Do you trust your bank with your money? Even though they don't keep it at your business and you can't stand behind them and watch what they do with it? Your fortune is at stake. Why do you trust them?
Do you trust your grocer to give you clean, fresh meats? Even though you can't go in the back, see how they're stored and watch them being cut? Your health is at stake. Why do you trust them?
Do you trust your pharmacy to give you the correct medication? Even though you dropped the prescription off, will pick it up later and don't know the look of one pill from another? Your life is at stake. Why do you trust them?
I haven't been to the Udvar-Hazy Center yet, but I plan on getting out there at some point. The problem there is that is is not all that close to the rest of the Smithsonian museums.
They needed a long enough runway to fly in the big planes. That means they either build their own or put it next to an existing large airport. No space to build a runway anywhere near the rest of the museums and no space to build a museum near national airport.
Attractions include a space shuttle, a Concorde, an SR-71 Blackbird and hundreds of other aircraft, spacecraft, missiles, engines and so on. Also has a 6-story IMAX.
SciTrek in Atlanta used to be a winner but I hear they closed.
The U of Hawaii telescope at the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii is a neat thing to go see, but it is only rarely open to the public so schedule carefully. Plus how many places can you drive from sea level to 13,000 feet in just a few hours?
Manslaughter requires a finding of recklessness. You can't just have killed someone, you have to have been behaving recklessly and killed someone as a result. If a guy randomly jumps out in front of your car and you mow him down, it isn't manslaughter. You have to be drunk or distracted or something else where you should have been able to avoid hitting him but didn't.
Was ACORN's behavior reckless? In 20/20 hindsight, ACORN paid inadequate attention to the possibility of fraud. But without benefit of hindsight, was that activity reckless? Not clearly enough for any prosecutors to pursue them anyway.
Should I evade the consequences of my actions if I tell the judge "I'm sorry your honour. I didn't think it would go off".
That sort of thing is typically the difference between murder and manslaughter. Manslaughter is when you're too irresponsible to realize that what you're doing is likely to get someone killed.
Also, don't forget that hindsight is 20/20. If you point a gun at someone and pull the trigger it's bluntly obvious that if you've made a mistake disarming it, you're going to kill the person. People have done this before. It has been well publicized. It isn't (or at least wasn't) nearly as obvious that if you pay a bunch of people to register voters, some will risk the laws wrath by submitting fakes.
If the process corrupts the result before it's verified then it isn't self-enforcing it's self-defeating.
In the half-cutting protocol the desired result is a fair division. It doesn't matter if I cut the cake 50/50 or 75/25 because either way I get the slice that's fair. I might intentionally cut one slice a little smaller because it has more icing.
That isn't true in show-of-hands because the desired result of a vote is the majority opinion, not necessarily the popular opinion.
The show of hands is not self-enforcing precisely because a non-secret ballot is subject to coercion. People vote their peers instead of their conscience.
Selecting a security protocol that adversely alters the results is a common mistake among information security personnel.
You're going to quibble in an interview for a position that pays $75k - $100k a year over a $10 box of pens?!?!
No. For one thing, $100k isn't enough to pique my interest any more. But even when it was, I'm not going to quibble. I'm going to invite the employer to quibble over a $10 box of pens. It's a weed-out question. The answer I'm looking for is: It's a creative, professional position. We don't care if you use a feather quill if it helps you get the job done.
If the answer is, "no, we really don't do that" I'm certainly not going to argue about it. The question has served its purpose: it has outed an employer that for all its claims of treating its employees well actually treats them like automatons.
1. Will you put me in an office instead of a cube?
For most jobs and companies this question will only signal that you're pompus, pretentious, and demanding. Smaller companies are going to have extremely limited office space, and will have their own criteria for how it is allocated.
9 times out of 10 you're absolutely right. The tenth time, you've found a gem of a place to work.
If your major job search goal is to become employed or maximize your salary, don't ask this question.
If your goal is to find a better, more satisfying job then you should push the prospective employer just a little bit and see how he responds. If he isn't accommodating when it's still easy for you to walk away, it won't get any better after you're hired and can't quickly walk away without making a hash of your job history.
2. I have my own [chair/computer keyboard/mini fridge]. Is it alright if I bring it in and use it?
Again, I think this is pretty demanding for an interview question.
