You see, no it isn't exactly like you say. I have written and have in production interfaces with SHARES and the problem isn't so much their infrastructure, as they are actively doing a lot more upgrades (I actually have had conference calls with their IT managers while migrating one of their systems) than anyone thinks. The problem is more operational than anything, but since I am actively under an NDA concerning things like that I can't bring up any specifics. Other than that, the other problem is too many vendors under the same roof. I have seen systems that have had probably every company in the business do an update somewhere to some module or piece of the system and THAT is what makes these things more of a nightmare than anything. The nice simple ones where it was a streamlined job, are very easy to upgrade and keep current.

Now that isn't to say that some of the current systems are not old and outdated, but many of the carriers are in the process of performing these upgrades right now (I have insider knowledge on that because of the work my company does). The general time-frame for large scale system upgrades varies between 5 to 10 years it seems, depending on how stable the original system actually was. I can also say that American actually just rolled out some new updates to several of their systems including their check-in and processing, and they are currently doing upgrades to other existing framework elsewhere. Smaller upgrades are usually much more frequent, but these are more behind the scenes and not something a customer would ever see.

Most of the legacy systems are surprisingly stable, and in fact there are more hiccups during the initial roll-out of new systems than anything else. This one is still up in the air it seems as to what or who was the culprit. More than likely it is a new system hiccup and things kind of fell through at a really bad time. I feel for whoever was scrambling trying to fix it, I have heard some nasty stories from our guys on emergency support calls and have had a few crappy ones myself.

And FYI you are referring to FIMS not FOMS, and United actually uses FLIFO for their flight information (again have interfaces in production right now working with it), and SHARES is run through mostly data-center grade servers and not mainframes (though they do still use a lot of command line to interface with the system).

P.S. I don't mean the post to come off condescending or anything, just I have much more intimate knowledge of these systems and felt I could share a little bit to allow for a better understanding of things.

You do realize that farming has become so much of a pain in the United States (and some other first world countries) that without government subsidy it wouldn't even provide enough for the farmer and their family to live on. There are a few crops that I believe can sustain returns great enough to survive and even be mildly profitable, but even with my low-level of agricultural and food production market knowledge, you can't only plant a few types of crops and expect things to work like what the country needs. This would lead to further need to import food and increase dependency outside the United States (or country of your choice) and on top of that soil exhaustion from improper crop rotation and other poor farming practices would compound the problem. Since certain crops are better suited to home climates you also look at possible (and likely) cost increases because of more overhead from shipping and the such and the farmers in other countries may have more difficulty in cultivating these crops.

In a nut shell, even if GMO is only making things easier on the farmer, this would likely actually have a ripple effect of positive gains on the entire infrastructure of food production. Now as far as knowing the intricacies of GMO food production, I can't say a whole lot as I only have a working understanding of it both in risk and reward, but from what I do understand from those more educated on the subject, the opposition seems to be making things sound a lot worse than they are or flat out lying in some instances (not unlike the idiots still crusading against vaccines because they believe they somehow cause autism, spoilers they don't, the entire basis of that movement was a faked statistical correlation report that has been disproved so many times many doctors are beginning to refuse to work with people who believe that crap and tell them to seek out a different medical professional, ya know in case you were wondering).

I'm a little confused here, your post kind of contradicts itself. You say the license isn't worth the paper it is printed on, but then say

The license is what allows someone to legally be an engineer for most disciplines. We went over this when I took my engineering ethics course back in college, and there have been numerous (some very frivolous in fact) lawsuits to keep people from using the term or actually practicing any form (of licensed) engineering. The only current exception to this is software engineers can legally use the term without a valid license because one doesn't exist.

The entire point of what I said in the first half of my post is that a P.E. would in fact make those software engineers legally liable for their work (within reason, even in other engineering disciplines things happen you just have to show that they took reasonable steps and practices to try and prevent it) therefore doing precisely what you said and shifting the liability on to these web developers.

Actually I do somewhat agree with the spirit of this post here. Software Engineering is a discipline that can affect large amounts of people and where not many people actually understand it. This is very similar to any other type of engineering (civil, nuclear, electrical, etc.) and to practice those other disciplines generally you have to have a P.E. or at least a P.E. signs off on the work done. Under current models, this is not in any way required for software and while most of your real software engineers don't really need to have this, for every one of them there are 10 or more idiots that picked up a "Complete Idiot's Guide to PHP" and started throwing websites up. The entire point of the license model is to ensure quality of work because engineers are working on things that affect the public tremendously.

