I remember reading about this in the 1991 release of "Practical Internet and Unix Security," from O'Reilly back in 1991. I'm pretty sure they even gave examples. They also laid out a number of suggestions to mitigate risk, including not specifying the current path, ".", in the root user's path so they must explicitly type the location of an executable script, and so on.
They also pointed out that some well-behaved shells eliminate certain ease-of-use-but-exploitable features when it detects that a privileged user is running it, and even on systems where that's not the standard, the default.bashrc or equivalent files often set up aliases for common commands that disable features like wildcard matching, or color codes (which could be used if you're very tricky, to match a filename color to the background color of the screen, among other things), the path restriction listed above, and many many others.
It's really hard to secure shell accounts on systems, no matter how you try. Is this article just proof that the current generation of unix admins is rediscovering this? Should I be shaking my fist and telling the kids to get off my lawn? This was old news 2 over decades ago.
Yeah. I tried playing Assassin's Creed in 3D, thinking it might be cool. Most of the 3D effects are minimal, with the exception of the new inclusion of depth of field. With 3D on, it makes anything more than 20 virtual feet from your character fuzzy and imprecise. After being sniped by or alerting rooftop guards that I couldn't distinguish from chimneys, masonry, doors, etc - I just turned it off. It incurred a penalty to play that way.
I took some pains to speak in terms of potential as opposed to guaranteed impact; I did not claim that focus on either profit or social causes would itself deny or develop social change, only that there's higher potential in one place than another. A generality, if you will.
As for Gandhi as the, he was born into privilege - his father and grandfather had been prime minister of their state - and even as the third son, was sent to England for education as a lawyer. He ended up working in the much less lucrative position of a legal aide doing drafting work because could indulge the luxury that he was "psychologically unable to cross-question witnesses," which would have been necessary as a barrister. Then it was 21 years in South Africa working for a trading firm before he returned to become what we know as the public face of the Indian independence movement.
Look, there's no doubt that he was a great person, and that he did great things. The fact that he had such a comfortable launching pad from which to achieve this doesn't detract from his accomplishments, but you ought to recognize that he had an increased potential to do so because he didn't have to worry about other aspects of his life, like where his next meal was coming from, or whether he had to maintain gainful employment. Since all his needs were met, he was able to focus on his ideals, and fight for rights and freedoms.
All of that just underscores my point. It's easier to be rich and charitable than to be needy and charitable.
Aside from the literal connotations, profit is potentially more valuable than charity to charitable work itself.
Let's say you want to help decrease the spread of disease in africa. You can get the necessary training, go to africa, and along with thousands of others, actually DO that, and you'll have an obvious impact.
Or, like the folks he's talking to, you could go to a prestigious college, get a fancy degree, and potentially land a job that can pay for 3 or 4 people to perform the duties of the charitable worker above, while still maintaining a very comfortable lifestyle. You could even end up higher in a profitable company, where you direct millions of dollars to aid programs just for tax breaks, if not altruism.
So it's a problem to encourage new grads to focus on charity. They are at the peak of their earning potential, and no matter how you look at it, focusing on altruism is a quick way to retard their ability to make potentially world-changing decisions later, when their potential has been realized.
The view most cultures have for this sort of work is very odd. I think Dan Pallotta spells it out in his TED talk about how we think about charities. We often direct involvement and financial sacrifice as the only acceptable path to social gains.
If the primary application of a specific education is to provide that specific education to the next group of people who will be providing that specific education, doesn't that strongly imply that it's not a very necessary area of expertise to have, and in turn, you should NOT have many jobs because they provide no benefit?
What is the end goal of getting an education that you only spend on furthering education? Specifically in the humanities fields where, often enough, the majority of obvious career options are in education, where you educate people so that they, one day, may also only apply their education to the field of education, and so on?
Did you know that we actually have done economic studies that show the impact of raising the minimum wage, and how little it actually helps the impoverished? According to a study published in the Southern Economic Journal in 2010, raising the federal minimum wage from then $7.25 to $9.50 would only benefit11.3% of those living in poverty, if you ignore any possible negative repercussions. However, coupled with negative employment effects, the conclusion is that it'd be a net loss.
I haven't seen a study yet that looked at raising the rates over 100% to $15, but I suspect that'd it'll end up even worse.
One of the concerns is that new unskilled workers - high schoolers and college kids - will be disproportionally targeted. After all, if your employment costs double, you can't risk someone with no proven work history when there's older, experienced individuals with responsibilities who can't afford to mess up a job around.
Another impact is that non-national chain stores will be severely impacted. Sole proprietorships - the Ma and Pa stores of mythical Main Street USA - will take great hits. These businesses usually lack the flexibility to provide employment as a loss-leader, and often don't have the option of doubling their employment budget. They'll have to make do with less, or simply not operate as a business.
There's heavy selection bias here, where the lifestyles that lead to success may coincidentally include these 3 goals, but that's part of the point.
We need to focus on education and long term planning - especially financial - and encourage a strong work ethic. Reducing the ability for highschool-aged folks to get jobs is almost the direct opposite direction. We need to focus on providing a path to skilled labor, blue or white collar, and realize that unskilled labor is primarily the domain of those just entering the workforce, not someone who's been in it for years.
Right now, the job market for developers is not very discriminatory. They'll take anyone they can. That means your barrier for entry is low. That being said, I've done a bit more research, and I can say that the most lucrative and mobile entry level development job you can land is probably web application developer. Not designer, but rather, someone who makes a web-based application 'go'.
With that in mind, you'll need the following skills: SQL, HTML, CSS, Javascript (jQuery specifically, but other libraries are good), and a backing language - probably Java or C#/ASP.NET. You'll also need to become familiar with your web execution framework - Tomcat is big in the Java world, and naturally IIS is used in the.NET world. Luckily for you, there are many resources to learn all these things absolutely free of charge, with huge communities of volunteers helping each other out. So, what level do you need these skills at?
Well, as a new hire - regardless of your skill level - you're unlikely to be given a new project to start on. Likely, your first few months are going to be a combination of learning your company's domain knowledge (like finances or autos, or whatever), and tackling bug fixes and/or feature enhancements. For that you'll need to understand how the programs work so that you can source problems. You'll have to be familiar with IDE's and the debugging capabilities - especially learning how to setup and debug web based programs on your local system, as well as remote debugging. You're going to have to be able to read code well enough that you can translate most of it into english in your head - without having to go line by line until you have to dig down that deep. That means recognizing structures and flow easily (which is why I also recommend you avoid ruby on rails and spring - and maybe even hibernate/nhibernate until you've learned more).
