"...the main difference between mathematicians and lawyers is that the mathematician's love for bizarre, pedantic arguments stays in the ivory towers."
We'd like that encryption back on your credit card and bank transfers, please.
Oh, and the compression on your JPEG images, we'll take that now, as well.
And the binary logic computing device, while we're at it.
"These machines are not 'switching votes'. They're just not..."
Reading the rest of your post I think what you really mean is that "These machines are not *intentionally switching votes*."
Nonetheless, what you have here is a hypothesis (the "Null Hypothesis"). You cannot definitively say "they're just not" without direct testing. Sure, I've seen a lot of user error in my days, users thinking they did one thing when they didn't.
But you know what? I've seen nearly as many snarky IT guys or fellow programmers reject user observations out-of-hand, and have the users turn out to be correct in the end. So the "Alternative Hypothesus" is that the machines are in fact switching votes, intentionally or by software error.
I agree with you that switching to paper ballots will remove a lot of the opportunity for errors of all types.
What I'd like to see is an analysis of what percentage of the original 13 colonies is in the Constitution-free zone? Just eyeballing it looks like around 80%.
"It is a case where they don't really need government intervention as most companies will regulate themseles on this front especially if they don't have immunity to legal problems if something goes wrong."
The evidence does not back up your theory.
The "legal problems" in question are too big and strike too rarely for companies to deal with them. When they come, they are disastrous and unmanageable. See: Enron and Arthur Anderson. See: Mortgage lending crisis.
"... i.e. finding ways to express a complex procedure in terms of a limited set of simple instructions."
Well, look, you couldn't avoid saying it right there. "In terms of a limited set." So what *is* the limited set? You need that first.
Programming is not the same as backward engineering an API. It's about taking an apparently minute, known set of operations and building up interesting, surprising things out of it. So I would say that the PB&J exercise has it precisely backwards.
You might think it's equivalent, but as a teacher I know that a detail like that makes an enormous difference the first time students encounter something. The people who intuit that the lesson is inherently unfair -- that there never was a possible correct answer -- may be lost to programming forever. Seriously.
Although mentioned several times, I actually don't like that approach. As a student, it seems inherently unfair. In any normal math/CS you need to (1) define available terms/operations (API), then (2) apply terms in proofs or algorithms.
In this demonstration, the operations are not well-defined. Can I say "pick up knife"? Or do you need "place hand on knife"? Or do you need "curl fingers around knife, then press with thumb"? Personally I get enormously frustrated when someone does this in-minute-detail exercise without defining the available operations. That's -- as a matter of logic -- simply not possible.
Suggestions for a fix: (1) Give a handout of available operations for the exercise. (2) Do a maneuvering example using Google map's options for left, right, or continue straight. Etc.
"They happen DAILY and are attempted every second of every day."
Not actual breaches at a specific company where you're working. If the brass at Company A only deals with one massive data-theft every 20 years, then they can ignore the whole issue for pretty much their whole career.
You, sir, are full of bullshit and don't what the hell you're talking about. Sometimes that happens. Do you know member of a teacher's union? Have you talked with him/her? Do you know what the stated priorities are of any union in your local area?
Look, I was thinking about this today. The teachers are the ones in the classroom, working shoulder-to-shoulder with students, seeing their needs, hearing their cries. The alternative is to put all the power in administrators -- actual fat cats who make more than teachers -- who never see, hear, or deal with students. All they care about is money figures in a spreadsheet. You can dig up enormous numbers of stories where it was the teacher's union fighting for student safety and welfare, and the administration fighting them every step of the way.
Here's an example. I used to teach in Massachusetts at community college with a pretty weak union; a cranky dean ran everything pretty much as a fiefdom. Students failed the physics final? Pass 'em anyway, more money for the school. Teaching basic math/science? Not interested, give me a "sexy" new class like cybersecurity to advertise. Observe what's going on in the classrooms? No time for that -- I had to beg to get an assistant dean into my room one time a year, for like 5 minutes, and scrawl some smoke-up-my-ass about how everything's great (and demonstrating that he didn't have a clue what I'd been teaching).
