if the US army picks up a non-Afghani with an AK47 in Afghanistan, and the group of people he was with were just firing at U.S. troops and they weren't members of the Taliban, then what do you do with him? You don't want to release him (he and/or the people with were just shooting at US soldiers!!) But you aren't going to get a conviction in any civilian court. You have no proof that HE specifically actually shot at US troops. To prove him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt under the standards of a civilian court, the FBI would have to go in, search the entire area for bullets and shell casings, fingerprint the AK47 and all weapons in the area, check which weapons were fired, test if the weapons were fired recently, do ballistic tests to match weapons with bullets, and do this all with a careful paper trail so it will withstand challenges of sloppiness by the defense. This is NOT POSSIBLE in a warzone.
Your argument includes the key phrase that matters to me: You have no proof
So don't lock someone up indefinitely if you have no proof. Don't threaten them with military courts that have no jurisdiction. Take them to the civilian courts. Afghanistan has those, you know. He broke the law there, try him there.
If you have no proof, then why are you holding him?
(1)There is no proof most people in Guantanamo are members of Al Qaeda. (2)There is no proof most people in Guantanamo were ever members of Al Qaeda (3)There is no proof most people in Guantanamo provided material support to Al Qaeda (4)There is proof that most people in Guantanamo were not captured on a battlefield (5)There is no proof most people in Guantanamo committed acts of war against the US (6)The term 'illegal combatant' is illegitimate. People are either soldiers, or civilians. A civilian attempting to harm or kill people is breaking the law and should be tried by a civilian court.
To be held in Guantanamo, an individual MUST be declared an illegal combatant.
Please, try looking at Guantanamo Bay from an objective perspective.
I will agree entirely with your final statement - his lawyers are attempting to keep him out of the US, by any legal means necessary, and scare stories about Guantanamo are one of those means. And the argument is entirely invalid, albeit only because British citizens in Guantanamo get out again pretty sharpish on account of UK Government pressure - the US would rather stick this guy in jail for a few years.
The UK does have laws against this. His alleged actions do break them. He should be tried in the UK and if found guilty be appropriately punished.
He should not be extradited to America for crimes he committed while in the UK, and he should definitely not be left vulnerable to indefinite detention without trial.
As a side note, the British Government are committed to attaining the release of any British citizens held in Guantanamo Bay; if the Americans did put him there they'd have to release him back to the UK again or risk a massive diplomatic incident. The US authorities aren't that daft; they'll just throw the book at him in the federal courts. The defense against extradition is raising Guantanamo as entirely that - a defense against extradition.
One of the joys of Duke 3D was the interactivity of the environment.
Almost everything you tried to do something to, did something.
I'm playing FEAR right now. There're phones, computers, fire extinguishers, desks, a ton of scenery. And it's all just scenery. I'm sat there going "hang on a minute. A decade ago FPS games had more interactivity than this!"
I go up to a computer in Duke Nukem Forever, I damn well expect to be able to browse the web on that thing. I expect to be able to run Google searches, click the links, navigate, check my own email. Then pull out a rocket launcher and blow the computer to pieces.
That's an immersive interactive environment. That and the humour is why Duke Nukem Forever was so eagerly awaited, long before it became a legend.
The whole realtime strategy genre would appear to have skipped straight past you.
MMORPGs not available for your preferred platform?
Forget individual games, and there have been several with a lot of innovation (the GTA series, BF1942, even something like Black & White, which while it sucked, was certainly innovative), you seem to be ignoring innovations on an entire genre level.
Never mind. Go back to R-Type and Pole Position, who needs this new fangled technology..
I'll throw in IrfanView - lightweight image viewer, handles everything I've ever thrown at it. Free!
MS Visio. I wish MS hadn't bought it, but I've still yet to find any tool comparable for ease of use and power - maybe professional CAD tools, but I just want to draw simple diagrams.
Eclipse - if you'd doing Java development, it's free and fantastic.
