Indonesia is, militarily, of interest to Australia, has been for decades though I've never really understood why. I would imagine this to be a pretty big win for some of the 3 letter agencies if it and Chinese were to be made compulsory.

You are right, most of the COBOL devs here in Asia are not long out of college. Migration away from mainframe has become one of the more common chunks of work being outsourced over the last couple of years, seems like a rapidly growing trend. IBM might be a bit late to plug the leaks though.

I thought the truth was pretty damn obvious myself, someones kids were killed. The tragedy for me is that they never got to experience life - very haunting, photoshopped or not. What sucks is that you get people (like this photographer) who go out of their way to use 'dead children' for propaganda, personal gain, or to push some agenda. Guy seems morally bankrupt, saw this as a money shot and used it as such.

He has a point though. While a college grad might come with a nice laminated certificate that covers a whole range of buzzwords to a depth of a few millimeters, you can't typically unleash them on a client without investing another 6 months in more focused training. Even with nothing else in their working lives to worry about beyond a shallow curve and a single programming language, quite a few just don't have any interest or motivation "because it's too hard" - worse, some of these graduates actually believe they are already "real programmers".

The guy from the FBI really has no clue what he is talking about. From his purview he may absolutely believe what he is saying, but he definitely has no appreciation for the technical realities. Recording voice is useless without storing the corresponding signaling system (SS7 these days) which is again useless if you don't know exactly which voice circuits the signaling system happens to be controlling. It's a very (very) tough problem to solve if you're doing the secret 3 letter agency thing somewhere along the comms path. How many CCITT7 links are there? Millions+ Each one runs at 64kbps typically.

Voice is only a tiny fraction of 'digital communications' anyway, there are millions of multiplexers running over millions of point to point radio / copper / fiber links, these in themselves use a staggeringly large number of frequencies, modulation methods, coding schemes, and so on. Some are encrypted, some are using non standard randomizers, unusual error correction, etc.

My point - the first post is correct. The problem space is far too large.

As a former secret 3 letter agency drone I'd like to point out that the internet is the metaphorical iceberg. Time to loosen the tinfoil I think : ) Your 'probably' may (or may not) scale more appropriately as the tip of the tip of the iceberg. Some perspective; A single satellite can relay several thousand unique transmissions. A single piece of fiber can convey orders of magnitude more data again. How much data do we push around daily, not just via the internet, but all networks combined? The NSA has a finite budget, a finite number of people, finite capability, finite everything.

I suspect the ATF can no longer get the data for free from anyone these days - particularly so now that Facebook has to please its shareholders. The days of government being able to stick their own hardware in the corner of the data center for free are probably over. Now they have to pay (probably a lot more), just like everyone else.

Lots of apps latch on to a myriad of system events so they can relaunch themselves - some are fairly obscene in how they go about this.

One good solution is to install "Autorun Manager" - it allows you to disable the receivers on a per application basis. Once you kill something, it stays dead until you explicitly start it again.

Fisher Price? If only. Compared with the Windows 8 UI, their toys are sleek with sexy smooth lines, not a hint of parasitic drag, just like a modern clothes iron straight out of the wind tunnel. Windows 8? No thanks.

Your friendly radiologist would like to be able to solve your head pain by reading your MRI study in 3D without having to pay 6 digits for a PACS viewer. That is one legitimate, if infrequent, scenario where 3D support in multiple browsers would be welcome.

Radar, we pump tons of that in to space using all kinds of transmission techniques and beam shapes. If anything is likely to make the distance that'd be it.

Shouldn't you have put that in the death star petition instead? :-)

In other analysis, 'Smoother pedaling and more power then old standard type cranks' - I don't think this means what he thinks it means.

After abandoning CDE, OLVWM, TWM, WindowMaker, AfterStep, and others back in the day for E16, aside from the eye candy there was nothing ever funky about it at all. It was in many ways like the transition between XP and Win7, a few odds and ends not quite how you like, but all in all a significantly better experience. It has been for me one of the most productive environments I've ever used. Virtual desktops, key mapping, sloppy mouse focus, what's not to like about it? E17 allows you to integrate compiz if that's your thing too.

You have a source for your claim that the classic desktop is magnitudes more difficult to operate? From my purview, which is no different than yours, the world wants their old interface back, be that classic Gnome or Windows. A vast generalization, but the desktop PC creates, the future you imagine involves consumption and finding abstract buzzwords to describe the same old file system that'll be with us for a few more decades yet.

Get back to me when you have an AI agent that can facilitate writing code more accurately and faster than I can type it.