I'm pretty sure that standard doesn't apply to copyrights. For Trademarks I believe that is true though, because if your trademark becomes common language (like kleanex) it becomes more difficult to protect that trademark through lawsuits. That's why Google is trying to keep the word 'google' from becoming a verb.
The copyrights of the images belong to the photographers so Ford doesn't have any rights regarding the pictures. The cars belong to the photographers (or their lenders) so Ford doesn't have any rights to them. The only thing I can imagine is that Ford is claiming the appearance of the Ford and Mustang logos is an infringement on their trademark, and that the distinctive appearance of the Mustang is itself a trademark.
But it has already been a very long time since it has been possible to be detained for not being able to produce your state ID that is based on that birth certificate. Not true. There is no legal requirement to HAVE a State ID or drivers license. I have a friend with CP. He's been stuck in a wheel chair since childhood. He has no license, he lives on a buss route and has friends haul him around. He didn't get a State ID until he was in his mid/late 20's. For a good period of time there, he was living on his own, in his own apartment, holding down a job, with out a drivers license or state ID. Yes, he had a couple of other IDs for various specific purposes, but nothing with a photo. If a cop were to demand identification from him, he would have been unable to comply, and he could not be legally detained for it.
If my memory serves correct, there was an attempt to pass legislation or a court case in recent history (in the last year) dealing with this very subject. I can't recall exactly how it turned out though. But at least until that point, you could not be legally detained for not providing identification. Sure, a cop could pick you up and take you to the station for not providing identification, but there is (was) no law or legal precedence that would compel you to provide identification other than that required by the activity you are partaking in (ie: Driving, fishing, hunting, selling guns, etc...)
Unfortunately more people don't fight for their civil liberties, so the acts of overzealous officers is becoming the norm. And eventually, riding on the back of the National ID, it will become law.
Just because it's already bad it doesn't mean that we should just stop fighting for our rights.
a national ID would solve as many problems for the individual as people think it would cause. EXCELLENT! Please do tell, what problems of mine will it solve?
I agree with you that we have already lost a lot, but due to the current existence of red tape, bureaucracy, and excessive burden, we are protected. Much like how copy right infringement was a non-issue before the internet due to the difficulties involved in reproduction and mass-distribution. The existing system is limited by it's technology and differing standards to prevent much of the abuse that it could be used for.
For example, you can not be arrested for walking down the street and being unable to produce your birth certificate. How long before the same can be said about your National ID card?
And that brings up another point. If we already have solutions to all of these "security via identification" issues, why are we creating a new solution? Let alone a solution that is going to cost us the tax payers billions of dollars to instate.
The government is offering us the opportunity to pay for them to reduce our civil liberties.
Who the hell is going to stand up and say, "Yes! I'll pay the government to further reduce my civil liberties and propagate my risk for identity theft!"
What's the risk of not going to such a card? We continue using state licenses, birth certificates, passports, etc... We continue life as usual.
What's the risk of going to such a card? Erosion of civil liberties? More cases of identity theft? Racial profiling and other abuses at the federal government? More invasions into our privacy? Hundreds of dollars more in taxes for every tax paying citizen just to get the systems online?
Maybe it's the libertarian inside of me, but why the hell should we buy a new system when our existing system isn't broken? I'd much rather be wrong and stick with our existing system than right and have the National ID card system.
So if the National ID card does nothing new, then why should we pay for it?
Also, currently you can not legally be detained for failure to present an ID. If you can not produce a drivers license while driving, you can be detained. But if you can not produce a drivers license or state ID while walking, you can not be legally detained. Not that that will stop an over zealous cop from dragging you down town, but you'll have grounds to get out in short order.
Honestly, all they're saying is that all IDs should "look the same" and contain the same set of information. If that were all that they were saying, then I would not object. But it goes well past that point.
1) All of the recorded data from applications is stored centrally under the control of the federal government. 2) Even if your application is rejected, your picture and all related data is stored and marked as rejected. 3) The plan explicitly limits citizen's liberties based on their possession of this card.
Now, in what realm is it a good idea to give the federal government a detailed list of everyone in the country, a centrally stored (and inevitably craqcked) database of that list, and the power to further limit our abilities?
People keep preaching about security. Let's be 100% clear on this: The National ID Card will NOT improve security. At best all it will do is further restrict the activities of law abiding citizens, at worst it will provide a huge step in the direction of a totalitarian state.
-Rick
PS: And actually, other than the tri-layered lamanent, the cards from state to state will not actually look like each other.
Yes, we currently have a combination of documents that do the same thing as what the National ID is supose to do. That right there should set off alarm bells: The National ID card is redundant. Not only that, but it is a combination of papers. No one is going to walk down the street with the birth certificate, SSN card, license, and passport on them at all times. The inability to produce all of these documents at any given time is what prevents a rapid slide down the "papers please" slope.