If they won't allow you to bring in your own keyboard/monitor/chair, run away just as fast as you can. Companies that won't accommodate such a trivial request are the same places where often-senseless policy will define every moment of your day. And if it's a $120k position, how worried should I really be about the remote possibility of them stealing my $1k Aeron chair?
As for results, here's how things have worked out for me in the last 5 job searches:
5. Temp position. Took as-is on the basis that I would walk away in 3 months if I didn't like it.
4. Asked the flexible schedule question. Was lied to. Job was rule-bound and very disappointing.
3. Asked the flexible schedule question. Got a Yes. Terrific job; loved it.
2. Asked the office question. Got a flat no. Accepted the position anyway since the pay was great and it seemed such a perfect fit for my skills. Worst job I've ever had. They kept throwing up insurmountable policy barriers to actually doing the work they hired me for.
1. Asked the office question. Got a meeting with the company's president. No office but he offered my pick of the available cubes and okayed rearranging the furniture to my taste. In other words, although he didn't offer what I asked for, he made a reasonable attempt to be accommodating. It's one of the best jobs I've had. I'm very happy there.
After listening carefully to their presentation during the interview, ask one but no more than one "difficult" question, something where they'll have a hard time accommodating you if they're not set up that way. Some questions include:
1. Will you put me in an office instead of a cube?
Remember, you'll be spending a significant part of your life here. You should have a comfortable working environment which matches your individual needs and wants. Offices generally cost the company about $2000-$3000 more per year. If you push them for an extra $3000 salary, 90% of companies will agree but if you push them to alter the office environment 90% won't. The point of this question is to see how accommodating they are. Will these people pay attention to your unique goals and desires as an individual? Or are you a cog in the machine that fills out a form to replace your broken office chair with the another of the standard crappy office chair?
The "office" question is particularly good in this respect because it cuts to the heart of the "do you respect your employees as individuals?" question. Too many companies use them as a status symbol instead of a productivity booster.
Milder questions in the same vein include:
2. I have my own [chair/computer keyboard/mini fridge]. Is it alright if I bring it in and use it?
3. I have particular brands pens and pencils I use as a matter of personal preference. Will you reimburse me if I buy them from Office Depot or am I expected to use only the office supplies the company provides?
4. After I've been here a few months and fully integrated with the rest of the team, are you willing to consider having me telecommute for part of the week?
5. How flexible are your work hours? Can I come in at 10:30/leave at 3:30 in order to avoid rush hour traffic?
Take care to ask only one of these questions. You don't want to present yourself as difficult and needy. You just want to get a measure of their willingness to interact with you as an individual. Also, try to avoid the ones that they've already hinted are no-no's within their company. If they're already said that the hours are 9 to 5, M-F, don't ask about flex hours and telecommuting.
One last thing: on-site consulting for the Government where you work for a private company but in an government-provided office environment at a site manned by government employees is just about the worst job in the world. Your co-workers are often some of the nicest people you'll meet, but you are a cog in the machine and there is absolutely nothing you or they can do about it. If you must work on site for the government, do it as a direct government employee. They're still insanely rule-bound, but at least then the rules work in your favor.
In the end, what you'd likely have is no proof your client did it, just wild ass speculations, no proof of any harm, even if they did, and so on.
This was a civil, not criminal case. Civil cases turn on the weight of the evidence, not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. If more evidence says you did it than says you didn't, you lose.
Your natural gas company charges you a monthly connection fee, even in the summer when you don't use it. Just 'cause you're not burning gas, they still have to maintain the pipes.
Your ISP charges you a monthly fee for your Internet link regardless of whether you transmit any packets. They have to maintain their infrastructure on the expectation that you can use it at any time. That costs them money whether you use it or not.
Singling out solar customers and only making them pay a fee seems unfair and if it isn't illegal it should be. But simply saying, hey: there's a minimum monthly fee for an electrical hookup whether you use it or not doesn't strike me as out of line.
The pair recommended a digital signature scheme to authenticate the call-home process.
How's that going to help? If you can replace the IP address then you can replace the certificate and signature too. If you have access to modify the BIOS flash, it's game over.
Creativity short of schizophrenia is a better metric of *human* intelligence than survival or logic or spacial recognition or any of the rest of the mess that AI researches try to measure intelligence with.
