I don't think GP was arguing against the ideas you suggest, just pointing out that Javascript isn't a language well designed to do it.
It's design flaws limit it's scalability and suitability as a general purpose language.
It's not a question of advancing Javascript, it's a question of replacing it (and in fact just building a new stack designed for web applications rather than attempting and failing to mangle a stack designed largely for static content to do it) to reach the future you propose.
None of that is new, and it's not real-time. Real-time has a specific meaning in computing that a system can be guaranteed to always respond within a minimal amount of time, and node.js cannot give that guarantee. To give that guarantee you tend to need specialist hardware with a specialist real time operating system.
It's just new and real-time to Javascript developers who don't know enough about computing to understand that real-time is something different, and nodes.js' method of handling requests isn't new.
It's like the "responsive design" fanboys, they seem oblivious that the term "responsiveness" was already taken with regards to Javascript and has a very different meaning and that when they say "responsive design" they normally just mean "resolution independent design" or similar. Responsiveness especially in relation to Javascript has historically been about how quickly the system responds, responsiveness in Javascript always referred to the fact that doing something client side was much more responsive than doing a page reload to do it server side. Obviously in an age of broadband where server side loads are pretty quick anyway and Javascript is less about responsiveness and more about complex client side interaction this understanding is lost on the hipsters though.
Web 2.0 amateurs need to stop redefining existing terms and start learning that the things they think they've invented have already been about for a very long time under a different name. Maybe if they did that they'd realise their new pet toy isn't actually new and could learn from the mistakes of past implementations of the idea instead of dooming themselves to repeat them, which they always do.
The worst part is I'm not even that old, I've barely broken into my 30s and I'm already annoyed by a new generation who are just making the mistakes that I learnt to avoid by learning from the generations before me who have already been there and done all this. Maybe because things change so much faster now 30 is the new 60? Oh well, get off my lawn then I guess.
But that's the problem isn't it? Javascript got where it was by default, not because it was inherently any good.
We had a situation where there were two browser vendors who bilaterally decided to support it (though not in the most compatible of manners) one of which died meaning the only option for many years for client side scripting was Javascript (or VBScript running on the same engine, Hah.) and so everything got written in Javascript because it was the only real choice. Then when we finally get competition in the browser market it's a bit late to support anything other than Javascript.
So we are where we are, the only way we'll get something better than Javascript is if there were to be a cross-vendor effort to do exactly that, but getting Microsoft to agree with Mozilla to agree with Apple to agree with Google to agree with Opera is a lost cause.
You're right that there isn't one but that's the exact problem. We can't do much about it, but it's understandable to whinge about it, because it's a fucking shitty and unfortunate situation when the only option is a bad one.
The problem is that that benefit is heavily outweighed by the fact that Javascript is fucking useless for anything non-trivial (it's OO support is fucking abysmal making it poor for server side which is normally fairly complex) and it's functional support is poorly designed (captured variable handling is badly done for example, in fact, C# did things in closures the Javascript way itself at first then fixed it as an actual language bug).
You're still better off switching languages and really it's not hard to do. I wont pretend that in a day where I was working with C#, PHP, Javascript and then XML and HTML on top that I didn't actually find it tiring, but it wasn't debilitantingly difficult and certainly working with two languages is no big deal.
It's not even like it's hard work given that serialisation/deserialisation to/from JSON in languages like C# is pretty much entirely automatic now. You don't even really have to worry about the interchange, you just have to use one language on the client and one on the server which isn't a big deal at all.
I'd rather have a server side application that's well designed, maintainable and has a good toolset behind it (especially for things like testing) rather than use a much more flawed language with worse support for writing good code and abysmal testability suites than get the single advantage of "not having to switch from it to something else server-side".
Please ignore your overrated moderation, Slashdot has gone downhill and the amount of amateur whiners that can't get jobs because they're actually shit rather than whatever excuse they use (H1-B, ageism, whatever) is grossly higher than those who actually are in jobs and have a clue what they're on about.
It's scary how many people here don't get that change is an inevitable fact of software development, it really shows how inexperienced and incompetent so many people on Slashdot nowadays are so it's no wonder that so many of them whine about being unemployed for what ever reason - it's not surprising when they're that shit.
"Yes, but this should be done prior to code writing."
