Of course one of the reasons for police cams is for police accountability; that means that public interest groups - or individuals claiming to represent public interest - should have access as well. In fact, I can't think of a sensible reason for anyone to be denied access in the general case - outside of other concerns (privacy, etc).

There's another factor to consider as well. Since these groups are often adversarial in relationship to the police, having the police themselves control the policy on who has access to it would be a bad idea. In fact, having the police anywhere in the chain is incorrect; they shouldn't have control of the video itself, much less be responsible for releasing it or not.

INAL, but ...

First, laws like the freedom of information act refer to federal institutions, so this ~may~ not apply
Second, someone has to classify the police video as 'public records'. They are not explicitly made so just because they're information produced by a public office.
Third, even if they do apply, they can be denied for valid grounds - for example, if they contain personally identifying information, underage nudity, or other public safety issues - it's going to be on a per-municipality basis.

Personally speaking though, I think that if what's being recorded happens in a public space, then there should be few barriers to viewing it. Additionally, 3 years to provide the video is complete bullcrap, and I think anyone even remotely involved would understand that. Unless they really are thinking they need to get consent forms from every person.

On the other hand, if you choose to display it in a public medium like youtube, well, maybe you would need to get permission from those recorded.

I can relate. I've had the same experience, applying for an IT job at a large bank, aside from a number of other places. They'd fly or voucher me out, I'd do the interview or two, managers would already be assigning projects, and then I'd be excluded for no apparent reason.

At one point, I had a company tell me that they were only hiring programmers with sysadmin experience (which I had) but that I had to have BOTH and ONLY "system administrator" and "software developer" as my job title for the last 5 years. Obviously this is literally not possible - I'm guessing they probably had an H1B on the hook already and I was just a seat-filler for the visa qualification process.

Once, I had actually signed a contract already, and they came in prior to their final stamp of authorization and cancelled it out of nowhere.

Another time when applying for a job at IBM in a good-ole-boy run office in North Carolina - and this was a fond memory - the hiring manager actually called me a liar and said that someone like me could not possibly have either the experience or expertise I claimed I did, based on nothing other than my appearance(*).

Two differences though; 1) I'm white, 2) I kept applying for other jobs.

Eventually I got actual job offers from actual companies.

Nothing in your story seems to indicate to me that race was an issue, or that it was anything out of the ordinary. You can't assume discrimination when more often than not it's a budget issue, or requires coordination among 3 or more departments with any one of them being able to issue a veto site unseen.

* - The appearance thing was because I was young and had been working as a sysadmin & dev since I was 16 and had more experience than they expected - it wasn't agism. They tested me and offered me the job anyway since both their DBA and lead programmer stated 'He could probably teach us'. The hiring manager said that he still believed I lied on the resume, but they'd "try me out" anyway.

Sorry, I should have been more clear.

There's apparently less corp-to-corp espionage rather than gov-to-corp*. It's simply not intrinsic to our culture, especially when the legal system provides such an easy way to strike at those who do. Heck, we even sue when people switch jobs to a competitor. If you come up with something remotely similar to an existing product - you're gonna get sued, that's how it is.

What I've noticed is that there's two general types of countries; in one type, the onus is on the potential victim to protect their IP, and in the other type, the onus is on the potential criminal to not commit a crime.

So you see places like India and China, where corporate espionage is not only expected, it's condoned at every level. Along with bribes and kickbacks, it's just how business - and often politics - is done. There's not even a cultural disconnect. It's expected! (check out another article from today : http://politics.slashdot.org/s... )

* - except when the government is running the corps, like in china...

... at least, outside of the US, it seems. Many countries have a policy that basically boils down to "if you can grab it, then it's yours, and it's impolite for another company to point fingers and claim you stole it." Not as litigious perhaps, but certainly less trustworthy. I got the standard 4 hour class from at least two companies; don't talk to folks on planes about it, don't talk to folks at the hotels, they'll arrange friendly people to sit next to you, or have a room next to you, or to flirt or whatever. Act as if your laptop/other hardware WILL be stolen or sabotaged. Keep one for travel with only the minimum relevant information on it, and so on.