A fellow teacher tells me about this kid who's in the engineering program. He took Calculus I three times before he just barely passed it. Now he's in Calculus II and failing that for the second time. The kid's obviously not cut out to be an engineer. Can anyone tell him this? No, because that would be less money for the school, and the dean would crack your nuts if he found out anyone had advised the student about that. So off they went, sucking money out of this hapless student year after year.
Now I'm in New York with a strong teacher's union. Instead of a dean, here my boss/employer is the department chairperson, a teacher herself. First thing she tells is do _not_ pass students who are unprepared into other classes. Last month she fought with administration to get smaller basic remedial classes, where students are really struggling. Here I get observed regularly -- every semester a different teacher comes into my room for a whole class period and writes up a 5+ page document on exactly what I did, puts it in my permanent record, and we have a 1/2 hour discussion about I can do to improve. Here I would feel very confident that I could politely advise a student on their own best-interests, even if it meant less tuition money to the college.
That's what the union is doing, specifically on the ground this week. Guess what's the #1 priority of the administration in their negotiating sessions? "Get rid of the chairpersons as union members." Remove their responsibilities to deans who are in administration, not teachers, not dealing with students.
It's really just common sense. Who's going to have a greater emotional connection and allegiance to students? Teachers in their classroom every day, or administrators in an office crunching budget figures? Those are really your only choices.
Look at this month's issue of "American Educator" magazine, from the American Federated Teacher's union. (http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/fall2008/index.htm) It's all about how to better judge and analyze how well teachers are doing. There's an article on peer review with what will be a surprising result to you -- it is the unions *fighting to fire more bad teachers*, because it hurts our profession, whereas the principals who hire them don't have the guts or care to start the process (p. 37). At one school where the union got involved in teacher evaluations, dismissals went up from 1% to 12% in the first year. You can see quotes from principals, surprised as you are, about how much more aggressive the union was about firing bad teachers than the administration would have been.
So to conclude: You are completely full of bullshit, ignorant on this issue, and don't know what the fuck you are talking about. Sometimes that happens; you can become more knowledgable. Maybe with luck this has been... educational.
How did this get modded up as "interesting"? It doesn't make any goddamn sense. Are people really falling for this "I'm too lazy but you can Google it" bullshit?
Are you telling me that CEOs also had to get designated as "entertainers" before they could make millions of dollars? That is not the way our economy works.
Highly doubt it. The problem with IT security breaches is that they're like earthquakes, flooding, or stock market crashes. They're too rare, too big, and too uniformly disastrous -- there generally won't be enough people left who remember it next time to do anything about it.
When I read this interview last month, I put it down and said to myself, "Wow, I think I just experienced a cultural/translation divide with the Japanese. That was really incoherent."
The whole critique of "competitive fun as opposed to cooperative fun", etc., seemed really unproductive. There's a bunch of new made-up words in the article -- that's always a red flag for me.
"Listen, I realize you're probably a 13 year old feeling suffocated by his parents - been there, done that. In the end, generally, thirteen year olds are nowhere near to being self-reliant. Also, there's more to self-reliance than finances."
Okay, this one got to me respond. I can pretty much guarantee that I'm older than you are. Possibly by a factor of x2.
The fact that young people actually think like you do... is itself a symptom how messed up this culture gets after "protecting" kids all the way to age 21. You seriously don't know how to function in the world after that point.
"It's targeted at parents of teenagers and seems like a generally good idea, especially if you get a break on your insurance."
It's a terrible idea. Teenagers need to be practicing setting their own responsibilities and limits. The more they're "protected" the less time they have to learn to be self-reliant.
Seriously, traditional societies recognize adulthood at, like 13. That's when you're physically mature. The more you fight that physical maturity vs. 2nd-class-citizenhood, the more fucked-up and schizophrenic people will become.
This is, unfortunately, a prelude or realization that Microsoft can embrace/extend/extinguish the _meaning of the phrase_ "open source" just as well as it can anything else.
Sadly, the exact same thing happened to all the "organic farmers". Big companies started slapping "organic" on all their products because it would sell, irrespective of any meaning behind the words.
