While we're at it, lets get rid of mandatory food labelling and mandatory car air bags. Lets get rid of all this nanny state BS and just do what the hell we want. Oh, you like those things? Well too bad, test your food yourself, and buy opt into the expensive life saving features option during your next car purchase. If you aren't a genious, then you're a fucking moron. Everything is quite clearly all or nothing in this world, you know?

Yes, I'm saying that student loans that stick to you through much of your adult life is a very bad idea in supporting a healthy society. If you enter a program under the assumption of getting $X at the end of the program, one can plan and budget a rational justification for taking the course. Now if you assume the graduation is significantly less than 100% and employment rates for graduates are very low, would that same assumption apply? Would me as the 18 year old kid picking his program know the employment prospects when I walked into professional life (assuming for a minute that the 2-4 years in between don't dramatically change the local/national job prospects for said profession)?

If said student decides that the risks are too great to enter school, the alternative is that the only ones going to high end schools are those who can afford the programs. All of a sudden, we're back to a hundred years ago, and high education is for rich people and the workers can have their professional apprenticing.

How about this, as a possible alternative *just spit balling here*

Post a mandatory employment survey for all recipient of government funding on a per school/program. The survery is as follows:
        - Are you working in the field you specifically went to school with (Y/N)
        - If different from your program, name said profession (unemployed, student, home maker, hospitality, etc..)
        - Gross Income per month
The survey is to be completed annually for the life of your loan term.

For all programs that want funding, they should provide:
      - Mean/Average/Deviation of all student's gross incomes at year 1 / 5 / 10 as a rolling average of the last 5 years' result prior
      - % of students that graduate (rolling average of the last 5 years' result prior)
      - % of students that transfer into other programs (and list the top transfer options)
      - List of the top transfer programs and the % of students who moved

At 17, I was told by literally everyone that getting into university was the best way to achieve a good job in life. It was that or 'vocational schools' if I wanted to be a carpenter or something(pass), or work at McDonalds the rest of my life. Framing one's entire life off the experiences of those around you is a big step, and if you were 100% prepared for your life at 18, I absolutely salute you for it. But government is for the people (as a whole) and for every person at 18 that knew exactly what they were getting into, there are probably another 10 who don't know what they fuck they're going to do in this lifetime.

Worse, the government supports it by paying a chunk of everyone's money for their experience. It justifiable to assume that the government's financial role in education is geared toward the best interests of society as a whole, hence spending money where it can have the most benefit, so sinking a ton of money into programs known to have horrible track records seems sensible to me.

"P.S. I am sure, if they can, they will tax even air for breathing."

TANSTAAFL

Just CHIP-IN-PIN and be done with it. Tech is amazing at making a mountain out of shit and calling it a better alternative.

Chip-in-pin works with basically every merchant systems, credit card processor, and Bank (or will sooner or later). The fees are dependent on the credit source.
      - If the merchant accepts credit cards at all, the credit card fees are built into the cost of the product NO MATTER WHAT (unless they're defrauding the contract of the CC by offering discounts)
      - If you pay with debit cards / cash, you pay for the CC fees and its just more net profit for company
      - Liability for CC's are on retailers, and at least recourse, buying limits, and some government insurance on checking accounts
      - I'd like my bank / CC provider to send notifications on every purchase made either through email (login to actually view info) or SMS / application

All that's left is the new vacuum of change that is flooding into the credit market to fill their pockets during the current industry volatility caused by the death of magstrip / signature and the rise of internet based buying patterns (significantly increasing). Google/Apple/CurrentC/Amazon/PayPal/etc.. all want their hedge into the market so that they can make money from your purchases. They're not altruistic, and their sole benefit for SOME are convenience (but not for me. I like chip-in-pin).

I see room for existing technologies to evolve (mostly to fix the broken internet buying based security limitations) but I don't see myself using google, apple or anyone else in a retail setting besides a recognized merchant service/(credit card for insullation maybe)/bank because hell, the fees are already there and built in, so I may as well use what I'm being charged for anyways, plus I get the reassurance that I know it works (and has for a very long time).

Woops, there is a bandwidth cap (before you pay extra) at 750 GB. After that I pay $0.25 / GB or $5.00 for 20

On Novus, 100/100 unlimited usage, $92.91 after taxes. A great reason to be in a building that has it!

