That's what introductory classes are for. De-mystify software and give children the basic concepts and skills to pursue it, and an opportunity to see if it interests them.
Completely agree. Computer science is not out of reach of most students, but it has to be introduced in proper context.
I think what many people are missing in this "teach compsci!" movement is that a firm understanding of computer science requires a very solid basis in logic and abstract mathematics. Guess what we don't teach in high school? (as far as I know; it wasn't part of my school, and I never see it mentioned in anything I've read about common core, etc.): Basic propositional logic and symbolic logic. Number theory and discrete mathematics. Abstract algebra!! Abstract algebra, at least the basics of groups, is not difficult and out of reach -- we should totally be teaching high schoolers about groups, which awakens the ability to abstract and see patterns, which is fundamentally what programming (and really all of comp sci) is all about.
I'm not as concerned about making compsci part of the high school curriculum as much as making real mathematics part of the curriculum. With a solid foundation in basic logic and mathematics, you open up the ability to pick up pretty much any technical book, and read it and understand it. You can go anywhere with that foundation -- computer science, but also engineering, physics, etc.
Yes, I think it is. So developers contribute to this "almost the same" Chakra engine, but Microsoft profits for it by using it in W10 and Edge, cause last time I checked those products weren't free.
Indeed, notice the project is called ChakraCore (my emphasis). They open source the core and let people contribute, crowdsourcing the "easy" work while they put their developers on the proprietary add ons outside the core. So they get free work on easy stuff, but the community does not get the proprietary stuff they tack on. It's quite a scam.
MS would likely not release anything GPL or they'd have to open it all up to the public, but this is an example why any free software developers out there should use GPL for their own work. If it is MIT/BSD, companies can pull things like this.
Generations of older idiots do not realize, that corporations are shafting you and laughing all the way to the bank based on *your* hardwork, and you just accept it. There is nothing wrong or shameful about asking for higher compensation, and joining a union to strength your demands by putting workers and executives on an even playing field, and all efforts to "fight" it are misguided and destructive.
FTFY.
Look, I don't mean to be rude in the above statement, but it really irritates me when people refer to younger generations as idiots, just because we have a different philosophy than you do.
In my view, BSD allows corporations to fork the code and never contribute back. They can essentially take everyone's hard work, say "So long and thanks for all the fish", and package up a proprietary version of it and sell it for oodles of money. They don't owe you a thing. They don't owe the open source project a thing. Just because some of them currently do contribute code/effort doesn't mean they will indefinitely. Once they have obtained what they want, what incentive do they have to keep working with the community?
The GPL, meanwhile, protects your hardwork. If you write free software (in RMS's terms; or open source if you prefer), you can still build a community around it and have anyone contribute, including corporations. You can use it for whatever you want, including commercial software (i.e., you can sell software that is GPL, that's not against the license). HOWEVER, there is one important exception: any changes/add-ons MUST be available under GPL license for others. While you can sell GPL software, you can't make it solely proprietary, ever. I look at it as demanding compensation -- if you worked hard (for free in most cases) to develop some open source library, and a corporation takes it to use in some product they sell, why should they solely profit off your work? Requiring them to give back to you and community -- so you can turn around and sell too if you wish -- keeps an even playing field. Everyone contributed so everyone gets it. No one can unilaterally decide they're done contributing back; it's a requirement of the license.
Imagine being the author of a library that becomes used in OS X, and then Apple says "Sorry, that's proprietary, you can't reverse engineer our code" -- they took your code, the code you wrote 99% of, and effectively removed your freedom to use your own library just because they made a few changes and reissued under a new license. BSD allows this; GPL doesn't.
The only thing GPL really requires is that changes also be released GPL, so everyone can use it. Otherwise, it's the same as BSD. How is that taking away freedom? You can do anything you want with GPL, including launch a commercial company and sell it, EXCEPT screw people over by taking your ball and going home. Does it not occur to you as being a little suspicious that corporations, after years working with GPL software, are starting to turn to BSD in some cases? You use it as an example of GPL's "failure", but I see it as an impending crisis among BSD software, where in a few years corporations will fork and close these libraries and leave BSD'd software to decay. Remember that old "extend-embrace-extinguish" memo? Did you not learn from history? BSD can't prevent that, but GPL can because of its viral nature.
Now if you really think corporations getting to take your code for proprietary stuff is important, then by all means pick BSD. I'm not going to sit here and tell you what to do with your own hard work. It's a free country. But stop spreading such lies about the GPL. The GPL protects your freedom by preventing others from taking away your freedom.
But no one is trying to address the fact that HTML's layout system is designed for documents... Not for GUIs. We really need something like XUL or XAML made in to a web standard.
I have daydreamed a bit about using Qt's QML as a way of transferring GUI information/design for websites, rather than HTML documents. If you're not familiar, QML is a Javascript-syntax (superset?) markup for declarative programming of GUIs, and Qt5 and KDE's Plasma 5 use it extensively. It's Javascript origins mean most people are already familiar with it, and could potentially repurpose/extend existing javascript engines for it rather than throwing it all out. I haven't done major projects with it, but I am a fan of KDE so I'm pretty convinced its powerful enough for general purpose web apps.
That being said...
That said JavaScript is garbage just like HTML and CSS for actual development and needs to be replaced with a sane language.
Javascript is not a great language so there's slight concern of any language based on javascript. But, maybe part of why javascript sucks so much is that HTML and CSS are not really designed to work together with it. A new language/engine designed to work with it, like Qt QML is, might be fine.
