The mob would think otherwise (and sometimes they have the financial data to back it up.) Or a criminal caught by a homeowner in the middle of his third break in a state with a three-strike law - killing homeowner -> increase changes of avoiding an automatic 20-year-to-life sentence.

Heck, from drug lords to mobsters, killing is well within the bound of rational self-interest. Not everyone that commits a murder is a mumbling idiot without forethought (and THAT is a very scary, horrifying concept.)

So, by your own admission, governments do change. Now, again, should I bring counter-examples that do not involve a revolution?

By that logic, I I were to engage in loan-sharking and racketeering, those are good because they benefit me (so long as I can get away with it, of course). In fact, if I had the power to change the law so that I can get away with it, then that would be good as well.

See, there is good, and there is right. Knowing or ignoring the difference indicates more the type of person you are than the economic system that is in place.

Should I bring a couple of counter-examples from, you know, history to counter that claim (the one I made in bold)?

Talking about self-deprecating titles. The problem here is not age, but confidence, direction and determination.

You are wrong. See, a significant number of cases involving police abuse are based on cops' allegations that the victim is/was a perp and that they acted in self-defense to explain why the victim/perp was beaten to a pulp or whatever. Now it will be harder for them to claim they acted in self-defense or that the person was acting irrationally or disobeying orders while claiming "ooops my camera was broken, take my word for it."

Also, the rate at which cameras "get broken" will become public record. A high incident of "broken video recorders" will raise eyebrows and closer scrutiny (specially if a strong correlation is found between those incidents and citizen's complains of abuse.)

It is not perfect. No solution is. And sure there will be ways corrupt/abuse cops will try to (and succeed) circumvent the system. But it will make such acts harder to commit. Your assertion that this will do little to nothing is erroneous.

Yeah, but people don't care about moral and intellectual questions. They care about whether Kim Kardashian is going to have another royal wedding, in yet again another white dress!!!!

So you argument boils down to obviously maybe ?

Good point. Similarly, Boston proper is very expensive, but some of the suburbs have real state cost of living closer to, say, South Florida, and thus the overall COL is not as murderous.

That is a stupid rebuttal, for one could say that "Newport" is a rebuttal against Boston. Shit happens anywhere. And, as horrible as it might have been, if the Aurora shooting is a statistical anomaly, then, it has no effect on the positive conditions that would make people call Denver a "hidden treasure".

And and a lot of those positions have mediocre pay and require not that much of technology depth. I know. I've worked on Java for a long time, and really, most web/enterprise stuff is really simple integration. It's barely engineering, and more plumbing.

Openings for C and C++ remain constant and will remain so simply because they cater to specific needs that won't go away with managed code.

Another thing. Look at Java job postings for the very best and brightest of companies (Adobe, Google, Apple, Lockheed Martin). Typically they desire (or even require that) people understand C and C++. Why do you think is that? I know that this is going off the tangent, but it should make you think about your claims that unmanaged code is going away.

I mean, for fucks sake, what language do you think the runtimes required for managed languages are going to be written? And if less and less people are competent in hard languages that are absolutely needed for problems that will not go away, who do you think will get paid the most.

The one thing I hate about many Java programmers (I am a Java developer btw) is that they look at technology from a lowest-common-and-dumb-denominator POV. They pigeonhole themselves into being one-trick ponies believing that such approach will provide stability in the future. This eventually shows in their quality of work and in their limited understanding of how software and hardware is supposed to work (which influences how systems are architected, designed and implemented.)

Suit yourself.

Which is great for very important and specific classes of problems.

And a significant % of web applications written in Java, .NET or, say, Ruby, have security holes up to the wazzo.

You might not get buffer over runs, but you certainly get null pointer, illegal arguments, index out of range, and invalid state exceptions (corresponding types as per each language.)

Memory leaks? You get similar manifestations of those in managed languages (abandoned file handles, database connections that are never released). Memory specific, you can bring a VM to the ground if the creation rate of objects is so large that it causes the garbage collector to utilize CPU beyond a given threshold. In Java, for example, you can get an OutOfMemoryException if the GC is trashing the CPU even if you have plenty of memory allocated to the VM

. Anyone who works in software for a living (and that is at least decently good at it) knows these issues. Anyone else thinks these problems are exclusively the domain of unmanaged code.

A lot of times you do not require such rich language libraries in unmanaged code. If you are writing a device driver for a memory constrained platform, you wouldn't (shouldn't) be needed a, let's say, uber-rich concurrent container class with even richer iterator semantics. That is just one example.

If you are finding yourself with a significant need for a rich library, then you should be using a higher-level language.

This only shows the significantly shallow view (or exposure) you have with respect of software technology. Look around you. There are more devices using unmanaged code that managed. Your toasters. Your microwaves and termostats. Your termometers. Your remote control. The cable/dsl/wireless modem that allows you to connect internet to post ignorant shit. The operating system and the myriad of hardware device drivers that make your computing experience possible.

What language do you think they are written with?

It is absolutely disturbing to see people think that unmanaged code is somehow waning away. That is where the money is. Those jobs are not decreasing. The jobs using managed code, that is the number that is increasing (and their salaries for the most part decreasing unless you are really a very good, Sr-or-Principal-level Java/.NET/Ruby/Python software engineer or architect.)

* source : 18 years of programming experience as a Java/JEE application and C/C++ systems developer in both the commercial and defense sector.

And our jobs will go to India or China, and programs will begin to write other programs making us developers obsolete, the earth is flat and the sun orbits it, blah blah blah.

That is an oxymoron. Of course you have to change with the times. But changing with the times does not necessarily mean changing languages. It means evolving your skill set. You are looking at the problem of being up-to-date and marketable as if it meant one should become a language-trick pony. There are code monkeys, and there as software engineers.

This is true, but it is also irrelevant. How hard is it to learn COBOL? If you get a chance to make $200K as a COBOL programmer in a city with very low cost of living, for example, it would be stupid to pass that in favor of using the latest tech blink for 75% of that in SV.

Let me know when communication technology, operating systems and device drivers are written in Java or Ruby. Again, your views insinuate a very shallow and limited exposure to what is out there in terms of the software industry.

It is because of its COL that it is not listed. Baltimore would come over the DC area because of its lower COL, but it would still trail Denver and Atlanta. I'm very surprised that Baltimore is not over NY and that Houston and Dallas (which are as cheap to live as Austin) are not in the list.

Why? I'm not trying to have an e-fight, but I'm ask in earnest (hopefully with the expectation of getting an objective, quantifiable answer.)

Maybe, maybe not. Remember, this is not just a salary comparison, it is a salary/cost-of-living comparison. In that sense, I would believe Austin, Denver and Atlanta to be on top over other metropolitan areas, including Seattle. I would also come to the same conclusion by looking at the number of openings for engineering per capita (where Denver come way above most areas.)

The reality is that Denver, Austin, Dallas and Houston are looking nicer and nicer for the tech worker simply because the total net income (not the gross salary, but the net, after taking COL into account) is significantly better than SV, Boston or Seattle. I came to that conclusion recently after doing the math (salary, COL, number of jobs per capita, etc) looking for a place to relocate off SoFla.