Cygwin/Firefox are my other two ever-present, along with text editor of choice (my choice differs to yours, but there are a lot to choose from)
At my current employer, a certain system loses the company approximately $16m an hour when it goes down.
If that system is down for two weeks in January (our peak trading) then the company would be heavily at risk - not bankrupt, but our parent organisation (the world leader in the industry) would be damaged to the point where it loses the ability to raise finance, suffers heavy redundancies, and becomes a prime candidate for takeover.
That's mission critical. No lives are at stake, the world wont end, but the company frankly can't tolerate the losses.
Oddly enough we put a lot of effort into managing the risks around that system, and a lot of expense into redundancy and failover...
Actually, this is a good point, and one I'd overlooked. Although with 10cm spare, you're looking at repeating your forward/backward iteration a few hundred times to get out.
Sounds like something you might want to automate. How about a robot that can auto-parallel-park for you?
I don't believe you. Unless you're on a motorbike, or have the ability to move your card sideways. Or have a car under 1m wide.
Why? Simple mathematics. As soon as your car is more than 1 metre wide it's length across the diagonal is at least 10cm longer than its long front to back. So it physically wont fit in the gap to get out.
You're right - the computer wont be able to achieve that. Computers are constrained to the possible.
The salary is a relatively minimal part of the cost of employing someone. In the UK you pay another third of their salary straight to the Government (for national insurance).
Then there are training costs, management overhead, heat/light in the place of work.
For sailors it's worse, you need to provide them with their off-duty accommodation too, entertainment, laundry facilities, LOA (living overseas allowance), etc.
It's not cheap, $100k/year sounds very reasonable.
If you lack other formal IT qualifications then sure, go for it. They'll demonstrate you do have some knowledge, and that you're prepared to learn, and that you're capable of passing exams.
Most/all companies value hands-on experience far more.
The CITP (Chartered IT Professional) qualification is a new one since I last spoke to someone at BCS. Maybe it does actually require some degree of skill and experience to attain.
Chat to the BCS about the value of what they do. Also bear in mind they're far from objective, so also speak to IT recruiters, experienced IT professionals and people holding CIO, CTO or IT Director positions.
I'm in the UK and I'm not aware of any equivalent professional qualification for IT professionals.
There are various certifications by Novell, Cisco, even company likes Microsoft and Sun. These can be useful for getting a job; they're not comparable to being a chartered accountant or engineer.
There is a body in the UK, the BCS, pretending to offer something comparable. When they stop handing it out to people that do data entry for a living just because they've been in the scheme for eight years I may consider giving it some credibility. Until then employers are going to (quite rightly) ignore it.
Steve McConnell put together a collection of essays on making software engineering a true profession. "After the Gold Rush" is worth reading, does explain where this industry is lacking, but getting from where we are to where he'd like us to be is unlikely to happen without governmental intervention or heavy unionisation. I don't see either on the horizon just yet..
Maybe your daddy earned a lot, but my personal income is more than my parents (both work) and my sister and her husband combined.
That's four people combined. And I get paid sweet FA compared to many people doing IT within 30 miles of me (due to very intentional career choices I've made).
So earning more than your daddy? For most people, IT remains a good choice to achieve that.
Good IT people can have a good career, can make a lot of money, can do far better than the average poor sod. While most of them wont become CEOs, some will. Others will build successful IT companies. Many will have far more enjoyment at work than should be legal, because programming is fundamentally damn good fun.
To keep a career in IT, most people will have to accept a glass ceiling (based on the top salary companies are willing to pay for programmers) or have diverse skills. Business employ people as sysadmins, testers, programmers, 'software engineers', analysts, etc but only to a certain level. After that you need to go into managerial roles, consultancy, contracting or take on job roles like architect.
