You don't need a license plate reader to discover vehicles with expired registration or that are uninsured. The insurance companies already report to the DMV, as required by state law. And the DMV really does know who has been renewing registration or at least filing the proper PNO forms (planned non-operation), because they've fined me on being late in the past and threatened to suspend my driver's license if I didn't sort it out by their deadline.

Cheaper than a vasectomy and you can watch Star Trek on it. In a future version might even be able to do an augmented reality of the bridge of the Enterprise, with that you really can make women obsolete. All you need is the soothing voice of the Enterprise computer.

Because when you get a call, anonymous or otherwise, that a shooting has happened, someone has been killed, and hostages have been taken and are being threatened, the police are not likely to send a beat cop to ring the bell with his hat in his hands.

I agree this is a symptom of the problem with the militarization of police, though. There needs to be a middle ground for an appropriate response that doesn't include a SWAT team.

That's a common misattribution. As that link notes, however, it is aa paraphrasing of a comedic play from 400 BC in which Socrates was caricatured:

I will, therefore, describe the ancient system of education, how it was ordered, when I flourished in the advocacy of justice, and temperance was the fashion. In the first place it was incumbent that no one should hear the voice of a boy uttering a syllable; and next, that those from the same quarter of the town should march in good order through the streets to the school of the harp-master, naked, and in a body, even if it were to snow as thick as meal. Then again, their master would teach them, not sitting cross-legged, to learn by rote a song, either “pallada persepolin deinan” or “teleporon ti boama” raising to a higher pitch the harmony which our fathers transmitted to us. But if any of them were to play the buffoon, or to turn any quavers, like these difficult turns the present artists make after the manner of Phrynis, he used to be thrashed, being beaten with many blows, as banishing the Muses. And it behooved the boys, while sitting in the school of the Gymnastic-master, to cover the thigh, so that they might exhibit nothing indecent to those outside; then again, after rising from the ground, to sweep the sand together, and to take care not to leave an impression of the person for their lovers. And no boy used in those days to anoint himself below the navel; so that their bodies wore the appearance of blooming health. Nor used he to go to his lover, having made up his voice in an effeminate tone, prostituting himself with his eyes. Nor used it to be allowed when one was dining to take the head of the radish, or to snatch from their seniors dill or parsley, or to eat fish, or to giggle, or to keep the legs crossed.

I'm particularly amused about the reference to dutifully marching to school, naked, in the snow. That the joke should be 2400 years old speaks to the truth of how the old perceive the young.

Because no networking vulnerability ever requires the use of packet crafting unless it uses XML. Yes, this is a failure of a plain text data serialization format. If only they'd used JSON, this never would have happened.

"it makes every floppy drive into a HARD drive"

She keeps wanting me to write a new operating system called PENIX.

It's not so much a brogrammer thing as a controversy between us low brow folks and snooty people who pretend that our dick jokes and fart jokes aren't hilarious.

Perhaps, but as a counter example, I never received any formal CS training and I'm a senior engineer at my company (SW architecture actually). Maybe that doesn't mean anything to you, but I do feel that I have the respect of hundreds of my coworkers and that I provide a valuable technical contribution to my company. (a fabless silicon vendor)
But that said, I read CS papers voraciously, and dig in deep in a few of the CS topics that interest me. (operating systems & concurrency)

Hey, I had to start at the bottom and work my way up. It's a lot easier to grok CS when you can code up a few functions in some language.

The two are closely related. I consider one to be an activity and the other a professional job. But unsurprisingly, I do program frequently when I'm working as a SW Engineer.

My High School offered BASIC and Pascal in the 1990s, and I found it tremendously helpful. I'm a Software Engineer today, and I doubt if I would have gone in this career direction if it wasn't for the classes and mentor I found at my high school.

Really? My experience says the opposite. When you get to the point where you need clusters, high core counts, and standby sites, the licensing costs of your RDBMS are a drop in the bucket. Sure, $100,000 looks like a lot, but next to the $500,000 you're spending on infrastructure and the $10 million you're spending on the application itself, you're really not spending all that much.

Eh, there is less control in SQL Server over locking than there is in other RDBMSs, and it is infamous for escalating locks to the page or table level even when you ask for lower level locks. It's rare that it happens, but it's not unheard of. The fact that the system uses optimistic locking and there's no good equivalent to SELECT ... FOR UPDATE is also somewhat problematic.

It's greatly mitigated in 2005+ by using read committed row versioning (MVCC) and/or snapshot isolation, but those are database level options and you may need to specifically request the right isolation levels with your code. The biggest problem is that you have to remember to use the feature; it's just always on with Oracle from what I hear (I haven't used it since I was in school).

There's a mountain of documentation (and videos!) from Microsoft on all this. The greatest thing about SQL Server is the extremely high quality of the documentation. It's a joy to learn about compared to IBM's DB2 documentation (but then, anything is better than IBM documentation), and Books Online is a step ahead of Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.

They belong to my employer. And I would violate the terms of my employment if I reveal them.

I wonder if NZ could do much if corporations applied pressure to them. NZ's GDP and Apple's revenue number is nearly the same at $183B (in USD).