The boiled frogs weren't paying attention — that's how. Smooth-talking lawmakers were introducing these "common sense" laws, while the objections from the disheveled principled ones were dismissed as "extreme" and "partisan".
Or, you can cause a lot more damage to people and property with a motorvehicle compared to a bike or a horse, so it needed to be more regulated. People involved in car accidents likely appreciate the fact that cars are registered; remember the license plate and tell the authorities, even if they drive off, and we know who's responsible.
I imagine that trains and planes have more regulation for similar reasons; as we now know, you could potentially cause a plane to crash into a building, for example. A train derailed can hurt lots of people and destroy lots of cargo. There's large responsibility again, so we do extra checks. If something goes wrong, we now have a shortlist of people to investigate.
Not saying the system is perfect. I worry about the surveillance state too, and am not a fan of the TSA's decisions lately. But we must acknowledge that the current system evolved for reasons (like safety and responsibility) that need to be carefully balanced with our liberties. Don't "throw the baby out with the bathwater" as they say. But definitely voice concerns to your congresscritters, and keep it in mind in upcoming elections.
The official right to keep and bear arms is another — and even more painful — example. You don't need a Wikipedia article — it is right there in the Bill of Rights. And yet, even the most liberal parts of the country consider it a mere privilege...
Let me quote the 2nd Amendment for you:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Note that phrase "well regulated" in the actual literal text of the Bill of Rights. Very very few people say that all guns should be taken away; instead, the argument is that we should actually follow the constitution and regulate guns. This probably includes at a minimum some mandatory training in proper usage and storage of guns and related equipment (note that "regulated" in this context was decided by the Supreme Court to mean "training"), as well as proper background checks (which effectively is a check that a person has the appropriate training and discipline, and hasn't violated such discipline and laws in the past). The free-for-all we currently have, particularly in the form of gun show loopholes, is the opposite of "well regulated" and should be fixed.
People tend to forget the first half of the 2nd Amendment about the regulated militia, but it is important.
Also, I dislike the generalizations and use of the word "liberal" as if its always a negative thing. It is fine to say you have a disagreement with a stance, but let's please not demonize groups of people and pretend that we aren't what we are -- a country with a diverse set of beliefs that really isn't easily categorized.
As an aside, If you want your freedoms and the constitution respected more, vote for Bernie Sanders. He has said no to surveillance state, no to perpetual war, no to corporate control of the economy and elections, and coming from a small state, he is very moderate on gun regulation. Let's all agree to stop voting for the typical establishment candidates and vote for candidates like Bernie if we want to see real results.
The real threat here is Millennials. They're an entire generation of people who've deluded themselves into believing that they stand for freedom and openness, yet in practice they're actually among the most virulent perpetrators of censorship and the suppression of free expression.
If you express an opinion that they dislike, they don't engage in discussion. They just shut you down, typically using a system that's without any sort of an appeal process, or due process of any sort.
Whoa, bit of an over-generalization there, don't you think? If you want to engage in generational blame, I could also easily blame the baby boomers that currently dominate congressional leadership, and feel the need to regulate things they don't understand (and laugh off the fact they don't understand technology, which always irritates me). The internet started free, and deteriorated into spying and other things under the boomers' watch, you know. Many Millennials only recent gained the ability to run for Senate, for example, and most are not even eligible to run for President. The generation hasn't even had an opportunity to contribute to governance much yet, and you already blame them?
Really, the issue is we've gone through a massive cultural shift in the 20ish years since the internet became mainstream. We can talk to people around the world, and learn about cultures and viewpoints we didn't before. We don't need commercial media as much, because my twitter stream shows me real time events in the middle east, for example, and aggregated together, probably much less biased. Just facts. The Internet allows us to seek our own knowledge and not be fully reliant on corporate media. I think what you will see is that a cross-section of people that have used the internet since its early days -- all generations but probably leaning more toward Millennials -- respect this freedom and independence, and want to protect it.
Meanwhile there seems to be a counter-culture that takes the corporate viewpoint a little too seriously -- some young people too but in my anecdotal experience, tends to be older people, I think because they grew up only having corporate media as single source of news -- and these people use the internet as a way to stay attached to people like them. Like-minded viewpoints. I have had the misfortune of stumbling across some of these on a number of social websites; they are groups for hate and fear-mongering. Where a person used to be the weirdo in town, now they can talk to other weirdos and pump themselves up and pretend they are majorities. It is these people that shut down all dissent and disagreeing viewpoints. They want to live in their own bubble; they are "proud conservatives that watch Fox News" for example, and seem to be proud of the fact that they stay in their bubble. I am not a fan of the current Republican candidates, but I still watch their debates because I want to know more about the viewpoints. There are those that refuse to hear anything outside of their viewpoint, and it really weirds me out.
So what we have is a cultural war -- do we see the internet as stay free, open, independent, allowing anyone to become a contributor and not just a bystander? Or do we see the internet as a way of segregating ourselves from other conflicting viewpoints? Really, this came about because of the rapid shift of computers and the internet and really the globalization of the economy. Our culture changed so quickly that I don't think everyone has caught up yet, and there's disagreement about how we should feel about the rapid shift..
If you agree with me, and the internet should stay free and independent, then it is our responsibility to speak up. Government in this country is still the people and laws -- if current representatives don't hear your pleas, start running for office yourself. Doesn't strictly have to be the US congress either; run for state congress, or even county-level or city-council. Mayors and county executives wield a large amount of power but we tend to ignore them. If you aren't willing to try something, then I don't believe you get to have much room to complain about government.
