Linux.com has nice summary on 'How major distributions are dealing with potential violations of patents and trademarks, cryptography, packaging proprietary software and consequential damages
I know windows won't let me use the OS in every way I want. For example, they have DRM that is enforced, DVD players under windows can lock you into a region. A friend had a linux laptop that was not locked into any region.
Is Linux going to start doing the same thing as windows? Are the major distros worried about being sued?
There are way too many lawyers in the USA. I bet if someone did a study, they would find just about everyone will be sued at least once in their life. Too bad it is not like the old days of PC computers when software companies made good money and left users alone. But ever since software companies stopped selling software and started selling services, they now are going after users. I guess selling software once for $50 is not as profitable as activating software on a monthly fee of $12.95. Take the RPG of the 80's and compare them to the games of today.:( If they had open networks, it would be like the 80's, but companies see a way of making more money.
Since the article seems to be more concerned about using cameras to store information, rather than taking pictures of sensitive documents, how long until USB Memmory sticks are targeted? Floppies? Geez, if they're that worried about security they need to be concerned about anything that stores info, not just what appears to be everyday items.
They check everyone who enters, no cameras are allowed. Everyone needs a special Id issued by them to eneter. No jackets are allowed. No loose sweaters are allowed. They have lockers where any banned item can be kept, outside the secure area. Once you make it to the guards station, they stamp every sheet of paper you take in. When you leave, you can only take out papers they stamped. They check EVERYTHING. And they have a ton of security cameras in the building, and employees that keep track of who comes and goes. I needed papers which were in a secure area. They made me wear an ID tied around my neck, and I was escorted by an employee.
They also make it a crime to try and decieve them (for example, sneak a camera in). People can go to jail, and there are heavy penalties. They have multiple checks. The first one is a metal detector and a police officer who is more than willing to use the hand wand. The next step is the security officer who checks you in.
If companies want security, it is not hard to ban everything, hire 20 or 30 police officers, make it a crime to violate their policy, and treat everyone as dishonest liars who are more likely to steal.
A chain is only as strong as the weakest link. That is the mentality these institutions have, so they don't trust anyone, not even thier own guards.
As long as he gets a full tuition refund, I don't see a problem with this.
He has the right to write, and they have the right to disagree and take action.
Since when does signing up for a class mean the person can no longer post their opinions? What did he post? Did he threaten someone, did he post naked pictures of a professor? Was his post a crime?
I see tuition as a contract. I agree to pay you money. You agree to teach me about a subject. Since when does the contract call for the student to agree with the university or be silent?
I can understand both sides. Universities want to keep order, they want to have an honor code saying certain activites are bad, like lying, plagerizing, stealing, and so forth. Unless this guy did something really bad, I can't understand the logic the university has.
In the end, if the university is a private school, they can do whatever they want. I am sure Brigham Young University will continue to admit mormons and exclude those who oppose their fiath. Just like Harvard will continue to give special consideration to legacy admits. Just like Howard will continue to give special consideration to blacks.
If people are insulted by this university not allowing this student to continue studies because of a blog, then the anwser is to never attend that university. After all, a private university needs money. If the top 25% of high school students decide not to attend a university, the reputation of the school will be harmed, Barrons will lower their ranking, and the school will become as important as State U of Southern Miss creek river campus.
Still, I can't understand the logic of the university. And if his tuition contract did not have something in there about the university having a right to drop him, he should sue for more than tuition. He just lost a year of income by being forced to graduate late.
But wasn't the Siegenthaler issue about an edit of his article, not creation?
Forgive me for being out of the loop, but who is Siegenthaler, and what is the controversy?
If they can justify needing an account to make an article, they will soon justify needing an account to edit. It is far simpler to edit a good article than to start a new one. I forget the details, but there have been plenty of articles that have been edited based on opinion, like a game of ping pong between two camps.
I thought the whole point of wiki was that anyone could add anything, at any time, and if someone does not like it, they can use a previous version of the article. Those radio buttons are nice for seeing the evolution of an article.
Plus, why is forcing registration to make articles any less private? Don't they log the IP address of anyone who adds content?
How many people in the study were killed off by high blood pressure before they had the chance to develop cancer?
Good question!
It seems that any industry can produce a study which says their product is healthy/benificial in some way. But they never tell you the adverse health effects. I would not be supprised if the tobacco industry would run a news story saying smoking decreased colon cancer by.0001% in the population. Too bad it would kill 100X as many from lung cancer.