I worked for a company once that did big data analysis for the semiconductor industry. Boosted yield rates by anywhere from 3 to 15%, which is a big deal. It was a service, not a software product, so we took their data, did our analysis, and the product was suggestions to correct their process, with proof. Obviously we had a lot of special software on the backend which represented our core IP, and we protected that.

When we went to China, we rewrote the executable so it was encrypted, plus locked to the CPU id.

Part of our process required about 18-20 hours to run on the puny laptops we had available, and the folks we met actually laughed when they told us we couldn't stay the night, nor take the systems back to the hotel with us because they had been exposed to their internal network. So we chained it to a desk, and the next morning, the system had died, and it looked like someone had removed the hard drive while the thing was running. Apparently after a day in a half of processing later, they realized they couldn't get their copy to run, and explained that they had to keep our machine, forever, but they would provide us with one that was equivalent - loaded with virii and spyware no doubt.

One of the individuals actually begged us to stop when we took apart our laptop and ground the hard drive and cpu up and shattered the boards. Total lack of composure, I assume he was losing his job at that point.

However, that was just par for the course for much of Asia, barring Japan.

I agree with many of your individual statements, but I think we'd disagree on the good/bad ratio of resultant trend and how they should be guided.

With the proviso that "college costs money to attend,";
        Attending college in preparation for a career is a financial investment with an expected return.
        Attending college to indulge yourself in an area of interest is not an investment, it is a luxury.

From these two simple statements, we can say that anyone who needs to take a loan out to attend college, but does not attend for vocational purposes is not only purchasing a luxury service, they're doing so by incurring debt with no method to pay it off. This is the height of personal self-indulgence and irresponsibility.

The individual-affecting downfalls you note have no meaning under these lights. So what if luxuries become more expensive? So what if people go to college to learn job skills? What if only the rich can afford to - not picking on anyone in particular - major in classical english literature?

Then we get to the other downfalls, those for society, what you call "the long term".

The original claim, and intent for liberal arts was not ever 'to learn a lot about a particular topic', but rather, to create a well-rounded individual who's had an increased potential to benefit society, if not themselves. Now a days we'd use terms like 'cross-discipline knowledge', but it's pretty much the concept that certain ideas could only form as a result of the intersection of several genres of knowledge, and never from a myopic focus on just one. ... and that's why we have gen-ed requirements today. So we're covered there too. I'd be hard pressed to prove that they do actual good, but I think the general concept is sound. Do we need experts or just basic knowledge here though? How could anyone even judge?

For now at least, I think that moves like this are a good start in weeding out non-vocational luxury studies from those who would go into debt to take them. In fact, I'd say you could go a few steps further with a simple-to-say change: every college is required to co-sign any student loan. That should correct many issues in one fell swoop; class cost, student debt, non-salable degrees, administrator's salaries, paying for non-profitable sports teams because of 'tradition', etc.

Actually, many of the trendy bars and restaurants I went to in Japan and Korea had terminals built into the table as a menu to order from. I thought it was quite neat; you got a picture of what the dish was supposed to be and they'd even provide - in one case - a timer with the expected delivery time of your order (this was at a shochu bar).

In Korea, they had already gone so far as to make vending machines and some chain stores - like Starbucks - let you order and/or pay from your cell phone. It looked like you could store your favorite orders, pick one, and then order and pay in a single wave, perhaps with a confirmation access code.

The only thing that struck me as odd was that in Japan, they still expected to be paid in cash, instead of card at the terminal, but they are a cash-based society.

I have yet to see someone actually explain why income inequality by itself is a bad thing.

I'm not talking about situations where there is corruption, like certain African-region dictators with gold plated limos while their people die on the streets from starvation, or more common, politicians being bought off by companies and individuals.

Take two people, put them in a room, one guy has a net worth of $100 and the second has a net worth of $5000. What harm is the second person doing? We're talking about a factor of 50x here. Take away the room, let them live their lives, what harm is that second guy perpetuating? Make the difference a factor of 1000 or a 1,000,000, and where do we see him doing harm?