Most IT firms have openings for "Senior technologists" or "Chief Scientist" or other grandiose roles - they're for thought leaders in the field, the innovators, the trend-setters, the really skilled people that the rest try to emulate. But most businesses don't employ these people. They have managers, architects, managers, analysts, managers, programmers, managers, testers and system administrators.
If you want a career in IT, it is available. But you can't do the same thing year after year; that's called a job, not a career.
Sadly it took me several years to realise that 'software engineering' is a people thing.
I use CS daily. The systems I write and use are compiled quickly, run on complex hardware doing clever things, rendering prettily and using optimal algorithms for sorting, for network communications, etc.
I don't do anything to advance that particular area of knowledge - I merely implement what other people found out.
Software engineering is however my job. There are technical difficulties - writing software isn't easy. But the full software lifecycle is, as mentioned above, extremely difficult.
Writing good software with unrealistic deadlines, with inadequate resource, with poor defined requirements, with your customers actively conspiring to make you fail, with no recognition and all the blame is a massive challenge. It can be fun. People that are good at it definitely have a very strong career option after they hit 30-35 and stop getting pay rises for just programming.
People that don't understand those challenges, or want to take them on, or have the ability to deal with them don't have a career in IT. Although there are technology jobs that don't require those skills, they're only a very small percentage of the IT jobs out there:(
Consider this scenario: I move to America, to a state where gambling is illegal. I connect to CasinoRouletteMillions.com (made up URL; may exist, I haven't checked) I place a bet using my credit card, on the digit 0, for my full credit limit. It doesn't come in.
I contact my card company and demand they charge back the amount, thus clearing my balance.
The casino can not challenge the charge back. The card is an American card; the transaction was under American laws. So either the casino accepts the charge back, or the card issuer, by permitting an illegal transaction, takes the hit.
Now, this is complicated. I'd potentially be liable for fraud. But in reality, the card issuers would refuse to permit card payments to the offshore casinos - they don't want to take that risk. They don't want the headaches. Or the casinos would refuse to take card based payments - they don't want that risk.
Either way, the ability for me, as a gambler, to access the gambling sites, and pay them, is horribly restricted.
That the sites are outside the jurisdiction of the US is irrelevant - the payment mechanisms they're using are not. Hence the bill targeting the payment mechanisms, not the websites.
The use of offshore banking alongside offshore casinos (as suggested in another response) is however a possible workaround.
I think Larry's pushing an agenda here. Linux and Apache were both tremendously successful long before the big corporations got involved. They got involved _because_ the Open Source products were successful.
If MySql hadn't established a market niche that's now threatening Oracle, would Larry have looked at buying it? How did he make it successful?
What about standard staples of Java development such as Ant, JUnit, even things like Struts? Sure, most corporations use them. But they're successful because they're written well, they add great value, they're available, and they were all of those things without IBM or Oracle or Microsoft buying them, promoting them, offering to support them, etc.
I think Larry's wrong. Surprisingly often people do just sit at home and write world-class software, and sometimes that does become successful. Open Source definitely doesn't need corporate sponsorship; the two can go together very nicely.
Then do what you're meant to do at university - drink, shag, learn genuinely useful skills.
If you're relying on your degree getting you a job, follow the BSc with an MSc in something more saleable - software engineering would be a good match, if you don't want the irrelevance of CS.
Slashdot Mirror
Mine disposal is definitely not yesterday's war.
Sorry, when I said 'sharpish' I did mean 'in comparison to the poor sods still there'.