This reminds me of the 80's when everyone was saying how bad butter is, and to switch to margarine or die of a heart attack. 10 years later, researchers said margarine is unhealthy and butter is better. I remember the same debate about eggs, until some researcher enlightened us to good cholesterol. LOL, I guess it took someone to fly to France to watch 80 year old men eat eggs fried in butter before they asked "What's going on here".
I am going to take my grandmothers advice, she is still alive in her 90's. She told me when I was young to get 8 good hours of sleep each night. Don't stay up past midnight, wake up early and ready for the new day. And everything is good in moderation, never take too much of anything. The only thing she said to avoid was smoke and drugs, and people who smoke or use drugs. The last bit of advice was that tomorrow is always a new day, no setback should foul your mood. It is pretty simple advice, but I think she was 100% correct.
10 Home
20 Print "What is the password: "
30 Get A$
40 If A$ = "b" then goto 70
50 Print "Wrong!"
60 Goto 20
70 Print "Right"
80 End
I do remember programs like the above (the old Compute! magazine provided listings of old-style BASIC programs each month), but such code is the very definition of "spaghetti".;-)
I remember those magazines too. It was such a fun way to learn, they would have code which anyone could type and save. The real fun started with changing the code in the magazine to do something new. One new 50 line program could provide a months worth of learning and playing. I remember looking at one months 50 lines of code, and remembering something from last year which I thought would be cool to add, and digging through a stack of magazines looking for that code.
I doubt there is any magazine like that for Java or C++, that a new user could type in notepad, and run without doing anything special. And I bet it would be difficult for new users to decipher C++ code, if they never had any real training.
The learning curve is definitely more difficult.
The only thing like old Basic might be HTML. There are no numbers, but the learning is the same. Anyone can look at the source, and re-arrange the code to make a new looking page. But even basic HTML is being pushed aside for CSS and scripting.
Is programming getting much harder?
on
Build a Program Now
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Back in the 80's, my first language was basic on an Apple II+. It was a very easy language to learn, every line of code was numbered, and everything was logical. Line 10 would run before line 20, and so on. For those who have never seen it before, a very simple password protection program might be:
10 Home
20 Print "What is the password: "
30 Get A$
40 If A$ = "b" then goto 70
50 Print "Wrong!"
60 Goto 20
70 Print "Right"
80 End
Now compare that kind of linear logic to a Java program with classes and { () and all that jazz. I remember when starting Java, thinking why do I need 3 different classes imported just to do a simple hello world? VB was no different, they had forms where you needed to drag and drop control boxes, and the like. Very little is straight forward, where a user/programmer could figure out the logic without a teacher/tutor.
I wonder how much more difficult the learning curve is? Maybe the programs will be better, and the programmers more skilled, but there was an element of fun in a language that is so simple a 7 year old can write his own code. Compare that to my college level Java class, which started 28 strong, and ended with only 16 students for the final exam.
What happened to a computer language that is intuitive and very easy, that anybody can learn?
If you need a song to understand the difference between glucose and fructose, then why bother taking the course in the first place? You're just going to forget everything you learned as soon as you complete the final exam.
Just because a class ends, does not mean the learning ends. Some people will have a lightbulb click on in their heads, a year later, remembering something from a previous class.
Most of what we learn when young is compartmentalized. We don't know how topic A1 relates to topic B4. In your example, maybe glucose means nothing to the test taker, except an answer to get a good grade in Biology 100. But next year, when taking Chem 100 and hearing about exothermic reactions, something will click in his head, and he will remember ATP and the krebs cycle. Maybe he will sit back, close his eyes, and start thinking of making a super mitochondira where an elephant can lift 10 times the normal weight, and how to use this elephant in hard to reach parts of Africa to build better housing or hospitals.
We should get the most from everyone, use whatever methods work, and not critisize a teacher for reaching 10% of his students that might otherwise not understand.
The worst teachers are stuck in one method. The best ones will explain a topic in multiple ways. I had one math teacher that used things like "Please Excuse My Poor Aunt Sally" to teach about equations- parenthesis, exponents, multiplication/division, addition, subtraction. To someone else, it might be a complex list of what to do first and rules. But he showed a small trick, and nobody missed it. I wish more teachers would take the time to find teaching methods that work, rather than passing the blame to students and telling students to "study harder".