You're also going to need to know enough about a development environment to know how to ask an intelligent question about it. There's a world of difference between "I can't get it to work," and something like "I tried increasing the max heap size, but I'm still getting an out of memory error each time I execute a prepared statement after the first call." See here: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/s... . One important quote to take away from this: "What we are, unapologetically, is hostile to people who seem to be unwilling to think or to do their own homework before asking questions." That faq will help you get past the newbie phase without giving up.
So, an unasked followup question, how long will it take to get there? Well, hour-by-hour, you can compress the entirety of a CS degree program into 4 months of 8 hours, 5 days a week, but you won't need all that. I'm going to say that to get there, to really be employable, worst case it'll take about 250 hours of study total. If you take it at a light pace, about 10 hours a week, you should be ready in 6 months.
With today's environment, I wouldn't be at all surprised if you halved that and still got a job, but I would feel bad for suggesting that was an adequate amount of study and practice.
One last important thing that I've only touched on indirectly; you absolutely must learn how to teach yourself. New libraries and frameworks come out every day, and the flavor of the month changes at a rapid pace. At some point, you'll realize that all languages do more or less the same thing, they just have different syntactical sugar, or internal constructs that make a given task easier or harder, sometimes even between versions of the same language. You need to be able to stay on top of those changes, while googling or asking for solutions to odd problems or configuration errors.
In the US, free speech is a blacklist-based phenomenon. There's a few things that are illegal to say - like 'Fire' in the theater - for example. If it's not listed, it's probably fair game, and you can't be jailed for it. Thus; westboro baptists and illinois nazis.
In many places in the world, it seems like the definition of free speech refers to the fact that there's a government-approved whitelist - here are the things you are allowed to talk about/say, anything not on the list are disallowed and legal offenses. Anything that's not explicitly on the list (and often times, even if it is) is subject to prosecutions. Heck, it's standard in these places to claim that opposing political parties are, by their language alone, seditionists, and have them locked up. In part, this is why there's outrage against the US that we allow hate speech and open protest; in other countries, that requires a mandate by the government, explicit approval.
Even in western, supposedly enlightened countries, there are onerous restrictions; check out slander laws in England, Germany's stance on anything Nazi-related, or France's many, many restrictions - for example, it's illegal to criticize a public employee (though I have no idea if it's actually enforced).
Calling this 'free speech' is like calling tax laws in the US 'voluntary taxes'.
What we're describing here is not a "tightening grip on free speech". It's just "additional regulations" on a locked down system where participating is the exception, not the rule. The only thing free about it is that one is "free" to follow all the rules, or shut up.
I'm actually surprised that I had to dig down into the Faqs to see text that said "Mac only right now". I thought maybe my adblockers was hiding anything but the 'download for mac' button.
I don't know about other folks but Mac has never been the assumed default for any program I ever download, especially editors aimed at developers. The ones that are actually say it up front. Otherwise we assume windows, being that it's still the majority desktop OS. Failing that, slashdot links tend to point at linux apps.
I don't think we can ever say that it's 'hipster' to expect the majority opinion.
I am sure. They correctly realized that there was little value in rote memorization.
Maybe it depends on the quality of institution you attend, but my teachers at least were more concerned with whether or not I knew how and when to apply a given formula than rote memorization of it. Sure, they had limits; you could only bring in one sheet of formulas for a given midterm or final (which was well more than enough), but most of the time they wrote the necessary equations right on the board.
As we're even more well connected, with everyone carrying a cellphone in their pocket capable of accessing nearly the whole of recorded public human knowledge in seconds, people are coming around to realize that memorization isn't as important as understanding - or almost as good, knowing how to search for information to gain understanding.
I wonder how well they'll be able to remember, if instead of using a laptop to take notes, they use their laptop to recorded and auto-transcribe it, so it can be replayed over and over. So that any parts that cause confusion can be examined until understood, without worrying about missing the next part. Where, with a press of a button, a user can mark the clip with a note; "important part here" or "come back to this, it's confusing" or even "prof says this will be on the test".
Besides, what a stupid study. There are certain classes where 'remembering' is the most important part of the class, but at least in my engineering and science classes, 'knowing' and 'understanding' had slightly higher priority. I can easily remember the last thing I was expected to memorize, with no other expectations - in 7'th grade, US History, I was expected to memorize each president's name and their start & end dates in office, in years. Completely useless.
Is that a laudable goal to test against for college students? That they're being judged at the 7'th grade level?
I seem to remember a case from the middle 90's where an engineer for a... phone? company came up with an interesting idea for a software-based filter. He talked to a co-worker about it who agreed it could be good, and took it to his superiors. They decided not to pursue it. A year later, he left the company, and he decided to go ahead and write that software - he knew a lot of folks who'd pay for it.
He was still 2 or 3 months from completing it when his old company heard about it. They sued him, claiming that he had the idea on company time, they could cite that he discussed it with a co-worker (so it was 'developed') and they claimed ownership. He lost his case. The judge had him not only turn over his source code, build environment, and all rights, but made him finish the product and deliver it to the company, with threats of fines or jail time if he acted maliciously (like making it impossible to run, or obfuscated, or anything other than delivering a finished product in a reasonable time frame).
Searching on google now for these terms just gets me lots of hits for 'bully bosses' and 'henry ford' for some reason, but... precedent is out there. I just can't find it.
The upshot is this... If he discussed ideas he had while at Zenimax with anyone else, and those ideas were shared with Oculus, even if they're not patentable or Zenimax had no desire to implement them, they may have a very good case.
Of course, I'm not a lawyer, so I may be bull-poopooing you inadvertently.
Based on the wording, he's comparing watching it on a given screen equal to watching it in a movie theater. That is, you don't get to keep it. Watch once, that sort of thing. Maybe a netflix model. At $4 bucks, 10 years from now, for a large screen tv, it sounds like it's some sort of rental, like the holy grail of DRM has promised the MPAA folks; they can only watch it _x_ times, or only until date _y_.
Of course, like all models that revolve around these sorts of limitations, you need to implement increasingly restrictive DRM, enforced by both software and hardware, and it can't have any holes or alternative routes. We all know how well that works. We've seen exactly how well it works. People, by and large, aren't in a big rush to adopt hardware for features that only benefit copyright distributors at the consumer's expense.
My guess is that in the best case, they'll end up partnering with cable companies and/or netflix to have some sort of ala carte channel model with a monthly subscription fee. Direct digital distribution is unlikely because they won't be able to set a price point that makes sense to the public - their price point will be based around the concept of giving up control completely, because once one person 'hacks' it, it free.
I won't run down the whole story, but my last company had a completely horrible, 100% custom, python based build system for a very large product that contained hundreds of subparts. Despite that - or perhaps because of it - I was able to easily get all the active code running from an eclipse instance, meaning that testing a code change usually required no more than republishing to an eclipse tomcat instance. You could pull the previous day's changes from all the other devs and in about a minute or two, have some 200 components fully uptodate and deployed locally. All very nice.