When I hear folks talking about this, what I really hear is, "since one person doesn't need that much money to live, the government should take the difference and use it to make MY life better,"

That doesn't sound like harm to me, but is that what the "harm" is being defined as?

Take our thought experiment above and change the parameters to match Bill's future view; now we live in a world where robots do everything, no one has to work, and all their actual needs (not wants) are taken care of. What harm does it now do to have a pauper and a billionaire?

Someone explain this harm to me, because from where I'm standing in a first world country, it seems to be just so much complaining over sour grapes.

The issue is video game reviewers and sites providing unearned positive praise for a product due to:
    - Bias from personal relationships, including those of a sexual nature
    - Political pressure to over-represent games which claim to be the product of a given minority group

If the 'customer' in this case, is the person expecting a fair and non-biased review of upcoming and current games, they are not served by these biases, especially when they're not revealed from the beginning. This is a basic failure of journalistic integrity.

This was further compounded by a backlash that centered around censorship of any discussion of these issues, no matter how applicable or tangentially related, which pointed these issues out, which is seen as patently unfair - not to mention draconian.

Perhaps the worst part of it all is that those trying to hide this discovery - or promote their side with no argument - chose something ethically sound to stand against, Women's Rights. This is unfortunate, because women's rights have nothing to do with this issue, and pretending it does only weakens future ACTUAL complaints that involve Women's Rights.

This is pretty standard in most established industries.

In banking, for example, one of the most popular formats for representing ACH transactions is defined in 2 pages. It takes a 2 volume set of books to explain what each field means, in relationship to the rest, and there's STILL room for interpretation.

I mean, they're usually not PDF format bad, but it's pretty awful. Worse, since these sorts of protocols are used by a relatively small subset of development houses who are not paid to make their software interchangeable - so there's no business reason to spend the money (via time and effort) to collaborate like that. Obviously there's also no open source or free libraries, it's all proprietary.

I've done some consulting in the realm of medical software and while I don't know every major in-and-out, the real problem is the market.

Here's an example of bringing a piece of software to the medical market:
    - Come up with the idea for some software, write, debug, document it. **This is not the problem**
    - Find a hospital or clinic, meet with the board (3+ months wait) to see if you can petition it's doctors/nurses/whomever to use your software.
    - Find a group of medical staff that is willing to use said software, free of charge, on the side. You probably have to 'pay' them to do it somehow - give it away for free, or discount, when you actually start selling the software, or just a lot of business lunches. These people cannot legally use your software for actual medical purposes. They're just doubling their workload by using your system next to whatever the current mechanism they use.
    - 6+ months go by. Now it's time to approach the board of directors of the hospital - make a presentation with the recommendations of the software users
    - Now, hire an independent software analyst to review your software, while working with a lawyer - who themselves will work with one or more of the hospital's lawyers - to ensure that you're following all the legal requirements and hopsital software requirements. 1-6 months before you're certified for that hospital.
    - Unfortunately, there may be other requirements that supersede the hospital's individual requirements, usually municipal, state, federal regs. You'll need to get certified on these (0-3 years duration).
    - Finally get it rolled out to the hospitals and sold in the wild (note: repeat the certification steps for each new hospital/hospital group, but they'll be expedited)

Okay, so that's the general process. One part software development, 82 parts legal wrangling, red tape, and butt kissing.

You're also not going to make this thing very open. You won't use public libraries, because they need to be certified. You won't have common data, because every hospital wants different things. You're not going to use new technology or standards because it takes years to get it live, and when you make changes like that you have to start over.

You're also not being paid to add the features to make this externally accessible to god knows what.

Imagine the extra requirements involved in providing legal access to medical records to third parties. It's not a technological barrier; it's almost all legal. They must be certified, the two must have a contract, etc, etc. You can't just give it to anyone who asks - you have to have a legal relationship with each asker. That will have to be signed off on by the board too. And so on, and so on.