I hate to burst your bubble, but I've spent time in Mexico, Germany, France, Korea, and Japan. I would actually venture to say just the opposite. Those people who DON'T complain about the National ID card are people who have never been in a country where police are able to demand you to identify yourself. Heck, just check some of the replies to this thread, you'll see stories about people getting picked up off the street in foreign countries and arrested just for not having their passport on them.
Uh, last I checked, illegal immigrants are not "overrunning" our country. In fact, last time I saw the numbers, illegal immigration numbers had leveled off. Claims that illegal immigration is going through some kind of sudden explosive growth is purely FUD. It is a combination of alarmist reporting to drive up ratings, and a political prop to get simpletons to vote for political parties that claim to be "hard" on immigration. Not that those laws actually do anything good for the local regions with high illegal immigration populations, but if they shout it loud enough, people will believe them.
Nah, if you want to work on minimizing the effect of illegal immigrants on our nation's stability and economy, the solution isn't to push them further underground, but just the opposite. Identify them, tax them, ensure that employers are following labor laws. If you make them responsible to the society that supports them, it will do far more good for the society as a whole than to remove them from all responsibility and allow the society to abuse them while short changing those members of society that are responsible.
Tighten the borders to reduce unfettered crossing, open more legal immigration options, and demand responsibility of those that are already here.
Slowly but surely, it will become a 'Show me your papers' issue. Imagine just walking down the street, a cop sees you, maybe he's having a bad day, maybe you roughly match the description of a wanted criminal, he approaches you and asks for you national ID. You don't have it though, because you were just going for a walk. Next thing you know, you're heading down town, handcuffed in the back of a crown vic. Sure, they'll let you out, once you can get a friend to bring your ID in, or go through the red tape to get the State to produce the paper work, but by that point you've been printed, your arrest has been recorded, and you're out a few hours to a few days getting everything straightened out.
Fear mongers will use it as a tool against illegal immigrants first. By requiring the national ID to be able to do the most mundane of things, they'll push aliens further out of the legal realm. Then all it would take is another attack to spur off a series of knee jerk reactions that lead to certain racial/ethnic groups having their cards pulled, leaving them as 2nd class citizens, virtually outlaws because they have no ID to prove their legitimacy in the US.
Yes, it's a paranoid delusion. But so was the idea that the US would use black site prisons, suspend habeas corpus, and invade a sovereign nation on manufactured intelligence. Given enough time, the system will be abused, and civil liberties will be eroded.
And the whole time, this card will do nothing to make our country more secure.
So it can take low res video, convert it to high res video, do facial recognition, and organize those recognized faces for easy playback... the potential for it's use in security and espionage systems is huge!
Are you serious? If yes, then this is a great way, really... I don't travel as much as I used to, but this was quite effective back in 2001-2003 time frame. It started off as one of those 'if they're going to go through my stuff' rants, turned into a bar room dare, and eventually was put into practice.
A few things I noticed: 1) the female inspector I had to deal with on one occasion was very flustered about the ordeal. After finding the first item she started blushing and was doing everything she could to get me out of there (the screening table was just off to the side of the line, so if any of the boarding passengers looked over they would have seen her holding the... instrument...) 2) the male inspector I had to with on another occasion said that he thought I was carrying the stuff just to try to embarrass him. I assured him that I was a swinger on my way to a wild party of decadence. Unfortunately though, he was right, I was just doing it to screw with him (and to cash in on a $25 bar bet). 3) I would recommend not bringing any toys in excess of 24" as they could be used as a bludgeoning weapon. 4) I would also recommend not bringing up any threats of choke hazards. Those TSA guards are damn picky, and one poorly timed joke will guaranty a missed flight. I almost got stranded in MN once because I disagreed with a TSA guard about the ability to use the clip on my wallet's chain (not the chain itself, the clip) as a weapon.
I think this goes directly to the article's point. A BSc in CS from a 4 year university should mean more than just the ability to program in a particular environment. Stop right there. A 4-year BS at a university does not mean MORE than a 4-year BS from a tech school. It means something DIFFERENT.