Then some folks came in and mavenized the whole thing, completely ignoring the concept of even using eclipse. Now, your only real choice in getting things to work is to make your changes to your one component, build up the jar, war, or installer for it (depending on the complexity of your change), and then overwrite your installed instances. Then you can start everything up and attach a remote debugger, with all the limitations that provides.
Of course, that's only if you're touching a front-end component that doesn't get client-side customizations. If you made some changes in a shared library, you now have to recompile the whole project and frankly, it's easier to run the installer than try to make sure you get each dependent jar everywhere it's used in the system. The compile takes between 40 minutes to an hour with tests disabled. 3+ hours otherwise. You still are stuck with the remote debugger instead of a local tomcat instance because there's no maven plugin to produce an eclipse web faceted project with all the libraries and dependent projects properly crosslinked. It's painful enough to try to set up the 30 plus dependencies and smattering of configuration settings required on one component, but then the next change comes through and I have to do it all over again - and that's only if the change introduces a dependency breaking change, or else I won't even know to update things in the first place.
I remember he used to lament the fact that we had to use computers to run programs, because they were always so impure. Hacked up with model-breaking input and output considerations. He loved APL. Had us write our programs as math equations and prove that they had no side effects. On paper. Step by step, like how elementary teachers used to have you write out long division. He was a computer scientist before they HAD computers, he'd point out.
To be fair, APL was a wonderful language, and perfect so long as you didn't want to actually/do/ anything.
Well, that's unfair. As long as you meant to do a certain type of thing, these languages work out fairly well. The issue is the old percent split issue you normally see with frameworks and libraries - by making it easy to do some percent, X, easily, you create a high barrier to performing the remaining percent, Y. The problem with adhering to pure functional languages is that Y is not only high, it's often the most common tasks. Iterating, direct input and output, multi-variable based behavior, a slew of what we'd call flow conditions - these are very hard to do in a pure functional language. The benefit you get is far outweighed by the fact that you could use C, or the non-functional aspects of OCaml, or some other so-called 'multi-paradigm' language to fix the problem in a fraction of the time, even with side-effect management.
Then, have you ever tried to maintain a complex functional program? There's no doubt you can implement those Y-items above. The problem is that it makes your code very specific and interrelated as you're forced to present a model that captures all the intended behaviors. It's a lot of work. Work that will then need to be repeated each time you need to make additional changes. Adding a mechanism to - for example - play a sound at the end of a processing job based on the status - that's a line of code in most languages. Not so in a functional language.
The problem here isn't the oft-cited 'Devs just have to think of things differently, and they'll see it's better.'. It's more basic. It's simple throughput. Functional languages might be a theoretical improvement, but they're a practical hindrance. That, in a nutshell, is why they're not in common use in a corporate environment, where "value" loses it's theoretical polish and is compared to hard metrics like time and cost for a given quality.
Another problem is that many of these analyses - let's assume they're generally accurate and not misleading - could result in numbers that are not politically correct. Like the sort of statistics that might drive law enforcement policies, or new laws targeting certain lifestyles or races. I don't know how we can differentiate between statistical analysis driving action and action born of discrimination, but simply ignoring the issues is not the correct decision.
There are whole sets of these sorts of problems with certified causes and guaranteed solutions, but we're not even allowed to talk about it because they are almost wholly restricted to the behaviors of specific minority. It's simply not politically safe to grapple with these issues. So we ignore them. Strike that - we actually go a step further and demonize the people who say them. My personal experience is that if a white male says something like this:
"National crime rates show that low-income black males between the ages of 15 and 34 are responsible for over 50% of the violent crime in America, most in urban environments. If we want to lower the crime rate, we should start there."... people will start mentally - if not verbally - tossing around terms like 'neo-nazi republican' and 'racist', and much much worse. It doesn't matter if that's what the statistics show. It's simply not politically correct to point out minority groups have negative traits, especially by white males - the majority of our politicians.
Then we have the deliberate ignorance by politicians which focuses on emotional appeals in popularity and re-election bids. For example, attacking scary looking rifles and calling them 'assault weapons', over the weapon of choice in something like 98% of the crimes involving firearms in the US: sub $400 handguns. It's just not as sexy, somehow. Not to mention that a fix like simply raising the price via tax - like we've done with cigarettes for example - will have a backlash claiming it's targeting the poor.
Yes, privacy is an issue, yes, poor input will result in inaccurate trend predictions or incorrect results, and yes, even something like the manner in which the data is collected can introduce a bias. However, I think these are minor issues compared to the glaring problem of not using the data once it's obtained. We have such a poor track record for making rational, data-driven decisions as a country that we don't need to speculate about misuse. The fact that we obtain it and then ignore it is misuse!
Yes. I've been beating this drum for the last 5+ years, but there have been studies along the lines of motivations. At least one that I can remember; The study was on entrepreneurs - so no glass ceiling issues - and the summary was this: Women outperformed men in every case where they were compared on matching motivational goals.
So, between those interested in money - women made more money. If family time was more important - women spent more time with family. Where flexible working hours or vacation time... you get the idea.
Of course, for the large part, women prioritized personal happiness, short commutes, family time, pretty much everything except money, whereas men prioritized money and professional recognition almost exclusively.
Unfortunately, the study is not online - at least, I haven't found it - I believe it was in a trade journal for industrial psychologists, or maybe just a business management magazine.
There are more items to throw into the mix too. As someone pointed out, women are not entering college programs where the degree is associated with higher financial income. Yet studies show that when they do, they often advance faster than men in the same position[1]. This is referred to as career discrimination - it's a self-selective discriminator meaning the person affected is the person making the choice. It's responsible for the largest source of wage disparity.
Career stability is another factor - someone else brought up that women are more likely than men to take time off for family, having & raising children, and so on - and thus have employment gaps which indicate family is more important than career. Not that this is bad, just that it does affect hiring decisions. This is why top execs (not surprisingly, those who make the most $$$) are rarely female. Not every woman is Marissa Mayer (Yahoo's CEO who went back to work with almost no leave after giving birth). When choices are made, you pick the one who places the business over their family, and 1-3 year gaps show that's not the case.
Then there's a whole other set of things; men being more willing to negotiate salary, self-selective bias towards culturally expected roles & professions, so on and so on.
When all is said and done, we still have some wiggle room, but most of the 'discrimination' can be explained due to non-discriminatory sources. There IS still discrimination however, make no mistake, but in the US today, it's easily offset by current affirmative action-promoted hiring standards and the apparent ability for women in general to outperform men - when they choose to.
If the goal is equality, I suggest that we're already there. If the goal is to eliminate discrimination, I think it's not only more challenging, but will necessarily require eliminating gender- and race-based decisions from things like college acceptance and hiring decisions. Obvious you say? It would mean no more affirmative action, as that provides advantages based on gender, race, sexuality or other minority status, which is literally discrimination based on those lines.