I don't know specifics of this project or the religious complaint against it, but consider this:
Some projects may have an environmental or "beauty" impact (what if the top of the mountain has a beautiful view, and the project is about to cut down all the trees in the area and limit access to that view?). This telescope may do something like that. People are upset at losing a natural resource: the beauty of nature in their area. It should be a national park for future generations to enjoy the same view I enjoyed, they might say.
So, they go to complain. But saying "I don't like this because it will ruin my view" will get everyone to laugh at you. "This is the cost of doing business", they tell you, "It's good for the local economy, and science, and whatever else." So they get ignored during the meeting and everyone goes about their business, not including the protestors.
The protestors are frustrated but realize that the US takes freedom of religion very seriously. Suddenly the idea is to call the land sacred and that will get some more legitimate discussion on the topic -- no one wants to be seen as discriminating against a religion. Now, media is covering the loss of environment since you called it sacred. Now, business and project leaders are calling you to make deals. Now, you're included in the process.
So what I pose to you is: is it possible that many of these "mythological" arguments in court are not actually completely sincere beliefs, but rather attempts to not be entirely trampled by the system? That freedom of religion is essentially a court "hack" that puts you on more equal footing?
So, a posix OS GUI client [I use linux] would be needed? Anybody who knows thunderbird and another have any ideas, based on experience with both?
I personally use KMail (and really the whole Kontact suite) under KDE. It's very nice, has a lot of features, pretty slick integration between apps. I actually think I might prefer it better than Thunderbird.
As KDE now uses Qt5, I think it is easier in theory to port to Windows, but I don't know if anyone has done so yet. I'd like to see more of those apps on other OSes, as I feel like options for Windows/Mac are rapidly dwindling. Losing Thunderbird would be a pretty big blow, unless the community can really rise up and take care of it (similar to the founding of Open Document Foundation for LibreOffice). You pretty much have to use some flavor of Linux or BSD if you expect any freedom or privacy these days.
Possibly the proliferation of mobile devices (iOS and Android) has made the ability for alternate desktops like Linux to become more common place possible; more people are used to the idea of "we need to use open protocols so everything interoperates now", whereas not that long ago I felt like the decision was "Everyone uses Windows, why we would ever think of anything else?". That's been at least one positive. So maybe more open desktops will catch on now that it's not as weird.
Mozilla, I have actually donated to you in the past, but I have to admit my faith and continued donations are really starting to waiver lately.
Don't get me wrong; its not because of the Australis and UI changes that many people complain about. I actually enjoy those changes, the cross-platform consistency it brought. That's not the issue.
The issue to me is that I feel like you're slowly abandoning your principles:
Incorporation of 3rd party proprietary services such as Pocket and Hello (the calling through Telefonica) seem to give up on principles of open source and control of data
Including ads in my new tab window is annoying, and possibly a privacy/security risk depending on where those ads are sourced from (they're not hosted on mozilla servers I'd guess; so do you trust the servers you're pulling from?).
Support of the DRM plugins/codecs for video. I know the argument was that you didn't really want to do it but were forced to, but how about principles? What can we do as a movement to try to push for open codecs again? I haven't received email updates on what you're doing to support that.
Now, giving up on Thunderbird, which is not just well known and liked, but I think its key selling point is ENCRYPTED PRIVATE email. By necessity, you can't do crypto (encrypted and signed emails) unless its in a mail client. If you want to send a webclient your private key, you're missing the point.
If you need money, tell us how it is. Lay out your plan for the next 3 years (a very specific vision!), estimate a figure of money, and maybe we can crowdsource it to happen. I think people are less likely to donate if they can't get clarity into what the money is used for (I know I'm that way).
I think that plan/vision needs to say more specifics like: we're campaigning against all kinds of ads, especially ones that track you and hurt your privacy; we're abandoning 3rd party proprietary things built in to our browser; we're re-focusing on our needs on your security and privacy. We're going to have the most secure browser on the planet, implementing the following list of protocols and standards, we're researching some new protocols and standards and working with the community on them. We're going 64 bit on Windows to take full advantage of performance and security extensions in modern OSes. We're going to make crypto more easy and transparent, both TLS in the browser, but especially we're going to refocus our efforts on Thunderbird and making your email safe with built in idiot-proof PGP encryption and signing. We're also going to work with web vendors to start implementing their own encryption, meaning when you get a notice from your bank, we expect it to be signed by your bank's encryption key and it all happens automagically to keep you safe.
If I don't start seeing more concrete things like this working for the betterment of the internet and my security and privacy on the internet, then my donation dollars will start looking for other projects. I want to know you're working for me, and not using me only to generate money.
... It's called taxes. You pay an amount proportional to your income, plus or minus adjustments based on your personal situation.
Public universities, colleges, tech schools, etc., should be completely free to all citizens, paid for by tax dollars. This is an investment in our citizens and our culture and worth the tax money. Most students on average would pay the money back and then some in taxes over their working lifetimes anyway, so it's a net win. Plus, studies have shown that we could offer free tuition and actually SAVE money from our federal budget compared to the enormous amount of money we dump on banks to prop up the failing student loan "industry".
It's obscene what we're allowing to happen to our young people; starting life with a massive debt really puts a huge roadblock on the path to prosperity and happiness, one that is not easily overcome, even when working hard. My wife had private loans for an average cost university. They make the loans sound so simple, but by the time you graduate you have 8+ loans (at least one for each semester, but possibly more since sometimes a bank is not willing to give a loan for the complete cost of a semester, so you have to get another one from someone else to finish it out) each with a minimum of at least $50 and before you know it, your monthly minimum is a mortgage payment of $600+ a month. So we're effectively requiring students to pay a mortgage right out of school (on top of the real rent/mortgage and cost of living). But then when students ask for higher wages to pay that bill, many of the older generation scoff and call the kids "entitled". If companies and HR want to continue demanding degrees for every position, then they need to pay the cost of doing business and raise wages.