I have a buddy who works in the laser microscopy industry. He has a 4-year EE BS from a tech school, almost all of his coworkers have 4-year EE BSs from Universities. They are all extremely smart guys. The University guys have an edge on him in some of the theoretical areas, which is to be expected. But he has an edge over them in engineering a product that will optimize a lot of the theory and limitations of their production abilities. For instance, he stepped in on a project that another engineer was working on. The project was functional, but just barely, all of the theory was spot on, but it wasn't anything that they could sell. So my friend took over, refining the layout and functionality of the electronics, removing almost 500 feet of wiring, completely restructuring the layout, designing new enclosures, mounting systems, etc... Could he have figured out the theory behind the original engineering all by himself? Probably, given enough time. But the University grad has more knowledge on it, and so he could come up with that design faster. Could the University grad have turned the proof of concept into a sell-able box? Probably, given enough time. But the tech school grad has more knowledge on real world environments, functional design, fabrication, and economic and production constraints, so he could come up with that design faster.
Me personally, I have a tech school AS in comp sci with a BS in Computer Information Systems (CS focus) and a BS in Computer Information Management. I've been doing software development since '97 in the military and as a civilian as a contractor and full time employee. I've worked with uneducated prodigies, grad school masters, and tech school graduates. And I have to say, if I need an entry level application developer for a business environment application, I head straight to the local tech schools and look for a student who is ace-ing the courses and getting along with his/her classmates.
It's not because I think tech degrees are better than university degrees. It's because I think tech degree course catalogs have more pertinent classes to the industry I work in than university programs do. If I were working at MS or Google, trying to find more people to work on a new search algorithm, or the next version of Windows, I would move my recruitment efforts to the universities.
I've seen (and suffered with) some horrible web and "office application" code that was written by people who obviously had no intuitive sense of algorithmic complexity and what the impact of an O(n^2) algorithm was as n got beyond their little test case. I've also seen (and suffered with) similar "multi threaded" code written by people who seemed to have only the barest of notions about concurrency control. I have also seen university grads look at a O(n^2) problem and find amazing ways of optimizing the compiler, creating custom memory management functionality, and working on making it the most efficient O(n^2) function they could. Just to have a tech school grad look at it and say 'you know if you reorganize your code's structure, you wouldn't need any of this'.
Once again, I'm not saying either degree is better than the other, just that they are different, and the graduates of both programs will likely have different things they can bring to the table.
Or just travel with an old broken laptop and when he asks you to boot it, ask the guy to fix it first. - "but officer, I'm taking it to Best Buy for repair!?" I find traveling with sex toys in your carry on is a great way to get searches to end quickly.
If you are going into Web development, office productivity desk top development, or information management applications, knowledge of pointers, memory management, stacks, linked lists, etc... is worth exceptionally little.
The vast majority of development is being done using pre-compiled libraries. Because let's face it, there is no need for your employer to pay you to recreate the string class, or a hash table, or any other primitive functionality that already exists in any number of languages. Sure, this knowledge is good to have as it can come in handy. But in reality, other then a cursory understanding to ground your knowledge to, the in depth knowledge of them will not effect the vast majority of developers.
Sure, if you are working in OS development, or in embedded software, or in other arena's where you may not be able to use a managed code solution, yeah, knowing C/C++ and all of the underlying mechanics is critical. But when was the last time you listened to a web developer talk about span width, compression algorithms, and rendering engines?
I think Java is an excellent tool for teaching OO design. Especially for people who had VB6 experience (because going from VB6 to VB.Net with out learning OO design was both possible and painful). C/C++ are also great tool for teaching the stuff that has already been written (as you mentioned, stacks, pointers, memory management). So both should be taught for the purpose of educating students. As for ADA, having taken a crap ton of ADA courses while in the military, I can only say that I saw nothing in it that really impressed me over Pascal. I could see bringing Lisp back into the educational realm, but it's real world usage is again, very limited.
I picked up my assoc CS degree from a tech college. We had 2 courses of C++, 3 courses of Java, 3 courses of VB.Net, 3 courses of Web related stuff (ASP.Net, HTML, Javascript, IIS/Apache, etc...), and the like. We never touched Assembler, no one coded an OS, we never touched a lot of stuff that my friends up at the University were working with.
But after 2 years, 9 of the original 60 students graduated the program. And of them, 5 were spot on to become entry level consultants with the flexibility to pick up a variety of languages and technologies. The other 4 were dedicated students that had worked very hard, but just didn't have the mindset to really make it in the development arena, but would still make solid tech support, technical writers, and technical managers.
Such an idea would work if they were to create a limited supply of the content. That's why it works with venue tickets, hardware and the like. There is only so much available, so consumers compete for it. With digitally distributed content, there is no such limitation.
Now if Amazon started a new program where they would only release x copies of a song a day at a starting bid of 1 dollar, and people had the option of bidding to try to get one that day, or to wait until the next day to bid. Yes, there might be a market for such thing. And prices would likely be high to start as everyone tries to get the latest greatest and they would tapper off as more and more of the demand is satisfied.