I'd be happy if I could just cancel my cell phone voicemail entirely and have it keep ringing until I answer or the caller gives up like a normal phone does.
My experience has been that sharing the ideas creates contacts and opportunities which keep me employed at work I love and, last week, sent me all expenses paid to Hawaii where on the Big Island I did off-road driving like a maniac in a rented Jeep through lava deserts to beautiful deserted beaches.
You are, as you put it, "constantly coming up with clever ideas." Don't worry about it if someone swipes one of them. Sooner or later, entrepreneurial folks who you become acquainted with notice that you're an idea man and some will pay to have you put your creativity to work on their projects. And if you tend to have really good ideas, they'll pay you quite well.
And as the entrepreneurial guys decide to jump out and start the next company, your name is on the list they'll invite to join them.
Of course, if you keep the ideas to yourself, no one will ever notice how clever you really are and the opportunities that could have been yours will swing wide of you instead.
They still block transfers for 60 days after a registrant's contact update,
I *want* them to do that for my domain names. Let's face it: passwords get hacked. Even yours. If the the registrar where *YOU* am the paying customer still holds the domain name, that damage can be promptly undone. Good luck getting [random non-English registrar] to undo a stolen name without going through months and thousands of dollars with the UDRP.
In prohibiting this behavior, ICANN expresses a confidence in the system security which is unwarranted by the operational reality.
The school I am now attending teaches what seems like every language in the book.
Back when I was in college they had a rule: CS majors were not permitted to take computer language classes for credit. One of the professors explained it this way: As a Computer Scientist you will use many computer languages over the course of your career. You're expected to learn any computer language you need to know whenever you need to know it. You're not here to learn a computer language; you're here to learn the fundamentals of Computer Science which will be applicable in any language.
So, my comment for the poster is this: welcome to a real school and congratulations on your admission. Don't sweat what employers are/aren't looking for. For folks with a deep understanding of computer science, there are jobs to be had in every programming language. Even lisp if you can believe that. Your time at this school will prepare you for an enjoyable software development job so you won't end up stuck as a routinely disrespected code monkey.
But I know you're going to sweat it anyway, so here's my advice: pick a language you like and start writing open source with it. By the time you graduate, you'll have considerable experience.
I'm hesitant to say he's full of shit without hearing a bit more of the debate around his ideas.
There really isn't a debate around his ideas, at least not any more.
The hitch is management overhead. Managing a flow requires remembering the flow. That means data structures and stateful processing. It's expensive and no one has demonstrated hardware accelerators that do a good job of it. On the other hand, devices like a TCAM can accelerate stateless packet switching a couple orders of magnitude past what's possible with a generic PC.
At low data rates where DRAM latency is not an issue (presently around the 500mbps range), flows can work and accomplish much of what he claims. At higher data rates (like the 10-100gbps links on the backbone) we simply can't build hardware capable of managing flows for any kind of reasonable price.
Beyond that, Larry has really missed the boat. The next routing challenge isn't raw bits per second. That's pretty much in hand. Rather the next challenge is the number of routes in the system. If you want two ISPs for reliability (instead of one), you currently have to announce a route into the backbone that is processed by every single router in the backbone even if it never sees your packets. That currently costs about $8k per route per year, the cost is falling a lot more slowly than the route count is climbing and the lack of filtering and accounting systems mean that each one of those $8k's is an overhead cost to the backbone networks rather than a cost directly recoverable from the user who announced the route.
Flow based routing doesn't help us solve that challenge in the least. If anything, it makes it worse.
If you're interested in routing theory and research, I recommend the Internet Research Task Force Routing Research Group (IRTF RRG). They're chartered by the IETF to perform basic research into Internet routing architectures and anyone interested can participate.
Slashdot Mirror
They did. They charged her with "identifying a police officer with intent to harass" which is a fancy way of saying "stalking a police officer."
Or are you complaining that stalking a starlet or ex-girlfriend is not -precisely- the same crime as stalking a police officer?
Concise version: Just trust us. We'll only use the power wisely.
Do you trust your bank with your money? Even though they don't keep it at your business and you can't stand behind them and watch what they do with it? Your fortune is at stake. Why do you trust them?
Do you trust your grocer to give you clean, fresh meats? Even though you can't go in the back,
see how they're stored and watch them being cut? Your health is at stake. Why do you trust them?