So tuition should be free to everyone, at any time, funded by taxes from individuals and businesses alike. Aside from obvious young adults age 18-22, I think we should encourage anyone of any age to attend college whenever they wish, and push the idea of microdegrees or certifications or badges, or whatever you want to call them. Why shouldn't a 30, 40, 50 year old be able to attend an engineering seminar to brush up on skills? Or a history class for fun (better use of time than sitting in front of the TV!)? We should encourage everyone to pursue life-long learning, not just the fresh-out-of-high-school crowd. We can do that when tuition is free and there is no financial risk to giving it a try and backing out later if demands of life (kids, work, etc.) prove too much that particular semester.
Bernie Sanders has called for tax-funded tuition-free universities. If you want to see this too, chip in a few bucks to his campaign.
Continuing the fine tradition of not RTFA around here, I didn't read the research paper but I did skim wikipedia's entry.
Nowhere do I see any mention of authenticity. This is as important as confidentiality and integrity. I'm not saying there isn't a solution (I'm not a cryptographer) but I wonder if anyone has any insight or links to a solution if it exists.
Here's the scenario. Homomorphic encryption lets us keep the data constantly encrypted, maintaining confidentiality. Ok, that's cool for data breaches, we stay much better protected from loss of confidentiality.
But what if a malicious actor purposely performs an operation on the data? Changing genomic data in this case might mess up diagnoses/research, etc. Future applications could be stuff like medical billing -- if its easy to tack on another bill, even if you don't know previous bills because its encrypted? Is there any mechanism that checks that the operation we perform on the encrypted data was authorized, i.e., that I am a manager allowed to do the operation and I specifically consent to performing the operation? Typical integrity checks wouldn't catch this; integrity is correctness of the data, which means it will only verify the computation was performed correctly and then move on. Authenticity is a different issue.
I would suspect Microsoft Research thought of this. My question is: is there a countermeasure that can be described as part of the algorithm? Or is the countermeasure "be careful with any software that uses this algorithm, make sure it checks authenticity before applying operations!". If the solution is for developers to be careful, I'm not convinced the algorithm made anything better. Many developers do not know cryptography and may assume safety, or may not have the time and resources due to a manager driving a hard deadline; in these cases, "we use MS's algorithm!" can get advertised without any increase in safety (and possibly even a decrease, as some might look to this as a crutch and reason why they can cut corners...).
Wow, where do you get such a negative attitude toward taxes?
Look the best way to look at it is the following: just by existing, you require stuff. Food, clothing, shelter, and then the slightly more luxurious things such as heating your home in winter (unless you use lumber you chopped yourself exclusively), or using internet to leave the comment. Unless you don't use the internet or electricity and don't have a job and feed yourself exclusively through farming, then you use or require something provided by the public.
Oh, but "I pay for my own internet/electricity/whatever", right? Something like $1 of every internet bill I get is a "Universal Access Fee", which gives people in the middle of nowhere access. Why? because business decided that it's not worthwhile to support you, and we as a society decided it was worthwhile to do. So, we pay a fee (tax, really) that subsidizes costs. Electricity is generated from things dug up from the ground, and that may have caused environmental issues to another region. To be fair to them, we help them clean it up. Goods are trucked in via roads that were paid for by the public. Your healthcare, even if you paid totally out of pocket for doctor and medicine, largely came about due to the US government guaranteeing student loans for doctors (otherwise, banks would not provide such a large amount of money with no collateral) and the fact that public tax money helps subsidize medical research (even if that research ends up owned by a private company, but that's an ethical issue for another day...).
Essentially, by existing, you require stuff, and some of that stuff is not something a free market will support. Too much risk, not enough reward, whatever. So, we as a society get together every once and while and say "Well this needs done anyway, so if business won't do it, how do we pay for it?". We negotiate a small amount every citizen pays into the pool to do these things, and send everyone a bill for the services. This bill from the government is called "taxes".. What, you expect everything to be for free?
Taxes is the bill you get for society to provide you with a modern lifestyle. Now the nice thing about it is that this bill is somewhat negotiable; through voting and our system of representatives, you are more than welcome to be part of the process and haggle for cost and even which services we consider important enough to do/offer. If all you do is complain online and never be involved in government affairs, you're kind of missing the point of living in a democratic society.
So, stop complaining and pay your damn bills. If you're not happy with the service/cost, feel free to get involved in government and change it. At least you have a chance with government... if you're unhappy with your private sector service, they just tell you to get lost.
My wife has written many collegiate level textbooks and they are used at many different schools. She netted a whopping $600 in royalties for 2014. The authors are not getting rich on sales of textbooks. Their salaries dwarf what they earn for publications.
Next conspiracy theory...
What course did she write a textbook for? Upperlevel books probably don't have as many students. In any case, the way to go these days is self publishing through Amazon or Lulu. Keep the profits for yourself and professors that work with you to edit the book. Pearson and other publishers rip you off. I think publishers are at this point almost obsolete. (I know, editors are good, and they may get you some publicity, but neither of those is worth how much they rip students off and how much they keep themselves)
At a normal university, there would be conflict-of-interest policies that apply and would probably prevent a department from forming a policy to require a course purchase which benefits a faculty member financially. At Cal State Fullerton, either there aren't any strong policies, or they are being ignored, apparently.
