I think you missed the point of my post. I'm not talking about city police officers moonlighting, I'm talking about officers working for private companies as their only job. As I said in my post, you don't have to work for a police department to be a police officer.

When did it become popular to hate on Perl on Slashdot? I thought Slashdot itself was written in Perl.

This is quite correct. You don't have to be working for a public police department to be a police officer. All you need is to be deputized, which usually involves passing some sort of exam and then getting a letter signed by some controlling police agency (usually state or municipal). There are many examples. As the parent pointed out, campus police at most universities work this way. Some high schools also have police officers on salary, and some private business which accommodate a large public population (eg. shopping malls, etc.) may employ deputized police officers for security. They have largely the same arrest powers that ordinary police officers do, so for example you could be charged with resisting arrest if you try to run away from them when they stop you, etc. It is a big mistake to assume that you don't have to do what they tell you just because they are working for a private company rather than the city or state.

My entire life, I've been told diversity is a critical component of success -- building a robust and varied environment out of people from a range of different experiences, etc.

Now you're telling me that two of the most successful companies on the entire planet are, in fact, super homogeneous?

Yeah, right. This flies in the face of everything I was indoctrinated to believe.

lllll AJ

No thanks to Obama.

There's no reason to think he wouldn't have turned off the jammer if he saw an accident.

An accident which wouldn't have occurred if the driver weren't using the cell phone while driving in the first place! Don't try to shift the blame here. This guy is just trying to make the roads safer; he got no personal or financial benefit by operating this jammer. His motives were good, even if his methods were a bit extreme.

BTW, if you think that "real engineers" deliver on time with predictable results, you need to read more about real engineers.

It's only a crime if you're suborning a specific instance of perjury. If I write a book saying that people should lie on the witness stand all the time, that isn't a crime. In fact there have been books written on how to be a hit man (The Death Dealers Manual). It isn't a crime to publish such a book since it doesn't advocate a specific instance of murder, but just instructs how to do it in general.

It's only illegal if they counseled the cops to do this in a specific case. If they just told the cops that's what they should do in general, then it isn't a crime.

Ultimately though, they only have the authority to regulate what features are sold in cars as they leave the factory (this power derives from the Interstate Commerce Clause). It's up to state governments to set the rules of the road and penalize drivers for breaking those rules. As to whether or not the Constitution allows them the authority to regulate apps isn't so clear. If they are sold commercially in interstate commerce, then they might have such authority, but there might also be First Amendment issues as software has been classified by at least some courts as a form of protected speech. And I'm not sure how freeware would fit into all this. Personally, I think it would be best if the NHTSA stuck to offering guidelines and leave it up to the states to pass the actual laws.

You may want to look into pandas as a middle ground. It's great for sucking in tabular or csv data and then applying statistical analysis tools to it. It has a native "dataframe" object which is similar to database tables, and has efficient merge, join, and groupby semantics. If you have a ton of data then a database and SQL is the right answer, but for a decent range of use cases in between pandas is extremely powerful and effective.

Python has the default implementation CPython which compiles python to an interpreted bytecode; there's also Jython which compiles to JVM, and IronPython which compiles Microsoft's CLR. There's also Cython (which requires extra annotations) which compiles to C and thence to machine code, and numba which does compilation to LLVM. Finally there's Pypy which is a python JIT compiler/interpreter written in a restricted subset of Python.

Thanks for the link. Thus my whining at a patently absurd phrase actually taught me something nice!