Do you trust your pharmacy to give you the correct medication? Even though you dropped the prescription off, will pick it up later and don't know the look of one pill from another? Your life is at stake. Why do you trust them?
I trust I've answered your question.
I haven't been to the Udvar-Hazy Center yet, but I plan on getting out there at some point. The problem there is that is is not all that close to the rest of the Smithsonian museums.
They needed a long enough runway to fly in the big planes. That means they either build their own or put it next to an existing large airport. No space to build a runway anywhere near the rest of the museums and no space to build a museum near national airport.
The Udvar-Hazy Center (Smithsonian Air & Space Annex) is a must see if you're near DC. http://www.nasm.si.edu/UdvarHazy/
Attractions include a space shuttle, a Concorde, an SR-71 Blackbird and hundreds of other aircraft, spacecraft, missiles, engines and so on. Also has a 6-story IMAX.
SciTrek in Atlanta used to be a winner but I hear they closed.
The U of Hawaii telescope at the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii is a neat thing to go see, but it is only rarely open to the public so schedule carefully. Plus how many places can you drive from sea level to 13,000 feet in just a few hours?
Manslaughter requires a finding of recklessness. You can't just have killed someone, you have to have been behaving recklessly and killed someone as a result. If a guy randomly jumps out in front of your car and you mow him down, it isn't manslaughter. You have to be drunk or distracted or something else where you should have been able to avoid hitting him but didn't.
Was ACORN's behavior reckless? In 20/20 hindsight, ACORN paid inadequate attention to the possibility of fraud. But without benefit of hindsight, was that activity reckless? Not clearly enough for any prosecutors to pursue them anyway.
Should I evade the consequences of my actions if I tell the judge "I'm sorry your honour. I didn't think it would go off".
That sort of thing is typically the difference between murder and manslaughter. Manslaughter is when you're too irresponsible to realize that what you're doing is likely to get someone killed.
Also, don't forget that hindsight is 20/20. If you point a gun at someone and pull the trigger it's bluntly obvious that if you've made a mistake disarming it, you're going to kill the person. People have done this before. It has been well publicized. It isn't (or at least wasn't) nearly as obvious that if you pay a bunch of people to register voters, some will risk the laws wrath by submitting fakes.
Congratulations, you've invented an even dumber form of voting than the IETF hum-poll.
http://en.allexperts.com/e/h/hu/hum_poll.htm
If the process corrupts the result before it's verified then it isn't self-enforcing it's self-defeating.
In the half-cutting protocol the desired result is a fair division. It doesn't matter if I cut the cake 50/50 or 75/25 because either way I get the slice that's fair. I might intentionally cut one slice a little smaller because it has more icing.
That isn't true in show-of-hands because the desired result of a vote is the majority opinion, not necessarily the popular opinion.
The show of hands is not self-enforcing precisely because a non-secret ballot is subject to coercion. People vote their peers instead of their conscience.
Selecting a security protocol that adversely alters the results is a common mistake among information security personnel.
You're going to quibble in an interview for a position that pays $75k - $100k a year over a $10 box of pens?!?!
No. For one thing, $100k isn't enough to pique my interest any more. But even when it was, I'm not going to quibble. I'm going to invite the employer to quibble over a $10 box of pens. It's a weed-out question. The answer I'm looking for is: It's a creative, professional position. We don't care if you use a feather quill if it helps you get the job done.
If the answer is, "no, we really don't do that" I'm certainly not going to argue about it. The question has served its purpose: it has outed an employer that for all its claims of treating its employees well actually treats them like automatons.
1. Will you put me in an office instead of a cube?
For most jobs and companies this question will only signal that you're pompus, pretentious, and demanding. Smaller companies are going to have extremely limited office space, and will have their own criteria for how it is allocated.
9 times out of 10 you're absolutely right. The tenth time, you've found a gem of a place to work.
If your major job search goal is to become employed or maximize your salary, don't ask this question.
If your goal is to find a better, more satisfying job then you should push the prospective employer just a little bit and see how he responds. If he isn't accommodating when it's still easy for you to walk away, it won't get any better after you're hired and can't quickly walk away without making a hash of your job history.