I can agree with that. I wrote a small book for a course, back at my old university. I was not allowed to make a profit from the book in any class that I taught. It was picked up by another neighboring university though, and that was ok (though I keep the price low anyway, about $30 right now, only a small profit, because I don't believe in $100+ books, education should be more or less free).
As a former university and tech school mathematics instructor, I'm happy to throw in my take on it.
Most textbooks are absolutely dull, and are full of extremely contrived examples designed to "show how useful the subject is". Many subjects are extremely useful, but perhaps to only certain fields, so it's sometimes difficult to explain the utility to a first undergraduate course in the subject. This makes many students bored because they're smart enough to realize they're essentially being lied to -- the examples are obviously contrived and lame. Furthermore, it pushes this idea that unless there's a "practical way to make money" on the subject, it's worthless, which is absolutely not true. We should encourage philosophical thought for its own sake, and recognize that such thought sometimes leads to great discoveries long term, even if we don't know how its useful right this minute.
So that being said, the textbook industry knows Education is a buzz word in politics. They know getting Good Jobs (TM) is another buzzword. So they rewrite the textbooks every year now. The actual content doesn't change (or at least not for the best; I think they often just remove content!), they just swap chapters around, and most importantly, tailor the contrived examples to the buzzword industry of the year. They can then go around convincing politicians, school districts, and universities that their books "prepare students to enter the workforce" and you absolutely need the latest edition or your students won't have the advantage others' do. It's kind of a bullying -- they make the professors feel bad, and if they manage to stand up, then they go to the school board or university administration to get their book in.
To convince people of the book, they spam free copies of the book to everyone. They hand out swag at conferences, reminding them of how awesome they are for publishing. They get name recognition.
Professors then start to feel bad that maybe my students are not receiving the same advantage as everyone else, let me use what they all use. Going through graduate school, I had my share of completely awful textbooks for courses. Couldn't learn a damn thing from them. We asked the professor about it (several different ones for different classes) and the response was almost always "this is the standard textbook nationwide on this topic".
Having a standard breeds mediocrity in some sense. To me, University is meant to open your mind to new ideas. I think they should be a little different between semesters and professors. Shake it up. Cover a few new topics, especially if the students seem interested. Throw out a few topics because maybe there's little interest. Why not tailor it to what the students want, rather than university and accreditation boards? I know, losing accreditation would be bad, but that's exactly my point -- the system has damaged what it means to have a university education. You just go through an assembly line, rather than being encouraged to explore your interested. Classes like linear algebra are amazingly useful, but (1) not every applied field in the world needs it, so I can see some instances where you don't want to cover all the nuances; (2) linear algebra is a very large subject and so even if a student should learn it, the question becomes: what part of linear algebra? What should be the focus of the class? We need professors willing to change it up based on student needs and interests. We're teaching kids how to learn, not rote memory -- if we do a good job, then even if we don't cover everything, students will know how to find and learn what they need in the future!
Finally, many textbooks themselves were not written because of someone's passion to educate, but rather to fulfill a bullet point for a PhD or tenure. Check the introduction/forward of any textbook; most of them will say "This grew out of work I did for my PhD....". It is almost verbatim someone's PhD thesis, but somehow undergraduates are expected to follow a PhD thesis on a subject (remembe
Certainly, not every programmer with a strong background in math is like this. But I've worked with people who are proud of their math ability, and who would be the first to tell you how critical math is to programming, who write terrible code... They pride themselves on their "uncommon" ability to keep lots and lots abstract details "in their heads," and in their "analytical" skills.
Throughout elementary, middle, high school and even into college (dependent a bit on major), we tell kids that "math" is learning your times tables, balancing a checkbook, and basically arithmetic skills. There's some algebra thrown in there in high school but for the most part, most people think of math as doing arithmetic. I'll give you an example. My mother says "You're so good at math!" whenever she's baking cookies and asks me how much flour to use if she wants to double the recipe and she typically uses 1/3 cup of flour. This isn't unusual; I heard this all through my life, from family, friends and even teachers.
Mathematics, however, is really just logical thinking. It is the art of logical reasoning about problems. Often applied to numbers, sure, but it doesn't have to be, or at least not in a concrete sense. It's more about reasoning about patterns, abstracting different types of problems (realizing that two problems you thought were different are actually the same type of problem!) There are whole college courses in mathematics I took back in the day where not a single number was written on the board. It was all symbols and functions and proving properties of things (meaning: what can I logically conclude about something based on this list of facts?). Being good at math really means being good at reasoning about problems, abstract away the difficulty, and notice patterns.
I think the disconnect is that there is a healthy population of people running around that declare themselves "good at math" because everyone they know (family friends teachers) tells them they are good at math... because they did arithmetic and basic algebra well. The end. I've met several people like that. Doing those things at a high school level is more about memorization (think: memorizing times tables, memorizing "FOIL" method for multiplying polynomials, memorizing quadratic formula, etc.) than logical reasoning. You might get a taste of that in high school geometry if you're lucky, but honestly even that seems to mostly be "memorize this proof about geometry" without really building logical reasoning skills that can be applied to other problems. You just do it for the sake of doing it, from the students' perspective.
The people that are "good at math" you meet that suck at programming are likely the people that fall into this category. They were great at K-12 math classes because they can memorize and hold a lot in their head, and they probably learned programming by the same method -- look at code (in a book, google search, whatever) and memorize the code. They memorize what functions do what, and how to throw things together, but they never really internalized that abstraction and problem solving that a true mathematical mind has. So they never really learned how the code goes together, or why one pattern is better than another. They just memorized an approach that worked in the past. I've seen a lot of that too unfortunately.