It is one of the reasons dissection is so important in Biology classes. Kids can't learn by looking at a picture in a book of what the digestive system looks like. It is different to cut a frog open and see for yourself. It also stimulates the imagination in ways books can not. I remember looking at the cardiovascular system and wondering "Why do we have heart attacks? Why not just add a small pump at the inferior vena cava to help weak hearts. And if someone has a heart attack, the pump will act like a CPR machine, keeping blood flowing.
Teachers like this guy are a pleasure to have. They love their field. They feel a responsibility to reach all students, regardless of how the kid learns. I knew some smart kids in highschool who never made it that far in academia because they got stuck with book learning- read the book than take a scan tron. But when you talk with them, you realize they learn 10X as much as the rest of us when they see something done. I've seen this guy tear a carburetor apart and rebuild it, after watching someone else do it. But he could not do simple Chem 100 problems.
I wonder how many savants are out there who were pushed out of mainstream education because traditional book reading followed by test taking did not show their potential?
I think the anwser for education is to require a Ed.D instead of a Ph.D to teach the first four years of college. Let the Ph.D's do research. Just because they are expert in their field does not mean they know how to convey that information to others.
Give people Linux in their youth so that they won't be completely computer-brain-dead and M$ vulnerable when they get older! An excellent idea!
Does the computer operating system a person uses as a child have any predictive value in forseeing what OS a person will use as an adult?
My first memory of a computer in a school was an Apple II+. I remember a program our history teacher used to show how the electoral college works- we all had budgets, knew which states leaned which way, and had to allocate funds to each state. We had an after school computer club that played Bard's Tale on those same computers. We knew the Apple II+ inside and out, we were 11-13 years old and were writing our own programs.
In high school, we all loved the new Apple IIgs systems. We did our homework reports on them. There were programs for our science labs.
But as soon as I hit college, the Pentium was introduced, and there were no Apple computer labs? Even though getting a pirated copy of Windows 98 was easy, there were people using Linux. Why?
I say the #1 reason is money. If someone can't pay for an OS, they will use a different one. Reason #2 is control. If a person can not accomplish a task on an OS, they will search for a different one. Reason #3 is why OS/2 failed- they could not get enough support from third party software companies. There was a computer store nearby that gave out 500 free copies of OS/2. But they had no software titles for sale to go with OS/2.
What OS a person starts out with when young will have ZERO impact on what OS they stay with. OS'es are not like McDonalds, we will not keep going to them into our 30's just because we had lunch there when 7 years old. OS'es are more like a tool, like a hammer. We will go and get the best one we can find for the job. You might as well try and predict what wrist watch a person will wear at age 30 based on what watch they wear in the fourth grade. Or calculator. Or anything. It is just a tool.
If linux is to get more of a market share, then linux needs to improve. Just targeting kids to use linux will not make it more used later in life. Linux could become all Apple was 20 years ago, and they still might not be used in universities or buisness if Linux does not do a better job than the large corporation in Redmond.
Before TiVo came out, I wondered how people got to vote for Nielson ratings? There were so many good shows I loved, but according to Nielson, nobody else did. Off Centre for example was a friday night staple a few years back. So was Class of 1993. But both of these shows were axed. If the Nielson ratings included my viewing habits, maybe these shows would still be on the air.
I wonder how marketing firms will use this new TiVo data? Will they discount the value of a show which was recorded and not watched live (because people can skip the commercials)?
And what about people who do not have TiVo, how will their votes count? I have a friend with a DVD/RW with VCR+ that lets him record like TiVo, but without the $12 a month fee. It is not connected to any phone line, and it works well. I guess he will not get a vote?
Is the anwser a system like Amazon, where everyone can leave remarks and generate buzz? TVTOME would have been the perfect website for that kind of task, but since they are gone and cnet took over, I do not trust a corporation.
I hope we get well written shows that require some IQ, not just the same lame sex jokes and reality tv.
wasn't something put in with the patriot-act that dumped money in the fbi for a huge database overhall. something to enable crosschecks between agencies. if i'm not wrong, what else are they in need of updating?
We don't need to have every database cross checked. All we need is one FBI database for the dangerous criminals, the murderers and corporate criminals. Before long, states will check other states databases for minor criminal offenses. I'll give one example- try getting a job as a realtor. Arkansas will check their database to see if anyone is behind on payments for state guarenteed loans (like school loans). If you are, Arkansas will not give you a license. Oklahoma has the same law. What will happen the way the system is now, is the guy from Arkansas will move to Oklahoma and get a job there. By having every state cross check every other state, people will not be allowed to start over. Maybe Joe Sixpack went to State U, ran himself into $40,000 in debt, and feels he can never overcome such a large amount of debt.
