Because if doctors have it then everyone has it -- in the above scenario, a patient has epilepsy but essentially doesn't want the government (DMV in this instance) to see that.

- First of all, he is committing a crime. And anyone knowingly abetting that is in some legal jeapordy (may not be big).
- Secondly, as soon as the doctor puts it on the chart, it gets stuck in the database. Then the insurer and anyone else who gets to see the database (? DMV) gets to see the diagnosis. It's like the Internet - once it's out there, the data''s not coming back. Access to the Big Database in the Sky isn't going to be hard to get, no matter what anyone says.

So, if you have any medical secrets, be sure not to tell anyone. But don't get mad when some doctor prescribes another medication that interacts with your epilepsy drug and puts you in a coma (and those drugs tend to interact with lots of other drugs).

It's not just the religious fundamentalists. Students of history understand that tracking of things is a useful step in controlling those things.

There's a very common pattern used by tyrannical governments. They demonize and marginalize the "undesirables", whether they be religious cultists, intellectuals, liberals, or conservatives (when you hear the word "terrorist" used without a weapon of mass destruction actually being detonated, you're seeing this step in action.) They isolate undesirables by restricting their travels: note that you don't have to pin a red star on their lapel if you place their names on a secret list. They build up lists of associations between people, so that if one undesirable does something violent, they instantly roll up his entire network. And if they know who the registered gun owners are, they go to their houses and disarm them before taking away any more of their rights. (This is tied closely into the American gun culture.)

I won't deny that bringing these topics up sounds like paranoia today, because today's definition of paranoia seems to now exclude the "irrational belief" clause. People who claim such things are marginalized as "conspiracy theorists". What is being deliberately forgotten is that both the Second World War and the Cold War involved these exact same activities. Today's children and young adults may not remember or understand the Nazis or the Red Menace, but their grandparents do, and the parallels to the US government's current activities are unmistakable. I don't think it qualifies as irrational when the threat has a basis in history and in documented, observable behavior today.

I don't care how well you think you're watching. You are a human, and you are capable of overseeing simple activities, such as official pieces of paper being dropped in a box, or official stones being dropped in a jar. Your capabilities for "oversight" do not extend down to observing the correct bits are flowing through a CPU.

The thing we've all forgotten in our rush to tune into the 24 hour news channel is that voting results do NOT have to be completed within 15 seconds of the polls closing. I don't care if Talking Hairpiece of the Nightly News wants to announce something, or if he really wants to announce something. The Constitutionally provided timeline for tallying election results specifies weeks, not minutes. The winner won't be seated in his office for two months following the election, so tallying the vote early or late doesn't change anything.

My right to voting securely damn well better not be trumped by your desire to see a news story.

Wow.

You know, I like the French Revolution as much as anyone, and these days, with all the corruption, abuse, and incompetence in our politics, financial institutions, industry, and so on, maybe it would be a good idea to set up and use some guillotines in Washington, in our capitals, on Wall Street, etc., pour encourager les autres.

But what you quoted there is not a general definition of a natural right of free speech. Instead, you quoted from the French Declaration of the Rights of Man from August, 1789. It's deeply ironic that you would post that given that the French had just abolished copyright law early in the previous month and wouldn't get around to establishing a new general copyright law until 1793 IIRC. (There were a couple of laws regarding performing plays as early as 1791, but they mainly seem to have been concerned with breaking down monopolies)

So leaving fun-filled France behind, maybe instead of going to Wikipedia and just using the first thing you saw on the page that looked like you could quote it, let's at the very least look to see if there was a part of the very same damn Wikipedia page that you could have quoted instead, had you bothered to read even a tiny bit further. How about this:

Here in the US, we took a fairly strong stance on this early on, at least on paper, with the First Amendment guaranteeing this (pre-existing, natural right):

And while some prominent figures support the idea of an absolute guarantee of free speech (Hugo Black, William O Douglas), the problem is that most people and most governments formed by those people, are pussies about it. So instead of at least taking an absolutist starting position and then maybe (but hopefully not) nibbling away at it, often one sees things like the sort of language you approvingly quoted, in which people are guaranteed free speech as long as it isn't the slightest bit inconvenient for those in power.

