as far as vehicle tracking goes, how about just requiring every car to have a gps that reports to the state all the time? that is what they are planning in finland and probably other countries as well.. of course cameras have the added benefit of recording everything else while at it.

so is this how eq2 started? houhou

What did you expect. It's Maven crawling along like an Ant. Just infinitely more complex and bloated.

I like www.flashtro.com. Works best on chrome of course, with flash auto-updating. And youtube has plenty of the demos videoed as well. Such things are what I use chrome for when I do use it.. fits the theme of the day I see

first they made these zoos called googleplex and apple ring. there the monkeys were fed and made to work all day and night. then someone demanded they be released from their privacy sucking imprisonment and they were released to the wild..

So what do you like? Writing grant proposals, rubbing some theoretical corner of a small theoretical problem area for the next 10-15 years with very little practical impact? Just sayin' there are many sides to it all... But if you really feel that is your thing, I would absolutely recommend doing what you like.

He/She who pays the bills? As a postdoc your freedom is to do what the professor bids you to do or so.. Of course nothing necessarily wrong with that since they do pay the bills from the grants etc. But I wouldn't call it much of an academic freedom.

Of course you would. But before you get there do you have academic freedom? You have to be politically correct, suck up to everyone, pick topics that lead to gaming the best metrics to get there etc. I don't have a better system but I wouldn't call that academic freedom either.. Maybe to some different degrees or so.

So you are just having a regulard nerd day? Nice.

and where is the benefit of even that? not much really unless you do it for yourself, that is because you like that sort of thing enough. generally i feel it rather limits the opportunities later to something really sad such a postdoc slaving for meager pay for years and years.. or go back to the industry competing with the 10+ years younger lot, what fun. course there is the odd chance to end up doing something really cool. but not too often i would say.. and btw many of them postdocs are not that hot as someone up there was thinking of 'doing' one.. :)

nord and bert, dude

nice to see the us gov making friends with the big tech they supposedly just made mad. lets all be friends, share the data, and loot the taxpayers. no need to for anyone to feel left out. ok, need to get ms, yahoo and then some onboard. next.

Nokia always was good with battery power. I guess managing to optimize their devices to run WP with good battery (even on a specific HW designed by them with few "extension" options) shows that.

Now we just need to wait for MS to fix that for you after buying Nokia..

Finally someone who understands me! Lets meet at Starbucks and have a chat first??

Yes I like the language, the JVM and the great tools+libraries it has. But the most of the most popular ones just make me want to run away when I have to use them. Eclipse is horribly unintuitive unless you used it for years and learned to trick it. IntelliJ is great but nowhere near as popular and well known. If I have to talk to someone and show something in the IDE they are always hugging their Eclipse cause "everyone else does it".. Can't blame people for not liking it if they have Eclipse forced on them.

Then there are the libraries/frameworks like Spring, Hibernate, the REST stuff, etc. I just don't get the need to hide everything in a factory of this and factory of that and put this annotation there. I try to debug it and figure out what is going wrong and it is way too complicated because it is all hidden under 50 layers of abstraction and it is near impossible to figure out what is really going on. Not to mention when I try to get something simple to run such as a remote call over HTTP/JSON and it takes me a day to browse the docs to see how to set up the weird dependency injects, annotation configurations and whatnot.

And then the idea of "I need to do a logical expression (such as &&), let me pull in that Apache library with zillion features to do it..". Small projects ends up with some 100+ libraries for the simplest things you could do in a few lines of code, resulting in even more added complexity for no real gain. Then there is the Maven to hide your build and require a pile of configuration files spread out, added to the configuration files for all the dependency injection etc. making it impossible to navigate the code and understand it.

In some cases the factory pattern is difficult to avoid since it has not been possible to define a lambda/closures thing but hopefully the next version fixes that. Now I just wait for what kind of a mess people will make with the stream API. Some of the reputation for Java being overly verbose it true and it is fashionable for geeks to bash Java for it, but the whole stream API just seem like the perfect opportunity to write weird to understand code. Hopefully I am just too old, resistant to change, and will learn to read/like it..

Yeah they probably sent an email to someone who uses Gmail, or maybe they used a HTC Android phone for anything. Same result, all your data (and the famous meta-data) leaked right there. Jail-time!