Private entities pay for cops all the time, this isn't as radical as it seems. For instance, when I used to be involved in student government we knew that part of the cost of having a big event was having to pay for the mandatory number of cops who had to be there. The city knew that college students in large groups were trouble, and they didn't want to have to foot the bill, so they passed an ordance that required us to foot the bill for any event with X number of people expected (I forget what X was).

I'm pretty sure the same thing happens with some concerts, sporting events, etc.: the municipalities don't want to pay, so they make the entity responsible pay for it. Then again, lots of stadium owners have cozy deals with the city, which probably avoid this sort of thing.

In any case, the only unusual thing about this that I can see is that's a full-time gig.

When I was a kid Mrs. Dunn (one of the parents of a kid at the school) taught an optional "math club" a half hour before school on Wednesdays. I don't remember exactly what we learned (it's since merged with all the "real" math classes I took), but I do remember learning sumnation and some other fairly advanced concepts.

Kids are smart, and they are totally capable of learning a lot of advanced math.

So you've never seen a line of my code, or heard a single word from any of my supervisors, or gotten any other indication of my actual programming ability, but because I didn't take calculus more than ten years ago in college you believe I'm a fuckup who should get out of *your* profession?

Spoken like someone who wasted a lot of time learning fundamentals and now wants to make sure everyone else has to waste just as much time.

I'm a professional Javascript programmer, and I've been working for almost ten years now. I graduated with a degree in Modern Literature, and I have never once needed any of the Calculus and above math classes or any of the other "fundamentals" that are supposedly so important.

Oh, and I make six figures and could get a new job tomorrow if I wanted to because our industry is DESPERATE for new web developers. So do tell why someone following the same exact path as me would not get hired tomorrow.

Project 1999 is an emulated Everquest server that only has the original game and one expansion (they plan to add one more expansion then stop). It's free, it's just as much (if not more) fun as Everquest was back in 1999, and I highly recommend it to any current or former Ever-Crackers.

(To be fair this new hire has a PhD in a neuroscience, so she's no dummy. I'm not saying just anyone can be a programmer, but I am saying that I've seen evidence that a smart person can get entry-level skills from such a program.)

We actually just hired a graduate of Hack Reactor. She hasn't started yet, so I have yet to see her do anything more than a "Fizz Buzz", but just based on that an hour or so of interviewing she seems to have picked up a lot in her short time there.

A BS in Computer Science teaches you ... just about nothing applicable in the real world of programming. Don't deny it, all that math you did was a giant waste of time right (except for the maybe 5% of you for whom that math is totally relevant). So to me it's no surprise that someone could condense all the actual "programmer stuff" that a new college grad comes equipped with in to a few weeks.

There have been LOTS of attempts at "visual code", and they all look great when you watch the 10 minute presentation on them, but when you actually try to use them you find that they all solve a very small set of problems. Programmers in the real world need to solve a wide variety of problems, and the only medium (so far) that can handle that is text code.

It's like saying "why don't we write essays in pictograms?" You might be able to give someone directions to your house using only pictograms (and street names), but if you want to discuss why Mark Twain is brilliant, pictograms just don't cut it: you need the English (or some other) language.

Am I the only one who pictured Bruce Willis in Twelve Monkeys, staring dumbfoundedly at a lion in the ruins of Baltimore, after reading that?

As a Literature Major/Programmer, let me start by admitting the obvious: of course code is not literature, it's code. That being said, there is far more in common between the two than most programmers realize. Just as you can write an essay that's easy to understand and follow, or hard, regardless of the topic of the essay, so can you write code that easy/hard to grok regardless of what it actually does.

In both cases a good writer tries to make the subject matter accessible to the reader, precisely so that they *don't* have to go on a scientific expedition just to grok it.

Sony has not "gone open" in any significant sense at all; the only thing they deserve credit only for is making a good business decision. Think about it: when Apple started the iTunes store, they were creating the marketplace, so they went proprietary. Then Amazon came in to the MP3 market, and "went open" because they were the one locked out of the marketplace.

Same thing is happening with eBooks: because Amazon created the marketplace, they went proprietary. Now Sony wants to break in, so suddenly they're all about open formats. But it has nothing to do with Sony in general. You can bet that the next time they think they can get another Walkman, they'll go to the mat with another Betamax/VHS, Blue-Ray/HDDVD, etc. fight to the death over their latest proprietary format.

Sony 3's controlling proprietary formats, they always have, and they (almost certainly) always will. They just settle for open formats when they're late to the table.

Bump. SugarCRM rocks, and is more than adequate for any small to mid-size company (my company is almost up to 100 employees, and we have yet to have any issues).

>>Or would that be considered torture by the Geneva Convention?
Feh, nobody cares about that thing anymore anyway ;-)