Each component of the system, that is supposed to be separate, is in bed with those it is supposed to be a check against. This wouldn't surprise anyone who has paid attention to the way that police officers are treated by judges and prosecutors, especially in "liberal areas" for abusing their authority. In places like Northern Virginia, one of the bluest parts of the country, the prosecutors won't touch a cop who shoots and kills someone in a criminal way while on duty. The very argument for giving them their extra powers over the public is that they're professionals with how they use it, and yet they're more likely to be treated like a well-meaning retarded child with a handgun rather than a professional for whom human error should almost invariably be regarded at first blush as criminal negligence.
The prosecutors will rarely try them, the judges will rarely sanction prosecutors who do things like hound a guy they know is innocent, etc. Why? Because in general, the people in law enforcement, the DA's office and the judiciary are bad apples, with a few good ones mixed in. This applies to federal agencies as well.
I have never bought into the argument that communicating online should always be legally regarded as the equivalent of having a conversation in public. People frequently put access controls and encryption on information sent over the Internet, and it's not like every person on the Internet has the ability to listen in on what you're saying in an IM conversation, emails, etc. There should be a reasonable basis to assume privacy in certain contexts, such as email and IM. IMO, the law should sanction people who eavesdrop on such communications without a good reason.
With Facebook, it all depends on the context. They should be required to show what information they are passing onto their application developers, but there should be no legal protection beyond that. People should be able to sell off their personal information in exchange for something they want. The only reasonable issue here is when the user is not able to reasonably find out and consent to the sharing of the information.
Personally, I am a lot more concerned with things like the FBI's latest attempts to get carte blanche access to email. If there is any institution that will destroy privacy in America, it's the federal government. Every major information/privacy issue that comes back to haunt the average person stems from the law or law enforcement agencies. The reason we worry about identity theft on the financial side of things is that the **law** does not put the onus on the lender to verify the identity of their customer. Why should it be my responsibility to ensure that someone isn't signing up in my name for credit cards? You worry about devastating legal decisions for privacy? The precedents are being set by the DoJ, not corporate America.
People like my mother use about 2GB of bandwidth at the most every month. For someone like her, a deal to charge her say.... $6-$8/month for basic connectivity with only 2GB of downstream bandwidth would be a bargain. As it is, she pays the same rate as her neighbor who is a fairly recent college grad who, if I know anything about his downloading habits today from what he was like in our dorm (college towns can be a scary small world), he's milking that DSL line for all its worth. Guys like him are probably sucking down the full amount that they are theoretically able to get from the service, for probably the better part of the day.
He's not a freeloader because he actually pays for his service. The problem is, he is being subsidized under Verizon's business plan by users like my mother. She only uses the equivalent of a few dollars worth of bandwidth. Now no one would go for this sort of business plan with water or electricity if they could avoid it. It is just a matter of Verizon continually adding infrastructure in order for them to provide full 3 or more Mbps to each user, but who pays for that much extra backbone connecting each home?
That's the catch. Per-GB isn't inherently odious. If basic cable internet access were $15/month for 5GB of bandwidth, and each additional GB was sold for $0.05-$0.10/GB, you'd barely notice. For many people, it'd actually be cheaper than paying a big fee for what they get now.
With the larger issue here of network neutrality and preferential routing of packets from specific sites and such, I'll admit that as a libertarian I find it to be a hard issue. On the one hand, these are private companies, and on the other hand, their very existence is due to government intervention to let them build infrastructure. In my opinion, companies built with strong government influence or that are owned by the government should be subject to sanctions in the marketplace in order to protect true private businesses.
This is what they'll do, at the most. They'll read the comments, take a few minor suggestions that are about as a substantive of a reform as a changing the paint on the wall from beige to white, and call it even. Then everyone in power will trumpet how the system works, the people were heard, and how America is still the greatest country on the face of the Earth.
In the end, we'll end up with an agency that can best be described as being filled primarily by the sort of people that routinely get rejected by local police agencies, affirmative action hires, etc.