Windows has been mostly architecturally portable since NT was released. The fact that they're debating supporting ARM's for their server cores is more interesting because it means their main consumer Windows OS could also run on ARM tablets / netbooks now, which I think has more viability for them. Having their managed code stack and applications that can be binary portable between underlying OS architectures would be the BIG win Microsoft should've done originally when they released their tablet-lite versions of software.

I may just be interpretting this discussion different than everyone else here, but assuming every developer is happy with company, and company decides to implement a new development philosophy or production model (for strategic / financial / etc..) reasons, wouldn't it be sensible and actually expected that a non-trivial number of developers won't be happy with said changes?

For example, If my company went from Dev and IT groups to merging them into devops, some people are going to be rocking the idea, and a shit ton may be unhappy about the change and decide to move on. DevOps isn't any more or any less better for an employee, but it means a different set of tasks for that developer to live in. Maybe this change will significantly improve workplace productivity and the change isn't only merited, but essential for the company's survival. Same with, say dropping support for Windows/Linux/Mac/etcc OS's and just supporting a smaller set of OS's. Some would say there are valid reasons to adopt the standard (less IT burdens), and others who use said dropped OS's will be more willing to leave.

To assume that the company simply doesn't care about its developers walking out is a little bit of an overstatement. Many won't like a change (regardless of what it is), and if you're going to leave, you might as well leave when you perceive a negative change in your job.

Yes, because nobody bought chromecasts or chomrbooks either, so who give a whack?

Quite literally, I'd be happy with Windows 2000 (plus a few common add-on programs) as long as their kernel/driver model were updated and games actually worked with it anymore. I held out with 2000 until like 2008 and by then I had to hack many game DLL's to ignore the XP only extensions and it was just too much hassle to stick with it. Today, Windows 7 works well enough, and with Classic Shell, everything but some annoying explorer aspects work about the same as 2000 did. No gloss, no FX, just productive bliss.

No no no sir, clearly when we all live in a libertarian paradise, everyone will behave themselves and lift the world out of the socialist cesspool that we live in!

When I was taking the SCJP(never bothered to take the tests, but the test prep's made me a better dev), I found javaranch a great tool. Later on, I spent a ton of time helping newbs learn the language, and I felt like it benefitted my own understanding. So, yeah the site's great!

From Wikipedia: "Since winning the Nobel Prize, Mullis has been criticized in The New York Times for promoting ideas in areas in which he has no expertise.[6] He has promoted AIDS denialism,[7][8][9][10][11][12] climate change denial[7] and his belief in astrology.[6][7]"

An interesting role model in deed.

As of -whenever it was- no copyright attribution needs to be asserted in order to apply. As long as the classes, or their structure were leveraged from others' works. Take 'Pair', 'Triple' as an example. In Java, there's no Pair, but many people like to associate two entities together in a free-form way. To do this, you:

Make a constructor with optionally 2,1,0 arguments
Setter for the first item (optional)
Getter for the first item
Setter for the second item (optional)
Getter for the second item

That API will be all but identical to the hundreds if not thousands of distinct implementations of Pair. As a construct, Pair has probably existed for several decades, and its rather shocking to assume that any primitive construct can be copyrighted by the 'first guy to come up with it'. In fact, it will certifiably lead to the end of software development as a whole (at least in the US) if such a ridiculously broad claim is upheld.

Once you start crossing borders, 'nations' become less worrisome. I'd like to know how many of the 'willing expats' have travelled out-of-nation prior to the survey. I'd bet that the majority have. I'd assume that there are fewer of the Americans surveyed who have travelled abroad, but this is just my gut feel. I've heard 'stories' mind you, of people who've never left their counties *shudder*.

Once you leave and explore the world a little, you'll find that many places are quite nice to visit / live for a while. Some will be learning experiences, some will just be for material gain, and others will receive opportunities that their own country can't offer. Why the specific people thought what they did was another topic.

Although one big reason is that there's still the prevailing belief that moving to America will increase your chance at happiness, security, or financial success. I'd still consider that debatable, but the circumstances are very relevant.

http://www.nationmaster.com/co...
Tells me there's a large shift in immigration for people moving into OIL rich nations which makes sense since there's probably a great financial incentive to move (10 year old data alas). The US is 30th, so still pretty strong on the immigration front, but seems to be slowwing per capita over time, which may indicate tighter immigration policies or less incentive from 2005-2008. Of course post-housing meltdown numbers would be more interesting, but oh well.