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
For projects of any reasonable size, that may even take as little as 6 months the reality is that the client may not even know what the requirements will be in 6 months time.
An anecdote I referred to in a previous discussion on a similar topic is a 18 month project I finished off last year. When the client was gathering initial requirements they wanted Blackberry support and SMS functionality, the iPad didn't even exist when they were gathering requirements, it wasn't long into the project that we actually started to work on it that SMS became less of an issue and Blackberry became a low priority support target instead preferring to have full Android/iOS support and support for dispatch to a notification app on those platforms. Business needs agility because in the real world business realities change quickly, sometimes in just a matter of a couple of weeks or in rare cases even days and this becomes ever more true depending on how competitive an industry your client is in.
Luckily we'd already abstracted notification dispatch so writing a dispatcher class for a mobile app they were to developing separately in place of SMS dispatch was trivial and no more expensive for them and similarly because we worked in a flexible manner it was no big deal dropping Blackberry support in favour of Android/iOS browser support on the web frontend.
Similarly on the same project we built scope for future flexibility into the database schema creating tables that weren't immediately needed but meant no refactoring needed for future work. As I left the project the client came back asking for exactly what I suspected to be added in and so rather than being a couple of week long refactoring job followed by implementation it was largely just implementation such that we could charge the client less than we'd otherwise have needed to but still charge a little more to increase our margins.
This is why you write and design code with added complexity, because the added complexity is never so cost inefficient (well unless you take it too far to the extreme) that it's not worth it. Part of being a good developer is being able to see where the client is likely to want to go in the future and yes, that means writing code that is not immediately useful but will be in the future.
I've always been able to deliver projects with really high profit margins (60% - 70%+) and I couldn't do this if I hadn't designed flexible architectures. The amount of refactoring required or the amount of pissed off customers at our refusal to accept the inevitability of change if we just set things in stone from the outset and said no changes, or charged for said refactoring would be massively detrimental to our business.
There's obviously balance to be drawn, your example seems a little extreme but being a good developer is absolutely about being able to foresee where your client needs will change and developing for that from the outset. It's the only way you can build a good relationship with customers and also make sure the inevitability of change will benefit you and the customer, not cost you both with wasted unnecessary refactoring time due to inflexible design.
I think a lot of Slashdot devs are either inexperienced or have only done internal dev, because the reality of working with clients and understanding as a result why change happens and why it's inevitable would soon put stop to some of the "It should be specced from the outset and never change" comments because you just cannot build good relationships with customers and hence cannot make a healthy profit across projects or even per-project that way. That attitude is a relic of internal development departments who feel they get to mandate to their colleagues what they're getting rather than bothering to listen to what they want and adapt as realisations change - you shouldn't even work like that internally if you want to work in a healthy business but you definitely can't work like
It's about the only example and even then much of it seems to blend paranoid conspiracy with actual fact. Again there's no doubt there was wrongdoing but his complaints on the issue seem to have descended from justified to paranoid delusion.
What I was referring to is a real actual problem that happens multiple times every single day with some police forces and even if all his claims were true it doesn't come close to that level of corruption.
When one is more famous than any other it's usually quite normal to assume it's the most famous one being referred to if there's ambiguity.
It's like when someone bitched the other week when an article said "The Queen" saying "Which Queen?". Which fucking Queen do you think? It's not exactly rocket science just as when an article says the "FBI" and talks about crime I don't scream "What has this got to do with the Federation of British industries?" or ask why Nashville School of the Arts has been engaged in spying on people's private data stored at Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft with Prism.
No point wasting bytes and summary space explaining every single god damn acronym and name in full detail just to spoon feed the lazy few with poor world knowledge who rather than simply Google it prefer to expend greater effort informing the rest of us as to how ignorant they are of the world.
If the UK bit in the summary wasn't enough of a clue that it may be the met in the UK and not some other country then anyone getting confused is too far gone stupid to help in the slightest anyway.
Exactly. What this system is is basically automation of day to day work which you get in any industry, I wouldn't expect the police to be any different.
If they can reasonably use publicly posted information to solve crimes or even prevent them before they happen then they're going to need to do that anyway and I'd rather they have a system that automates and pulls out the important parts and hence only need a few officers to review than than have hundreds of officers expensively wasting time reading absolutely everything they can.