Now, playing devil's advocate to my own point, you can also argue that the no license required is how the web and software grew like it did. There have been plenty of great projects and ideas put out there that would not have been if a P.E. were required to sign off on the work. Indie development would all but die under this kind of model or at best the cost would increase significantly because of needing a P.E. to review everything after the fact and point out the real problems.

Kind of a double edged sword honestly, but there is a valid point in Tenebrousedge's post.

This. This. A million times this. So many people do not see the value of the degree until after they are at least mostly done with it. Half of the 'drop-outs' and 'self-taught' people are just not patient enough to get the degree and start using cope out arguments. Don't get me wrong, some people can pull off self teaching and what not and be effective software developers, but there is a reason we have a massive shortage of GOOD software engineers in the US and elsewhere. Yes, you will sit through some boring and mostly useless classes, but most of them are not that. A CS degree is teaching the fundamentals and then gets into the advanced more specialized topics later.

The OP is only 2 years in and has not reached the advanced point yet. When I graduated my last year and a half was focused almost exclusively on the much more advanced and specialized classes that people want immediately but have no business in before they have the proper foundation. I took courses focusing on software development, high level security and cryptography, mobile development (the entire world of it, not just how to write applications), and I even took advanced programming languages (learned a lot about functional and logic programming, while I am not the best at it, the class gave me a start and great perspective on OO, imperative, and declarative languages I already knew). They even offered courses focusing on web development like what the OP is talking about(mostly PHP, we didn't mess a lot with .NET or anything else).

Sticking out for the degree is important because you WILL learn those high level concepts and be much better prepared for generally abstracting the concepts to move between things. I mean, basically the way the programs should (and usually do at good schools) is directly akin to proper programming in that you don't hard code and specialize things, you keep it general and abstract such that the individual instances (students) can apply that knowledge effectively in their chosen specialization.

What is important is to supplement your course work with your own more specialized interests. I did plenty of research on languages and programming styles much different than what the university taught me, and I even did a lot of IT and hardware work as just a general hobby (helped me grasp a lot of things later on and make me into a more well-rounded software engineer).

If you have some experience with RSLogix and already do electrical work it might not be a big step for you to get into electrical engineering and do mostly system automation. You are right that Rockwell is not used near as much, but the airline industry actually uses it pretty heavily still for things like bag room automation. If you get your foot in the door with that you can probably segway into some Siemens PLC programming in Step 7 as that is used in some airports as well (but is much more heavily used in other automation areas, i.e. expands your opportunities). As long as your can do decent programming with it most companies are fine with doing additional training for other PLC programming.

This is true but using a simple encryption algorithm as was suggested would negate this problem. At that point the intermediary is just moving along encrypted data that he has no idea if it is copyrighted material or a bunch of cat videos that are tagged as public domain. Since deep packet inspection and breaking the encryption algorithm is illegal and constitutes a "cybercrime" (or what ever the hell they are calling it now) it would be a VERY hard sell to even get that into a court.

Now, it isn't impossible because it is kind of the argument that parcel couriers have to deal with daily. Technically if someone ships a package through their system it could be completely "anonymous" and some might argue that it should be, but all of them reserve the right to inspect the packages simply because if they ship someone a bomb their ass is potentially on the line for that (That said how many extremely dangerous items go through the USPS every day).

The main difference is two fold. For the courier their is a concerted effort to move said package between points A and B or (D1 and D2 in your scenario), and a large coordinated effort on several people's part. In the case of the user proxy it is one person "moving" the "closed package" with little to no effort on their part. Sheer logistics in this case dictates that it would be unreasonable for that person to inspect every package (which is a small piece of the actual infringement that on it's own can't actually be used for crap unless the source and other things are identified) especially considering with some mediocre encryption and usage of a few diffie-helman exchanges you will never piece it all together (or hell it could be routed through 3 or 4 different users). This is akin to basically shipping the parts to a bomb or some such through the couriers and then assembling it on the other end.

At that point it is no longer a burden on the proxy user, as they are merely using the technology for what could be legitimate purposes. Hell, most torrent trackers have started using some weak encryption to help obfusticate traffic from ISPs already, so this isn't very clean cut in my opinion.

I don't really buy that considering NORAD would detect it the second it was out in the open. Even encasing the damn thing in a lead shell the patrols and sensors around the coast would probably still pick it up. While I am the first one to say we have a bloated over the top military budget, some of the defense tools they use for physical defense and prevention are extremely advanced.

