Wait, something like this could work to everyone's advantage:

1.) Set up a company hosting all music and movies to be shared. Encode said files with an identical MD5 checksum, to be used later.
        For irony, perhaps use 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0.
        The checksum will be used as evidence because checksums are very hard to fake.
2.) Everybody grab whatever they want.
3.) The RIAA/MPAA sues the company for $1.5 trillion, or whatever large number they'd like to come up with.
4.) Said company is found guilty (checksums prove it, and besides, they admit it) but they can't pay, and fold.
5.) The RIAA/MPAA can't come after you, since they've already been awarded damages covering the infringement.
6.) PROFIT!

(If you haven't figured it out yet, this is meant to be funny and I am not a lawyer. Laugh already!)

And I personally know cops and other law enforcement that work hard to help keep our society safe, regardless of the risk to themselves. What's your point?

I did not elect the police either, but I am very glad they are around. If my 4-year old son is lost or in danger, he knows he can ask a police officer for help. If I am driving too fast, I deserve to get a ticket -- and if I flip my car, it is likely there will be a trooper, cop or sheriff there in minutes, calling in aid and trying to rescue me.

You make a valid point about many investigations and reports ending up without activity, but this is a comment more on the nature of our society and the inability of the police to follow every lead than anything else. In order to "solve every crime", which is obviously impossible, the police force would have to be huge -- and I imagine you would have some serious complaints about that! I would as well. But your point about the police not being there to protect you, or that they never think about the crimes they see once they've filed their reports, is ridiculous.

Do you like the media calling all tech-savvy people "hackers", and then misdefining that as "super-genius young male loner-types who break into systems for fun or money"? Is that you? Then why do you proceed to take the same approach to law-enforcement, painting them all with a negative brush that applies to a very few?

We rightly hold law enforcement officers to high standards because of the authorities that they have been given, and because of this I think we should be allowed to record them whenever they are performing their public duties. If nothing else, this is ought to fall under the heading of public accountability used elsewhere. There's nothing special about video recording; it is simply the best method for auditing a primarily physical job.

As has been pointed out, you might find people will respect your opinions more when you voice them with less vitriol and hyperbole and more reason. There is a difference between being heard and being listened to.

I paused for a second, waiting for the flash of lightning and crack of thunder, but it didn't come...

Thanks for the laugh, though! :-D

I did a double-take when I read that -- how many hitpoints do you need to enter the highway? :-)

You make some good points, though I doubt you'll be modded insightful given the current (and fairly earned) dislike for Zucker and his ethics.

I can't speak for everyone, but I keep an eye on my personal information because I resent its use by strangers. When I share something with friends, it is not intended to be available to people who I do not know. It should not be for sale to marketers. It should not be used for decisions of worthiness of credit or employment. It most certainly should not be avalailable to identity thieves.

Unfortunately, that's not the current trend. Businesses are out to make money, and to many people the idea of being asked to keep a confidence is an antiquated imposition.

But what to do? Staying off of social networks is not a perfect solution, since a partial online identity will likely be created for you by proxy -- created from an amalgam of pictures and posts by friends and acquaintances, and pages made by other people who share your name. I think it is better to maintain a simple web presence with accurate public information and minimal private information. Consider what you say and post before doing so, and try not to embarrass your future self. If nothing else, showing responsible use is a better testimony to your character than either immature wild abandon or paranoid avoidance.

You will never have "complete control over your privacy settings" as long as Facebook keeps the "Friend's Apps Have Access To Your Data" permission. Facebook will not remove that, because if they did, major application developers would stop making free Facebook apps. Access to your personal information is why Zynga (the maker of virtually ALL the most popular Facebook applications) gives away their games.

The real problem is that Facebook suckers people in with a semblance of privacy and control over it, then changes the Terms of Service -- over and over again, often with little or no notice -- then makes the changes retroactive and sells your personal information to all interested parties.

If they defaulted to sane privacy settings and opt-in marketing "features", there would be no current uproar. They could still make money from ads like normal sites do; they already have insane numbers of page hits. If they behaved responsibly in this way, and then offered enhanced functionality (such as customizable layouts, themes, members-only applications, &c.) for a monthly or annual fee, then I would very likely subscribe. I do use Facebook on a daily basis to keep in touch with friends and family around the world, and in that regard it works quite well.

But who am I kidding? Their track record is soiled so badly that it would take a complete change of ownership, management, privacy settings and implementation, before I could trust them enough to type any credit card or other payment information in the same browser session as Facebook -- let alone into their page.

I think you are missing an element. Black boxes as you say should be more reliable and have less bugs and security issues than code written by a random programmer. Take for example Hibernate. It is used by probably more than a 100,000 apps/websites. Only really obscure bugs are going to go unnoticed. Writing all your SQL by hand however is only used by one application and there is a greater potential for bugs/security issues to exist.

But this illustrates my point exactly. Of those 100,000 apps/websites that use Hibernate, how many of the developers have looked at or understood the code at all? Are you familiar with the Unresolved Major bugs with the currently released versions of just the Hibernate Core? I doubt it, given that there are presently 792 of them. (You'll have to configure the search yourself.)

My concern is that developers are blindly using such platforms because everyone else is, or they look cool, or they are fun, or they are told to, and they are either too lazy, too busy, or too trusting in the developers who wrote them to expend the effort to understand the tools that they use.

The intent of my post was not to say that we should all go about reinventing the wheel. You're right; if you do that, you end up with alot of square wheels. But we need to understand how our tools work, when we are building things that our society increasingly relies on for daily functionality. "Me bang keyboard and mouse together, make program!" is not an appropriate development strategy.