Or what about minor crimes? What if someone at the age of 20 decided to join the Alabama KKK? That person never broke a crime, just went to protests and meetings. At age 24 the person quits, and two years later moves to New York. Should New York know about his prior membership because of some anti-terrorism database? I know what everyone is thinking, the KKK is bad, so screw that person. I'll give a counter example, same facts as above, but instead of KKK the person is a member of PETA where his cohorts raid a university research center and free test animals.
Are we still a free nation, or a nation where everyone has a history stored in a database?
What is going to happen is some start-up in Cali will offer a service, checking a person through every state and FBI database. Once that becomes profitable, forget about ever trying to get a job for more than minimum wage if you have a blemish on your record. It will be the same thing employers are doing with checking credit reports before hiring workers.
We should have a committee directing the FBI, and not just 1 person. Perhaps the president can appoint one member, with the consent of the Senate. Maybe a second member can be appointed by the conference of Governors. That way the states will have some oversight into what Big Brother is doing.
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I know windows won't let me use the OS in every way I want. For example, they have DRM that is enforced, DVD players under windows can lock you into a region. A friend had a linux laptop that was not locked into any region.
Is Linux going to start doing the same thing as windows? Are the major distros worried about being sued?
There are way too many lawyers in the USA. I bet if someone did a study, they would find just about everyone will be sued at least once in their life. Too bad it is not like the old days of PC computers when software companies made good money and left users alone. But ever since software companies stopped selling software and started selling services, they now are going after users. I guess selling software once for $50 is not as profitable as activating software on a monthly fee of $12.95. Take the RPG of the 80's and compare them to the games of today. :( If they had open networks, it would be like the 80's, but companies see a way of making more money.
They check everyone who enters, no cameras are allowed. Everyone needs a special Id issued by them to eneter. No jackets are allowed. No loose sweaters are allowed. They have lockers where any banned item can be kept, outside the secure area. Once you make it to the guards station, they stamp every sheet of paper you take in. When you leave, you can only take out papers they stamped. They check EVERYTHING. And they have a ton of security cameras in the building, and employees that keep track of who comes and goes. I needed papers which were in a secure area. They made me wear an ID tied around my neck, and I was escorted by an employee.
They also make it a crime to try and decieve them (for example, sneak a camera in). People can go to jail, and there are heavy penalties. They have multiple checks. The first one is a metal detector and a police officer who is more than willing to use the hand wand. The next step is the security officer who checks you in.
If companies want security, it is not hard to ban everything, hire 20 or 30 police officers, make it a crime to violate their policy, and treat everyone as dishonest liars who are more likely to steal.
A chain is only as strong as the weakest link. That is the mentality these institutions have, so they don't trust anyone, not even thier own guards.
He has the right to write, and they have the right to disagree and take action.
Since when does signing up for a class mean the person can no longer post their opinions? What did he post? Did he threaten someone, did he post naked pictures of a professor? Was his post a crime?
I see tuition as a contract. I agree to pay you money. You agree to teach me about a subject. Since when does the contract call for the student to agree with the university or be silent?
I can understand both sides. Universities want to keep order, they want to have an honor code saying certain activites are bad, like lying, plagerizing, stealing, and so forth. Unless this guy did something really bad, I can't understand the logic the university has.
In the end, if the university is a private school, they can do whatever they want. I am sure Brigham Young University will continue to admit mormons and exclude those who oppose their fiath. Just like Harvard will continue to give special consideration to legacy admits. Just like Howard will continue to give special consideration to blacks.
If people are insulted by this university not allowing this student to continue studies because of a blog, then the anwser is to never attend that university. After all, a private university needs money. If the top 25% of high school students decide not to attend a university, the reputation of the school will be harmed, Barrons will lower their ranking, and the school will become as important as State U of Southern Miss creek river campus.
Still, I can't understand the logic of the university. And if his tuition contract did not have something in there about the university having a right to drop him, he should sue for more than tuition. He just lost a year of income by being forced to graduate late.
Forgive me for being out of the loop, but who is Siegenthaler, and what is the controversy?
If they can justify needing an account to make an article, they will soon justify needing an account to edit. It is far simpler to edit a good article than to start a new one. I forget the details, but there have been plenty of articles that have been edited based on opinion, like a game of ping pong between two camps.