This isn't to say there shouldn't be safe guards, they need to make sure the system is fit for purpose and is focussing on the important things, and it needs to be limited to public information unlike prism, but all in all if there is information out there publicly that can solve crimes then that's kind of exactly what the police are meant to do - find information to assist in solving and preventing crimes and if they can do that more efficiently than reading everything and anything then great.
I agree they've got a lot to answer for but "most corrupt" is pushing it a bit given that in some countries you can outright pay officers to arrest people or get arrested on made up charges and have to pay a bribe to be released.
It's also a rather big force as it has the best part of 50,000 staff which is more than Sweden and Norway put together have to police their entire countries and given that you're bound to have some bad eggs, but yes, they could certainly do better.
Who knows, maybe a cup to their ear against the wall in the room next to you? but I guess unlike us here in the UK you wouldn't name it so that it sounds like a new brand of shoe freshener for people with smelly feet at least.
They were planning on flying a plane with a small amount of explosive into a US base on German soil that secretly stockpiles now poorly maintained and unstable cold-war era nukes to detonate them and trigger a nuclear explosion, which the US would respond to by nuking Russia believing it was an attack by them and Russia would then nuke Germany to complete destruction.
Yeah, okay I made all that up and might have been slightly inspired by The Sum of all Fears which just happened to be on again the other day.
Actually I should stop, I'll be giving the German authorities ideas as to how they can further trump up the charges wont I?
To be fair the BBC at least has had a number of articles such as "What could they know about me?" and that sort of thing so it's not all media outlets that have been ignoring the questions the revelation raises.
Yet their dirty secrets were spread far and wide by Edward Snowden, and that's the reality.
They no doubt do have some absolute geniuses working for them but it only takes one bumbling manager to fuck it all up by saying something they shouldn't, or by mandating that their secrets should be accessible way beyond sensible levels of security. The fact a low level contractor at a 3rd party company had so much access to NSA secrets is evidence of that.
Security is always limited by the weakest link and it's no different for the NSA, they could have the top 10,000 brightest security experts in the world working there but it'd only take their 10,001'th employee to be a bumbling idiot to fuck all that up. You don't need the NSA to be incompetent, you just need a single one of their employees to be incompetent, and guaranteeing 100% incompetence across a whole large organisation is an arguably impossible feat.
Because it's trivial to detect outbound data transfer.
Seriously it's like the same argument with Microsoft using Kinect in the new XBox to spy on you - you think people wouldn't be able to detect a video/audio stream sent from their console? You think you can make this kind of data transfer magically invisible on the network?
You may not control the software, you may not even control the hardware, but most people control the equipment those things have to pass through to get to their destinations. Even if the data transfer is encrypted it's enough to raise questions when you see a sizeable data transfer which would be required to transfer anything meaningful.
The same is true of Windows activation which someone suggested may be a vector for this transfer - there's a big difference between the few kilobytes needed to activate software and the multi-megabytes that would be needed to transfer anything of value.
This is why such conspiracy theories are just stupid, they seem to rely on some magical ability to hide data transfer across devices they don't even control. To get away with this sort of conspiracy theory Microsoft would have to not just hide everything so well that many millions of man hours of security research can't find it, but also be in league with every router, switch and network device manufacturer on the planet, every ISP at every hop along the way and so forth.
This is why Prism has stuck to tapping the fibres and so forth - because it can be done transparently without anyone finding out if it weren't for whistleblowers. When you start adding exploits and backdoors into the devices people find out. You really think Russia's FSB and so forth are somehow so infinitely more incompetent than the NSA that they couldn't unmask this sort of thing?
You only have to look at scenarios where security services have tried this sort of thing, it didn't exactly take that long for the likes of Stuxnet to be unmasked did it and that was pretty specifically targeted.
There's a vast difference between NSA spying transparently and them backdooring actual hardware and software indiscriminately. They may get away with doing it to bug a targeted individual's system but they're never going to get away with it on hardware and software owned by millions of people around the globe without someone noticing something fishy.
It's stupid, if you don't own and control the entire end-to-end infrastructure you can't hide anything, it's a two way street - just as you don't necessarily know what MS Word does being closed source (though that's not necessarily an impediment if you know assembly), they don't know what you can and can't see with your router or whatever on your network because they don't control and own it, hence they cannot hide anything from it.
