It's a statistics game. You make a test then feed it to a few different groups of known skill levels, i.e. "people who already have a PhD", "bright people with a bachelor's degree", "gifted amateur", "dumber-than-a-sack-full-of-hammers-asshole-off-th e-street", etc. You then tweak the questions and scoring until a random person with a given skill level will be assigned to the proper category on the basis of a test score with some desired percentage of accuracy. You then set the "bar" for the test to give the desired number of "qualified" applicants for graduate school each year.
The problems discussed above will most likely be fixed in the next revision of the test; cheating will obviously be ineffective for awhile, and the scores will be recalculated as above so as to provide a better gauge of ability. However, I am disturbed that the rote-ability study-guide-memorization seems to be effective for this class of tests, because when the statistics are cooked the next time to detect "qualified" applicants, the bar will have risen to astronomical levels. This gives an advantage to persons with the free subsidized time/eidetic memory/coerced performance requirements that allows one to regurgitate a study guide at will, not necessarily those with the empirically greater skill. (Case in point: East Asia/Indian subcontinent. Solution? Add creativity-based questions to the test, and watch the average scores from that corner of the world drop like a rock. This is typically not amenable to a standard multiple-choice examination, though.)
As far as this year, well, I guess everybody who was planning to get into CS grad school is SOL. Tough luck. Maybe they should break down and get a real degree, like one in mathematics or engineering. (If it's got a "science" in the name, it isn't. >;->)
This is not a democracy. It is a constitutional republic - look up the meaning of the word. That does not mean that there is any such thing as "government of the people, by the people, for the people"; it _does_ mean that we are _supposed_ to have some rules that cannot be broken, even by a majority of the population. But that's a discussion for a later thread.
Cringely is spot-on with this one. It is unfortunate that people blither on endlessly about "write your representative!", as if that has had, does now, or will have any effect whatsoever on legislation of this type. Frankly, having people write letters to their congressmen is pointless, unless each one of them is including a $100 check with their letter. This is not an issue that "most people" care about. That means that it can be safely ignored by virtually any politician except in extremely bizarre circumstances, like the "geek vote" being the crucial segment of the population that politicians fight for to springboard into office. (This has roughly the same probability of occurrence as Bill Gates spontaneously deciding to dissolve Microsoft as a corporation and turn it into a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting BSD on the desktop.)
Given that you are never going to get enough of the general population up in arms over this to make any kind of a difference, your only other options to defeat this law are either a) form a lobbying group and pony up some cash, because you're going to need it, or b) massive civil disobedience over the limit required to effectively "break" the system. (And by the way, to reference an earlier message, do the math; if the prisons are swelled with disobedient citizen-units who are not otherwise deviant, "prison rape" becomes a non-issue. The relatively small number of "hardened" criminals in a prison is not, or at least _should_ not, be sufficient to subdue such a large mass of people.)
The first would most likely work - there ought to be enough geeks by now who have enough money to be able to force the issue by providing money to these various issues. I do, however, really relish the thought of the second. A nice big collective "Up Yours" to these wankers is just what the doctor ordered right now.
Unfortunately, that does require sacrifice. It means you might lose your job, you might spend time in jail, you might be punished and shit on by the System. Remember, though, ladies and gentlemen - when everything is a crime, everyone is a criminal. You are probably _already_ illegal. Unless you value being viewed as an easily-replaceable net-consumer worker-drone citizen-unit by The Powers That Be, and enjoy being made to do the bidding of everyone else in a position of dubious authority over you, you'd better find a pair of feet to stand up, a voice to say "Screw you", and a middle finger to wave proudly at the secret chiefs of the world.
I think most people here are missing the point of this.
I am not an optical engineer, but the important part of this is not "you cannot duplicate this token", since that didn't appear to be in anything I read; it's "you cannot duplicate this token _by reading the interference pattern or disassembling/probing inside_", which is a different problem entirely.
I suspect that with sufficiently high-quality materials and production controls, it _is_ possible to duplicate these in the production phase, which then makes it a useful toy; make two of them that have the same interference pattern, and given identical readers, you have a one-time pad that you can use for quite a while. I don't know how they're embedding the glass spheres in the epoxy, but with a finite number of positions for each glass ball in the epoxy (small enough to be useful, large enough to be secure), you might be able to have either coded duplicates (like keys; "2488210366" == "glass balls in pattern X") or a "mold" system where you position the balls identically for a pair of tokens and then destroy the mold, making it impossible to recreate the tokens. Either way has its useful features.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a statistics game. You make a test then feed it to a few different groups of known skill levels, i.e. "people who already have a PhD", "bright people with a bachelor's degree", "gifted amateur", "dumber-than-a-sack-full-of-hammers-asshole-off-th e-street", etc. You then tweak the questions and scoring until a random person with a given skill level will be assigned to the proper category on the basis of a test score with some desired percentage of accuracy. You then set the "bar" for the test to give the desired number of "qualified" applicants for graduate school each year.