I'll never forget the one time I've flown since 9-11. I was going to Italy from Dulles Airport in Virginia in 2005. The TSA personnel I saw were mostly obese people you know that got hired to fill a quota. The people they hired were clearly by and large not their on their ability to screen and secure the choke points in the airport. What I'll never forget was going to De Gaulle Airport and feeling like the French actually knew how to run security.
For the love of all that is holy. When French security is more intimidating and professional looking than your own, you know that you've made a mistake along the way that doesn't bode well.
Not only that, but Apple is in for a swift kick in the ass if they're not careful. Even though a lot of people will still be able to afford an iPhone, the issues surrounding its battery will be a deterrent to purchasing it. Apple will have two choices if it wants to appeal to consumers who are starting to worry about their budgets: make the batter removable like a Razr or any other phone, or lose potential customers.
A removable battery takes away nothing from the aesthetics of the case. The only thing it does is keep it out of Apple's service shop every year, and thus makes it harder to justify buying a new one every year. Apple needs to prepare itself by making this a non-issue for the iPod Touch and iPhone if it doesn't want to face potential disruption.
Apple could take an active part in developing software for both devices, and sell them to offset the losses in their plans from people not spending a lot of money on repairs and new phones.
Any organization should decide in advance what tools are appropriate for the majority of the jobs it does. That's just common sense. Where I've worked, my clients expect all deliverables to be released using a combination of Java, Perl and/or korn shell. They later added Jython when they upgraded Weblogic to version 10 and got the WLST feature. It was one of the only things that actually made sense about the way they did things. That way, you had freedom, but you had to do it within a process that allowed you to be replaced.
Otherwise we would end up with application servers written in C and ASM, with server-side applications in a combination of Groovy and Ruby, rendered in programs that are written in Perl/Gtk by a disgruntled Perl monk who is afraid for his job.
The Wii is scooping up mostly casual gamers. These are the sort of people who will buy up a lot of $20-$30 games, but won't be buying a lot of the more "hardcore" games like Halo, Gears of War, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy, Mass Effect, Devil May Cry, etc. It's almost two separate markets.
One of the things I'm curious about here is that a lot of the people buying the Wii are not in the audience that is likely to buy many games, like the elderly. I wonder how many of the people who've bought the console will actually buy a lot of even the Nintendo-published games for it like Metroid and Mario. If Nintendo ends up with a usebase where 25-50% of the base is just buying a few casual games, their revenues could take a big hit once the console reaches saturation.
It's not just Computer Science. When it's not being dumbed down, it's often falling victim to tenured professors who are incompetent. That's what happened to us at my alma mater. We had some brilliant professors who were tenured, couldn't communicate, and frequently were so slothful that you couldn't practically learn from your mistakes. We'd get homework from the first few weeks back halfway between the midterm and final in some cases.
I graduated with a 2.8 GPA overall, and about a 2.5 GPA in my major. That was mostly because projects were usually 10% to 20% of our grade. One exam was usually worth all project work combined. Our valedictorian, a girl who could regurgitate raw data on exams, but could barely write hello world in any language, had a 4.0 in Computer Science.
A big problem that I saw was the hand-holding. Professors don't feel confident because of the crop of students they have, in just telling students that figuring out their development tools is their problem, not the professor's obligation to teach them.
These laws are pretty much designed to target men to protect women and children. As a man, I want a database that shows every single intersection between those I meet and the legal system. If I were single, I'd want to know everything the government knows about the criminal record of every woman I consider dating. Huh, you mean you really were married three times in the past five years, all to rich men? Wow, that's interesting. No second date for you, honey. You've filed rape charges against several men after going on dates with you in the past few years. You're not getting a second chance!
Put up or shut up. The 14th amendment demands equal protection before the law. Either expose everything, or don't do anything.
How about proposals that don't destroy our physical property rights? Stop telling people what they can do with their DVD players and computers, and we'll have more respect for your copyrights. Our physical property rights are the result of centuries of common law and culture. They should get primacy over intellectual property rights because they are a tradition that has been with us, and worked for us, for far longer than intellectual property has been around.
