A less environmentally religious person might ask: "In what way does this pollution affect my (and my family's, and my neighbors') survival, comfort, security, longevity, and prosperity? What are the tradeoffs? How do I know for sure?"

Might. Or they might ask "does it have significant negative short term cost to quality of my life, and if not then why should I care?". Or "does this contribute too excessively to suffering of sentient life of any kind on earth to be right thing to do for me?" - putting different amount(s) of weight on different values does not in itself imply "religion".

Why am I writing this for though? I'm pretty certain what type of person I'm replying to when they write of caring about environment and comparing it to religion... Oh well, might just as well post this anyway.

I don't know who are thought to be profiting from this nor how exactly but you and your ilk got it wrong: It's not going to profit them, it's gonna cost us (including you and most likely the mysterious "them") a lot - the longer we take to act, higher the price.

Sure, I admit that someone is going to gain money, obviously (otherwise it would not cost, economically at least), however given that the costs are likely going to affect globally on economy it might end up being just reduction of the cost for them too...

It sounds stupid because being equally good&gifted as your mate doesn't equal to ending up with same outcome. Not saying that your mate took stupid route, only that no matter how good you are there are more things to account for when trying to choose your own way than what someone else somewhere and sometime else did. Those cheering that one or the other is stupid for you "because someone else" are the last people you should listen for.

Also, if the schools on that side of the globe really adjust their teaching speed (and therefor how much they are able to teach and require you to learn to pass on basis of predefined percentage they "wan't to pass", well... the thought baffles me to no end).

I agree that most of what good programmers have learned when they graduate did not come from the school though - and many probably know most, if not more, of the stuff when they're going in too. I think it's something you learn out of passion, unless you're just average code monkey with no love for it.

Sounds awful - but if you like growing to be bitter old man with awful companion of wrecked union because out of inexperience you made even more wrong choices later, go for it :P

Even if you're not going to "settle down" until at least 40 (if ever), it's still likely to be *one of the best* in life for most. It's also the last time your having fun at that particular age, which you understand later in life, and you don't want that understanding to come in form of "why didn't I... when I was younger", no matter how much fun you have or can't have later, because you can't have the same fun later.

You and the AC below have the most insightful posts I've read on /. in this type of discussions/subjects for a long time (if not ever), and often I've been on the edge of posting about importance of knowing how to program over knowing specific languages.

Various different kind of languages (close to iron, like C, static/dynamic typing, pointers & taking care of memory management vs. automatic garbage collector, heavily OO (java being good example, as much as I dislike coding with it), etc. etc.) are good to know, which ones they are specifically doesn't matter that much. Common Lisp can't hurt though, and for the record I personally think Perl is probably a great source of learning. But in the end all that really matters is learning how to program and learning the very basic logic behind it that in the end is all that every bit of it comes to - if you take the languages I listed, it's unlikely that anyone here would mention those exact ones I did anyway.

After getting frustrated seeing dozens of ignoramus comments like your having nothing else to do than parrot their view of what it is like to live in "Africa, The Country", while apparently not even bothering to check which *country* are they doing this in and how things are there. But nooo, "this be Africa, here be warlords".

Search engines can be chosen by prefixing the search terms with a keyword assigned to search engine using the address field. Defining/changing the keywords can be done from search field's dropdown menu. I prefer single letter's (like g for google, s for startpage.com, y for youtube, etc.) or short strings (like trans for translate.google.com). To search startpage.com for "google search engine" I would enter "s google search engine" in the address field.

Newer used awesomebar so I have no idea if it messes up with this behavior or not but it's the default firefox functionality (and has been for long time, I've used it at least from 3.5), though it seems there are many here who don't know this (and some of them fairly fould mouthed in their being mistaken - not you though and I'm happy to help :) ). I would personally remove the whole search field from the UI (I don't mean like "if I was charge of firefox", just from my own system) if I knew how to access managing search engines without it.

I disagree. And it's one of many many things why I like eLinks over Links1/2/Hacked, w3m or other text-mode browsers (defined in Options: Protocols->URI Rewriting->Smart Prefixes). Sometimes one facility for multiple different functions is indeed a Good Thing.

There is little reason to limit browsers main text based access field to one access method (URI's) - especially if there's a way to limit what you can do from that field somewhere in browser setting (not sure, but I recall seeing such settings in FF). I've optimized my browser for quick keyboard only access (I also have add-on for mouse gestures, the point being avoiding having to change between the controlling devices unnecessarily) with such add-on's as Keysnail and Mouseless Browsing, yet I don't even remember the hotkey for search field (I only use it to select "Manage Searches..." or to add new search engines) as searching is way easier done from the general access field, prefixing the phrase or URL (latter comes handy when quickly accessing translate.google.com for current URL with C-l C-a t [space] [return]) with letter or short word for engine/site to search (s->startpage.com,g->google.com,w->wikipedia(en),wfi->wikipedia(fi),sana->sanakirja.org(multi-language dictionary),y->youtube, etc.).