I haven't honestly seen any of the code for the game so I don't know exactly what you are talking about in regards to his implementation. That said though, an OO implementation can be somewhat replicated in imperative languages like C, though obviously not the exact same since there are fundamental differences in the way things are handled. Hell, technically Java is not a true OO language even since it still heavily uses primitive types.

What I am saying is if he didn't even manage memory correctly in Java which is pretty brain dead easy, then he would have spent years trying to debug memory leaks and faulty pointer arithmetic that would have rendered the game basically unplayable. My comment isn't meant as he was intentionally using the features of a managed language to avoid issues and crashes, it is more that it is harder (not impossible obviously) to have serious memory related issue when writing something in a managed language like Java so it probably worked out for the better.

If a person writes crappy code in Java they will probably still write crappy code in C or other similar languages, but Java does have some training wheels type features to help with that. You could probably argue they are at least more likely to write crappy code in declarative, functional, or logic languages as well, but I have actually seen some people that just understood those paradigms better than OO programming (granted this is really rare). I don't completely fault the guy as memory management can be difficult to do properly in C (I believe it was Excel in the 90s actually had a memory leak in it that was never fixed until MS did the full Office redesign), but it is pretty strange he is actually causing memory related crashes in a Java application.

Yea, if he has managed to run out of memory in Java, the game would have been UNPLAYABLE if he wrote it in C.

This is true to a degree, but not all compilers were created equal in the case of C/C++. Java occasionally has that same come up but it is much more rare and usually isn't a big deal on the large platforms. I mean I can go write a simple 100 line program in Visual Studios right now, but it isn't going to run very well on Linux without some cajoling and a recompile on the gcc/g++ compiler. Hell, technically it won't even run on a Windows machine without the Visual Studios Runtime installed.

Depending on the compiler used, yes you can indeed write a program that is going to be fairly portable between the platform, but you trade off a lot of things for that and both system do not support the same things at the OS level so you don't have the same feature availability (it has been a while since I wrote targeting Linux but I think even some simple features have to be done two separate ways in Linux/Windows).

To a degree I agree with that, but I was mostly letting the other poster know that just because a Java application was written for Windows originally does not mean it won't run on Linux, and in many cases will run without much additional work (if any). C you run into a lot of compiler/assembler issues because of it being a much lower level imperative language, and while implementations can be very abstracted with a lot of work, in the case of games and many application that are not necessarily just trying to interface with the hardware it isn't as easy to port.

I mean technically if one were so inclined they could probably write a lot of things that would port between platforms much easier in C or C++, but without more intimate knowledge of the compiler and assembler (which can be an absolute beating to look at for any language, much less something like C or C++ where there are a metric ton of add ons) it is difficult to predict how the logic will change when translated to machine code. Some things just lend themselves to be much more abstract-able (that isn't really a word but to hell with it).

Har, har. Problem is, those comments, pictures, or anything you post on there, never actually are deleted. Facebook kind of removes them from public view (I say kind of, because due to glitches or just plain stupid ass over-sight on new features, or hell maybe it is on purpose), but they are still on their servers. Unless it is enforced at the company level (and eve then...) you will never have any right to be forgotten. This is probably my biggest reason for never signing up for facebook or myspace. Call me paranoid, but I like my privacy and the only way to enforce my will on my own data is to keep it from people and corporations like this.

Could be a number of things. Improper threading springs to mind immediately as many applications in the vein of how minecraft was developed do not use multi-thread expansion correctly. Over-use of memory is another considering how vast the spaces in minecraft are there may be some required disk writes server side and even if the implementation uses B-Trees and proper spanning those kinds of operations are extremely costly moving it from disk to active RAM and vice-versa. Without looking at the code or observing the game more closely (my nephew plays it a lot, but I honestly haven't looked into that much of it) I'm just throwing out initial impressions.

C is also much more prone to fucked up pointer arithmetic and memory leaks. It is honestly probably better that it is written in Java if Notch is a bad programmer because at least you have a managed language so that the game doesn't constantly crash from some memory issue.

I will agree with you that normal performance yes, C absolutely wrecks Java, but good Java is at least decent considering it is a managed language. Hell, if someone were so inclined they can try to force some mock memory management by forcing garbage collection at critical times, but that gets kind of dangerous if overused because then you just kill performance even worse.