Their last major IT projects were spectacular failures that never went anywhere, and I don't see how this is going to end up much different. This will probably go the way of Virtual Case File, among others.
Telecommuting works great if you have a few trusted employees. One of the developers on a team I used to work on about 8 months ago had to commute from about 45 minutes away to get into the office. He telecommuted a lot when he felt like. Our manager bent (more like broke, later on) the rules so that he didn't have to add 1.5 hours to his commute. My coworker and I literally lived down the street from our new office. Why should we be allowed to telecommute? Seriously, we lucked out such that we could walk about 10-20 minutes away from our apartments to get to the office on a bad day.
I think it all depends on three things:
1) How far away does the employee live 2) How well can you trust them to do their work 3) Can they do all of their work from home, and if not, will the come in and do what they can't in the office
Telecommuting ought to be a privilege, not a right. Part of the reason my company ended up having a general policy of ending telecommuting was the abuse. Too little work was getting done by most of the telecommuters.
And say that this blog never really had that big of a following. I just scanned the front page, and it didn't seem like it was any worse than a lot of the biased crap that I've seen on TheRegister. The conflict of interest angle is certainly a black mark on them, but I think it makes them look more desperate than anything else. Personally, I think this just smacks of the sort of crap that Saddam's information minister pulled denying that U.S. forces were gaining ground in Iraq.
If Intel were smart, they'd start on a program to give away Eee PCs to kids that show a strong desire for science and engineering. Don't give them to the sort of kids that are just using them for porn in Nigeria, but give them to the studious kids who might actually use them for something cool. The Eee PC is a good deal more powerful than the stuff from the OLPC program, so giving away 10,000-20,000 high end Eee PCs might do a lot of good in the right kids' hands.
Groups like MADD are the modern day puritans. They're not content with just protecting basic public order, but rectifying perceived personality flaws by using the state to remake society. MADD and those like them have never met a restriction on drinkers' rights they didn't find too onerous, short of the way that Sharia tends to punish drinkers.
I hate being reminded of the damage that alcoholics do as part of some stupid scheme to further erode basic rights. I grew up with an alcoholic father. Don't fucking remind me. There are only times I've nearly punched a girl in the face was when I had a proto-MADD member who didn't grow up in such a household piously get in my face saying that I didn't know what I was talking about WRT alcoholism and family life.
Send them a notice saying that they have two choices: they can comply with the DMCA and take down all content that uses your photos, or they can pay you a nominal fee of $2,500-$5,000/photo to get a full business license to use it in any of their marketing materials online. If they refuse to pay, the DMCA is clear. Even big Hollywood has to take down the illegal content or face legal reprisal.
A developer that can sit down and talk to a prospective client about their business needs is going to provide a lot more value to their employer in most cases than one who needs someone else to build up the requirements set. I know some very gifted developers who have learned how to really talk to clients, and the pay difference is amazing. We're talking like they're getting paid salaries that'd make you think the dotcom bubble never burst. Why? They're one employee who can do the work of a developer and a business analyst. They can discover the needs, write them up in a way their team can understand, and then work with their team to execute them. Much cheaper than having two employees for the company, who is more than happy to pay bigger bucks to the developer.
Take as many development internships as possible. It doesn't matter how little the pay you. Take them. It's job experience that you can start out with that a hiring manager will look at your resume and go "ah, this guy isn't just a worthless, theory-ladden undergrad."
You'll learn a lot of skills that way, and you might get paid to do it. Chances are, you'll learn a lot of basic skills that are applicable to your job market.
This is the advice that I always give to people who are going to be graduating. Look at the skills that employers want where you plan to live. It doesn't matter whether you can code the best embedded systems in C and ASM on Earth, if there are no jobs for that where you want to live. If you want to get skills that aren't purely work-related, then study just what interests you.
Where I live, Northern Virginia, the job market is primarily for Java developers. I don't waste my time learning languages like C++ on the grounds that someday I might need to learn them, when I can quickly pick up the basics when I need to use them at work. I keep up to date on Java for work, and learn Perl and stuff like that for my own enjoyment.