No it's not, you made the claim that goes against common understanding. If you think everything publicised about global population is wrong, it's upto you to prove it.
I agree with you there's a good reason for the web as an applications platform, we just need better technologies to allow it to do that better because we currently risk breaking or at least over complicating the technologies that are used for static content in trying to make them something they're not.
I have no problem with what Javascript can do but I think even when you understand it's functional capabilities and so forth it's not a great language. The difference between declaring var and not causing the difference between local and global scope for example is braindead and it's handling of captured variables in closures is unhelpful. The point is that it's not that Javascript isn't powerful and that you can't do impressive things with it when you know it's quirks inside out but that there are plenty of languages that do everything Javascript does without those quirks proving that those quirks are demonstrative of original bad design than an inherent trait of Javascript's prototype/functional/oo hybrid design - the problem is it supports multiple paradigms but it supports them all in a sub-standard manner and that's the problem, none of the issues that make it sub-standard stop you doing what you need to do on a small scale but they do result in unnecessarily verbose and more awkward to debug code than is necessary such that as your code base grows maintainability of it gets pretty awful through no fault of the programmer but simply as a result of the language's quirks and half arsed implementations of various muddled paradigms.
So yeah, Javascript is powerful, yeah you can make it work, but a better thought through language would allow production of far better code again. Personally I think C# is a good example nowadays because it's a proper fully featured OO language from the outset, with fully fledged lambda support and optional DLR for dynamic typing or creating a prototype style environment where necessary. C# has evolved such that it's only added one paradigm at a time to make sure that as it has it does each properly, Javascript in contrast feels like everything was thrown in with no clear plan and not enough time spent ensuring it was done as well as it could be and that's the problem.
£10 is the maximum but yeah I just looked it up, I didn't realise CCTV was quite so firmly covered by the DPA. Well, there's an option for fighting over the top CCTV then, issuing SARs to companies and the police even at £10 a time could easily create a type of DOS attack because the amount of time required to find all footage of you, copy it off and send it to you would take up a good amount of a CCTV operator's time daily.
It depends what area of tech, if you're talking day to day tech support like repairing PCs and so forth then yes, this has become a low skilled job because frankly it's easier nowadays (no more pratting around with the 640k barrier for example) and no more doing solder repairs and so forth because we have a "just replace it" society now.
If you're talking about software development then yes it does pay higher than average by a reasonable amount. There may be pockets of civilisation where this isn't the case but it's certainly the case on average, even if you narrow down to individual countries like the UK and US. The UK national average wage for example is £26k - even in the North of England where wages are way lower than in London you can sometimes get this as a starting salary, let alone as a career average.
The fact is if it's tech support then the young "punks" are getting the jobs because they do know their stuff, because the stuff they need to know is just that much easier nowadays. The problem is that there's a divide between knowledge and relevant knowledge, it's okay knowing more but if what you know is no longer relevant to the job as is the case with some (but definitely by no means all) of the knowledge anyone doing IT support in the 90s or earlier obtained then you're going to have no practical advantage. I'm speculating here, this may not apply to you at all, but certainly it's the case that IT support wages have declined for the simple reason that IT support is now a much easier job than it used to be.
I wont pretend that IT jobs including development don't get based less than industries such as banking and so forth, but development is still in the top half or probably even top quartile of salary brackets on average.
Source? The global population is most definitely growing by all publicly available statistical measures and none of China, India or the US are shrinking or even close. Some European nations have seen slowed/stalling growth, Russia is shrinking (or at least has been). Africa and South America are growing.
If the global population is only breaking even or in decline then where exactly is this decline occuring? Russia doesn't hold enough of the world's population for it to cause that by itself or with only a handful of smaller nations.
Sounds like Obama's best option when deciding policy is decide what he wants to do, announce the exact opposite meaning the Republicans will back what he wants to do just to spite the exact opposite he announced and then announce "Hey, Republicans, you know what, you're right, let's do what you want" and watch as they sit smugly thinking they've won and pass the bills he wanted to pass in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think GP was arguing against the ideas you suggest, just pointing out that Javascript isn't a language well designed to do it.
It's design flaws limit it's scalability and suitability as a general purpose language.