I thought the whole point of wiki was that anyone could add anything, at any time, and if someone does not like it, they can use a previous version of the article. Those radio buttons are nice for seeing the evolution of an article.
Plus, why is forcing registration to make articles any less private? Don't they log the IP address of anyone who adds content?
Good question!
It seems that any industry can produce a study which says their product is healthy/benificial in some way. But they never tell you the adverse health effects. I would not be supprised if the tobacco industry would run a news story saying smoking decreased colon cancer by .0001% in the population. Too bad it would kill 100X as many from lung cancer.
This reminds me of the 80's when everyone was saying how bad butter is, and to switch to margarine or die of a heart attack. 10 years later, researchers said margarine is unhealthy and butter is better. I remember the same debate about eggs, until some researcher enlightened us to good cholesterol. LOL, I guess it took someone to fly to France to watch 80 year old men eat eggs fried in butter before they asked "What's going on here".
I am going to take my grandmothers advice, she is still alive in her 90's. She told me when I was young to get 8 good hours of sleep each night. Don't stay up past midnight, wake up early and ready for the new day. And everything is good in moderation, never take too much of anything. The only thing she said to avoid was smoke and drugs, and people who smoke or use drugs. The last bit of advice was that tomorrow is always a new day, no setback should foul your mood. It is pretty simple advice, but I think she was 100% correct.
I do remember programs like the above (the old Compute! magazine provided listings of old-style BASIC programs each month), but such code is the very definition of "spaghetti". ;-)
I remember those magazines too. It was such a fun way to learn, they would have code which anyone could type and save. The real fun started with changing the code in the magazine to do something new. One new 50 line program could provide a months worth of learning and playing. I remember looking at one months 50 lines of code, and remembering something from last year which I thought would be cool to add, and digging through a stack of magazines looking for that code.
I doubt there is any magazine like that for Java or C++, that a new user could type in notepad, and run without doing anything special. And I bet it would be difficult for new users to decipher C++ code, if they never had any real training.
The learning curve is definitely more difficult.
The only thing like old Basic might be HTML. There are no numbers, but the learning is the same. Anyone can look at the source, and re-arrange the code to make a new looking page. But even basic HTML is being pushed aside for CSS and scripting.
10 Home
20 Print "What is the password: "
30 Get A$
40 If A$ = "b" then goto 70
50 Print "Wrong!"
60 Goto 20
70 Print "Right"
80 End
Now compare that kind of linear logic to a Java program with classes and { () and all that jazz. I remember when starting Java, thinking why do I need 3 different classes imported just to do a simple hello world? VB was no different, they had forms where you needed to drag and drop control boxes, and the like. Very little is straight forward, where a user/programmer could figure out the logic without a teacher/tutor.
I wonder how much more difficult the learning curve is? Maybe the programs will be better, and the programmers more skilled, but there was an element of fun in a language that is so simple a 7 year old can write his own code. Compare that to my college level Java class, which started 28 strong, and ended with only 16 students for the final exam.
What happened to a computer language that is intuitive and very easy, that anybody can learn?
Just because a class ends, does not mean the learning ends. Some people will have a lightbulb click on in their heads, a year later, remembering something from a previous class.
Most of what we learn when young is compartmentalized. We don't know how topic A1 relates to topic B4. In your example, maybe glucose means nothing to the test taker, except an answer to get a good grade in Biology 100. But next year, when taking Chem 100 and hearing about exothermic reactions, something will click in his head, and he will remember ATP and the krebs cycle. Maybe he will sit back, close his eyes, and start thinking of making a super mitochondira where an elephant can lift 10 times the normal weight, and how to use this elephant in hard to reach parts of Africa to build better housing or hospitals.
We should get the most from everyone, use whatever methods work, and not critisize a teacher for reaching 10% of his students that might otherwise not understand.
It is one of the reasons dissection is so important in Biology classes. Kids can't learn by looking at a picture in a book of what the digestive system looks like. It is different to cut a frog open and see for yourself. It also stimulates the imagination in ways books can not. I remember looking at the cardiovascular system and wondering "Why do we have heart attacks? Why not just add a small pump at the inferior vena cava to help weak hearts. And if someone has a heart attack, the pump will act like a CPR machine, keeping blood flowing.
Teachers like this guy are a pleasure to have. They love their field. They feel a responsibility to reach all students, regardless of how the kid learns. I knew some smart kids in highschool who never made it that far in academia because they got stuck with book learning- read the book than take a scan tron. But when you talk with them, you realize they learn 10X as much as the rest of us when they see something done. I've seen this guy tear a carburetor apart and rebuild it, after watching someone else do it. But he could not do simple Chem 100 problems.