Anyway, though, the presence of utterly hypocritical and utterly repulsive pro-censorship language in guarantees of free speech still doesn't support your position. After all, free speech is an inherent right. It isn't granted by the state. And if the state infringes on it in a way that it claims is legal, that doesn't make it any less of an infringement. Whether a state oppresses its people a little or a lot, it's always the same thing.

No. There is no natural right to a copyright. A copyright is inherently, inescapably, censorship. It's a power of censorship that the state grants to a copyright holder, rather than exercising for itself, and it's a power used for avaricious purposes, rather than the more common purpose of securing and maintaining political power; but at the end of the day, being told that you cannot engage in some speech because it is seditious is little different than being told that you cannot because it doesn't respect the greed of the copyright holder.

Copyright and free speech are opposed to one another. You can't have both be natural rights. Plunk people down in a state of nature, and you'll see them engage in free speech straight away. But what we call copyright didn't even appear on the planet until 1710, and then only in England, and didn't seriously catch on until the 19th century and then largely helped along by European colonialism, which was generally a shitty thing.

The reason, of course, is that copyright is wholly artificial. And it could never be justified -- among those who think it can be justified -- as simply being infringement of free speech in order to let copyright holders charge monopolistic prices for books and such. No, it has to be justified as being beneficial to the very same public who has to suffer the embarrassment of copyright's existence.

First, that is not even a little bit true; copyrighted works are typically less available than public domain works. And always less available if you control for varying levels of popularity, simply because all else being equal, public domain works can be published by anyone, anywhere, without needing permission, and without any charge.

Second, are you not a native English speaker? "Free" has two very different meanings here. I have been talking about free speech in the sense that there is a liberty to speak. Why you suddenly jumped into "virtually free" as in, it has a low but greater than zero monetary cost, is beyond me. It's totally a non sequitur.

The only thing preventing it is copyright. And eventually, the copyright on a work vanishes, and then nothing prevents it.

And just for those people following along at home, the original point of all this was that someone claimed that Apple ought to have the right to collude with publishers because they should be free to have any business arrangements they want and that no one should be able to dictate to them what they can and cannot do.

And I had pointed out that if no one can dictate what people can and cannot do, there is no grounds for copyright, which is a copyright holder empowered by the state, itself empowered by the willingness of the people to be governed by it, telling people what they can and cannot do.

If copyright can legitimately exist, then so can antitrust law.

The simple fact of the matter is that the world is over populated. In order to have a chance at a non-menial career, people go to colleges and universities. But because so many people want a non-menial career, there is a vast oversupply of people from those programs.

As a result, companies have to sift through thousands of resumes looking for the wheat in the chaff. Often they'd rather go with the simpler/easier solution of outsourcing the problems of development and design to a company (usually overseas) that they can sue if there are any problems with the results. With an internal staff, the worst you can do is fire them. There is no option for recovering the monies spent or for the "damage" done by the flaws.

Globally, the world is in a tough place. Our whole social mentality is based on the idea that some people are more skilled than others, and therefore deserve more money. But when you look at the aggregate population, there just flat out aren't enough jobs that demand those high skill sets compared to the number of people being educated in those fields.

Consider this: How many people does it take to design something like a phone? On the bright side, it's a relatively large team -- probably a couple dozen to a hundred skilled and trained people. On the downside, that one small team is responsible for a product that (hopefully) sells in the millions of units around the globe. Compared to the market serviced, the efforts of the team are paltry and employ an extremely small number of people.

And the more we globalize and standardize products, the more that problem of "less talent needed" becomes. We're already at a point where the vast majority of the parts in something like a phone are standard components available from a very few vendors.