A real college level course in mathematics is really eye-opening (likewise, I think physics majors and a few others also experience this), and I think that ability to reason abstractly really does make a huge difference in how you approach problems. Even if you never directly use your math classes at your job, having gone through those classes permanently change how you think about and approach problems, and I think that is a huge benefit. It's a shame most people -- even the ones "good at math" -- never take one of those classes.
The (economic) question is however are those advances better (more progress/$) than direct funding of consumer products? Analysis shows no.
I am aware of such analyses, but do not know if such analysis is the consensus opinion or more a conjecture at this point.
I would still argue that overall the other benefits I listed imply that government funding of such things would be good. If nothing else, business is sometimes very risk averse, and once government research proves something is feasible, then they will jump on it (see the various businesses that have popped out of projects started at FFRDCs, for example). So such funding would then jumpstart consumer products that wouldn't have been tried in the first place by the private sector.
space exploration returns next to nothing, its basic economics
The problem with statements like this is that "basic economics" is not always correct. It is a model, and like all models, it is incredibly helpful at helping us understand things and make predictions, but it doesn't always reflect reality. Most economists didn't predict the debt bubbles and economic issues of the past decade, for example.
In any case, let me illustrate why it's actually a great thing to do space exploration, even when other things need done too (nothing is mutually exclusive):
Science/engineering advances from space exploration often find their way into consumer products, allowing new businesses and innovations to develop. Often advancement in science and engineering understanding seems "dumb" until someone realizes a purpose for it (see for example, computers and all of the naysayers on how practical/useful they would be).
A strong space exploration program will be enticing for some of the world's top minds, and allow the US to "capture" those minds thru immigration. Those people will go on to develop great scientific advances and some of them start great companies, which will be American companies rather than $country companies.
People need to be hired to build and test these space exploration devices (satelites, landers, rockets, etc.), so we'll employ a bunch of people for a while and pay good salaries. That will help bring down our unemployment numbers and bring down family debt. When the program is over, they'll have something cool to put in resumes as they look for other work in the private sector or even start their own businesses. Or possibly we can keep working on awesome future space projects.
A space program that makes people excited will encourage more of the young generation to go into the sciences, making sure we stay competitive technologically into the future. We don't want current trends to continue, where there's little excitement in science (== little funding, no big projects, government doesn't support it, etc.) and so many of our bright students go into business instead, worried about their futures if they chose science.
Have you ever been to the Smithsonian museums? People from all over the world go there to see the lunar module and space shuttle and other stuff. They see the moon rocks. They buy their kids a t-shirt. "See the talk by the person that went to Mars!" or "See the Mars rock" or "Climb inside the real cockpit of the Mars lander!" would attract many tourists from across the world. And tourists spend money.
It's just plain bad-ass. Why does everything we do absolutely need to be profitable? Why is money the only judge of whether something is worthwhile or not? How about we just have pride in ourselves and our culture and do something because its there. At the end of your life, will you be happy that you saved $5 (your share of federal taxes paying for space program is so low that $5 probably isn't that far from the truth in a back of the envelope calculation) or that you got to see a person land on Mars on live TV? I'd rather have an interesting life than a boring one with more money.
There's probably even more arguments than this but here's for starters. We absolutely need to focus on our national infrastructure, our educational system and student debt, and other issues (shameless plug for Bernie Sanders goes here, as he's the only candidate really talking about all of these things), but I don't think any of that work says you can't also spend on science at the same time. In fact, I think it's a necessity.
Clue #1: a minimum wage job isn't something you should live off of. It is expressly for teenagers and for folks who use it as a stepping stone or fallback until something better comes along.
Who says? This is misinformation/propaganda being spread. If you look at the actual bill that instituted the minimum wage in the US (the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938), the law literally says the reasoning for setting the minimum wage is "Congress finds that... labor conditions detrimental to the maintenance of the minimum standing of living necessary for health, efficiency, and general well-being of workers causes..." and then goes on to list negative effects of not being paid enough to live. So yes, the law quite literally states that the minimum wage is something you're meant to live off of. (Feel free to read the law yourself on the Dept of Labor website.
This idea of "teenagers can do it" is only a ploy to make people complacent with low wages. Remember a teenager at 17/18 can easily be out living on their own and not have the support of family (for many reasons: family doesn't have ability to help, family has cancer and teenager needs to support them, family is crazy/insane/drug addicts, family is dead, etc.), and so even teenagers should make enough money to support themselves.
Clue #2: these jobs usually require little-to-no skill, and consequently do not bear the value of $15/hr at current inflation/valuation.
When the minimum wage was instituted in 1938, the many US jobs were in agriculture or simple manufacturing. I don't consider those jobs to be "high skill", but that doesn't mean they're not super important (without food, we die -- about as important as you can get! and manufacturing gave us the modern world, despite many of those jobs being just to screw the same bolt on over and over). So for one thing, skill does not equate with importance, and I think important jobs especially should be well paid.
Furthermore, have you seen secretary and human resources job these days? Also requires pretty low skill (mostly just typing and sending emails and filling out forms -- anyone who can read and write can do it, really), but look at how much these people make (in my area, you can get jobs in HR making upwards of $50k with only minimal experience, much above minimum wage). If we were going by your metric, these paper-pusher jobs should be making low pay and important jobs like farmers and restaurants that provide me food should be making more.