2. I have my own [chair/computer keyboard/mini fridge]. Is it alright if I bring it in and use it?
Again, I think this is pretty demanding for an interview question.
If they won't allow you to bring in your own keyboard/monitor/chair, run away just as fast as you can. Companies that won't accommodate such a trivial request are the same places where often-senseless policy will define every moment of your day. And if it's a $120k position, how worried should I really be about the remote possibility of them stealing my $1k Aeron chair?
As for results, here's how things have worked out for me in the last 5 job searches:
5. Temp position. Took as-is on the basis that I would walk away in 3 months if I didn't like it.
4. Asked the flexible schedule question. Was lied to. Job was rule-bound and very disappointing.
3. Asked the flexible schedule question. Got a Yes. Terrific job; loved it.
2. Asked the office question. Got a flat no. Accepted the position anyway since the pay was great and it seemed such a perfect fit for my skills. Worst job I've ever had. They kept throwing up insurmountable policy barriers to actually doing the work they hired me for.
1. Asked the office question. Got a meeting with the company's president. No office but he offered my pick of the available cubes and okayed rearranging the furniture to my taste. In other words, although he didn't offer what I asked for, he made a reasonable attempt to be accommodating. It's one of the best jobs I've had. I'm very happy there.
After listening carefully to their presentation during the interview, ask one but no more than one "difficult" question, something where they'll have a hard time accommodating you if they're not set up that way. Some questions include:
1. Will you put me in an office instead of a cube?
Remember, you'll be spending a significant part of your life here. You should have a comfortable working environment which matches your individual needs and wants. Offices generally cost the company about $2000-$3000 more per year. If you push them for an extra $3000 salary, 90% of companies will agree but if you push them to alter the office environment 90% won't. The point of this question is to see how accommodating they are. Will these people pay attention to your unique goals and desires as an individual? Or are you a cog in the machine that fills out a form to replace your broken office chair with the another of the standard crappy office chair?
The "office" question is particularly good in this respect because it cuts to the heart of the "do you respect your employees as individuals?" question. Too many companies use them as a status symbol instead of a productivity booster.
Milder questions in the same vein include:
2. I have my own [chair/computer keyboard/mini fridge]. Is it alright if I bring it in and use it?
3. I have particular brands pens and pencils I use as a matter of personal preference. Will you reimburse me if I buy them from Office Depot or am I expected to use only the office supplies the company provides?
4. After I've been here a few months and fully integrated with the rest of the team, are you willing to consider having me telecommute for part of the week?
5. How flexible are your work hours? Can I come in at 10:30/leave at 3:30 in order to avoid rush hour traffic?
Take care to ask only one of these questions. You don't want to present yourself as difficult and needy. You just want to get a measure of their willingness to interact with you as an individual. Also, try to avoid the ones that they've already hinted are no-no's within their company. If they're already said that the hours are 9 to 5, M-F, don't ask about flex hours and telecommuting.
One last thing: on-site consulting for the Government where you work for a private company but in an government-provided office environment at a site manned by government employees is just about the worst job in the world. Your co-workers are often some of the nicest people you'll meet, but you are a cog in the machine and there is absolutely nothing you or they can do about it. If you must work on site for the government, do it as a direct government employee. They're still insanely rule-bound, but at least then the rules work in your favor.
When I want to run their software I'll install it.
When I just want to -read- about their software, I don't want to have to -run- anything from them.
You crazy kids today will just run anything at all, never mind the risk of transmitting infections...
Maybe they can spend some of their spare time polishing the web site. With javascript off (via noscript) http://www.starcraft2.com/ is a blank page.
In the end, what you'd likely have is no proof your client did it, just wild ass speculations, no proof of any harm, even if they did, and so on.
This was a civil, not criminal case. Civil cases turn on the weight of the evidence, not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. If more evidence says you did it than says you didn't, you lose.
Your natural gas company charges you a monthly connection fee, even in the summer when you don't use it. Just 'cause you're not burning gas, they still have to maintain the pipes.
Your ISP charges you a monthly fee for your Internet link regardless of whether you transmit any packets. They have to maintain their infrastructure on the expectation that you can use it at any time. That costs them money whether you use it or not.
Singling out solar customers and only making them pay a fee seems unfair and if it isn't illegal it should be. But simply saying, hey: there's a minimum monthly fee for an electrical hookup whether you use it or not doesn't strike me as out of line.