There is no solution to this problem. We need a mental shift to evolve into a socialist society rather than one that depends on money to determine wealth and reward. But how and when this shift will happen is anybody's guess. I hope it doesn't take the form of leaving millions of people on welfare and social assistance fomenting an eventual rebellion for us to realize that we just can't justify a world where CEOs make hundreds of times what their workers do. Hell, we can't even justify a world where someone makes ten times what someone else does.

At the same time, the critical shift has to happen personally. People need to realize that they need to have enough for a comfortable living, not a luxurious one. But greed is an inherent part of the human animal, so I don't foresee that happening any time soon.

Remember the EDI systems of old? Have you worked with XML today?

Those data transfer systems only work because the information formats are standardized amongst the products that claim to support them.

Unfortunately, EDI standards were often a "kitchen sink" approach with a bazillion "optional" message components to cater to the "special features" of vendors who had enough clout to demand that they be supported.

A rational, clean, genuine reworking and reengineering of data streams would lead to interoperability and the ability to share information between all the different components involved, while allowing specialized features to be tailored to the vertical segments of the marketplace (doctor's office, hospital, pharmacy, and so on.)

The unfortunate thing for the IT industry is that there are very few verticals within the horizontal, so if the "big players" provide for those markets, there is little to no market left for anyone who wants to get a foot in the door. I'd be willing to bet that 90% or more of the negative comments in this thread about the initiative are from people who work with or for those smaller players, and who see their jobs disappearing as the megaproviders take over.

Agile works best when it's both easy and cheap to build, test, and deploy changes to an existing product. If your testing processes are slow and painful, or if your finished product is a very well defined embedded unit, like a toaster, Agile becomes only one of the many approaches you might choose.

For example, if you're building a pacemaker or an airplane flight control system, there's an awful lot of engineering and design that has to go in up front. It all has to work together and be perfect the first time, because if you get anything wrong, you've got dead bodies on your hands. Agile may not be your best choice here.

If you're burning a CD-ROM release of software, you better be putting out a disk you can live with. What goes in the box needs to have a reasonable chance of working well at every client's site. If you have an automatic online updater, it's somewhat less important, but still, you don't want to ship a bad version.

But if you're building an iPhone app, you can put out a crappy 1.0 version just to see if people will fall for your advertising gimmicks and download it. Next week you can push a version 1.1 out to add a few features and fix a few bugs, version 1.2 can follow a couple weeks later, and so on. Most iPhone users are conditioned to clicking the "update all" button every day or two, and many people are tolerant of feature-poor apps. Same with web sites. You can release a new web site to the world four times a day, if you want. The trick is that it costs you almost nothing to push out a new version of software.

Even when you can't deliver to all your end users quickly or cheaply, you can almost always use an Agile or iterative methodology to evolve the product with your clients and beta testers. The ideas for a car start out as rough designs that are tested and iterated until a working prototype exists.

If your problem is with development and testing, though, then your options are limited. If you can't start by running automated unit tests and automated system tests of your software, Agile is just one more way to throw your money away quickly.

I agree, but I think if you're been doing science and math for those 13 years prior to the university, you already understand this to a certain degree. Also I was in engineering, and my math prof's were either engineers or applied mathematicians, there were very few pure theorists as may be more common in a liberal arts university.

Yeah, my bad. If you need an excuse:

I'm an American; I can't be expected to know anything about world geography.

That sounds too much like 'pay to play', and is a bit corrupt for my tastes. Google holds the cards, not the politician. They could build their multimillion dollar data center somewhere else, and allow the good Senator to exist without the benefits that the increase to his tax and voter base would bring.

Donating to a politician of any stripe is guaranteed to cheese off 49.9% of the people.

Very few of us are "qualified" to do what we do, we oversell ourselves (within the limits of reason), work ourselves to death training ourselves on the job while doing something badly that we should probably have received a few weeks of training to do properly but the company won't pay for.