[1] - Yes, this could be due to affirmative action more than ability, the studies tend to focus on large companies with high data counts, and those companies tend to desire an appearance of gender and other forms of equality, as well they should. However, the first study I commented on indicates that women outperform men, so I'm theorizing this is earned promotions due to ability.
A pretty comprehensive study was done that showed regardless of the language selected, the programs written by developers with the most experience in that language were the the ones with the least security bugs, regardless of traits of the language like attack surfaces or complexity.
It's short and sweet. A developer's experience with the specific language or framework an application is written in is a better indicator of application security than the language or framework an application is written in.
I've seen the various design concepts before and they're all variations on the same intrinsically flawed theme; displays projected on either a liquid or gas that requires very still air, and a very irritating environmental system to manage, not to mention an image that is disrupted when a user 'interacts' with it because it's interrupting the 'canvas'.
I don't know of any scheme that could avoid these fundamental problems that will stop this from ever being a widely useful, much less consumer level technology.
I think we're just going to have to stick to visual overlays on 3D space, augmented reality style, at least until we can actually produce the sci-fi concept of projected holograms. Anything less is simply not useful enough.
Theoretically you need to;
- Level the build plate and calibrate it
- Learn any 3D modeling software to create or modify objects, often at millimeter level precision
- Learn the slicing software which converts your 3D object file into a file your printer understands as instructions
That's it. Frankly, the second one is a huge investment of time and energy, and while some simple 3D design is possible in very stripped-down programs, nothing BUT simple design is possible in very stripped-down programs. Autodesk Inventor and others may be more complex than they need to be, but only for a fairly basic definition of 'need'. Many folks just rely on others models and skip step two entirely, and you can get by that way... for a while.
A bigger problem to the consumer market is the practical issues. What a consumer needs is reliability, and a by-the-numbers process. Like an ink printer, when I send a document to it, I hit 'print' and I expect it to work.
It took a long time for printers and copiers to get to that point. Even now we have issues where printers need different settings for different paper, and we still have paper jams and ink smears, and the basic functionality of a printer is significantly less complex.
So we're not there yet though. As a replicative process, any minor error grows geometrically as the model progresses, and we don't have consumer-level devices that match the precision of the expensive commercial-sized printers. The following items all have a large impact on the success of your build, and all of them are intractably linked; print speed affects optimal rafting, which is impacted by the humidity, and so on and so on.
- Managing airflow, humidity, temp, and particulate matter (dust) around the device
- Rafting and supports to actually allow printing various shapes with undercuts and voids (which vary based on a number of things, not least of which is the actual model)
- Balancing heating and cooling; cooling causes contraction which results in curling especially when different parts of the build are at different temps at the same time.
- Print speed
- Print quality
- Printer head wear and tear
One of the tests of these "pro-sumer" 3D printers is to try to print the same object out 5 or 10 times, and count how many times it was successful with the same build instructions. 8/10 is really good. Usually, of course, you'll have to try 2 or 3 times just to get your first 'successful enough' print - these don't count, you're just dialing the numbers in for that model based on experience and guesswork for your specific printer.
What we're left with is this; All the made-for-your-mother, 'basic consumer' 3D printers are, and will be for the short foreseeable future, akin to the EZ-Bake-Oven. They sorta look like a real oven, and they can sort of cook food like a real oven, but you're not meant to try to use it as a real oven. Stick to the company approved recipes only, and even then, the quality will be low.
So, no, I don't think they're going anywhere with a consumer device at this point in time. Maybe in another 5-8 years we'll be ready for the first widely usable one, but it's a bit too early to crow about it just yet.
It's no longer making the news, but for a while it was a nearly-daily occurrence. It's just not a big media draw anymore, unless it impacts a politician or famous entertainer.
I've written about this before; I used to write financial software for a living, and one of the requirements for a US bank was to provide a mechanism to detect transactions by an unauthorized person.
In short, the govt. provides a list of bad people in a text file. One name per line, all upper case, like it came out of an old batch system. We then check to see if the sender or receiver of any transaction/EXACTLY/ matches that string, case insensitive. If it's an exact letter-for-letter match, there's a flag that's set and the transaction is delayed, but it appears to go through as normal(*). What happens after that is the bank's responsibility, but that's the whole of the complexity.
Whoever made the list usually has a few variants of spelling; OSAMA BIN LADEN or OMASA BIN LADEN or OSMA BIN LADEN, for example. But that's it. Just spelling your name slightly differently is enough to avoid the flag. We're literally not allowed to add anything else, like soundex matching or handling foreign letters.
This is ~probably~ also how the TSA no fly list works, and why you still hear about false positives from time to time. It's also probably how any security works until it's been around for 20 years and they hire a contracting company to make them really good software that does what they want, instead of what they think they want it to do.
It just takes a very long time for software designed by a legislative committee with no technical awareness to morph into something usable, but that's government for you.
* - most transactions are not sent out until the end-of-day reconciliation anyway, so it looks like it's accepted like most other transactions, probably in a 'pending' state in your online balance - unless you're paying for a wire transfer or something.
The simple fact of the matter is that a 4-year university's computer science program is not meant to provide job training, and as far as career skills go, you could pick up a CS degree equivalent of job skills in under a year.
Some of these theory classes may provide better insight, and lacking them may limit you if you're attempting to enter a highly specialized, complex field with no demonstrable experience in it (which, by the by, doesn't really happen), but for 98% of your day job, it's going to be more important for you to know how to parse and sanitize input than it will be for you to know how to write a compiler, raytracer, decompose a function into mathematical terms, perform a Big-O analysis, design a memory manager for an OS, and you'll probably never use matrices or differential equations.
Hell, the grads I see now a days haven't got a concept of efficient design, most lack basic database skills, awareness of common libraries, common development tools, never used any team-based tracking systems or source control, and so on. Unless they've struck out on their own, they're almost completely unsuitable as candidates. Many of the self-taught devs seem to have a better grasp of things, if only because they end up attempting to write usable software from design to implementation, instead of homework assignments demonstrating polymorphism and recursion.
On the other hand, for many HR departments, a degree is go/no-go. You'll never get to an interview without one, and there's no free, online equivalent for that. You'll just have to make do with having superior technical skills, and try to apply at a company that values that more than a sheet of paper.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember reading about this in the 1991 release of "Practical Internet and Unix Security," from O'Reilly back in 1991. I'm pretty sure they even gave examples. They also laid out a number of suggestions to mitigate risk, including not specifying the current path, ".", in the root user's path so they must explicitly type the location of an executable script, and so on.