But in reality, such a system would bomb horribly. People who are buying music online usually want to listen to that music right away, so having to bid and wait until the end of the bidding cycle to get the music would turn off a huge portion of your clientel. Not to mention that the purposeful limitation of content for which you are the soul distributor of when no limitation is required could lead to some form of legal liability or monopoly rulings.
Unfortunately, I don't think that's accurate either. It'll be $20 for anything people want, and $1 for the stuff no one downloads anyways.
Whether you are looking at a new spears album, classic Zeppelin, some up and coming rock band, what ever. If it's popular enough to have people trying to download it, they'll price it as high as the market will bear. If it's not popular enough for people to download, they'll price it higher than the market will bear.
J# is still running and supported. There is a new version being released with Orcas (VS.Net 2k8). That will be the last version though due to lack of penetration and lack of demand. Even with that, they are still supporting J# until 2015. They introduced J# as a soft transition language for Java developers, just as VB.Net is a soft transition for VB6 developers, to the.Net framework and ideally into C# (although the VB crossover is large enough that VB.Net gets almost as much support as C#). The market couldn't support it though, so they're pulling the plug. And even with it being a non-profitable branch of their product catalog, they are still offering support for 9 more years.
I'd say that's pretty fair of them. Try to get a 9 year support contract from Dell or GM;)
Microsoft has done some horrible things, and it has done some amazing things. I'm not going to defend their honor or virtue, but the.Net framework and Visual Studio have been some of the best things to happen in the developer arena.
If Microsoft created c and it was as popular as VB it wouldn't have existed past 1989. I disagree with that. Look at it from a business perspective, there would be entirely too much money to be made in supporting it while there were still no significant competitors (ADA and Pascal.../shudder). As opposed to VB6 where it was losing market share to Java hand over fist. And that was in the upswing of the Silicon Valley days, where web development was exploding. VB6 had no place on the web. Every other week there was a new killer language that would topple VB6 on the desk top and 2 new web technologies that VB6 couldn't touch. The.Net framework was the right way to go, at the right time.
So if I hack something while running my custom application in debug mode from an IDE like Eclipse or VS.Net, would that not make Eclipse and VS.Net hacker tools that should be stripped from the land?
These laws are just retarded knee jerk reactions made by people who have no idea about what it is they are legislating on.
Don't believe me, assume that you'll be able to use your.net skills for years to come, and you might, but you'll have no control over that. Yeah, woe are those people who picked up.Net in 2000-2001, as every thing they learned back them has left them unable to work with.Net 7 years later.
Oh wait, working with.Net has not changed significantly in a fundamental way over the last 7 years. Sure, new functionality has been added, old functionality has been refined, and the tools have continued to improve, but the fundamentals are still the same.
So yeah, we'll be going out on a bit of a limb learning XAML, WPF, SL, DRL, etc... technologies. But MS's track record has been pretty damn solid. Heck, look at your VB sample. MS released VB1 in 1991 and VB6 in 1998 and continued mainstream support through 2005 and you can STILL get extended support on VB6 through Q1 2008. So you think maintaining a product line for only 17 years is unacceptable, And that regardless of the improvements in technology they should have stuck to it? VB development would have died off regardless of the.Net platform. Sure,.Net probably hastened it a good bit, but if it wasn't.Net, it would have been something else.
The writing was on the wall. Java was a huge step up from VB6 in it's OO design fundamentals and it was a much smaller step than learning C++ in complexity. Microsoft knew that VB6 was doomed if they couldn't get something as powerful as C++ with the simplicity of VB. If MS had not launched the.Net platform, we would all be using Java now, either the Sun, OS, or MS version.
Last time I talked to a MS rep (late summer 07) indepth about Silver Light, he said the FF beta was out and that MS intended to get SL running on all major browsers. There was also some chat about limited support for the folks over at Mono for the Moonlight project running Silverlight apps on Linux.
Silverlight 1.1 is based on the.Net framework, that alone opens so many doors. The functionality that having the entire.Net framework at the tips of your fingers while developing is a godsend.
You gain all of the advantages of the.Net framework, the excellent toolsets provided in VS.Net 2008, the MM power of Flash, and the ease of web distribution.
It's not perfect, by any means, but it is still a very young product. But 2008 could be a really great year for it. And in the mean time, it still makes a killer foundation for controlled environment deployments.
TBH though, I am a.Net developer, so I may have a bit of bias. But the power and ease of development that Silver Light gives you is very impressive. It's not the right tool for every job, but for multi-media intensive, widely distributed apps, from the tools I've seen, it definitely has some great advantages.
Antigua could legally release any US software's source code under a GPL like license, and the vendor would have to prove each year that Antigua has violated them for more than $21 mil. $21,000,000 is a hell of a write off every year, especially if you aren't selling hundreds of thousands if not millions of copies of the software out side of Antigua.