It's not a question of advancing Javascript, it's a question of replacing it (and in fact just building a new stack designed for web applications rather than attempting and failing to mangle a stack designed largely for static content to do it) to reach the future you propose.
None of that is new, and it's not real-time. Real-time has a specific meaning in computing that a system can be guaranteed to always respond within a minimal amount of time, and node.js cannot give that guarantee. To give that guarantee you tend to need specialist hardware with a specialist real time operating system.
It's just new and real-time to Javascript developers who don't know enough about computing to understand that real-time is something different, and nodes.js' method of handling requests isn't new.
It's like the "responsive design" fanboys, they seem oblivious that the term "responsiveness" was already taken with regards to Javascript and has a very different meaning and that when they say "responsive design" they normally just mean "resolution independent design" or similar. Responsiveness especially in relation to Javascript has historically been about how quickly the system responds, responsiveness in Javascript always referred to the fact that doing something client side was much more responsive than doing a page reload to do it server side. Obviously in an age of broadband where server side loads are pretty quick anyway and Javascript is less about responsiveness and more about complex client side interaction this understanding is lost on the hipsters though.
Web 2.0 amateurs need to stop redefining existing terms and start learning that the things they think they've invented have already been about for a very long time under a different name. Maybe if they did that they'd realise their new pet toy isn't actually new and could learn from the mistakes of past implementations of the idea instead of dooming themselves to repeat them, which they always do.
The worst part is I'm not even that old, I've barely broken into my 30s and I'm already annoyed by a new generation who are just making the mistakes that I learnt to avoid by learning from the generations before me who have already been there and done all this. Maybe because things change so much faster now 30 is the new 60? Oh well, get off my lawn then I guess.
But that's the problem isn't it? Javascript got where it was by default, not because it was inherently any good.
We had a situation where there were two browser vendors who bilaterally decided to support it (though not in the most compatible of manners) one of which died meaning the only option for many years for client side scripting was Javascript (or VBScript running on the same engine, Hah.) and so everything got written in Javascript because it was the only real choice. Then when we finally get competition in the browser market it's a bit late to support anything other than Javascript.
So we are where we are, the only way we'll get something better than Javascript is if there were to be a cross-vendor effort to do exactly that, but getting Microsoft to agree with Mozilla to agree with Apple to agree with Google to agree with Opera is a lost cause.
You're right that there isn't one but that's the exact problem. We can't do much about it, but it's understandable to whinge about it, because it's a fucking shitty and unfortunate situation when the only option is a bad one.
The problem is that that benefit is heavily outweighed by the fact that Javascript is fucking useless for anything non-trivial (it's OO support is fucking abysmal making it poor for server side which is normally fairly complex) and it's functional support is poorly designed (captured variable handling is badly done for example, in fact, C# did things in closures the Javascript way itself at first then fixed it as an actual language bug).
You're still better off switching languages and really it's not hard to do. I wont pretend that in a day where I was working with C#, PHP, Javascript and then XML and HTML on top that I didn't actually find it tiring, but it wasn't debilitantingly difficult and certainly working with two languages is no big deal.
It's not even like it's hard work given that serialisation/deserialisation to/from JSON in languages like C# is pretty much entirely automatic now. You don't even really have to worry about the interchange, you just have to use one language on the client and one on the server which isn't a big deal at all.
I'd rather have a server side application that's well designed, maintainable and has a good toolset behind it (especially for things like testing) rather than use a much more flawed language with worse support for writing good code and abysmal testability suites than get the single advantage of "not having to switch from it to something else server-side".
Please ignore your overrated moderation, Slashdot has gone downhill and the amount of amateur whiners that can't get jobs because they're actually shit rather than whatever excuse they use (H1-B, ageism, whatever) is grossly higher than those who actually are in jobs and have a clue what they're on about.
It's scary how many people here don't get that change is an inevitable fact of software development, it really shows how inexperienced and incompetent so many people on Slashdot nowadays are so it's no wonder that so many of them whine about being unemployed for what ever reason - it's not surprising when they're that shit.
"Yes, but this should be done prior to code writing."
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
For projects of any reasonable size, that may even take as little as 6 months the reality is that the client may not even know what the requirements will be in 6 months time.