They also pointed out that some well-behaved shells eliminate certain ease-of-use-but-exploitable features when it detects that a privileged user is running it, and even on systems where that's not the standard, the default .bashrc or equivalent files often set up aliases for common commands that disable features like wildcard matching, or color codes (which could be used if you're very tricky, to match a filename color to the background color of the screen, among other things), the path restriction listed above, and many many others.
It's really hard to secure shell accounts on systems, no matter how you try. Is this article just proof that the current generation of unix admins is rediscovering this? Should I be shaking my fist and telling the kids to get off my lawn? This was old news 2 over decades ago.
Yeah. I tried playing Assassin's Creed in 3D, thinking it might be cool. Most of the 3D effects are minimal, with the exception of the new inclusion of depth of field. With 3D on, it makes anything more than 20 virtual feet from your character fuzzy and imprecise. After being sniped by or alerting rooftop guards that I couldn't distinguish from chimneys, masonry, doors, etc - I just turned it off. It incurred a penalty to play that way.
I took some pains to speak in terms of potential as opposed to guaranteed impact; I did not claim that focus on either profit or social causes would itself deny or develop social change, only that there's higher potential in one place than another. A generality, if you will.
As for Gandhi as the, he was born into privilege - his father and grandfather had been prime minister of their state - and even as the third son, was sent to England for education as a lawyer. He ended up working in the much less lucrative position of a legal aide doing drafting work because could indulge the luxury that he was "psychologically unable to cross-question witnesses," which would have been necessary as a barrister. Then it was 21 years in South Africa working for a trading firm before he returned to become what we know as the public face of the Indian independence movement.
Look, there's no doubt that he was a great person, and that he did great things. The fact that he had such a comfortable launching pad from which to achieve this doesn't detract from his accomplishments, but you ought to recognize that he had an increased potential to do so because he didn't have to worry about other aspects of his life, like where his next meal was coming from, or whether he had to maintain gainful employment. Since all his needs were met, he was able to focus on his ideals, and fight for rights and freedoms.
All of that just underscores my point. It's easier to be rich and charitable than to be needy and charitable.
Aside from the literal connotations, profit is potentially more valuable than charity to charitable work itself.
Let's say you want to help decrease the spread of disease in africa. You can get the necessary training, go to africa, and along with thousands of others, actually DO that, and you'll have an obvious impact.
Or, like the folks he's talking to, you could go to a prestigious college, get a fancy degree, and potentially land a job that can pay for 3 or 4 people to perform the duties of the charitable worker above, while still maintaining a very comfortable lifestyle. You could even end up higher in a profitable company, where you direct millions of dollars to aid programs just for tax breaks, if not altruism.
So it's a problem to encourage new grads to focus on charity. They are at the peak of their earning potential, and no matter how you look at it, focusing on altruism is a quick way to retard their ability to make potentially world-changing decisions later, when their potential has been realized.
The view most cultures have for this sort of work is very odd. I think Dan Pallotta spells it out in his TED talk about how we think about charities. We often direct involvement and financial sacrifice as the only acceptable path to social gains.
If the primary application of a specific education is to provide that specific education to the next group of people who will be providing that specific education, doesn't that strongly imply that it's not a very necessary area of expertise to have, and in turn, you should NOT have many jobs because they provide no benefit?
What is the end goal of getting an education that you only spend on furthering education? Specifically in the humanities fields where, often enough, the majority of obvious career options are in education, where you educate people so that they, one day, may also only apply their education to the field of education, and so on?
Did you know that we actually have done economic studies that show the impact of raising the minimum wage, and how little it actually helps the impoverished? According to a study published in the Southern Economic Journal in 2010, raising the federal minimum wage from then $7.25 to $9.50 would only benefit11.3% of those living in poverty, if you ignore any possible negative repercussions. However, coupled with negative employment effects, the conclusion is that it'd be a net loss.
I haven't seen a study yet that looked at raising the rates over 100% to $15, but I suspect that'd it'll end up even worse.
One of the concerns is that new unskilled workers - high schoolers and college kids - will be disproportionally targeted. After all, if your employment costs double, you can't risk someone with no proven work history when there's older, experienced individuals with responsibilities who can't afford to mess up a job around.
Another impact is that non-national chain stores will be severely impacted. Sole proprietorships - the Ma and Pa stores of mythical Main Street USA - will take great hits. These businesses usually lack the flexibility to provide employment as a loss-leader, and often don't have the option of doubling their employment budget. They'll have to make do with less, or simply not operate as a business.
So where's the fix?
What a lot of this comes down to is what I feel is an incorrect assumption; that minimum wage jobs are life-long careers, and that we intend for someone to work as an unskilled laborer for their entire life. The Brookings institute did a study/a - which does not prove causation, you know the drill - that showed that if a person could graduate highschool, get a full time job, and avoid marriage until after 21, they had only a 2% chance of living below the poverty line. In other words, analyzing the current population, that 15-20% that are living below the poverty line, 98% of them did not do at least one of those things.
There's heavy selection bias here, where the lifestyles that lead to success may coincidentally include these 3 goals, but that's part of the point.
We need to focus on education and long term planning - especially financial - and encourage a strong work ethic. Reducing the ability for highschool-aged folks to get jobs is almost the direct opposite direction. We need to focus on providing a path to skilled labor, blue or white collar, and realize that unskilled labor is primarily the domain of those just entering the workforce, not someone who's been in it for years.
For example, here; http://www.catb.org/jargon/htm...
I have fielded this question a number of times.
Right now, the job market for developers is not very discriminatory. They'll take anyone they can. That means your barrier for entry is low. That being said, I've done a bit more research, and I can say that the most lucrative and mobile entry level development job you can land is probably web application developer. Not designer, but rather, someone who makes a web-based application 'go'.
With that in mind, you'll need the following skills: SQL, HTML, CSS, Javascript (jQuery specifically, but other libraries are good), and a backing language - probably Java or C#/ASP.NET. You'll also need to become familiar with your web execution framework - Tomcat is big in the Java world, and naturally IIS is used in the .NET world. Luckily for you, there are many resources to learn all these things absolutely free of charge, with huge communities of volunteers helping each other out. So, what level do you need these skills at?
Well, as a new hire - regardless of your skill level - you're unlikely to be given a new project to start on. Likely, your first few months are going to be a combination of learning your company's domain knowledge (like finances or autos, or whatever), and tackling bug fixes and/or feature enhancements. For that you'll need to understand how the programs work so that you can source problems. You'll have to be familiar with IDE's and the debugging capabilities - especially learning how to setup and debug web based programs on your local system, as well as remote debugging. You're going to have to be able to read code well enough that you can translate most of it into english in your head - without having to go line by line until you have to dig down that deep. That means recognizing structures and flow easily (which is why I also recommend you avoid ruby on rails and spring - and maybe even hibernate/nhibernate until you've learned more).