Until a doctor needs that healthcare information, prescribes the wrong treatment, and ends up killing someone based on ignorance due to the records this bastard destroyed.
I'm saying that if you are receiving public money, you shouldn't be allowed to vote until you stop receiving it. The natural human tendency is to use politics to protect one's own position. That is how it's done in much of the world. We're simply better at mitigating that habit and controlling it sometimes.
Someone who is currently receiving tax-supported medical care is, on average, going to vote for a politician who will increase their benefits. Very few people say "no thanks, I know I'm partially a ward of the state, so in the interest of respecting my fellow citizens, I'll be the least burden I can be." Dude, the average person is more likely to say "gimme, gimme, gimme" when it's not their money, they have a real need for it, and there is a way that they can legally turn the money printing press back on for their wallet.
This may come as a surprise to you, but I used to do some work for the government, and yet I would have gladly given up my right to vote during that time out of principle. Instead, I compensated by voting for limited government candidates who would be a lot more skeptical about the need for spending.
For starters, why should anyone dependent on the government for income or benefits have a say in how the system is run? It is in their financial interest to see the status quo maintained or expanded. The right to vote should be tied to at least two things:
1) Gainfully employed on your own, even if it's at McDonalds 2) Not drawing any income from the government. I'm dead serious on this one. Not even the military, of which I am a big fan and supporter (like most people that straddle the fence between conservatism and libertarianism), should be allowed to vote. If someone wants to sign up for the reserves, and really volunteer their time, they should have to choose to receive no pay at all while they maintain their right to vote.
#2 is critical. How many welfare babies have you heard of that are down with the idea of limited government?
I live in Fairfax County, VA, a place where a significant number of the wealthy voters are contractors and federal employees. It shows in their voting, as we are by far one of the most statist counties in Virginia.
I think the case of one of the doctors that prosecutor Mary Beth Buchanan went after illustrates a problem with the whole idea of licensing professions. The defense found that all of Buchanan's little hoochies who had testified against him, lying and saying he had traded sex for pain killers, had committed massive perjury, but he's still lost his license. Even if he gets totally exonerated he's not going to be able to legally work in his own profession until he gets the license back. Who the fuck is the state to tell people that they cannot pursue a peaceful profession while they are not sitting in prison? So what if you have incompetent doctors and such. I have news for you, do you know what they call the guy who graduates with the lowest possible passing score in medical school after he leaves medical school? That's right, doctor. We still grant licenses to people who are barely worth their alma mater's acreditation.
This won't do a thing for forensic services' professionalism. It doesn't even make sense. PI work is very different from forensics. Comparing PI work to forensics is as asinine as comparing a field agent or cop to a forensic examiner.
Besides, the state is always free to hire total whackjobs who just so happen to have a degree and some sort of license. Just do a search on theagitator.com for the stories about Dr. Hayne. Lovely character, and system that supports him. Guess what. He has a license.
Recording speech should be like handling a firearm. If you are not harassing others with it, or using it to commit a crime, you should not be stopped from carrying it in public or using it in self-defense against anyone--even cops when they are behaving violently and illegally. You want to know why there is little justice today? I'll tell you why. Legal technicalities. The bus driver was breaking the law in a serious way. She had no good argument for why she should not have to deal with the recorder. Under a just system, the fact that her "privacy rights" (what bullshit, privacy in **plain view of the public**) were violated would be no defense nor would it be an argument for why she shouldn't be serving jail time.
The most specious argument along these lines is the one that if we didn't drop cases where the police really screw up, they'd have no incentive to not break the rules to get evidence. Excuse me? Anyone who believes that stupid line hasn't been paying attention, nor do they give two shits about the victim's right to justice. So what if another party screwed up? The fact is, the person still committed a crime against a private citizen. What's next? We allow a serial killer to get off because he "went good" for a while by mopping up a few child molesters? That's where this line of thought ends up going.