I also like how it can list bookmark entries matching the word(s) you type, often giving access to what you want faster than through bookmarks menu - which I have naturally sorted into subfolders up to reasonable level, but that doesn't help at all when what you're looking for could reasonably exist in more than one subfolder; which is where matching your words to bookmark/subfolder names and keywords comes very convenient and quick.

I use that field for those three reasons, I know when I'm using it to type URL or search or to find bookmarks, and the browser knows it well enough to present what I'd expect in dropdown list just perfectly. God knows what could there possibly be that I would find better in usability (THE keyword) with having to use three separate fields for each access method but I'm sure that, with proper settings and possibly add-on's, it could be done with FF if someone likes it better that way. As it is now, I don't know what there is to complain in the way it currently works, even if you don't want to use the field for searching: Enter the URI you want and off it goes anyway. Only thing that annoys me is not knowing another way to access "Manage searches..." than through search field's drop down menu, which unfortunately keeps me from removing the separate search field from the UI alltogether.

Watched cops are less abusive cops.

+++This.

Modern technology is now enable to provide, if combined with proper laws and regulations, to the question of "who watches the watchmen", and I don't feel surprised at all to see some of the watchmen attacking this (as they always are with anything threatening to limit their powers). What worries me the most however is the number of people, who are claiming (and not dishonestly) to oppose any movement towards police state, attacking this because it supposedly is bigger invasion of privacy (in public or in case of police entering your house with your permission or warrant), all the while there are concrete breaches of privacy and/or other rights constantly breaken by police officers ready to back each others story who, if implemented correctly, would be unable to act so and use the shield of the law to break the law (on peoples rights at that) without facing severe consequences.

Some arguments though are good for discussion of what kind of laws and regulations are needed to make this actually work for the good of people - however some people are sadly using them to oppose the whole idea. Nevertheless they do bring forth issues that need to be taken for account.

Of course the vast majority of the time those who drive this distrust of the police are decidedly lawless themselves, and have good reason to fear the authorities.

Haven't I heard this kind of accusations, made by police or politicians, before on other subjects about new changes to limit police rights to invade and breach other (civilian) peoples rights as they see just based on their own discrimination, Mr. Officer?

P.S. You shouldn't really feel quilty about racism of other people - only your own. No large groups of people have zero people with racist (whether using the current "spoken language definition" or the dictionary/scientific one of the word) tendencies, in fact we are so far from being civilized societies (yet anyway) that the percentage in any groups is probably unfortunately high. Yet I take no personal shame of my species for the shortcomings of other's - my own shortcomings are burden enough for me, thank you.

...also, your link made me (again) wonder why the officers are so heavily armed and so trigger happy in the US the first place. Here in Finland the police has to do paperwork and explain each and any shot they take, and shooting an unarmed man just for escaping would unlikely come to consideration of even the most aggressive cops in the country. The police here are known to avoid using possibly leathal force and, in fact, even them shooting a "warning shot" in the air is so rare it makes to newspaper headlines.

After he talks you into turning off his camera, because you're both reasonable fellows

The police officer should not have any acceptable reason to even suggest such thing, and if a complaint was made it should count very strongly against him if he did - after all, up to the point the "talking into it" would have been recorded and any defence lawyer worth his shit should be able to use that to tear the officer a new one.

Of course I understand the laws are rarely written perfectly (and thus they need to be adjusted time to time) but, in comparison, the current situation would protect nobody any better if the cop wanted to beat your hiney.

I'm all for this and have little problem with the so called "privacy issues", provided that the laws (and the devices) are designed properly to minimize any risk of tampered and/or missing evidence. I see much more privacy issues without this than with this, and I would also like to extend these laws to require private security firms to use this and tougher laws to deal with so called "missing tapes"/"broken camera" issues to protect the rights of civilians.

Only fear that I have is that the "missing footage" type of stuff will be allowed to continue, as it is nowdays with security cameras and complaints against security guards or police (the latter not being much of an issue here in Finland, but in many countries it's different).

There should be serious investigations if a complaint is made and a camera, which is OK for most of the time, but conveniently doesn't happen to have the recording at the time of the incident the complaint is about - and serious consequences to those who have access to these things. Private security firms should in no case have more leeway than police has, but that is unfortunately not always the case :(

Why is there a baby wearing what seems to be an octopussy costume?