You're also going to need to know enough about a development environment to know how to ask an intelligent question about it. There's a world of difference between "I can't get it to work," and something like "I tried increasing the max heap size, but I'm still getting an out of memory error each time I execute a prepared statement after the first call." See here: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/s... . One important quote to take away from this: "What we are, unapologetically, is hostile to people who seem to be unwilling to think or to do their own homework before asking questions." That faq will help you get past the newbie phase without giving up.
So, an unasked followup question, how long will it take to get there? Well, hour-by-hour, you can compress the entirety of a CS degree program into 4 months of 8 hours, 5 days a week, but you won't need all that. I'm going to say that to get there, to really be employable, worst case it'll take about 250 hours of study total. If you take it at a light pace, about 10 hours a week, you should be ready in 6 months.
With today's environment, I wouldn't be at all surprised if you halved that and still got a job, but I would feel bad for suggesting that was an adequate amount of study and practice.
One last important thing that I've only touched on indirectly; you absolutely must learn how to teach yourself. New libraries and frameworks come out every day, and the flavor of the month changes at a rapid pace. At some point, you'll realize that all languages do more or less the same thing, they just have different syntactical sugar, or internal constructs that make a given task easier or harder, sometimes even between versions of the same language. You need to be able to stay on top of those changes, while googling or asking for solutions to odd problems or configuration errors.
Squirrels could potentially cause black-outs and mess with power grid configurations. In fact, they have.
In the US, free speech is a blacklist-based phenomenon. There's a few things that are illegal to say - like 'Fire' in the theater - for example. If it's not listed, it's probably fair game, and you can't be jailed for it. Thus; westboro baptists and illinois nazis.
In many places in the world, it seems like the definition of free speech refers to the fact that there's a government-approved whitelist - here are the things you are allowed to talk about/say, anything not on the list are disallowed and legal offenses. Anything that's not explicitly on the list (and often times, even if it is) is subject to prosecutions. Heck, it's standard in these places to claim that opposing political parties are, by their language alone, seditionists, and have them locked up. In part, this is why there's outrage against the US that we allow hate speech and open protest; in other countries, that requires a mandate by the government, explicit approval.
Even in western, supposedly enlightened countries, there are onerous restrictions; check out slander laws in England, Germany's stance on anything Nazi-related, or France's many, many restrictions - for example, it's illegal to criticize a public employee (though I have no idea if it's actually enforced).
Calling this 'free speech' is like calling tax laws in the US 'voluntary taxes'.
What we're describing here is not a "tightening grip on free speech". It's just "additional regulations" on a locked down system where participating is the exception, not the rule. The only thing free about it is that one is "free" to follow all the rules, or shut up.
I'm actually surprised that I had to dig down into the Faqs to see text that said "Mac only right now". I thought maybe my adblockers was hiding anything but the 'download for mac' button.
I don't know about other folks but Mac has never been the assumed default for any program I ever download, especially editors aimed at developers. The ones that are actually say it up front. Otherwise we assume windows, being that it's still the majority desktop OS. Failing that, slashdot links tend to point at linux apps.
I don't think we can ever say that it's 'hipster' to expect the majority opinion.
I am sure. They correctly realized that there was little value in rote memorization.
Maybe it depends on the quality of institution you attend, but my teachers at least were more concerned with whether or not I knew how and when to apply a given formula than rote memorization of it. Sure, they had limits; you could only bring in one sheet of formulas for a given midterm or final (which was well more than enough), but most of the time they wrote the necessary equations right on the board.
As we're even more well connected, with everyone carrying a cellphone in their pocket capable of accessing nearly the whole of recorded public human knowledge in seconds, people are coming around to realize that memorization isn't as important as understanding - or almost as good, knowing how to search for information to gain understanding.
I wonder how well they'll be able to remember, if instead of using a laptop to take notes, they use their laptop to recorded and auto-transcribe it, so it can be replayed over and over. So that any parts that cause confusion can be examined until understood, without worrying about missing the next part. Where, with a press of a button, a user can mark the clip with a note; "important part here" or "come back to this, it's confusing" or even "prof says this will be on the test".
Besides, what a stupid study. There are certain classes where 'remembering' is the most important part of the class, but at least in my engineering and science classes, 'knowing' and 'understanding' had slightly higher priority. I can easily remember the last thing I was expected to memorize, with no other expectations - in 7'th grade, US History, I was expected to memorize each president's name and their start & end dates in office, in years. Completely useless.
Is that a laudable goal to test against for college students? That they're being judged at the 7'th grade level?
I seem to remember a case from the middle 90's where an engineer for a ... phone? company came up with an interesting idea for a software-based filter. He talked to a co-worker about it who agreed it could be good, and took it to his superiors. They decided not to pursue it. A year later, he left the company, and he decided to go ahead and write that software - he knew a lot of folks who'd pay for it.
He was still 2 or 3 months from completing it when his old company heard about it. They sued him, claiming that he had the idea on company time, they could cite that he discussed it with a co-worker (so it was 'developed') and they claimed ownership. He lost his case. The judge had him not only turn over his source code, build environment, and all rights, but made him finish the product and deliver it to the company, with threats of fines or jail time if he acted maliciously (like making it impossible to run, or obfuscated, or anything other than delivering a finished product in a reasonable time frame).
Searching on google now for these terms just gets me lots of hits for 'bully bosses' and 'henry ford' for some reason, but ... precedent is out there. I just can't find it.
The upshot is this... If he discussed ideas he had while at Zenimax with anyone else, and those ideas were shared with Oculus, even if they're not patentable or Zenimax had no desire to implement them, they may have a very good case.
Of course, I'm not a lawyer, so I may be bull-poopooing you inadvertently.
Based on the wording, he's comparing watching it on a given screen equal to watching it in a movie theater. That is, you don't get to keep it. Watch once, that sort of thing. Maybe a netflix model. At $4 bucks, 10 years from now, for a large screen tv, it sounds like it's some sort of rental, like the holy grail of DRM has promised the MPAA folks; they can only watch it _x_ times, or only until date _y_.
Of course, like all models that revolve around these sorts of limitations, you need to implement increasingly restrictive DRM, enforced by both software and hardware, and it can't have any holes or alternative routes. We all know how well that works. We've seen exactly how well it works. People, by and large, aren't in a big rush to adopt hardware for features that only benefit copyright distributors at the consumer's expense.
My guess is that in the best case, they'll end up partnering with cable companies and/or netflix to have some sort of ala carte channel model with a monthly subscription fee. Direct digital distribution is unlikely because they won't be able to set a price point that makes sense to the public - their price point will be based around the concept of giving up control completely, because once one person 'hacks' it, it free.