The only defense would have been to trademark "organic" / "open source" and have it be held by some public committee, but it's too late now.
"No. The idea is that the value of stocks fluctuate over time. (Have you seen stock charts? those suckers can be crazy-volatile. all over the place.) Because you buy a fixed amount each month, you'll end up buying more of the stock when it's cheap, and less when it's expensive; as a result, you'll end up with a pile of stock for which you paid a below-average amount per share... You're on Slashdot. Go find some price history data on a few ETFs or mutual funds somewhere, and write a script to run a simulation if you don't believe me."
Yep, that's the myth in a nutshell! I've done this before. It always works out worse than if you'd just invested it all up front -- unless the overall trend is downwards.
Please give me an example of data where you think dollar-cost-averaging helps. I've never seen one to date.
"If you get far enough away from this universe, and I'm talking 'Douglas Adams' far, this universe would appear to be perfectly uniform."
That's a pretty bold claim. Other options could include (a) it's chaotic and has detail at all scales, (b) there's always more stuff but it has measure zero (countable vs. uncountble infinite sets), etc.
"... and take advantage of dollar cost averaging!"
From what I can tell, dollar-cost-averaging is a myth. I've never seen an example presented where it benefits the investor, unless you expect stocks to go _down_ over the long-term.
Personally, my best theory is that investment companies like it because it makes _their_ cash flow more predictable month-to-month.
"Also, they can't really stop the "analog hole" until they implant DRM-laden microchips in our ears, and forcibly encode all the world's audio sources. Or ban all consumer microphones and recording devices."
I feel like maybe we should change or duplicate the standard [a href="foobar"] tag to just say [go to:"foobar"]. Then when these cases come up it will be even more blatant that the free-speech question is really "Am I allowed to say 'go to: foobar'?".
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a mathematician, you insensitive clod!
"...the main difference between mathematicians and lawyers is that the mathematician's love for bizarre, pedantic arguments stays in the ivory towers."
We'd like that encryption back on your credit card and bank transfers, please.
Oh, and the compression on your JPEG images, we'll take that now, as well.
And the binary logic computing device, while we're at it.
"These machines are not 'switching votes'. They're just not..."
Reading the rest of your post I think what you really mean is that "These machines are not *intentionally switching votes*."
Nonetheless, what you have here is a hypothesis (the "Null Hypothesis"). You cannot definitively say "they're just not" without direct testing. Sure, I've seen a lot of user error in my days, users thinking they did one thing when they didn't.
But you know what? I've seen nearly as many snarky IT guys or fellow programmers reject user observations out-of-hand, and have the users turn out to be correct in the end. So the "Alternative Hypothesus" is that the machines are in fact switching votes, intentionally or by software error.
I agree with you that switching to paper ballots will remove a lot of the opportunity for errors of all types.
'Nuff said.
What I'd like to see is an analysis of what percentage of the original 13 colonies is in the Constitution-free zone? Just eyeballing it looks like around 80%.
30 seconds before we get someone posting the old classic, "It's not censorship if someone other than the government does it!"
"It is a case where they don't really need government intervention as most companies will regulate themseles on this front especially if they don't have immunity to legal problems if something goes wrong."
The evidence does not back up your theory.
The "legal problems" in question are too big and strike too rarely for companies to deal with them. When they come, they are disastrous and unmanageable. See: Enron and Arthur Anderson. See: Mortgage lending crisis.
"... i.e. finding ways to express a complex procedure in terms of a limited set of simple instructions."
Well, look, you couldn't avoid saying it right there. "In terms of a limited set." So what *is* the limited set? You need that first.
Programming is not the same as backward engineering an API. It's about taking an apparently minute, known set of operations and building up interesting, surprising things out of it. So I would say that the PB&J exercise has it precisely backwards.
You might think it's equivalent, but as a teacher I know that a detail like that makes an enormous difference the first time students encounter something. The people who intuit that the lesson is inherently unfair -- that there never was a possible correct answer -- may be lost to programming forever. Seriously.
Although mentioned several times, I actually don't like that approach. As a student, it seems inherently unfair. In any normal math/CS you need to (1) define available terms/operations (API), then (2) apply terms in proofs or algorithms.
