Wait, you walked out on a MOVIE that explored the concept of pre-crime as a moral dilemma 10 minutes into it? I don't get it. Are you only able to watch happy romantic comedies, and early adam sandler movies?

Read some of the comments above, or Peter Watts own blog. The fact is that he was traveling out of Michigan, not into Michigan. Just that simple fact alone is wrong. The press coverage is entirely unreliable.

I agree, I want to see the video. I am a Canadian citizen living in California. To be honest, traveling to and from the United States has become nightmarish. We have enough anecdotal tales from other posters, I won't add mine. But I can certainly sympathize with someone reacting poorly to Customs officials rooting through my trunk while I was forced to remain in the front seat.

The address for sending Freedom of Information requests was posted in a comment above, but I'll post it again.

Paul Colpitts
Access to Information and Privacy Coordinator
410 Laurier Avenue West, 11th Floor
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0L8
Telephone: 613-941-7431
Facsimile: 613-957-6408
ATIP-AIPRP@cbsa-asfc.gc.ca

If you are a Canadian citizen, and you want to know, send that in. I've met Peter Watts, he struck me as a very reasonable man. I'd certainly like to know more.

Raise your hand if this sounds like something you WANT the department of homeland security to be worrying about.

[crickets]

That's what I thought.

Nah, If you plan on providing criticism on the syntax of pseudo code (which is absurd), I can only reply to the sheer ridiculousness by pointing out how your own code is unsafe.

See, I write a lot of code in languages you probably have a glib and witty remark about, like Lua. In Lua, the command

    if (isTrue)

would return true if isTrue was equal to 7, or 0, or 1, or a table, or anything at all other than explicitly false. So all your check does is see if isTrue is defined, not if its value is true. Thats imprecise, and the sort of lazy bullshit programming that causes bugs.

I don't code in pseudo code, so I am not familiar with the language definitions - maybe it works the same way :-).

Such a typical programmer/geek response. It's still a problem - you just found a workaround. Doesn't mean it doesn't need to be fixed :-)

Amen. Unfortunately there will always be elitist arses who think that just because they know a little bit about some obscure topic, anyone who doesn't is a lazy slacker. I don't have any need for asset tracking of this nature at the moment, but i found the topic interesting, and learned something from the few comments that have appeared so far. The politics and YRO topics bore me to tears. These topics are why I still bother to visit this site.

You sir, are every IT departments nightmare.

I send you a text, you respond when you have time. I call you, you have to choose between ignoring me and taking my call. Texting is asynchronous, where a conversation is synchronous. Granted, I can communicate more information in a short amount of time with a phone conversation, but if my issue is non-critical then texting is often more effective.

I am talking about texting from a business prospective here. I often text sales staff on the road, who may well be in a meeting, or contractors on a noisy job site. A director in a meeting with an artist. In all these cases texting not only gets them the information they need without them having o interrupt some other task, it also avoids the need for them to grab a pen or some other device - I just include the information. No lost or misunderstood numbers or names.

Now social texting does confuse me. "OMG! I am at the inaugaration". Why???

Odds are good that whatever she decides, she will end up changing her mind anyway. Virtually no one I went to school with is still doing what they started out in school for. A few are, but the majority spent a few years working (or trying to work) in their chosen fields before finding something that grabbed their 'adult' interest.

Personally I 'wasted' my talent and school years (according to my dad) studying technical theatre. 10 years later I make visual effects software. I use the lessons I learned in school every day, just not the way I expected at the time.

So don't sweat it. She will likely land in the right place for her eventually.

Indeed - that's how it looked yesterday. But when I woke up this morning I was disappointed to learn today was still the present.

Ah well. There's always tomorrow!