I suspect there'd be something of a diplomatic ruckus if this chap got flown to Cuba after we agreed to extradition...
if the US army picks up a non-Afghani with an AK47 in Afghanistan, and the group of people he was with were just firing at U.S. troops and they weren't members of the Taliban, then what do you do with him? You don't want to release him (he and/or the people with were just shooting at US soldiers!!) But you aren't going to get a conviction in any civilian court. You have no proof that HE specifically actually shot at US troops. To prove him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt under the standards of a civilian court, the FBI would have to go in, search the entire area for bullets and shell casings, fingerprint the AK47 and all weapons in the area, check which weapons were fired, test if the weapons were fired recently, do ballistic tests to match weapons with bullets, and do this all with a careful paper trail so it will withstand challenges of sloppiness by the defense. This is NOT POSSIBLE in a warzone. Your argument includes the key phrase that matters to me: You have no proof So don't lock someone up indefinitely if you have no proof. Don't threaten them with military courts that have no jurisdiction. Take them to the civilian courts. Afghanistan has those, you know. He broke the law there, try him there. If you have no proof, then why are you holding him?
(1)There is no proof most people in Guantanamo are members of Al Qaeda.
(2)There is no proof most people in Guantanamo were ever members of Al Qaeda
(3)There is no proof most people in Guantanamo provided material support to Al Qaeda
(4)There is proof that most people in Guantanamo were not captured on a battlefield
(5)There is no proof most people in Guantanamo committed acts of war against the US
(6)The term 'illegal combatant' is illegitimate. People are either soldiers, or civilians. A civilian attempting to harm or kill people is breaking the law and should be tried by a civilian court.
To be held in Guantanamo, an individual MUST be declared an illegal combatant.
Please, try looking at Guantanamo Bay from an objective perspective.
I will agree entirely with your final statement - his lawyers are attempting to keep him out of the US, by any legal means necessary, and scare stories about Guantanamo are one of those means. And the argument is entirely invalid, albeit only because British citizens in Guantanamo get out again pretty sharpish on account of UK Government pressure - the US would rather stick this guy in jail for a few years.
The UK does have laws against this. His alleged actions do break them. He should be tried in the UK and if found guilty be appropriately punished.
He should not be extradited to America for crimes he committed while in the UK, and he should definitely not be left vulnerable to indefinite detention without trial.
As a side note, the British Government are committed to attaining the release of any British citizens held in Guantanamo Bay; if the Americans did put him there they'd have to release him back to the UK again or risk a massive diplomatic incident. The US authorities aren't that daft; they'll just throw the book at him in the federal courts. The defense against extradition is raising Guantanamo as entirely that - a defense against extradition.
One of the joys of Duke 3D was the interactivity of the environment.
Almost everything you tried to do something to, did something.
I'm playing FEAR right now. There're phones, computers, fire extinguishers, desks, a ton of scenery. And it's all just scenery. I'm sat there going "hang on a minute. A decade ago FPS games had more interactivity than this!"
I go up to a computer in Duke Nukem Forever, I damn well expect to be able to browse the web on that thing. I expect to be able to run Google searches, click the links, navigate, check my own email. Then pull out a rocket launcher and blow the computer to pieces.
That's an immersive interactive environment. That and the humour is why Duke Nukem Forever was so eagerly awaited, long before it became a legend.
If it delivers that, I'll buy it. Hell yes.
The whole realtime strategy genre would appear to have skipped straight past you.
MMORPGs not available for your preferred platform?
Forget individual games, and there have been several with a lot of innovation (the GTA series, BF1942, even something like Black & White, which while it sucked, was certainly innovative), you seem to be ignoring innovations on an entire genre level.
Never mind. Go back to R-Type and Pole Position, who needs this new fangled technology..
I'll throw in IrfanView - lightweight image viewer, handles everything I've ever thrown at it. Free!
MS Visio. I wish MS hadn't bought it, but I've still yet to find any tool comparable for ease of use and power - maybe professional CAD tools, but I just want to draw simple diagrams.
Eclipse - if you'd doing Java development, it's free and fantastic.
Cygwin/Firefox are my other two ever-present, along with text editor of choice (my choice differs to yours, but there are a lot to choose from)
At my current employer, a certain system loses the company approximately $16m an hour when it goes down.
