment is generally ignored). Only expressly granted rights and duties accrue to the government.
In one of the early Federalist papers, this is discussed quite thoroughly. In essence, it is the historical need for standing armies and fortified borders, and the concommitant need to take away the rights of the people who lived in those border areas, that over time accustomed the Europeans to being deprived of liberties to the point where they don't realize that they are so deprived.
When I was in a management job, I hired people in situations like yours. What I always looked for were people who could understand what was going on conceptually, and could do something basic on the board, such as code a bubble sort, in any language they desired. Job experience and education are important, but not critical. Understanding and ability are critical.
Be prepared for a lower salary to start with, though, than a programmer with a background or education in the field. After all, your employer will be taking a risk on you.