Microsoft? Apple? Diebold? Cisco? Oracle?
A single person with access to code and a $21 million a year grudge to burn might already be shopping for a 1-way ticket to Antigua.
I buy all my music on CD. I listen to other peoples' music on Pandora.Com. I get movies off of the Premium channels on demand service from Charter. I won copies of Office 2k and 2k3 for my wife and I. I got vendor copies of VS.Net 2k3, 2k5, and assorted other dev tools from user groups and conferences. I use 'free' licensed alternatives for much of my other work (Gimp, MySQL, etc...) At work I insist on valid licensing, which the big wigs usually come through on (although they have been known to buy licenses post hock on occasion).
I'm sure my wife and I are breaking someone's IP, as others have pointed out, there is such a huge volume of IP, it is virtually impossible to not be violating someone's rights.
And heck, I've even used Bit Torrent to pick up Linux distro's before;)
Not saying we're perfect, but there are a lot of people out there who go about their business as good little consumers that don't purposely violate IP rights. That said, I think current IP laws are a bit out of whack and could use some trimming.
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I'm pretty sure that standard doesn't apply to copyrights. For Trademarks I believe that is true though, because if your trademark becomes common language (like kleanex) it becomes more difficult to protect that trademark through lawsuits. That's why Google is trying to keep the word 'google' from becoming a verb.
The copyrights of the images belong to the photographers so Ford doesn't have any rights regarding the pictures. The cars belong to the photographers (or their lenders) so Ford doesn't have any rights to them. The only thing I can imagine is that Ford is claiming the appearance of the Ford and Mustang logos is an infringement on their trademark, and that the distinctive appearance of the Mustang is itself a trademark.
-Rick
If my memory serves correct, there was an attempt to pass legislation or a court case in recent history (in the last year) dealing with this very subject. I can't recall exactly how it turned out though. But at least until that point, you could not be legally detained for not providing identification. Sure, a cop could pick you up and take you to the station for not providing identification, but there is (was) no law or legal precedence that would compel you to provide identification other than that required by the activity you are partaking in (ie: Driving, fishing, hunting, selling guns, etc...)
Unfortunately more people don't fight for their civil liberties, so the acts of overzealous officers is becoming the norm. And eventually, riding on the back of the National ID, it will become law.
Just because it's already bad it doesn't mean that we should just stop fighting for our rights. a national ID would solve as many problems for the individual as people think it would cause. EXCELLENT! Please do tell, what problems of mine will it solve?
-Rick
I agree with you that we have already lost a lot, but due to the current existence of red tape, bureaucracy, and excessive burden, we are protected. Much like how copy right infringement was a non-issue before the internet due to the difficulties involved in reproduction and mass-distribution. The existing system is limited by it's technology and differing standards to prevent much of the abuse that it could be used for.
For example, you can not be arrested for walking down the street and being unable to produce your birth certificate. How long before the same can be said about your National ID card?
And that brings up another point. If we already have solutions to all of these "security via identification" issues, why are we creating a new solution? Let alone a solution that is going to cost us the tax payers billions of dollars to instate.
The government is offering us the opportunity to pay for them to reduce our civil liberties.
Who the hell is going to stand up and say, "Yes! I'll pay the government to further reduce my civil liberties and propagate my risk for identity theft!"
What's the risk of not going to such a card? We continue using state licenses, birth certificates, passports, etc... We continue life as usual.
What's the risk of going to such a card? Erosion of civil liberties? More cases of identity theft? Racial profiling and other abuses at the federal government? More invasions into our privacy? Hundreds of dollars more in taxes for every tax paying citizen just to get the systems online?
Maybe it's the libertarian inside of me, but why the hell should we buy a new system when our existing system isn't broken? I'd much rather be wrong and stick with our existing system than right and have the National ID card system.
-Rick
So if the National ID card does nothing new, then why should we pay for it?
Also, currently you can not legally be detained for failure to present an ID. If you can not produce a drivers license while driving, you can be detained. But if you can not produce a drivers license or state ID while walking, you can not be legally detained. Not that that will stop an over zealous cop from dragging you down town, but you'll have grounds to get out in short order.
-Rick
1) All of the recorded data from applications is stored centrally under the control of the federal government.
2) Even if your application is rejected, your picture and all related data is stored and marked as rejected.
3) The plan explicitly limits citizen's liberties based on their possession of this card.
Now, in what realm is it a good idea to give the federal government a detailed list of everyone in the country, a centrally stored (and inevitably craqcked) database of that list, and the power to further limit our abilities?