If that system is down for two weeks in January (our peak trading) then the company would be heavily at risk - not bankrupt, but our parent organisation (the world leader in the industry) would be damaged to the point where it loses the ability to raise finance, suffers heavy redundancies, and becomes a prime candidate for takeover.
That's mission critical. No lives are at stake, the world wont end, but the company frankly can't tolerate the losses.
Oddly enough we put a lot of effort into managing the risks around that system, and a lot of expense into redundancy and failover...
Actually, this is a good point, and one I'd overlooked. Although with 10cm spare, you're looking at repeating your forward/backward iteration a few hundred times to get out.
Sounds like something you might want to automate. How about a robot that can auto-parallel-park for you?
"its length" not "it's length". Gah.
I don't believe you. Unless you're on a motorbike, or have the ability to move your card sideways. Or have a car under 1m wide.
Why? Simple mathematics. As soon as your car is more than 1 metre wide it's length across the diagonal is at least 10cm longer than its long front to back. So it physically wont fit in the gap to get out.
You're right - the computer wont be able to achieve that. Computers are constrained to the possible.
Following your instructions I still haven't actually moved. Was I meant to release the clutch at some point?
Even if I get into an automatic, I fear I've left my vehicle at a 60 degree angle from the curb.
try again..
(for the record, I parallel park every day outside my house. With ease.)
Maybe it's because people pronounce it CIN-CI-NATI (or, for those that have never seen it written, SIN-SI-NATTY)
Don't blame us because your home city is hard to spell. Heck, try living in Gloucester and having to hear Americans try and pronounce it..
The salary is a relatively minimal part of the cost of employing someone. In the UK you pay another third of their salary straight to the Government (for national insurance).
Then there are training costs, management overhead, heat/light in the place of work.
For sailors it's worse, you need to provide them with their off-duty accommodation too, entertainment, laundry facilities, LOA (living overseas allowance), etc.
It's not cheap, $100k/year sounds very reasonable.
If you lack other formal IT qualifications then sure, go for it. They'll demonstrate you do have some knowledge, and that you're prepared to learn, and that you're capable of passing exams.
Most/all companies value hands-on experience far more.
The CITP (Chartered IT Professional) qualification is a new one since I last spoke to someone at BCS. Maybe it does actually require some degree of skill and experience to attain.
Chat to the BCS about the value of what they do. Also bear in mind they're far from objective, so also speak to IT recruiters, experienced IT professionals and people holding CIO, CTO or IT Director positions.
I'm in the UK and I'm not aware of any equivalent professional qualification for IT professionals.
There are various certifications by Novell, Cisco, even company likes Microsoft and Sun. These can be useful for getting a job; they're not comparable to being a chartered accountant or engineer.
There is a body in the UK, the BCS, pretending to offer something comparable. When they stop handing it out to people that do data entry for a living just because they've been in the scheme for eight years I may consider giving it some credibility. Until then employers are going to (quite rightly) ignore it.
Steve McConnell put together a collection of essays on making software engineering a true profession. "After the Gold Rush" is worth reading, does explain where this industry is lacking, but getting from where we are to where he'd like us to be is unlikely to happen without governmental intervention or heavy unionisation. I don't see either on the horizon just yet..
Maybe your daddy earned a lot, but my personal income is more than my parents (both work) and my sister and her husband combined.
That's four people combined. And I get paid sweet FA compared to many people doing IT within 30 miles of me (due to very intentional career choices I've made).
So earning more than your daddy? For most people, IT remains a good choice to achieve that.
Good IT people can have a good career, can make a lot of money, can do far better than the average poor sod. While most of them wont become CEOs, some will. Others will build successful IT companies. Many will have far more enjoyment at work than should be legal, because programming is fundamentally damn good fun.
To keep a career in IT, most people will have to accept a glass ceiling (based on the top salary companies are willing to pay for programmers) or have diverse skills. Business employ people as sysadmins, testers, programmers, 'software engineers', analysts, etc but only to a certain level. After that you need to go into managerial roles, consultancy, contracting or take on job roles like architect.