The problems discussed above will most likely be fixed in the next revision of the test; cheating will obviously be ineffective for awhile, and the scores will be recalculated as above so as to provide a better gauge of ability. However, I am disturbed that the rote-ability study-guide-memorization seems to be effective for this class of tests, because when the statistics are cooked the next time to detect "qualified" applicants, the bar will have risen to astronomical levels. This gives an advantage to persons with the free subsidized time/eidetic memory/coerced performance requirements that allows one to regurgitate a study guide at will, not necessarily those with the empirically greater skill. (Case in point: East Asia/Indian subcontinent. Solution? Add creativity-based questions to the test, and watch the average scores from that corner of the world drop like a rock. This is typically not amenable to a standard multiple-choice examination, though.)
As far as this year, well, I guess everybody who was planning to get into CS grad school is SOL. Tough luck. Maybe they should break down and get a real degree, like one in mathematics or engineering. (If it's got a "science" in the name, it isn't. >;->)
-SD
This is not a democracy. It is a constitutional republic - look up the meaning of the word. That does not mean that there is any such thing as "government of the people, by the people, for the people"; it _does_ mean that we are _supposed_ to have some rules that cannot be broken, even by a majority of the population. But that's a discussion for a later thread.
Cringely is spot-on with this one. It is unfortunate that people blither on endlessly about "write your representative!", as if that has had, does now, or will have any effect whatsoever on legislation of this type. Frankly, having people write letters to their congressmen is pointless, unless each one of them is including a $100 check with their letter. This is not an issue that "most people" care about. That means that it can be safely ignored by virtually any politician except in extremely bizarre circumstances, like the "geek vote" being the crucial segment of the population that politicians fight for to springboard into office. (This has roughly the same probability of occurrence as Bill Gates spontaneously deciding to dissolve Microsoft as a corporation and turn it into a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting BSD on the desktop.)
Given that you are never going to get enough of the general population up in arms over this to make any kind of a difference, your only other options to defeat this law are either a) form a lobbying group and pony up some cash, because you're going to need it, or b) massive civil disobedience over the limit required to effectively "break" the system. (And by the way, to reference an earlier message, do the math; if the prisons are swelled with disobedient citizen-units who are not otherwise deviant, "prison rape" becomes a non-issue. The relatively small number of "hardened" criminals in a prison is not, or at least _should_ not, be sufficient to subdue such a large mass of people.)
The first would most likely work - there ought to be enough geeks by now who have enough money to be able to force the issue by providing money to these various issues. I do, however, really relish the thought of the second. A nice big collective "Up Yours" to these wankers is just what the doctor ordered right now.
Unfortunately, that does require sacrifice. It means you might lose your job, you might spend time in jail, you might be punished and shit on by the System. Remember, though, ladies and gentlemen - when everything is a crime, everyone is a criminal. You are probably _already_ illegal. Unless you value being viewed as an easily-replaceable net-consumer worker-drone citizen-unit by The Powers That Be, and enjoy being made to do the bidding of everyone else in a position of dubious authority over you, you'd better find a pair of feet to stand up, a voice to say "Screw you", and a middle finger to wave proudly at the secret chiefs of the world.
-SD
I think most people here are missing the point of this.
I am not an optical engineer, but the important part of this is not "you cannot duplicate this token", since that didn't appear to be in anything I read; it's "you cannot duplicate this token _by reading the interference pattern or disassembling/probing inside_", which is a different problem entirely.
I suspect that with sufficiently high-quality materials and production controls, it _is_ possible to duplicate these in the production phase, which then makes it a useful toy; make two of them that have the same interference pattern, and given identical readers, you have a one-time pad that you can use for quite a while. I don't know how they're embedding the glass spheres in the epoxy, but with a finite number of positions for each glass ball in the epoxy (small enough to be useful, large enough to be secure), you might be able to have either coded duplicates (like keys; "2488210366" == "glass balls in pattern X") or a "mold" system where you position the balls identically for a pair of tokens and then destroy the mold, making it impossible to recreate the tokens. Either way has its useful features.
--
SD