I won't run down the whole story, but my last company had a completely horrible, 100% custom, python based build system for a very large product that contained hundreds of subparts. Despite that - or perhaps because of it - I was able to easily get all the active code running from an eclipse instance, meaning that testing a code change usually required no more than republishing to an eclipse tomcat instance. You could pull the previous day's changes from all the other devs and in about a minute or two, have some 200 components fully uptodate and deployed locally. All very nice.
Then some folks came in and mavenized the whole thing, completely ignoring the concept of even using eclipse. Now, your only real choice in getting things to work is to make your changes to your one component, build up the jar, war, or installer for it (depending on the complexity of your change), and then overwrite your installed instances. Then you can start everything up and attach a remote debugger, with all the limitations that provides.
Of course, that's only if you're touching a front-end component that doesn't get client-side customizations. If you made some changes in a shared library, you now have to recompile the whole project and frankly, it's easier to run the installer than try to make sure you get each dependent jar everywhere it's used in the system. The compile takes between 40 minutes to an hour with tests disabled. 3+ hours otherwise. You still are stuck with the remote debugger instead of a local tomcat instance because there's no maven plugin to produce an eclipse web faceted project with all the libraries and dependent projects properly crosslinked. It's painful enough to try to set up the 30 plus dependencies and smattering of configuration settings required on one component, but then the next change comes through and I have to do it all over again - and that's only if the change introduces a dependency breaking change, or else I won't even know to update things in the first place.
I remember he used to lament the fact that we had to use computers to run programs, because they were always so impure. Hacked up with model-breaking input and output considerations. He loved APL. Had us write our programs as math equations and prove that they had no side effects. On paper. Step by step, like how elementary teachers used to have you write out long division. He was a computer scientist before they HAD computers, he'd point out.
To be fair, APL was a wonderful language, and perfect so long as you didn't want to actually /do/ anything.
Well, that's unfair. As long as you meant to do a certain type of thing, these languages work out fairly well. The issue is the old percent split issue you normally see with frameworks and libraries - by making it easy to do some percent, X, easily, you create a high barrier to performing the remaining percent, Y. The problem with adhering to pure functional languages is that Y is not only high, it's often the most common tasks. Iterating, direct input and output, multi-variable based behavior, a slew of what we'd call flow conditions - these are very hard to do in a pure functional language. The benefit you get is far outweighed by the fact that you could use C, or the non-functional aspects of OCaml, or some other so-called 'multi-paradigm' language to fix the problem in a fraction of the time, even with side-effect management.
Then, have you ever tried to maintain a complex functional program? There's no doubt you can implement those Y-items above. The problem is that it makes your code very specific and interrelated as you're forced to present a model that captures all the intended behaviors. It's a lot of work. Work that will then need to be repeated each time you need to make additional changes. Adding a mechanism to - for example - play a sound at the end of a processing job based on the status - that's a line of code in most languages. Not so in a functional language.
The problem here isn't the oft-cited 'Devs just have to think of things differently, and they'll see it's better.'. It's more basic. It's simple throughput. Functional languages might be a theoretical improvement, but they're a practical hindrance. That, in a nutshell, is why they're not in common use in a corporate environment, where "value" loses it's theoretical polish and is compared to hard metrics like time and cost for a given quality.
Another problem is that many of these analyses - let's assume they're generally accurate and not misleading - could result in numbers that are not politically correct. Like the sort of statistics that might drive law enforcement policies, or new laws targeting certain lifestyles or races. I don't know how we can differentiate between statistical analysis driving action and action born of discrimination, but simply ignoring the issues is not the correct decision.
There are whole sets of these sorts of problems with certified causes and guaranteed solutions, but we're not even allowed to talk about it because they are almost wholly restricted to the behaviors of specific minority. It's simply not politically safe to grapple with these issues. So we ignore them. Strike that - we actually go a step further and demonize the people who say them. My personal experience is that if a white male says something like this:
"National crime rates show that low-income black males between the ages of 15 and 34 are responsible for over 50% of the violent crime in America, most in urban environments. If we want to lower the crime rate, we should start there." ... people will start mentally - if not verbally - tossing around terms like 'neo-nazi republican' and 'racist', and much much worse. It doesn't matter if that's what the statistics show. It's simply not politically correct to point out minority groups have negative traits, especially by white males - the majority of our politicians.
Then we have the deliberate ignorance by politicians which focuses on emotional appeals in popularity and re-election bids. For example, attacking scary looking rifles and calling them 'assault weapons', over the weapon of choice in something like 98% of the crimes involving firearms in the US: sub $400 handguns. It's just not as sexy, somehow. Not to mention that a fix like simply raising the price via tax - like we've done with cigarettes for example - will have a backlash claiming it's targeting the poor.
Yes, privacy is an issue, yes, poor input will result in inaccurate trend predictions or incorrect results, and yes, even something like the manner in which the data is collected can introduce a bias. However, I think these are minor issues compared to the glaring problem of not using the data once it's obtained. We have such a poor track record for making rational, data-driven decisions as a country that we don't need to speculate about misuse. The fact that we obtain it and then ignore it is misuse!
Yes. I've been beating this drum for the last 5+ years, but there have been studies along the lines of motivations. At least one that I can remember; The study was on entrepreneurs - so no glass ceiling issues - and the summary was this: Women outperformed men in every case where they were compared on matching motivational goals.
So, between those interested in money - women made more money. ... you get the idea.
If family time was more important - women spent more time with family.
Where flexible working hours or vacation time
Of course, for the large part, women prioritized personal happiness, short commutes, family time, pretty much everything except money, whereas men prioritized money and professional recognition almost exclusively.
Unfortunately, the study is not online - at least, I haven't found it - I believe it was in a trade journal for industrial psychologists, or maybe just a business management magazine.
There are more items to throw into the mix too. As someone pointed out, women are not entering college programs where the degree is associated with higher financial income. Yet studies show that when they do, they often advance faster than men in the same position[1]. This is referred to as career discrimination - it's a self-selective discriminator meaning the person affected is the person making the choice. It's responsible for the largest source of wage disparity.
Career stability is another factor - someone else brought up that women are more likely than men to take time off for family, having & raising children, and so on - and thus have employment gaps which indicate family is more important than career. Not that this is bad, just that it does affect hiring decisions. This is why top execs (not surprisingly, those who make the most $$$) are rarely female. Not every woman is Marissa Mayer (Yahoo's CEO who went back to work with almost no leave after giving birth). When choices are made, you pick the one who places the business over their family, and 1-3 year gaps show that's not the case.
Then there's a whole other set of things; men being more willing to negotiate salary, self-selective bias towards culturally expected roles & professions, so on and so on.
When all is said and done, we still have some wiggle room, but most of the 'discrimination' can be explained due to non-discriminatory sources. There IS still discrimination however, make no mistake, but in the US today, it's easily offset by current affirmative action-promoted hiring standards and the apparent ability for women in general to outperform men - when they choose to.