Most IT firms have openings for "Senior technologists" or "Chief Scientist" or other grandiose roles - they're for thought leaders in the field, the innovators, the trend-setters, the really skilled people that the rest try to emulate. But most businesses don't employ these people. They have managers, architects, managers, analysts, managers, programmers, managers, testers and system administrators.
If you want a career in IT, it is available. But you can't do the same thing year after year; that's called a job, not a career.
Sadly it took me several years to realise that 'software engineering' is a people thing.
I use CS daily. The systems I write and use are compiled quickly, run on complex hardware doing clever things, rendering prettily and using optimal algorithms for sorting, for network communications, etc.
I don't do anything to advance that particular area of knowledge - I merely implement what other people found out.
Software engineering is however my job. There are technical difficulties - writing software isn't easy. But the full software lifecycle is, as mentioned above, extremely difficult.
Writing good software with unrealistic deadlines, with inadequate resource, with poor defined requirements, with your customers actively conspiring to make you fail, with no recognition and all the blame is a massive challenge. It can be fun. People that are good at it definitely have a very strong career option after they hit 30-35 and stop getting pay rises for just programming.
People that don't understand those challenges, or want to take them on, or have the ability to deal with them don't have a career in IT. Although there are technology jobs that don't require those skills, they're only a very small percentage of the IT jobs out there
I believe that one's already covered under money laundering laws.
Consider this scenario:
:(
I move to America, to a state where gambling is illegal.
I connect to CasinoRouletteMillions.com (made up URL; may exist, I haven't checked)
I place a bet using my credit card, on the digit 0, for my full credit limit.
It doesn't come in.
I contact my card company and demand they charge back the amount, thus clearing my balance.
The casino can not challenge the charge back. The card is an American card; the transaction was under American laws. So either the casino accepts the charge back, or the card issuer, by permitting an illegal transaction, takes the hit.
Now, this is complicated. I'd potentially be liable for fraud. But in reality, the card issuers would refuse to permit card payments to the offshore casinos - they don't want to take that risk. They don't want the headaches. Or the casinos would refuse to take card based payments - they don't want that risk.
Either way, the ability for me, as a gambler, to access the gambling sites, and pay them, is horribly restricted.
That the sites are outside the jurisdiction of the US is irrelevant - the payment mechanisms they're using are not. Hence the bill targeting the payment mechanisms, not the websites.
The use of offshore banking alongside offshore casinos (as suggested in another response) is however a possible workaround.
I haven't explained this well, sorry.
>> Making as much money as you can in a profession is something every human being in an open market wishes to do
I disagree entirely.
In my profession I could double my salary tomorrow - risk free. I could take a few risks and possibly end up a multi-millionaire in a couple of years.
I have the skills, I have the opportunity. I also have the choice.
I've chosen other things ahead of making money.
I think Larry's pushing an agenda here. Linux and Apache were both tremendously successful long before the big corporations got involved. They got involved _because_ the Open Source products were successful.
If MySql hadn't established a market niche that's now threatening Oracle, would Larry have looked at buying it? How did he make it successful?
What about standard staples of Java development such as Ant, JUnit, even things like Struts? Sure, most corporations use them. But they're successful because they're written well, they add great value, they're available, and they were all of those things without IBM or Oracle or Microsoft buying them, promoting them, offering to support them, etc.
I think Larry's wrong. Surprisingly often people do just sit at home and write world-class software, and sometimes that does become successful. Open Source definitely doesn't need corporate sponsorship; the two can go together very nicely.
Illegal in the UK. Admittedly that's not from a precedent setting court yet, but I'd very strongly recommend against risking it.
Then do what you're meant to do at university - drink, shag, learn genuinely useful skills.
If you're relying on your degree getting you a job, follow the BSc with an MSc in something more saleable - software engineering would be a good match, if you don't want the irrelevance of CS.