People keep preaching about security. Let's be 100% clear on this: The National ID Card will NOT improve security. At best all it will do is further restrict the activities of law abiding citizens, at worst it will provide a huge step in the direction of a totalitarian state.
-Rick
PS: And actually, other than the tri-layered lamanent, the cards from state to state will not actually look like each other.
Yes, we currently have a combination of documents that do the same thing as what the National ID is supose to do. That right there should set off alarm bells: The National ID card is redundant. Not only that, but it is a combination of papers. No one is going to walk down the street with the birth certificate, SSN card, license, and passport on them at all times. The inability to produce all of these documents at any given time is what prevents a rapid slide down the "papers please" slope.
I hate to burst your bubble, but I've spent time in Mexico, Germany, France, Korea, and Japan. I would actually venture to say just the opposite. Those people who DON'T complain about the National ID card are people who have never been in a country where police are able to demand you to identify yourself. Heck, just check some of the replies to this thread, you'll see stories about people getting picked up off the street in foreign countries and arrested just for not having their passport on them.
Those people need to open their eyes.
-Rick
Uh, last I checked, illegal immigrants are not "overrunning" our country. In fact, last time I saw the numbers, illegal immigration numbers had leveled off. Claims that illegal immigration is going through some kind of sudden explosive growth is purely FUD. It is a combination of alarmist reporting to drive up ratings, and a political prop to get simpletons to vote for political parties that claim to be "hard" on immigration. Not that those laws actually do anything good for the local regions with high illegal immigration populations, but if they shout it loud enough, people will believe them.
Nah, if you want to work on minimizing the effect of illegal immigrants on our nation's stability and economy, the solution isn't to push them further underground, but just the opposite. Identify them, tax them, ensure that employers are following labor laws. If you make them responsible to the society that supports them, it will do far more good for the society as a whole than to remove them from all responsibility and allow the society to abuse them while short changing those members of society that are responsible.
Tighten the borders to reduce unfettered crossing, open more legal immigration options, and demand responsibility of those that are already here.
-Rick
First you get an ID.
Then you need that ID to fly.
Then you need that ID to leave the country.
Then you need that ID to get into the country.
Then you need that ID to vote.
Then you need that ID to cross state borders.
Then you need that ID to buy gas.
Then you need that ID to be a legal citizen.
Slowly but surely, it will become a 'Show me your papers' issue. Imagine just walking down the street, a cop sees you, maybe he's having a bad day, maybe you roughly match the description of a wanted criminal, he approaches you and asks for you national ID. You don't have it though, because you were just going for a walk. Next thing you know, you're heading down town, handcuffed in the back of a crown vic. Sure, they'll let you out, once you can get a friend to bring your ID in, or go through the red tape to get the State to produce the paper work, but by that point you've been printed, your arrest has been recorded, and you're out a few hours to a few days getting everything straightened out.
Fear mongers will use it as a tool against illegal immigrants first. By requiring the national ID to be able to do the most mundane of things, they'll push aliens further out of the legal realm. Then all it would take is another attack to spur off a series of knee jerk reactions that lead to certain racial/ethnic groups having their cards pulled, leaving them as 2nd class citizens, virtually outlaws because they have no ID to prove their legitimacy in the US.
Yes, it's a paranoid delusion. But so was the idea that the US would use black site prisons, suspend habeas corpus, and invade a sovereign nation on manufactured intelligence. Given enough time, the system will be abused, and civil liberties will be eroded.
And the whole time, this card will do nothing to make our country more secure.
-Rick
So it can take low res video, convert it to high res video, do facial recognition, and organize those recognized faces for easy playback... the potential for it's use in security and espionage systems is huge!
It is both exciting, and slightly scary.
-Rick
A few things I noticed:
1) the female inspector I had to deal with on one occasion was very flustered about the ordeal. After finding the first item she started blushing and was doing everything she could to get me out of there (the screening table was just off to the side of the line, so if any of the boarding passengers looked over they would have seen her holding the... instrument...)
2) the male inspector I had to with on another occasion said that he thought I was carrying the stuff just to try to embarrass him. I assured him that I was a swinger on my way to a wild party of decadence. Unfortunately though, he was right, I was just doing it to screw with him (and to cash in on a $25 bar bet).
3) I would recommend not bringing any toys in excess of 24" as they could be used as a bludgeoning weapon.
4) I would also recommend not bringing up any threats of choke hazards. Those TSA guards are damn picky, and one poorly timed joke will guaranty a missed flight. I almost got stranded in MN once because I disagreed with a TSA guard about the ability to use the clip on my wallet's chain (not the chain itself, the clip) as a weapon.