I don't mind being an asshole like this, but some people (like my wife, who has a EE degree) don't feel comfortable playing the game like this. If someone asks her a signal integrity question, she says she doesn't know. But she actually knows quite a bit more than most people know, she just doesn't like to venture out of her comfort zone.

You can't be like that, you have to go out on a limb a bit. Senior engineers who know their stuff will know you're out there, but they'll like the initiative. Some managers and senior idiots may not know but think you're smart.

To invent a chip, depending on what it does and how big it is, requires $1M-$50M in investment, sometimes more. Tee second you ask for that kind of money, there is no "your own" company, at best you're a major shareholder.

Also innovation is weighed too heavily these days, nothing gets done without execution and an educated, trained workforce who can execute cleanly and flawlessly. Those people don't come cheap. Further, in the process of executing, you actually innovate quite a lot, as you discover new, hard problems you wouldn't have seen before. Innovation of this nature is not rewarded at all, except maybe your name on a patent, which with $.50 won't get you a cup of coffee.

You're talking about "getting rich", the rest of us are talking about "good paying jobs". You'll never get rich working a good paying job, neither as an engineer nor a doctor nor lawyer or any other profession, except maybe senior executive (for reasons I can't really understand). The "getting rich" is always for entrepreneurs and investors, of which the market can bear only a small amount.

The incidents I read about that led to the doctrine of Crew Resource Management were from American carriers. Captains would try to do everything themselves and ignore their teammates.

We're talking about a human interaction failure mode, not some exotic Asian culture thing.

I make 100% more than when I started, and started before the dot boom. But i do job hop every 3-5 years, I am a squeaky wheel, I work 80-100 hrs a week and I drive a hard bargain. I am not afraid to leave an employer after a year if I believe they haven't held their end of the bargain or try to bait and switch me into a non-technical job (systems engineering, fae, project management, etc.). I believe the ceiling is perhaps 30% above where I am at, which at 36 is still somewhat disheartening considering that what I do directly impacts the bottom line, and 6 months of my work can provably produce tens of millions in revenue, of which I see a microscopic amount.

However I am also seeing opportunities dry up and go overseas, I'm seeing "quantity over quality" hiring practices particularly at abusive employers like Intel and AMD, and every job tries to push either more management or more offshore labor training on me as a requirement, which I refuse to do. It is unclear I will be able to realize that 30% in the time it takes for me to get it, versus the rate of market collapse. Intel's CEO (former or soon to be former) was fond of trying to lure people to EE saying something like "and you can make 25% over average". That's hardly worth the degree and the stress of diffeq and the labs, but that probably represents what Wall Street wants to see in labor costs, and what the industry is going to be doing over the next decade in terms of further wage stagnation/depression via labor choices and overseas development.

I really don't recommend EE as a career choice for anyone who is in college now. The day is going to come where it's either organize/unionize or let it go overseas, but engineers being engineers, I doubt we'll ever work together though and set a bar or board certification system and get it codified into law. Everyone thinks he's better, or everyone is a mini-entrepreneur who likes to pretend he's an investor or going to make it big, thus we all get poorer. Doctors and lawyers figured this out a long time go, but engineers, EE, ME and even CS, are fairly stupid and continue to empathize too much with management. You don't go to the bargaining table feeling sorry for your opponent, you go there and take every dollar you can, knowing full well there's no deal until the other party is getting enough to make their ends meet.

And if you think working the back end and having the government intercede on overseas and H1-B use is "unfair", then you're part of the problem. Take every dime you can get, by force. They will too, and won't respect you if you don't. All this talk about economic philosophies and principles is just pure bullshit. Capitalism is all about The Deal, and you are obligated to make the best deal for yourself as possible, however you can. We've learned from Wall Street this includes playing dirty pool and having absolutely no morals.

They'd be better off acting honestly than entering politics. If OK won't give them what they need, move next door to TX or somewhere they'll get the concessions they seek.

Jumping in bed with a politician can only give you the venereal diseases they have - it can't cure any problems you started with.