All of this is an aside from the real goal of minimum wage, which is that if you do ANY type of work for anyone, you're important to someone and should be able to support yourself doing that work. If you're not needed, why did the company hire you? I'm tired of this idea that companies are entitled to cheap labor; if your company requires effectively slave labor to exist, then how about we state the truth that your company is failing, not doing well, and maybe should go bankrupt due to mismanagement rather than keeping it chugging on the backs of the poor?
Clue #3: when you price human labor too high, automation becomes more attractive. There are already machines that can effectively replace fast-food cashiers, and are cheaper to operate and maintain than $15/hr people. There are also machines coming online that can operate the back-end of a fast food joint as well, which will also just come under the wire as being cheaper (but would come out ahead by being reliable, on-time, etc.)
That is going to happen no matter what because of corporate greed to always maximize profit. Even if we paid people $1/hr, at some point people would need to eat and sleep while a machine could work all night long straight, cranking out more widgets. We can't compete with technology.
What we instead need to do is have real discussion on what the future economy looks like when jobs are phased out by robo
From what I have seen, Mitre and NIST often show inaccurate CVSS scores on the CVE pages.
Have to stop you there, sorry for perhaps being a bit pedantic, but the NIST score is more or less the "official" score of a vulnerability, given how closely they work with organizations like MITRE. The CVSS scoring rules have some nuance to them, and in some scenarios the official rules on scoring a vector is not what you'd expect. NIST tries to follow the official scoring rules as strictly as possible. You may not agree with the rules (and many people don't, I'm not trying to knock you), but technically their scores are the most accurate.
CVSS recently released v3.0 scoring in order to try to address some criticisms in scoring. It did this by upgrading its base vector to be a bit more easily comprehensible by adding obvious metrics like "user interaction required", which was previously embedded in "access complexity" in v2. I think in general I like the concepts and it makes it easier for the most part, but time will tell if the general public agrees. The sticking point I think is the idea of scope, which is not a bad idea in general, but the definition seems a little fuzzy to me. We may have only shifted where the nuance is, and so disagreement in scoring may continue into the future.
In order for the metric to be truly useful, every organization has to localize measurement to their environment and each vendor needs to measure impact against their use or non-use of the underlying code. At the end of the day, it's all about risk measurement, but with those steps you end up with a reasonably accurate assessment.
Exactly. CVSS allows for this by use of temporal and environmental scores, but unfortunately, most organizations don't use them. This means most people run around talking about the base score without a clear sense of how it applies to them. I've seen vulnerabilities with a base score of let's say 7.0 or so being knocked down to 1.5, after you factor in its temporal factors (such as a patch being available) and environmental factors (such as not very widely deployed). I wish more people would talk about the environmental factors. CERT is one of the few places that lists temporal and environmental metrics, though their database is not comprehensive.
CVSSv3.0 is weakest in the fact that they essentially threw out the environmental metrics; yeah, its technically there, but its shadow of its former self -- it doesn't include important metrics like population anymore. I hope they will put that back in for CVSSv3.1, and encourage more widespread adoption.
There is nothing wrong with the current system that wider spread adoption and education cannot fix. Part of the problem is the media hype surrounding the bugs. If every little issue wouldn't get a cute name -- Shellshock, Logjam, POODLE -- the reactions might be a little less kneejerk.
I agree, but education can sometimes take a while and be harder than you think. There's momentum -- and money -- behind the current system. You get everyone wound up, and then offer to sell a widget that "protects against it". There's a lot of snake oil for sale in the industry right now, and so far, companies and governments are eating up. It will continue as long as money is being made. The bigger question is, how do you make it more profitable to tell the truth about threats?
Organizations like CERT tend to straight talk it and provide honest feedback with their temporal and environmental scores, but they're not picked up in the media as much as these security start-ups that are out to cause a ruckuss and make money. The start-ups seem to me to be more marketing companies than security companies these days; they tend to overinflate the CVSS base score and talk it up by reaching out to media directly, when in reality, the base score itself may not be that high, nevermind that temporal and environmental factors might lower it more. Fear makes money right now.
Temporal and environmental factors and only be assessed by people in the know. Windows shops obviously don't care about Linux vulnerabilities and vice versa.The base ratings are strictly focused on the vulnerability. Other factors you need to determine yourself... And there's already a system for that.
Yeah that's kind of the problem, most companies don't use temporal or especially environmental factors. If you base everything on the base score only, you're not getting a really accurate feeling for the severity of the vulnerability.
The other problem is that CVEs tend to be treated in the researcher community as gold. You list CVEs on your resume, for example. CVEs are not meant to indicate severe vulnerabilities, or even all types of vulnerabilities -- many things that are important don't get CVEs, while many lame vulnerabilities do have a CVE. These systems need rethinking in general.
It's because BSD/MIT pretty much are cool with anything as long as you attribute the code to the original author. That is the main requirement of distribution. So proprietary is ok as long as somewhere deep in the credits they add the name of the original author.
GPL meanwhile requires not just attribution, but the availability of the full source code. So you can't be a proprietary trade secret with GPL code, so any proprietary software using GPL is in violation of the license and therefore copyright law. It's illegal.
The GPL is "viral" in that if you use even a smattering of GPLed code, you are required to release ALL of your code as GPL as well.
It concerns me that you state you use example Apple code. What license is it? ("has its own terms" is completely unhelpful).
In general, you're restricted to using a license that is the most restrictive. The liberal licenses like BSD and MIT can morph into anything pretty much. GPL is one of the most restrictive on redistribution (RMS would say it preserves user freedoms by restricting developer distribution, and I would tend to agree with it; just throwing that in there because I don't mean restrictive in a negative sense here, only that it was designed to prevent people from running off with the code without contributing back to the community, so you can't just re-release GPLed code under MIT like you suggested). Apple's license may be open source or not; furthermore, there are known open source licenses that are NOT compatible with the GPL, so its entirely possible that the Apple code may not be distributed together with the GPL code. For reference, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/li....