-Rick
I have a buddy who works in the laser microscopy industry. He has a 4-year EE BS from a tech school, almost all of his coworkers have 4-year EE BSs from Universities. They are all extremely smart guys. The University guys have an edge on him in some of the theoretical areas, which is to be expected. But he has an edge over them in engineering a product that will optimize a lot of the theory and limitations of their production abilities. For instance, he stepped in on a project that another engineer was working on. The project was functional, but just barely, all of the theory was spot on, but it wasn't anything that they could sell. So my friend took over, refining the layout and functionality of the electronics, removing almost 500 feet of wiring, completely restructuring the layout, designing new enclosures, mounting systems, etc... Could he have figured out the theory behind the original engineering all by himself? Probably, given enough time. But the University grad has more knowledge on it, and so he could come up with that design faster. Could the University grad have turned the proof of concept into a sell-able box? Probably, given enough time. But the tech school grad has more knowledge on real world environments, functional design, fabrication, and economic and production constraints, so he could come up with that design faster.
Me personally, I have a tech school AS in comp sci with a BS in Computer Information Systems (CS focus) and a BS in Computer Information Management. I've been doing software development since '97 in the military and as a civilian as a contractor and full time employee. I've worked with uneducated prodigies, grad school masters, and tech school graduates. And I have to say, if I need an entry level application developer for a business environment application, I head straight to the local tech schools and look for a student who is ace-ing the courses and getting along with his/her classmates.
It's not because I think tech degrees are better than university degrees. It's because I think tech degree course catalogs have more pertinent classes to the industry I work in than university programs do. If I were working at MS or Google, trying to find more people to work on a new search algorithm, or the next version of Windows, I would move my recruitment efforts to the universities. I've seen (and suffered with) some horrible web and "office application" code that was written by people who obviously had no intuitive sense of algorithmic complexity and what the impact of an O(n^2) algorithm was as n got beyond their little test case. I've also seen (and suffered with) similar "multi threaded" code written by people who seemed to have only the barest of notions about concurrency control. I have also seen university grads look at a O(n^2) problem and find amazing ways of optimizing the compiler, creating custom memory management functionality, and working on making it the most efficient O(n^2) function they could. Just to have a tech school grad look at it and say 'you know if you reorganize your code's structure, you wouldn't need any of this'.
Once again, I'm not saying either degree is better than the other, just that they are different, and the graduates of both programs will likely have different things they can bring to the table.
-Rick
-Rick
If you are going into Web development, office productivity desk top development, or information management applications, knowledge of pointers, memory management, stacks, linked lists, etc... is worth exceptionally little.
The vast majority of development is being done using pre-compiled libraries. Because let's face it, there is no need for your employer to pay you to recreate the string class, or a hash table, or any other primitive functionality that already exists in any number of languages. Sure, this knowledge is good to have as it can come in handy. But in reality, other then a cursory understanding to ground your knowledge to, the in depth knowledge of them will not effect the vast majority of developers.
Sure, if you are working in OS development, or in embedded software, or in other arena's where you may not be able to use a managed code solution, yeah, knowing C/C++ and all of the underlying mechanics is critical. But when was the last time you listened to a web developer talk about span width, compression algorithms, and rendering engines?
I think Java is an excellent tool for teaching OO design. Especially for people who had VB6 experience (because going from VB6 to VB.Net with out learning OO design was both possible and painful). C/C++ are also great tool for teaching the stuff that has already been written (as you mentioned, stacks, pointers, memory management). So both should be taught for the purpose of educating students. As for ADA, having taken a crap ton of ADA courses while in the military, I can only say that I saw nothing in it that really impressed me over Pascal. I could see bringing Lisp back into the educational realm, but it's real world usage is again, very limited.
I picked up my assoc CS degree from a tech college. We had 2 courses of C++, 3 courses of Java, 3 courses of VB.Net, 3 courses of Web related stuff (ASP.Net, HTML, Javascript, IIS/Apache, etc...), and the like. We never touched Assembler, no one coded an OS, we never touched a lot of stuff that my friends up at the University were working with.
But after 2 years, 9 of the original 60 students graduated the program. And of them, 5 were spot on to become entry level consultants with the flexibility to pick up a variety of languages and technologies. The other 4 were dedicated students that had worked very hard, but just didn't have the mindset to really make it in the development arena, but would still make solid tech support, technical writers, and technical managers.
-Rick
I got a chuckle out of that too, thanks for pointing it out. What can I say, it's friday ;)
-Rick
Such an idea would work if they were to create a limited supply of the content. That's why it works with venue tickets, hardware and the like. There is only so much available, so consumers compete for it. With digitally distributed content, there is no such limitation.