An anecdote I referred to in a previous discussion on a similar topic is a 18 month project I finished off last year. When the client was gathering initial requirements they wanted Blackberry support and SMS functionality, the iPad didn't even exist when they were gathering requirements, it wasn't long into the project that we actually started to work on it that SMS became less of an issue and Blackberry became a low priority support target instead preferring to have full Android/iOS support and support for dispatch to a notification app on those platforms. Business needs agility because in the real world business realities change quickly, sometimes in just a matter of a couple of weeks or in rare cases even days and this becomes ever more true depending on how competitive an industry your client is in.
Luckily we'd already abstracted notification dispatch so writing a dispatcher class for a mobile app they were to developing separately in place of SMS dispatch was trivial and no more expensive for them and similarly because we worked in a flexible manner it was no big deal dropping Blackberry support in favour of Android/iOS browser support on the web frontend.
Similarly on the same project we built scope for future flexibility into the database schema creating tables that weren't immediately needed but meant no refactoring needed for future work. As I left the project the client came back asking for exactly what I suspected to be added in and so rather than being a couple of week long refactoring job followed by implementation it was largely just implementation such that we could charge the client less than we'd otherwise have needed to but still charge a little more to increase our margins.
This is why you write and design code with added complexity, because the added complexity is never so cost inefficient (well unless you take it too far to the extreme) that it's not worth it. Part of being a good developer is being able to see where the client is likely to want to go in the future and yes, that means writing code that is not immediately useful but will be in the future.
I've always been able to deliver projects with really high profit margins (60% - 70%+) and I couldn't do this if I hadn't designed flexible architectures. The amount of refactoring required or the amount of pissed off customers at our refusal to accept the inevitability of change if we just set things in stone from the outset and said no changes, or charged for said refactoring would be massively detrimental to our business.
There's obviously balance to be drawn, your example seems a little extreme but being a good developer is absolutely about being able to foresee where your client needs will change and developing for that from the outset. It's the only way you can build a good relationship with customers and also make sure the inevitability of change will benefit you and the customer, not cost you both with wasted unnecessary refactoring time due to inflexible design.
I think a lot of Slashdot devs are either inexperienced or have only done internal dev, because the reality of working with clients and understanding as a result why change happens and why it's inevitable would soon put stop to some of the "It should be specced from the outset and never change" comments because you just cannot build good relationships with customers and hence cannot make a healthy profit across projects or even per-project that way. That attitude is a relic of internal development departments who feel they get to mandate to their colleagues what they're getting rather than bothering to listen to what they want and adapt as realisations change - you shouldn't even work like that internally if you want to work in a healthy business but you definitely can't work like
It's about the only example and even then much of it seems to blend paranoid conspiracy with actual fact. Again there's no doubt there was wrongdoing but his complaints on the issue seem to have descended from justified to paranoid delusion.
What I was referring to is a real actual problem that happens multiple times every single day with some police forces and even if all his claims were true it doesn't come close to that level of corruption.
When one is more famous than any other it's usually quite normal to assume it's the most famous one being referred to if there's ambiguity.
It's like when someone bitched the other week when an article said "The Queen" saying "Which Queen?". Which fucking Queen do you think? It's not exactly rocket science just as when an article says the "FBI" and talks about crime I don't scream "What has this got to do with the Federation of British industries?" or ask why Nashville School of the Arts has been engaged in spying on people's private data stored at Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft with Prism.
No point wasting bytes and summary space explaining every single god damn acronym and name in full detail just to spoon feed the lazy few with poor world knowledge who rather than simply Google it prefer to expend greater effort informing the rest of us as to how ignorant they are of the world.
If the UK bit in the summary wasn't enough of a clue that it may be the met in the UK and not some other country then anyone getting confused is too far gone stupid to help in the slightest anyway.
I don't live in London so I can't say I'm scared in the slightest. In fact, even if I did live in London I can't say I'd be scared in the slightest.
Exactly. What this system is is basically automation of day to day work which you get in any industry, I wouldn't expect the police to be any different.
If they can reasonably use publicly posted information to solve crimes or even prevent them before they happen then they're going to need to do that anyway and I'd rather they have a system that automates and pulls out the important parts and hence only need a few officers to review than than have hundreds of officers expensively wasting time reading absolutely everything they can.