I wonder how many savants are out there who were pushed out of mainstream education because traditional book reading followed by test taking did not show their potential?
I think the anwser for education is to require a Ed.D instead of a Ph.D to teach the first four years of college. Let the Ph.D's do research. Just because they are expert in their field does not mean they know how to convey that information to others.
Does the computer operating system a person uses as a child have any predictive value in forseeing what OS a person will use as an adult?
My first memory of a computer in a school was an Apple II+. I remember a program our history teacher used to show how the electoral college works- we all had budgets, knew which states leaned which way, and had to allocate funds to each state. We had an after school computer club that played Bard's Tale on those same computers. We knew the Apple II+ inside and out, we were 11-13 years old and were writing our own programs.
In high school, we all loved the new Apple IIgs systems. We did our homework reports on them. There were programs for our science labs.
But as soon as I hit college, the Pentium was introduced, and there were no Apple computer labs? Even though getting a pirated copy of Windows 98 was easy, there were people using Linux. Why?
I say the #1 reason is money. If someone can't pay for an OS, they will use a different one. Reason #2 is control. If a person can not accomplish a task on an OS, they will search for a different one. Reason #3 is why OS/2 failed- they could not get enough support from third party software companies. There was a computer store nearby that gave out 500 free copies of OS/2. But they had no software titles for sale to go with OS/2.
What OS a person starts out with when young will have ZERO impact on what OS they stay with. OS'es are not like McDonalds, we will not keep going to them into our 30's just because we had lunch there when 7 years old. OS'es are more like a tool, like a hammer. We will go and get the best one we can find for the job. You might as well try and predict what wrist watch a person will wear at age 30 based on what watch they wear in the fourth grade. Or calculator. Or anything. It is just a tool.
If linux is to get more of a market share, then linux needs to improve. Just targeting kids to use linux will not make it more used later in life. Linux could become all Apple was 20 years ago, and they still might not be used in universities or buisness if Linux does not do a better job than the large corporation in Redmond.
I wonder how marketing firms will use this new TiVo data? Will they discount the value of a show which was recorded and not watched live (because people can skip the commercials)?
And what about people who do not have TiVo, how will their votes count? I have a friend with a DVD/RW with VCR+ that lets him record like TiVo, but without the $12 a month fee. It is not connected to any phone line, and it works well. I guess he will not get a vote?
Is the anwser a system like Amazon, where everyone can leave remarks and generate buzz? TVTOME would have been the perfect website for that kind of task, but since they are gone and cnet took over, I do not trust a corporation.
I hope we get well written shows that require some IQ, not just the same lame sex jokes and reality tv.
We don't need to have every database cross checked. All we need is one FBI database for the dangerous criminals, the murderers and corporate criminals. Before long, states will check other states databases for minor criminal offenses. I'll give one example- try getting a job as a realtor. Arkansas will check their database to see if anyone is behind on payments for state guarenteed loans (like school loans). If you are, Arkansas will not give you a license. Oklahoma has the same law. What will happen the way the system is now, is the guy from Arkansas will move to Oklahoma and get a job there. By having every state cross check every other state, people will not be allowed to start over. Maybe Joe Sixpack went to State U, ran himself into $40,000 in debt, and feels he can never overcome such a large amount of debt.
Or what about minor crimes? What if someone at the age of 20 decided to join the Alabama KKK? That person never broke a crime, just went to protests and meetings. At age 24 the person quits, and two years later moves to New York. Should New York know about his prior membership because of some anti-terrorism database? I know what everyone is thinking, the KKK is bad, so screw that person. I'll give a counter example, same facts as above, but instead of KKK the person is a member of PETA where his cohorts raid a university research center and free test animals.
Are we still a free nation, or a nation where everyone has a history stored in a database?
What is going to happen is some start-up in Cali will offer a service, checking a person through every state and FBI database. Once that becomes profitable, forget about ever trying to get a job for more than minimum wage if you have a blemish on your record. It will be the same thing employers are doing with checking credit reports before hiring workers.
We need less databases, and more privacy laws.
We should have a committee directing the FBI, and not just 1 person. Perhaps the president can appoint one member, with the consent of the Senate. Maybe a second member can be appointed by the conference of Governors. That way the states will have some oversight into what Big Brother is doing.