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Each component of the system, that is supposed to be separate, is in bed with those it is supposed to be a check against. This wouldn't surprise anyone who has paid attention to the way that police officers are treated by judges and prosecutors, especially in "liberal areas" for abusing their authority. In places like Northern Virginia, one of the bluest parts of the country, the prosecutors won't touch a cop who shoots and kills someone in a criminal way while on duty. The very argument for giving them their extra powers over the public is that they're professionals with how they use it, and yet they're more likely to be treated like a well-meaning retarded child with a handgun rather than a professional for whom human error should almost invariably be regarded at first blush as criminal negligence.
The prosecutors will rarely try them, the judges will rarely sanction prosecutors who do things like hound a guy they know is innocent, etc. Why? Because in general, the people in law enforcement, the DA's office and the judiciary are bad apples, with a few good ones mixed in. This applies to federal agencies as well.
I have never bought into the argument that communicating online should always be legally regarded as the equivalent of having a conversation in public. People frequently put access controls and encryption on information sent over the Internet, and it's not like every person on the Internet has the ability to listen in on what you're saying in an IM conversation, emails, etc. There should be a reasonable basis to assume privacy in certain contexts, such as email and IM. IMO, the law should sanction people who eavesdrop on such communications without a good reason.
With Facebook, it all depends on the context. They should be required to show what information they are passing onto their application developers, but there should be no legal protection beyond that. People should be able to sell off their personal information in exchange for something they want. The only reasonable issue here is when the user is not able to reasonably find out and consent to the sharing of the information.
Personally, I am a lot more concerned with things like the FBI's latest attempts to get carte blanche access to email. If there is any institution that will destroy privacy in America, it's the federal government. Every major information/privacy issue that comes back to haunt the average person stems from the law or law enforcement agencies. The reason we worry about identity theft on the financial side of things is that the **law** does not put the onus on the lender to verify the identity of their customer. Why should it be my responsibility to ensure that someone isn't signing up in my name for credit cards? You worry about devastating legal decisions for privacy? The precedents are being set by the DoJ, not corporate America.
People like my mother use about 2GB of bandwidth at the most every month. For someone like her, a deal to charge her say.... $6-$8/month for basic connectivity with only 2GB of downstream bandwidth would be a bargain. As it is, she pays the same rate as her neighbor who is a fairly recent college grad who, if I know anything about his downloading habits today from what he was like in our dorm (college towns can be a scary small world), he's milking that DSL line for all its worth. Guys like him are probably sucking down the full amount that they are theoretically able to get from the service, for probably the better part of the day.
He's not a freeloader because he actually pays for his service. The problem is, he is being subsidized under Verizon's business plan by users like my mother. She only uses the equivalent of a few dollars worth of bandwidth. Now no one would go for this sort of business plan with water or electricity if they could avoid it. It is just a matter of Verizon continually adding infrastructure in order for them to provide full 3 or more Mbps to each user, but who pays for that much extra backbone connecting each home?
That's the catch. Per-GB isn't inherently odious. If basic cable internet access were $15/month for 5GB of bandwidth, and each additional GB was sold for $0.05-$0.10/GB, you'd barely notice. For many people, it'd actually be cheaper than paying a big fee for what they get now.
With the larger issue here of network neutrality and preferential routing of packets from specific sites and such, I'll admit that as a libertarian I find it to be a hard issue. On the one hand, these are private companies, and on the other hand, their very existence is due to government intervention to let them build infrastructure. In my opinion, companies built with strong government influence or that are owned by the government should be subject to sanctions in the marketplace in order to protect true private businesses.
This is what they'll do, at the most. They'll read the comments, take a few minor suggestions that are about as a substantive of a reform as a changing the paint on the wall from beige to white, and call it even. Then everyone in power will trumpet how the system works, the people were heard, and how America is still the greatest country on the face of the Earth.
In the end, we'll end up with an agency that can best be described as being filled primarily by the sort of people that routinely get rejected by local police agencies, affirmative action hires, etc.