This isn't to say there shouldn't be safe guards, they need to make sure the system is fit for purpose and is focussing on the important things, and it needs to be limited to public information unlike prism, but all in all if there is information out there publicly that can solve crimes then that's kind of exactly what the police are meant to do - find information to assist in solving and preventing crimes and if they can do that more efficiently than reading everything and anything then great.
I agree they've got a lot to answer for but "most corrupt" is pushing it a bit given that in some countries you can outright pay officers to arrest people or get arrested on made up charges and have to pay a bribe to be released.
It's also a rather big force as it has the best part of 50,000 staff which is more than Sweden and Norway put together have to police their entire countries and given that you're bound to have some bad eggs, but yes, they could certainly do better.
It's okay, you can be forgiven for not having heard of them, it's not like they're the oldest police force in the world or anything:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Police_Service
Who knows, maybe a cup to their ear against the wall in the room next to you? but I guess unlike us here in the UK you wouldn't name it so that it sounds like a new brand of shoe freshener for people with smelly feet at least.
They were planning on flying a plane with a small amount of explosive into a US base on German soil that secretly stockpiles now poorly maintained and unstable cold-war era nukes to detonate them and trigger a nuclear explosion, which the US would respond to by nuking Russia believing it was an attack by them and Russia would then nuke Germany to complete destruction.
Yeah, okay I made all that up and might have been slightly inspired by The Sum of all Fears which just happened to be on again the other day.
Actually I should stop, I'll be giving the German authorities ideas as to how they can further trump up the charges wont I?
Because all it does is just scrape public data, whilst Prism targets private data, which is kind of a fundamental difference.
To be fair the BBC at least has had a number of articles such as "What could they know about me?" and that sort of thing so it's not all media outlets that have been ignoring the questions the revelation raises.
Yet their dirty secrets were spread far and wide by Edward Snowden, and that's the reality.
They no doubt do have some absolute geniuses working for them but it only takes one bumbling manager to fuck it all up by saying something they shouldn't, or by mandating that their secrets should be accessible way beyond sensible levels of security. The fact a low level contractor at a 3rd party company had so much access to NSA secrets is evidence of that.
Security is always limited by the weakest link and it's no different for the NSA, they could have the top 10,000 brightest security experts in the world working there but it'd only take their 10,001'th employee to be a bumbling idiot to fuck all that up. You don't need the NSA to be incompetent, you just need a single one of their employees to be incompetent, and guaranteeing 100% incompetence across a whole large organisation is an arguably impossible feat.
Because it's trivial to detect outbound data transfer.
Seriously it's like the same argument with Microsoft using Kinect in the new XBox to spy on you - you think people wouldn't be able to detect a video/audio stream sent from their console? You think you can make this kind of data transfer magically invisible on the network?
You may not control the software, you may not even control the hardware, but most people control the equipment those things have to pass through to get to their destinations. Even if the data transfer is encrypted it's enough to raise questions when you see a sizeable data transfer which would be required to transfer anything meaningful.
The same is true of Windows activation which someone suggested may be a vector for this transfer - there's a big difference between the few kilobytes needed to activate software and the multi-megabytes that would be needed to transfer anything of value.
This is why such conspiracy theories are just stupid, they seem to rely on some magical ability to hide data transfer across devices they don't even control. To get away with this sort of conspiracy theory Microsoft would have to not just hide everything so well that many millions of man hours of security research can't find it, but also be in league with every router, switch and network device manufacturer on the planet, every ISP at every hop along the way and so forth.
This is why Prism has stuck to tapping the fibres and so forth - because it can be done transparently without anyone finding out if it weren't for whistleblowers. When you start adding exploits and backdoors into the devices people find out. You really think Russia's FSB and so forth are somehow so infinitely more incompetent than the NSA that they couldn't unmask this sort of thing?
You only have to look at scenarios where security services have tried this sort of thing, it didn't exactly take that long for the likes of Stuxnet to be unmasked did it and that was pretty specifically targeted.
There's a vast difference between NSA spying transparently and them backdooring actual hardware and software indiscriminately. They may get away with doing it to bug a targeted individual's system but they're never going to get away with it on hardware and software owned by millions of people around the globe without someone noticing something fishy.