Now if Amazon started a new program where they would only release x copies of a song a day at a starting bid of 1 dollar, and people had the option of bidding to try to get one that day, or to wait until the next day to bid. Yes, there might be a market for such thing. And prices would likely be high to start as everyone tries to get the latest greatest and they would tapper off as more and more of the demand is satisfied.
But in reality, such a system would bomb horribly. People who are buying music online usually want to listen to that music right away, so having to bid and wait until the end of the bidding cycle to get the music would turn off a huge portion of your clientel. Not to mention that the purposeful limitation of content for which you are the soul distributor of when no limitation is required could lead to some form of legal liability or monopoly rulings.
-Rick
Unfortunately, I don't think that's accurate either. It'll be $20 for anything people want, and $1 for the stuff no one downloads anyways.
Whether you are looking at a new spears album, classic Zeppelin, some up and coming rock band, what ever. If it's popular enough to have people trying to download it, they'll price it as high as the market will bear. If it's not popular enough for people to download, they'll price it higher than the market will bear.
-Rick
THE CAKE IS A LIE!
-Rick
I'd say that's pretty fair of them. Try to get a 9 year support contract from Dell or GM
Microsoft has done some horrible things, and it has done some amazing things. I'm not going to defend their honor or virtue, but the
-Rick
So if I hack something while running my custom application in debug mode from an IDE like Eclipse or VS.Net, would that not make Eclipse and VS.Net hacker tools that should be stripped from the land?
These laws are just retarded knee jerk reactions made by people who have no idea about what it is they are legislating on.
-Rick
Oh wait, working with
So yeah, we'll be going out on a bit of a limb learning XAML, WPF, SL, DRL, etc... technologies. But MS's track record has been pretty damn solid. Heck, look at your VB sample. MS released VB1 in 1991 and VB6 in 1998 and continued mainstream support through 2005 and you can STILL get extended support on VB6 through Q1 2008. So you think maintaining a product line for only 17 years is unacceptable, And that regardless of the improvements in technology they should have stuck to it? VB development would have died off regardless of the
The writing was on the wall. Java was a huge step up from VB6 in it's OO design fundamentals and it was a much smaller step than learning C++ in complexity. Microsoft knew that VB6 was doomed if they couldn't get something as powerful as C++ with the simplicity of VB. If MS had not launched the
-Rick
You're right, they've closed the gap a bit. By using 3+ different development tools, Java developers are now only about 5 years behind in tool sets.
-Rick
Last time I talked to a MS rep (late summer 07) indepth about Silver Light, he said the FF beta was out and that MS intended to get SL running on all major browsers. There was also some chat about limited support for the folks over at Mono for the Moonlight project running Silverlight apps on Linux.
.Net framework, that alone opens so many doors. The functionality that having the entire .Net framework at the tips of your fingers while developing is a godsend.
.Net framework, the excellent toolsets provided in VS.Net 2008, the MM power of Flash, and the ease of web distribution.
Silverlight 1.1 is based on the
You gain all of the advantages of the
It's not perfect, by any means, but it is still a very young product. But 2008 could be a really great year for it. And in the mean time, it still makes a killer foundation for controlled environment deployments.
-Rick
TBH though, I am a .Net developer, so I may have a bit of bias. But the power and ease of development that Silver Light gives you is very impressive. It's not the right tool for every job, but for multi-media intensive, widely distributed apps, from the tools I've seen, it definitely has some great advantages.
-Rick
Antigua could legally release any US software's source code under a GPL like license, and the vendor would have to prove each year that Antigua has violated them for more than $21 mil. $21,000,000 is a hell of a write off every year, especially if you aren't selling hundreds of thousands if not millions of copies of the software out side of Antigua.
Microsoft? Apple? Diebold? Cisco? Oracle?
A single person with access to code and a $21 million a year grudge to burn might already be shopping for a 1-way ticket to Antigua.
-Rick
I buy all my music on CD.
;)
I listen to other peoples' music on Pandora.Com.
I get movies off of the Premium channels on demand service from Charter.
I won copies of Office 2k and 2k3 for my wife and I.
I got vendor copies of VS.Net 2k3, 2k5, and assorted other dev tools from user groups and conferences.
I use 'free' licensed alternatives for much of my other work (Gimp, MySQL, etc...)
At work I insist on valid licensing, which the big wigs usually come through on (although they have been known to buy licenses post hock on occasion).
I'm sure my wife and I are breaking someone's IP, as others have pointed out, there is such a huge volume of IP, it is virtually impossible to not be violating someone's rights.
And heck, I've even used Bit Torrent to pick up Linux distro's before
Not saying we're perfect, but there are a lot of people out there who go about their business as good little consumers that don't purposely violate IP rights. That said, I think current IP laws are a bit out of whack and could use some trimming.
-Rick