If the goal is equality, I suggest that we're already there. If the goal is to eliminate discrimination, I think it's not only more challenging, but will necessarily require eliminating gender- and race-based decisions from things like college acceptance and hiring decisions. Obvious you say? It would mean no more affirmative action, as that provides advantages based on gender, race, sexuality or other minority status, which is literally discrimination based on those lines.
[1] - Yes, this could be due to affirmative action more than ability, the studies tend to focus on large companies with high data counts, and those companies tend to desire an appearance of gender and other forms of equality, as well they should. However, the first study I commented on indicates that women outperform men, so I'm theorizing this is earned promotions due to ability.
A pretty comprehensive study was done that showed regardless of the language selected, the programs written by developers with the most experience in that language were the the ones with the least security bugs, regardless of traits of the language like attack surfaces or complexity.
It's short and sweet. A developer's experience with the specific language or framework an application is written in is a better indicator of application security than the language or framework an application is written in.
I've seen the various design concepts before and they're all variations on the same intrinsically flawed theme; displays projected on either a liquid or gas that requires very still air, and a very irritating environmental system to manage, not to mention an image that is disrupted when a user 'interacts' with it because it's interrupting the 'canvas'.
I don't know of any scheme that could avoid these fundamental problems that will stop this from ever being a widely useful, much less consumer level technology.
I think we're just going to have to stick to visual overlays on 3D space, augmented reality style, at least until we can actually produce the sci-fi concept of projected holograms. Anything less is simply not useful enough.
Theoretically you need to;
- Level the build plate and calibrate it
- Learn any 3D modeling software to create or modify objects, often at millimeter level precision
- Learn the slicing software which converts your 3D object file into a file your printer understands as instructions
That's it. Frankly, the second one is a huge investment of time and energy, and while some simple 3D design is possible in very stripped-down programs, nothing BUT simple design is possible in very stripped-down programs. Autodesk Inventor and others may be more complex than they need to be, but only for a fairly basic definition of 'need'. Many folks just rely on others models and skip step two entirely, and you can get by that way ... for a while.
A bigger problem to the consumer market is the practical issues. What a consumer needs is reliability, and a by-the-numbers process. Like an ink printer, when I send a document to it, I hit 'print' and I expect it to work.
It took a long time for printers and copiers to get to that point. Even now we have issues where printers need different settings for different paper, and we still have paper jams and ink smears, and the basic functionality of a printer is significantly less complex.
So we're not there yet though. As a replicative process, any minor error grows geometrically as the model progresses, and we don't have consumer-level devices that match the precision of the expensive commercial-sized printers. The following items all have a large impact on the success of your build, and all of them are intractably linked; print speed affects optimal rafting, which is impacted by the humidity, and so on and so on.
- Managing airflow, humidity, temp, and particulate matter (dust) around the device
- Rafting and supports to actually allow printing various shapes with undercuts and voids (which vary based on a number of things, not least of which is the actual model)
- Balancing heating and cooling; cooling causes contraction which results in curling especially when different parts of the build are at different temps at the same time.
- Print speed
- Print quality
- Printer head wear and tear
One of the tests of these "pro-sumer" 3D printers is to try to print the same object out 5 or 10 times, and count how many times it was successful with the same build instructions. 8/10 is really good. Usually, of course, you'll have to try 2 or 3 times just to get your first 'successful enough' print - these don't count, you're just dialing the numbers in for that model based on experience and guesswork for your specific printer.
What we're left with is this; All the made-for-your-mother, 'basic consumer' 3D printers are, and will be for the short foreseeable future, akin to the EZ-Bake-Oven. They sorta look like a real oven, and they can sort of cook food like a real oven, but you're not meant to try to use it as a real oven. Stick to the company approved recipes only, and even then, the quality will be low.
So, no, I don't think they're going anywhere with a consumer device at this point in time. Maybe in another 5-8 years we'll be ready for the first widely usable one, but it's a bit too early to crow about it just yet.
Yes.
It's no longer making the news, but for a while it was a nearly-daily occurrence. It's just not a big media draw anymore, unless it impacts a politician or famous entertainer.
I've written about this before; I used to write financial software for a living, and one of the requirements for a US bank was to provide a mechanism to detect transactions by an unauthorized person.
In short, the govt. provides a list of bad people in a text file. One name per line, all upper case, like it came out of an old batch system. We then check to see if the sender or receiver of any transaction /EXACTLY/ matches that string, case insensitive. If it's an exact letter-for-letter match, there's a flag that's set and the transaction is delayed, but it appears to go through as normal(*). What happens after that is the bank's responsibility, but that's the whole of the complexity.
Whoever made the list usually has a few variants of spelling; OSAMA BIN LADEN or OMASA BIN LADEN or OSMA BIN LADEN, for example. But that's it. Just spelling your name slightly differently is enough to avoid the flag. We're literally not allowed to add anything else, like soundex matching or handling foreign letters.
This is ~probably~ also how the TSA no fly list works, and why you still hear about false positives from time to time. It's also probably how any security works until it's been around for 20 years and they hire a contracting company to make them really good software that does what they want, instead of what they think they want it to do.
It just takes a very long time for software designed by a legislative committee with no technical awareness to morph into something usable, but that's government for you.
* - most transactions are not sent out until the end-of-day reconciliation anyway, so it looks like it's accepted like most other transactions, probably in a 'pending' state in your online balance - unless you're paying for a wire transfer or something.
The simple fact of the matter is that a 4-year university's computer science program is not meant to provide job training, and as far as career skills go, you could pick up a CS degree equivalent of job skills in under a year.
I wrote about this the other day, on the Ask Slashdot: Modern Web Development Applied Associates Degree topic, and I'm sticking to my guns on it. You don't need any math more complex than simple algebra. You don't need any theory classes.
Some of these theory classes may provide better insight, and lacking them may limit you if you're attempting to enter a highly specialized, complex field with no demonstrable experience in it (which, by the by, doesn't really happen), but for 98% of your day job, it's going to be more important for you to know how to parse and sanitize input than it will be for you to know how to write a compiler, raytracer, decompose a function into mathematical terms, perform a Big-O analysis, design a memory manager for an OS, and you'll probably never use matrices or differential equations.
Hell, the grads I see now a days haven't got a concept of efficient design, most lack basic database skills, awareness of common libraries, common development tools, never used any team-based tracking systems or source control, and so on. Unless they've struck out on their own, they're almost completely unsuitable as candidates. Many of the self-taught devs seem to have a better grasp of things, if only because they end up attempting to write usable software from design to implementation, instead of homework assignments demonstrating polymorphism and recursion.
On the other hand, for many HR departments, a degree is go/no-go. You'll never get to an interview without one, and there's no free, online equivalent for that. You'll just have to make do with having superior technical skills, and try to apply at a company that values that more than a sheet of paper.