It's stupid, if you don't own and control the entire end-to-end infrastructure you can't hide anything, it's a two way street - just as you don't necessarily know what MS Word does being closed source (though that's not necessarily an impediment if you know assembly), they don't know what you can and can't see with your router or whatever on your network because they don't control and own it, hence they cannot hide anything from it.
No it's not, you made the claim that goes against common understanding. If you think everything publicised about global population is wrong, it's upto you to prove it.
I agree with you there's a good reason for the web as an applications platform, we just need better technologies to allow it to do that better because we currently risk breaking or at least over complicating the technologies that are used for static content in trying to make them something they're not.
I have no problem with what Javascript can do but I think even when you understand it's functional capabilities and so forth it's not a great language. The difference between declaring var and not causing the difference between local and global scope for example is braindead and it's handling of captured variables in closures is unhelpful. The point is that it's not that Javascript isn't powerful and that you can't do impressive things with it when you know it's quirks inside out but that there are plenty of languages that do everything Javascript does without those quirks proving that those quirks are demonstrative of original bad design than an inherent trait of Javascript's prototype/functional/oo hybrid design - the problem is it supports multiple paradigms but it supports them all in a sub-standard manner and that's the problem, none of the issues that make it sub-standard stop you doing what you need to do on a small scale but they do result in unnecessarily verbose and more awkward to debug code than is necessary such that as your code base grows maintainability of it gets pretty awful through no fault of the programmer but simply as a result of the language's quirks and half arsed implementations of various muddled paradigms.
So yeah, Javascript is powerful, yeah you can make it work, but a better thought through language would allow production of far better code again. Personally I think C# is a good example nowadays because it's a proper fully featured OO language from the outset, with fully fledged lambda support and optional DLR for dynamic typing or creating a prototype style environment where necessary. C# has evolved such that it's only added one paradigm at a time to make sure that as it has it does each properly, Javascript in contrast feels like everything was thrown in with no clear plan and not enough time spent ensuring it was done as well as it could be and that's the problem.
£10 is the maximum but yeah I just looked it up, I didn't realise CCTV was quite so firmly covered by the DPA. Well, there's an option for fighting over the top CCTV then, issuing SARs to companies and the police even at £10 a time could easily create a type of DOS attack because the amount of time required to find all footage of you, copy it off and send it to you would take up a good amount of a CCTV operator's time daily.
It depends what area of tech, if you're talking day to day tech support like repairing PCs and so forth then yes, this has become a low skilled job because frankly it's easier nowadays (no more pratting around with the 640k barrier for example) and no more doing solder repairs and so forth because we have a "just replace it" society now.
If you're talking about software development then yes it does pay higher than average by a reasonable amount. There may be pockets of civilisation where this isn't the case but it's certainly the case on average, even if you narrow down to individual countries like the UK and US. The UK national average wage for example is £26k - even in the North of England where wages are way lower than in London you can sometimes get this as a starting salary, let alone as a career average.
The fact is if it's tech support then the young "punks" are getting the jobs because they do know their stuff, because the stuff they need to know is just that much easier nowadays. The problem is that there's a divide between knowledge and relevant knowledge, it's okay knowing more but if what you know is no longer relevant to the job as is the case with some (but definitely by no means all) of the knowledge anyone doing IT support in the 90s or earlier obtained then you're going to have no practical advantage. I'm speculating here, this may not apply to you at all, but certainly it's the case that IT support wages have declined for the simple reason that IT support is now a much easier job than it used to be.
I wont pretend that IT jobs including development don't get based less than industries such as banking and so forth, but development is still in the top half or probably even top quartile of salary brackets on average.
Source? The global population is most definitely growing by all publicly available statistical measures and none of China, India or the US are shrinking or even close. Some European nations have seen slowed/stalling growth, Russia is shrinking (or at least has been). Africa and South America are growing.
If the global population is only breaking even or in decline then where exactly is this decline occuring? Russia doesn't hold enough of the world's population for it to cause that by itself or with only a handful of smaller nations.
Sounds like Obama's best option when deciding policy is decide what he wants to do, announce the exact opposite meaning the Republicans will back what he wants to do just to spite the exact opposite he announced and then announce "Hey, Republicans, you know what, you're right, let's do what you want" and watch as they sit smugly thinking they've won and pass the bills he wanted to pass in the first place.
Do you? where do you live? what about private cameras such as shop CCTV?