The project I did some consulting on? They're basically a sort of spreadsheet with calculations. It's been ~4 years, and it's still bouncing around, not yet fully certified and ready to open for sale. If they went back and added 3'd party export functionality, it'd be another 4.

Looking out there at other countries use of this sort of power, the only thing it's ever been used for is to crush political opposition including peaceful protests, and to hide government abuse at the time it's happening.

"Setting a child free on the Internet is a failure to cordon off the world and its dangers."

Well, yes. At a certain point when they lack the ability to comprehend danger, that might be true. However, you can only go for so long before enforced ignorance will backfire. You think your kid's friends have the same definition of limits as you? Or the public library? Or commercials on tv for sexed up teen drama, or sexed up medical drama, or murder-sex-up-cop drama? Or the line of magazines at the grocery store proclaiming "10 ways to have SEX that will give you a SUPER-ORGASM"? Or pop music about sex, drugs, and how great it is to combine the two?

At some point, you have to start coaching the child on the actual dangers of the world, including the internet. Especially the internet. It's ubiquitous, and once they're old enough to be a target, they're old enough to have circumvented any access restrictions you might use.

When they're old enough to start using Minecraft, they're probably old enough to get one in a series of many talks about the world. Stranger Danger applies to emails and creepy guys on websites too, you know.

Minecraft is not any sort of solution to this issue. It's just entertainment, and has nothing to do with it.

If the metric of comparison is employment, you need to be able to produce output rather than cite theory. In fact, I know of no developer, ever, who was hired on the strength of his awareness of theory with no programming ability. There is a chance you could get something like that in emerging fields like machine learning or data analysis, but you'd still have to have some ability to implement your theories or processes. Of course, you'd also have to be an acknowledged expert in the field, and that's not likely without products.

If the metric is the ability to produce a secure, well-architected product that utilizes some of the more popular frameworks and libraries, working with the common IDEs, build and testing tools, team collaboration tools, and awareness of the software development lifecycle, well again, being an actual software developer is better.

If the metric is ease of writing more efficient code (less memory, faster), or being able to evaluate, generate, and implement complex or new algorithms and heuristics such as key based encryption, trend analysis, predictive modeling, physics frameworks, and so on - well, in these cases you need the strength of the CS degree. You can't do it without picking up a great deal of necessary knowledge.

As a side note, at least 98% - probably more - of software business needs revolve around simple data manipulation, trivial calculations, and user interfaces of ever-increasing complexity. They want an inventorying system, or a way to generate a report on sales, or to send a digital payment from one customer to another, or whatever.

I dunno about you, but when that happens, the developers also tend to land on their feet, in a better job they didn't previously go for because they got comfy where they were. In my personal experience, devs are sort of lazy that way. They're not aware of their own value, and they don't self promote for purposes of advancing their career.

That's not how most management types work. Their thinking is always on how to progress. They're not interested in current output, they're interested in increasing the rate of output. They make vertical career changes, going up with each transition. That sort of thinking is ingrained in that domain. Big picture view. They don't have a problem torpedoing a project, if it's already done what it could for them and the company, no matter how much ownership a dev has in it.

Most software devs aren't like that. They don't think of dirty hacks as a good ROI, they think of them as simmering damage that needs a refactor. They're focused on the short term now, and long term personal ownership. When someone asks them where they'll be in the next 5 years (I hate this question ...) they never think "VP in a different company" - they think "maybe ... senior developer?". They don't maintain good relationships with recruiters or contracting agencies. In fact, when I suggested people do this last time in a slashdot post, there were a bunch of angry replies that varied from claiming I was working for contracting agencies, selling out my current company, or was acting like a manager.

As if ensuring a steady paycheck with as little difficulty as possible and watching the state of the company in case it was headed downhill was something only managers should be doing, and screw them for doing it.

We're way past the day when tradesmen and artists (however you think of yourself) can expect to be promoted to the highest echelons of pay and position simply for doing a really, REALLY good job for a long time. The average job duration is now right around 4.5 years. Raises and promotions that actually increase pay more than a pittance (instead of just more responsibilities) are almost nonexistent. You want a better position, more pay, you have to take that risk and jump.