I'll never forget the one time I've flown since 9-11. I was going to Italy from Dulles Airport in Virginia in 2005. The TSA personnel I saw were mostly obese people you know that got hired to fill a quota. The people they hired were clearly by and large not their on their ability to screen and secure the choke points in the airport. What I'll never forget was going to De Gaulle Airport and feeling like the French actually knew how to run security.
For the love of all that is holy. When French security is more intimidating and professional looking than your own, you know that you've made a mistake along the way that doesn't bode well.
Not only that, but Apple is in for a swift kick in the ass if they're not careful. Even though a lot of people will still be able to afford an iPhone, the issues surrounding its battery will be a deterrent to purchasing it. Apple will have two choices if it wants to appeal to consumers who are starting to worry about their budgets: make the batter removable like a Razr or any other phone, or lose potential customers.
A removable battery takes away nothing from the aesthetics of the case. The only thing it does is keep it out of Apple's service shop every year, and thus makes it harder to justify buying a new one every year. Apple needs to prepare itself by making this a non-issue for the iPod Touch and iPhone if it doesn't want to face potential disruption.
Apple could take an active part in developing software for both devices, and sell them to offset the losses in their plans from people not spending a lot of money on repairs and new phones.
Any organization should decide in advance what tools are appropriate for the majority of the jobs it does. That's just common sense. Where I've worked, my clients expect all deliverables to be released using a combination of Java, Perl and/or korn shell. They later added Jython when they upgraded Weblogic to version 10 and got the WLST feature. It was one of the only things that actually made sense about the way they did things. That way, you had freedom, but you had to do it within a process that allowed you to be replaced.
Otherwise we would end up with application servers written in C and ASM, with server-side applications in a combination of Groovy and Ruby, rendered in programs that are written in Perl/Gtk by a disgruntled Perl monk who is afraid for his job.
The Wii is scooping up mostly casual gamers. These are the sort of people who will buy up a lot of $20-$30 games, but won't be buying a lot of the more "hardcore" games like Halo, Gears of War, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy, Mass Effect, Devil May Cry, etc. It's almost two separate markets.
One of the things I'm curious about here is that a lot of the people buying the Wii are not in the audience that is likely to buy many games, like the elderly. I wonder how many of the people who've bought the console will actually buy a lot of even the Nintendo-published games for it like Metroid and Mario. If Nintendo ends up with a usebase where 25-50% of the base is just buying a few casual games, their revenues could take a big hit once the console reaches saturation.
It's not just Computer Science. When it's not being dumbed down, it's often falling victim to tenured professors who are incompetent. That's what happened to us at my alma mater. We had some brilliant professors who were tenured, couldn't communicate, and frequently were so slothful that you couldn't practically learn from your mistakes. We'd get homework from the first few weeks back halfway between the midterm and final in some cases.
I graduated with a 2.8 GPA overall, and about a 2.5 GPA in my major. That was mostly because projects were usually 10% to 20% of our grade. One exam was usually worth all project work combined. Our valedictorian, a girl who could regurgitate raw data on exams, but could barely write hello world in any language, had a 4.0 in Computer Science.
A big problem that I saw was the hand-holding. Professors don't feel confident because of the crop of students they have, in just telling students that figuring out their development tools is their problem, not the professor's obligation to teach them.
It was SAIC, or as I like to call them, Substandard Architectures and Implementations for the Customer.
These laws are pretty much designed to target men to protect women and children. As a man, I want a database that shows every single intersection between those I meet and the legal system. If I were single, I'd want to know everything the government knows about the criminal record of every woman I consider dating. Huh, you mean you really were married three times in the past five years, all to rich men? Wow, that's interesting. No second date for you, honey. You've filed rape charges against several men after going on dates with you in the past few years. You're not getting a second chance!
Put up or shut up. The 14th amendment demands equal protection before the law. Either expose everything, or don't do anything.
I believe you meant to say, there's never an excuse to beat up on anyone.
You can't argue that women are equal to men, then turn around and say that women get special protection.
How about proposals that don't destroy our physical property rights? Stop telling people what they can do with their DVD players and computers, and we'll have more respect for your copyrights. Our physical property rights are the result of centuries of common law and culture. They should get primacy over intellectual property rights because they are a tradition that has been with us, and worked for us, for far longer than intellectual property has been around.