The pair recommended a digital signature scheme to authenticate the call-home process.
How's that going to help? If you can replace the IP address then you can replace the certificate and signature too. If you have access to modify the BIOS flash, it's game over.
Creativity short of schizophrenia is a better metric of *human* intelligence than survival or logic or spacial recognition or any of the rest of the mess that AI researches try to measure intelligence with.
I'd be happy if I could just cancel my cell phone voicemail entirely and have it keep ringing until I answer or the caller gives up like a normal phone does.
With a song or book, the copyrighted thing is the end result and what is distributed to users.
That's not really true. If I buy a CD, I don't magically have a copy of the unmixed master tapes when the copyright expires.
My experience has been that sharing the ideas creates contacts and opportunities which keep me employed at work I love and, last week, sent me all expenses paid to Hawaii where on the Big Island I did off-road driving like a maniac in a rented Jeep through lava deserts to beautiful deserted beaches.
You are, as you put it, "constantly coming up with clever ideas." Don't worry about it if someone swipes one of them. Sooner or later, entrepreneurial folks who you become acquainted with notice that you're an idea man and some will pay to have you put your creativity to work on their projects. And if you tend to have really good ideas, they'll pay you quite well.
And as the entrepreneurial guys decide to jump out and start the next company, your name is on the list they'll invite to join them.
Of course, if you keep the ideas to yourself, no one will ever notice how clever you really are and the opportunities that could have been yours will swing wide of you instead.
They still block transfers for 60 days after a registrant's contact update,
I *want* them to do that for my domain names. Let's face it: passwords get hacked. Even yours. If the the registrar where *YOU* am the paying customer still holds the domain name, that damage can be promptly undone. Good luck getting [random non-English registrar] to undo a stolen name without going through months and thousands of dollars with the UDRP.
In prohibiting this behavior, ICANN expresses a confidence in the system security which is unwarranted by the operational reality.
The school I am now attending teaches what seems like every language in the book.
Back when I was in college they had a rule: CS majors were not permitted to take computer language classes for credit. One of the professors explained it this way: As a Computer Scientist you will use many computer languages over the course of your career. You're expected to learn any computer language you need to know whenever you need to know it. You're not here to learn a computer language; you're here to learn the fundamentals of Computer Science which will be applicable in any language.
So, my comment for the poster is this: welcome to a real school and congratulations on your admission. Don't sweat what employers are/aren't looking for. For folks with a deep understanding of computer science, there are jobs to be had in every programming language. Even lisp if you can believe that. Your time at this school will prepare you for an enjoyable software development job so you won't end up stuck as a routinely disrespected code monkey.
But I know you're going to sweat it anyway, so here's my advice: pick a language you like and start writing open source with it. By the time you graduate, you'll have considerable experience.
I'm hesitant to say he's full of shit without hearing a bit more of the debate around his ideas.
There really isn't a debate around his ideas, at least not any more.
The hitch is management overhead. Managing a flow requires remembering the flow. That means data structures and stateful processing. It's expensive and no one has demonstrated hardware accelerators that do a good job of it. On the other hand, devices like a TCAM can accelerate stateless packet switching a couple orders of magnitude past what's possible with a generic PC.
At low data rates where DRAM latency is not an issue (presently around the 500mbps range), flows can work and accomplish much of what he claims. At higher data rates (like the 10-100gbps links on the backbone) we simply can't build hardware capable of managing flows for any kind of reasonable price.
Beyond that, Larry has really missed the boat. The next routing challenge isn't raw bits per second. That's pretty much in hand. Rather the next challenge is the number of routes in the system. If you want two ISPs for reliability (instead of one), you currently have to announce a route into the backbone that is processed by every single router in the backbone even if it never sees your packets. That currently costs about $8k per route per year, the cost is falling a lot more slowly than the route count is climbing and the lack of filtering and accounting systems mean that each one of those $8k's is an overhead cost to the backbone networks rather than a cost directly recoverable from the user who announced the route.
Flow based routing doesn't help us solve that challenge in the least. If anything, it makes it worse.
If you're interested in routing theory and research, I recommend the Internet Research Task Force Routing Research Group (IRTF RRG). They're chartered by the IETF to perform basic research into Internet routing architectures and anyone interested can participate.