With the amount of abstraction in software development these days, very few people seem to really know what they're doing anymore. This should concern you -- if it doesn't, you haven't thought about it enough yet.

We regularly see new exploits that affect systems that have been live for years, oft-times spanning multiple major versions and platforms. In retrospect these flaws are often usually painfully obvious, but because they have been buried in the layers of sediment of "best practices", "boilerplate" code and underlying platforms, they aren't seen. At least, not until a curious or malicious mind starts poking around.

While this is in part a problem with QA, the deception of abstraction is that it provides a Black Box that is very easy to trust. This affects developers as much as QA.

Are we really wise to keep building on these layers of abstraction? Toolkits on top of frameworks on top of virtual machines on top of operating systems on top of hardware -- even device manufacturers can't keep their locked-down devices from being rooted in a matter of days, sometimes even before release. While many of the Slashdot crowd laugh because there is a sense of social justice in seeing DRM broken, the same exploits may some day be used against systems we rely on. I don't consider myself a fearmonger, but I wouldn't be surprised to see significant digital infrastructure fail at some point, either due to malicious intent or simply instability, at some point in my lifetime. Poor software quality hurts us all.

I realize that I sound like an old man yearning for the better days, but I learned to program in assembly on 8088s, and I knew exactly what my programs were doing. I'm not saying I want to go back to that, but the idea that most developers these days don't even understand memory management or garbage collection blows my mind. Asking for a new language because getters and setters are too much of a hassle? Somebody get this kid a lollipop, please.

I read the article (no, I'm not new here) and the author's main point, emphasis original, is this:

If your team is spending any time at all writing code to produce listing, filtering, and sorting behavior, not to mention creating CRUD screens and the back end logic for these operations, they are probably working at the wrong level of abstraction.

Where does he draw the line at "wasting time writing code"? This is exactly the mindset that leads us to buffer overruns, SQL injections, and many other problems which should not make it into production software. He wants his developers to abstract as much as possible, but code reuse all too easily leads to blind acceptance and a failure to understand what is being imported. If he trusts that all those acronyms on the blog post he wrote are bug-free, then I would hate to be one of his customers. Not that there seems to be many categorically better options available.

In the end, I think we need to abandon the cycle of "software bloat to more powerful hardware to software bloat..." and figure out what we can do with what we have. Good grief -- look at CUDA! We have orders of magnitude more processing power in a single video game console than all the world's computers before World War II, and available memory is simply insane. Take a look at what Farbrausch has done, and you will see what dedicated focus on efficiency can do.

Stop being lazy, understand what you are doing, understand what you have available, and use it well.

The autonomy of these rovers is already quite impressive, as they can choose parts of their paths based on a braveness variable provided by the engineers.

This latest enhancement is really interesting, essentially giving them something of a sense of curiosity. I'm not trying to anthropomorphize; the rovers are now allowed to use some sort of Bayesian-like algorithms for determining objects of interest, and examining them without direct input from us. This gives them the potential for returning more scientifically interesting information for the communication cycle.

Way to go, NASA! You guys rock!

Your idea has merit, but you need to extend the idea a little further. Make your error dialogs look like this, and you will get more user participation than you can handle:

--------
INSERT CUTESY PICTURE HERE
A little lost $Animal_Name has wandered onto your farm. It needs help! You can add it to your farm, but you need to tame it first.

To tame it, the magic words are $Magic_Word_1, $Magic_Word_2, and $Magic_Word_3.

When you are ready, click HERE to tame it and add it to your farm!
--------

You just have a simple lookup table for the $Animal_Name and $Magic_Word variables, and you've got all the info you need. Of course, then you need to make some sort of ridiculous farm app, but that could be a further source of monetization! :-)

Somebody mod dtolman up, and Wrath0fb0b down. Please.

Putting wrong information out there about how to make a split-second decision in a rare, left-threatening emergency is very irresponsible.

dtolman is correct. To reiterate:

Put the car in NEUTRAL. The engine will disengage.
Hit the brake HARD. Do not pump.
Steer the car off the road, and once its stopped, you can PARK it and turn off the engine.

The problem is that we will always see ourselves as the pinnacle of intelligence. It is a combination of hubris and misunderstanding.

See, our brains aren't large enough to recognize the intelligence of species that are significantly smarter than us, so because they are unintelligible to us, we see them as unintelligent.

Although the above point is mildly tongue-in-cheek, it certainly applies to species that are less intelligent than us. If we don't "see" the intelligence, we assume that it is not there.

Intelligence is difficult enough to define to everyone's satisfaction, let alone measure, but we have made some surprising discoveries over the last century about various species' methods of communication, tool use, and social structures.

I am presently going back to school to get a Master's in Libary and Information Sciences. After having worked 15 years in various IT fields, I am looking forward to getting into a career with books.

Innovation is great, and appreciated in libraries when it serves a useful purpose. But as has been mentioned by others, technology changes quickly, and becomes obsolete just as quickly.

This prep-school library is trying something new, and I'm all for them trying. But getting rid of tried-and-proven technology in favor for the next buzz-word seems very foolish. Why not store the stacks in locking, rolling-shelf systems? This would save a great deal of space and still provide a reliable backup.

What they've done is like discarding bicycles in favor of Segways. If they want to show they have money and like new technology, fine. But when their new toys break, unexpected problems arise, or their needs change, I will be reading my books and chuckling at them.