Their last major IT projects were spectacular failures that never went anywhere, and I don't see how this is going to end up much different. This will probably go the way of Virtual Case File, among others.
Telecommuting works great if you have a few trusted employees. One of the developers on a team I used to work on about 8 months ago had to commute from about 45 minutes away to get into the office. He telecommuted a lot when he felt like. Our manager bent (more like broke, later on) the rules so that he didn't have to add 1.5 hours to his commute. My coworker and I literally lived down the street from our new office. Why should we be allowed to telecommute? Seriously, we lucked out such that we could walk about 10-20 minutes away from our apartments to get to the office on a bad day.
I think it all depends on three things:
1) How far away does the employee live
2) How well can you trust them to do their work
3) Can they do all of their work from home, and if not, will the come in and do what they can't in the office
Telecommuting ought to be a privilege, not a right. Part of the reason my company ended up having a general policy of ending telecommuting was the abuse. Too little work was getting done by most of the telecommuters.
And say that this blog never really had that big of a following. I just scanned the front page, and it didn't seem like it was any worse than a lot of the biased crap that I've seen on TheRegister. The conflict of interest angle is certainly a black mark on them, but I think it makes them look more desperate than anything else. Personally, I think this just smacks of the sort of crap that Saddam's information minister pulled denying that U.S. forces were gaining ground in Iraq.
If Intel were smart, they'd start on a program to give away Eee PCs to kids that show a strong desire for science and engineering. Don't give them to the sort of kids that are just using them for porn in Nigeria, but give them to the studious kids who might actually use them for something cool. The Eee PC is a good deal more powerful than the stuff from the OLPC program, so giving away 10,000-20,000 high end Eee PCs might do a lot of good in the right kids' hands.
Groups like MADD are the modern day puritans. They're not content with just protecting basic public order, but rectifying perceived personality flaws by using the state to remake society. MADD and those like them have never met a restriction on drinkers' rights they didn't find too onerous, short of the way that Sharia tends to punish drinkers.
I hate being reminded of the damage that alcoholics do as part of some stupid scheme to further erode basic rights. I grew up with an alcoholic father. Don't fucking remind me. There are only times I've nearly punched a girl in the face was when I had a proto-MADD member who didn't grow up in such a household piously get in my face saying that I didn't know what I was talking about WRT alcoholism and family life.
Send them a notice saying that they have two choices: they can comply with the DMCA and take down all content that uses your photos, or they can pay you a nominal fee of $2,500-$5,000/photo to get a full business license to use it in any of their marketing materials online. If they refuse to pay, the DMCA is clear. Even big Hollywood has to take down the illegal content or face legal reprisal.
A developer that can sit down and talk to a prospective client about their business needs is going to provide a lot more value to their employer in most cases than one who needs someone else to build up the requirements set. I know some very gifted developers who have learned how to really talk to clients, and the pay difference is amazing. We're talking like they're getting paid salaries that'd make you think the dotcom bubble never burst. Why? They're one employee who can do the work of a developer and a business analyst. They can discover the needs, write them up in a way their team can understand, and then work with their team to execute them. Much cheaper than having two employees for the company, who is more than happy to pay bigger bucks to the developer.
Take as many development internships as possible. It doesn't matter how little the pay you. Take them. It's job experience that you can start out with that a hiring manager will look at your resume and go "ah, this guy isn't just a worthless, theory-ladden undergrad."
You'll learn a lot of skills that way, and you might get paid to do it. Chances are, you'll learn a lot of basic skills that are applicable to your job market.
This is the advice that I always give to people who are going to be graduating. Look at the skills that employers want where you plan to live. It doesn't matter whether you can code the best embedded systems in C and ASM on Earth, if there are no jobs for that where you want to live. If you want to get skills that aren't purely work-related, then study just what interests you.
Where I live, Northern Virginia, the job market is primarily for Java developers. I don't waste my time learning languages like C++ on the grounds that someday I might need to learn them, when I can quickly pick up the basics when I need to use them at work. I keep up to date on Java for work, and learn Perl and stuff like that for my own enjoyment.