In this demonstration, the operations are not well-defined. Can I say "pick up knife"? Or do you need "place hand on knife"? Or do you need "curl fingers around knife, then press with thumb"? Personally I get enormously frustrated when someone does this in-minute-detail exercise without defining the available operations. That's -- as a matter of logic -- simply not possible.
Suggestions for a fix: (1) Give a handout of available operations for the exercise. (2) Do a maneuvering example using Google map's options for left, right, or continue straight. Etc.
"They happen DAILY and are attempted every second of every day."
Not actual breaches at a specific company where you're working. If the brass at Company A only deals with one massive data-theft every 20 years, then they can ignore the whole issue for pretty much their whole career.
And so they will.
You, sir, are full of bullshit and don't what the hell you're talking about. Sometimes that happens. Do you know member of a teacher's union? Have you talked with him/her? Do you know what the stated priorities are of any union in your local area?
Look, I was thinking about this today. The teachers are the ones in the classroom, working shoulder-to-shoulder with students, seeing their needs, hearing their cries. The alternative is to put all the power in administrators -- actual fat cats who make more than teachers -- who never see, hear, or deal with students. All they care about is money figures in a spreadsheet. You can dig up enormous numbers of stories where it was the teacher's union fighting for student safety and welfare, and the administration fighting them every step of the way.
Here's an example. I used to teach in Massachusetts at community college with a pretty weak union; a cranky dean ran everything pretty much as a fiefdom. Students failed the physics final? Pass 'em anyway, more money for the school. Teaching basic math/science? Not interested, give me a "sexy" new class like cybersecurity to advertise. Observe what's going on in the classrooms? No time for that -- I had to beg to get an assistant dean into my room one time a year, for like 5 minutes, and scrawl some smoke-up-my-ass about how everything's great (and demonstrating that he didn't have a clue what I'd been teaching).
A fellow teacher tells me about this kid who's in the engineering program. He took Calculus I three times before he just barely passed it. Now he's in Calculus II and failing that for the second time. The kid's obviously not cut out to be an engineer. Can anyone tell him this? No, because that would be less money for the school, and the dean would crack your nuts if he found out anyone had advised the student about that. So off they went, sucking money out of this hapless student year after year.
Now I'm in New York with a strong teacher's union. Instead of a dean, here my boss/employer is the department chairperson, a teacher herself. First thing she tells is do _not_ pass students who are unprepared into other classes. Last month she fought with administration to get smaller basic remedial classes, where students are really struggling. Here I get observed regularly -- every semester a different teacher comes into my room for a whole class period and writes up a 5+ page document on exactly what I did, puts it in my permanent record, and we have a 1/2 hour discussion about I can do to improve. Here I would feel very confident that I could politely advise a student on their own best-interests, even if it meant less tuition money to the college.
That's what the union is doing, specifically on the ground this week. Guess what's the #1 priority of the administration in their negotiating sessions? "Get rid of the chairpersons as union members." Remove their responsibilities to deans who are in administration, not teachers, not dealing with students.
It's really just common sense. Who's going to have a greater emotional connection and allegiance to students? Teachers in their classroom every day, or administrators in an office crunching budget figures? Those are really your only choices.
Look at this month's issue of "American Educator" magazine, from the American Federated Teacher's union. (http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/fall2008/index.htm) It's all about how to better judge and analyze how well teachers are doing. There's an article on peer review with what will be a surprising result to you -- it is the unions *fighting to fire more bad teachers*, because it hurts our profession, whereas the principals who hire them don't have the guts or care to start the process (p. 37). At one school where the union got involved in teacher evaluations, dismissals went up from 1% to 12% in the first year. You can see quotes from principals, surprised as you are, about how much more aggressive the union was about firing bad teachers than the administration would have been.
So to conclude: You are completely full of bullshit, ignorant on this issue, and don't know what the fuck you are talking about. Sometimes that happens; you can become more knowledgable. Maybe with luck this has been... educational.
How did this get modded up as "interesting"? It doesn't make any goddamn sense. Are people really falling for this "I'm too lazy but you can Google it" bullshit?
