AIUI (I don't live in the US so their may be errors in this)

To issue notices to register for the draft (there is no draft in the US at the moment but registration is still required in case there is one) you need two things, firstly a list of people with their addresses, secondly a list of people who have already registered for the draft. Then they can take the people who are in the first list and not in the second list and send them notices.

So the question becomes where to get that list, why the DMV well it's kinda simple.

1: most people drive and hence are issued driving licenses by their state's DMV
2: driving licenses are used as ID cards
3: you have a minority of people who don't drive, these people nevertheless need some kind of ID card, the states decided that it was simpler to have the DMV issue ID cards to people even if they don't drive than to set up a separate ID card department.

So the DMV database is the closest thing to a "database of all people in the state" that is readily available.

AIUI they used the DMV (driver registration) database to send out these reminders. Is it really that surprising that someone born in the 1890s could have been driving up to say the 1980s and have active records in the driving license database continuing into the 1990s and 2000s?

Why do you think they have that field? Why would someone design a database that is less efficient and encourages wrong queries?

Most likely because someone previously fucked up and thought 2-digit years would be enough, by the time they realised they needed to fix that it was easier to add a new field than change the semantics of an existing one. Given that how accurate do you expect the data in the centuary field to be for old records?

and in some databases they didn't even go as far as adding a century field instead just assuming that 2 digit years represented dates in a window arround the current date.

All your meme are belong to us!

I believe the word you want is "audiophule." You know, the type that claims that they can hear differences that an oscilloscope doesn't show?

Don't forget the RF shielded optical fiber interconnects, for true fidelity at high frequencies, and a mellow bass.

+1 Funny, I hope.

Lol, what's funny about that is if they like rock or electronic music it's highly likely the source of the music is CL, many instruments including the Korg Triton use CL chips (in the case of the Triton it was the same chip as in one of the high end SB Live cards).

OK, I can understand that. I don't agree with it, but I understand it. And, the reason that I don't agree with it is that AFAIK there's nothing in Communist ideology that would dictate that type of conduct, any more than there's anything in Bushido that could be used to justify the Rape of Nanking. BTW, back in '71, I saw a documentary on that war that included some newsreel footage from Nanking; I'm still trying to forget some of the images.

That was an ideological difference between the two that prevents the Germans from being willing to surrender German territory to the Soviets...

That wasn't the biggest reason that the Germans fought so much harder in the East during the final days of the war. They considered the Soviets to be little more than animals, and if you'll read accounts of how they acted, e.g., raping every female they found from 8 to 80, you'll see that the Germans were, to some extent, trying to make sure that they surrendered to the western allies, who they could trust to act in a civilized manner. Aside from that, I have no disagreement with your premise.

Who cares if the pilot was the only one onboard, a crash of a full sized helicopter full of fuel is a significant risk to everyone in the vicinity. As to the charges, sure there's expungement (though in some states you can only expunge convictions, not arrests), but unfortunately for these guys they ran to the media so there's a more or less permanent record.

Really? So, who do you consider the defenders of global freedom and privacy? Russia and China?

So when are reckless endangerment charges going to be filed against the pilot? He intentionally steered his craft towards an object that they admit through their own filings presented a risk of a crash.

What I think a lot of the utopian visions miss, as well as a lot of the posters here, is that the problems with programming are not problems with the tools, but with the code that these amateurs produce. Writing clean, clear, correct, modular, maintainable, tested, and reusable code is still a skill that takes time to learn.

Generally, most people understand following a sequence of steps to achieve a goal. They can follow a recipe's steps to bake a cake. Some can even write down the steps they took to accomplish a task, which is the beginning of automating it; but recording and playing back steps is certainly not all there is to programming. Almost anyone who can write steps down can then learn enough of a language to string together a dozen or even a hundred individual steps to then achieve a goal: StepA(foo); bar = StepB(foo); StepC(foo,bar); ... another 97 steps here...; return(). The problem is that because writing down all those steps is possible, people who manage to do it once think they're programming. But all they're really doing is scripting.

Once someone tries to add logic to their scripts, the resultant code is generally buggy, slow, difficult to maintain, impossible to test, and probably should not be put into production, let alone reused. What a professional software developer does is recognizes the difference. He or she uses his or her experience, skills, and knowledge to organize those instructions into small groups of functionality, and wraps them into readable, testable, reusable, methods. He or she recognizes dependencies in the code, follows design principles to ensure they are properly organized, groups related methods into classes or modules, knows when to follow design patterns and when to break from them, groups related areas of modules into architectural layers, and wraps the layers with clean, testable, usable interfaces. He or she knows how to secure the code against various types of attack or misuse, and to properly protect the data it's been entrusted with. He or she understands validation, authorization, authentication, roles, sanitization, whitelisting, and blacklisting. And he or she understands the many forms of testing needed, including unit testing, system testing, integration testing, fuzz testing, pen testing, performance testing, as well as tools to evaluate the code, such as static code analysis and metrics.

On the other end of the developer's life are the inputs to the processes: requirements, stories, use cases, usability, scalability, performance. They know that following certain development methodologies can make a great deal of difference to the software's quality. And then there are the realities of all the non software development issues: equipment, firewall rules, IDPs, networking, vendor contracts, software licensing, hosting, distribution, installation, support, bug tracking, and even sales.

Tools can help with all of these steps, but as you pointed out, having a word processor does not make one a poet.

As I recall, people were very surprised to find out just how different the other side of the Moon is. Right up until the pictures came back everybody expected that both sides would be much more similar than they turned out to be.