Until a doctor needs that healthcare information, prescribes the wrong treatment, and ends up killing someone based on ignorance due to the records this bastard destroyed.
No customers capable of affording it either.
I'm saying that if you are receiving public money, you shouldn't be allowed to vote until you stop receiving it. The natural human tendency is to use politics to protect one's own position. That is how it's done in much of the world. We're simply better at mitigating that habit and controlling it sometimes.
Someone who is currently receiving tax-supported medical care is, on average, going to vote for a politician who will increase their benefits. Very few people say "no thanks, I know I'm partially a ward of the state, so in the interest of respecting my fellow citizens, I'll be the least burden I can be." Dude, the average person is more likely to say "gimme, gimme, gimme" when it's not their money, they have a real need for it, and there is a way that they can legally turn the money printing press back on for their wallet.
This may come as a surprise to you, but I used to do some work for the government, and yet I would have gladly given up my right to vote during that time out of principle. Instead, I compensated by voting for limited government candidates who would be a lot more skeptical about the need for spending.
For starters, why should anyone dependent on the government for income or benefits have a say in how the system is run? It is in their financial interest to see the status quo maintained or expanded. The right to vote should be tied to at least two things:
1) Gainfully employed on your own, even if it's at McDonalds
2) Not drawing any income from the government. I'm dead serious on this one. Not even the military, of which I am a big fan and supporter (like most people that straddle the fence between conservatism and libertarianism), should be allowed to vote. If someone wants to sign up for the reserves, and really volunteer their time, they should have to choose to receive no pay at all while they maintain their right to vote.
#2 is critical. How many welfare babies have you heard of that are down with the idea of limited government?
I live in Fairfax County, VA, a place where a significant number of the wealthy voters are contractors and federal employees. It shows in their voting, as we are by far one of the most statist counties in Virginia.
I think the case of one of the doctors that prosecutor Mary Beth Buchanan went after illustrates a problem with the whole idea of licensing professions. The defense found that all of Buchanan's little hoochies who had testified against him, lying and saying he had traded sex for pain killers, had committed massive perjury, but he's still lost his license. Even if he gets totally exonerated he's not going to be able to legally work in his own profession until he gets the license back. Who the fuck is the state to tell people that they cannot pursue a peaceful profession while they are not sitting in prison? So what if you have incompetent doctors and such. I have news for you, do you know what they call the guy who graduates with the lowest possible passing score in medical school after he leaves medical school? That's right, doctor. We still grant licenses to people who are barely worth their alma mater's acreditation.
This won't do a thing for forensic services' professionalism. It doesn't even make sense. PI work is very different from forensics. Comparing PI work to forensics is as asinine as comparing a field agent or cop to a forensic examiner.
Besides, the state is always free to hire total whackjobs who just so happen to have a degree and some sort of license. Just do a search on theagitator.com for the stories about Dr. Hayne. Lovely character, and system that supports him. Guess what. He has a license.
Recording speech should be like handling a firearm. If you are not harassing others with it, or using it to commit a crime, you should not be stopped from carrying it in public or using it in self-defense against anyone--even cops when they are behaving violently and illegally. You want to know why there is little justice today? I'll tell you why. Legal technicalities. The bus driver was breaking the law in a serious way. She had no good argument for why she should not have to deal with the recorder. Under a just system, the fact that her "privacy rights" (what bullshit, privacy in **plain view of the public**) were violated would be no defense nor would it be an argument for why she shouldn't be serving jail time.
The most specious argument along these lines is the one that if we didn't drop cases where the police really screw up, they'd have no incentive to not break the rules to get evidence. Excuse me? Anyone who believes that stupid line hasn't been paying attention, nor do they give two shits about the victim's right to justice. So what if another party screwed up? The fact is, the person still committed a crime against a private citizen. What's next? We allow a serial killer to get off because he "went good" for a while by mopping up a few child molesters? That's where this line of thought ends up going.