Are you telling me that CEOs also had to get designated as "entertainers" before they could make millions of dollars? That is not the way our economy works.
"Will this wake them up?"
Highly doubt it. The problem with IT security breaches is that they're like earthquakes, flooding, or stock market crashes. They're too rare, too big, and too uniformly disastrous -- there generally won't be enough people left who remember it next time to do anything about it.
When I read this interview last month, I put it down and said to myself, "Wow, I think I just experienced a cultural/translation divide with the Japanese. That was really incoherent."
The whole critique of "competitive fun as opposed to cooperative fun", etc., seemed really unproductive. There's a bunch of new made-up words in the article -- that's always a red flag for me.
"Listen, I realize you're probably a 13 year old feeling suffocated by his parents - been there, done that. In the end, generally, thirteen year olds are nowhere near to being self-reliant. Also, there's more to self-reliance than finances."
Okay, this one got to me respond. I can pretty much guarantee that I'm older than you are. Possibly by a factor of x2.
The fact that young people actually think like you do... is itself a symptom how messed up this culture gets after "protecting" kids all the way to age 21. You seriously don't know how to function in the world after that point.
"It's targeted at parents of teenagers and seems like a generally good idea, especially if you get a break on your insurance."
It's a terrible idea. Teenagers need to be practicing setting their own responsibilities and limits. The more they're "protected" the less time they have to learn to be self-reliant.
Seriously, traditional societies recognize adulthood at, like 13. That's when you're physically mature. The more you fight that physical maturity vs. 2nd-class-citizenhood, the more fucked-up and schizophrenic people will become.
This is, unfortunately, a prelude or realization that Microsoft can embrace/extend/extinguish the _meaning of the phrase_ "open source" just as well as it can anything else.
Sadly, the exact same thing happened to all the "organic farmers". Big companies started slapping "organic" on all their products because it would sell, irrespective of any meaning behind the words.
The only defense would have been to trademark "organic" / "open source" and have it be held by some public committee, but it's too late now.
"No. The idea is that the value of stocks fluctuate over time. (Have you seen stock charts? those suckers can be crazy-volatile. all over the place.) Because you buy a fixed amount each month, you'll end up buying more of the stock when it's cheap, and less when it's expensive; as a result, you'll end up with a pile of stock for which you paid a below-average amount per share... You're on Slashdot. Go find some price history data on a few ETFs or mutual funds somewhere, and write a script to run a simulation if you don't believe me."
Yep, that's the myth in a nutshell! I've done this before. It always works out worse than if you'd just invested it all up front -- unless the overall trend is downwards.
Please give me an example of data where you think dollar-cost-averaging helps. I've never seen one to date.
That was in the pre-media monopoly era, so that makes a difference.
"If you get far enough away from this universe, and I'm talking 'Douglas Adams' far, this universe would appear to be perfectly uniform."
That's a pretty bold claim. Other options could include (a) it's chaotic and has detail at all scales, (b) there's always more stuff but it has measure zero (countable vs. uncountble infinite sets), etc.
"Just my take on it, I'm interested in maths, but resent the way mathematicians try to maintain their elitist clique."
LOL. That's the funniest thing I've read all day. Thanks for that.
"... and take advantage of dollar cost averaging!"
From what I can tell, dollar-cost-averaging is a myth. I've never seen an example presented where it benefits the investor, unless you expect stocks to go _down_ over the long-term.
Personally, my best theory is that investment companies like it because it makes _their_ cash flow more predictable month-to-month.
"Look at code in the 1980's it was usually written by people with out Computer Science Degrees, so there will be Goto and the like."
Look at my code from yesterday, it was written by a person without a Computer Science degree. There was a Goto and the like.
"Also, they can't really stop the "analog hole" until they implant DRM-laden microchips in our ears, and forcibly encode all the world's audio sources. Or ban all consumer microphones and recording devices."
For god's sake, don't give them any more ideas.
I feel like maybe we should change or duplicate the standard [a href="foobar"] tag to just say [go to:"foobar"]. Then when these cases come up it will be even more blatant that the free-speech question is really "Am I allowed to say 'go to: foobar'?".