It's possible your pro-bono advice is correct and this doesn't matter too much if you release it publicly and open source (it seems unlikely open source projects would sue other open source projects), but in case you ever plan on making money on this project (and even if you don't), to avoid any possible legal trouble you should choose the most restrictive license compatible with all licenses at play. Likely this means the GPL, but the wildcard is Apple. If you post the terms to it, we could probably help sort it out (with the usual IANAL caveat). Otherwise, you may need to rethink which libraries are included with your code and possibly even roll your own depending how niche it is.
Where do I get started building Android apps in C++? Inquiring minds suddenly want to know.
The latest versions of Qt5 support building Qt/C++ apps for Android and iOS. I've never tried it for more than running a few examples, but it seems pretty nice and easy, and I've really enjoyed Qt development for years now.
Really, with all the important issues that should occupy a president's attention, if this is even on your radar, you're not qualified for the job.
Converting to metric is not just a fun science nerd issue no one cares about.
Really it's an economic issue, and I'm surprised it hasn't been made more of a big deal. When we follow international standards, we can better share ideas and better trade goods. If the US used metric, we'd be in a much better position to sell our goods worldwide, as we wouldn't need to re-tool or re-calculate all the time.
Great example: our US engineers are mostly trained in the English system. My wife used to work in an industry that is now heavily developing and building things overseas. The American engineers had to build everything to metric standards, since they were building in India and what not, and really had trouble with it, as they weren't properly trained to do metric calculations and the equipment they wanted to buy from American companies didn't always come in a metric size. Instead, the engineers would have to half-ass some crazy scheme (like buying parts and then cutting them -- makes sense until you realize you'd have to pay field guys to do this 10,000 times) to get it to work. The quality suffers, and since there's all these problems, I get the sense that many international companies would rather just hire Germans or whatever to do it.
This is an anecdote of one industry, sure, but if our engineers were trained in metric, and our businesses made the jump to make metric products in the first place, we'd probably be a lot more competitive in the world market. We wouldn't need to spend all this extra time and money on customization, we could just do it. I imagine all this effort has long ago exceeded the cost of buying new tools once; we should have just switched then and told businessmen to shut up about costs.
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That's what introductory classes are for. De-mystify software and give children the basic concepts and skills to pursue it, and an opportunity to see if it interests them.
Completely agree. Computer science is not out of reach of most students, but it has to be introduced in proper context.
I think what many people are missing in this "teach compsci!" movement is that a firm understanding of computer science requires a very solid basis in logic and abstract mathematics. Guess what we don't teach in high school? (as far as I know; it wasn't part of my school, and I never see it mentioned in anything I've read about common core, etc.): Basic propositional logic and symbolic logic. Number theory and discrete mathematics. Abstract algebra!! Abstract algebra, at least the basics of groups, is not difficult and out of reach -- we should totally be teaching high schoolers about groups, which awakens the ability to abstract and see patterns, which is fundamentally what programming (and really all of comp sci) is all about.
I'm not as concerned about making compsci part of the high school curriculum as much as making real mathematics part of the curriculum. With a solid foundation in basic logic and mathematics, you open up the ability to pick up pretty much any technical book, and read it and understand it. You can go anywhere with that foundation -- computer science, but also engineering, physics, etc.
Yes, I think it is. So developers contribute to this "almost the same" Chakra engine, but Microsoft profits for it by using it in W10 and Edge, cause last time I checked those products weren't free.
Indeed, notice the project is called ChakraCore (my emphasis). They open source the core and let people contribute, crowdsourcing the "easy" work while they put their developers on the proprietary add ons outside the core. So they get free work on easy stuff, but the community does not get the proprietary stuff they tack on. It's quite a scam.
MS would likely not release anything GPL or they'd have to open it all up to the public, but this is an example why any free software developers out there should use GPL for their own work. If it is MIT/BSD, companies can pull things like this.
Generations of older idiots do not realize, that corporations are shafting you and laughing all the way to the bank based on *your* hardwork, and you just accept it. There is nothing wrong or shameful about asking for higher compensation, and joining a union to strength your demands by putting workers and executives on an even playing field, and all efforts to "fight" it are misguided and destructive.
FTFY.
Look, I don't mean to be rude in the above statement, but it really irritates me when people refer to younger generations as idiots, just because we have a different philosophy than you do.
In my view, BSD allows corporations to fork the code and never contribute back. They can essentially take everyone's hard work, say "So long and thanks for all the fish", and package up a proprietary version of it and sell it for oodles of money. They don't owe you a thing. They don't owe the open source project a thing. Just because some of them currently do contribute code/effort doesn't mean they will indefinitely. Once they have obtained what they want, what incentive do they have to keep working with the community?
The GPL, meanwhile, protects your hardwork. If you write free software (in RMS's terms; or open source if you prefer), you can still build a community around it and have anyone contribute, including corporations. You can use it for whatever you want, including commercial software (i.e., you can sell software that is GPL, that's not against the license). HOWEVER, there is one important exception: any changes/add-ons MUST be available under GPL license for others. While you can sell GPL software, you can't make it solely proprietary, ever. I look at it as demanding compensation -- if you worked hard (for free in most cases) to develop some open source library, and a corporation takes it to use in some product they sell, why should they solely profit off your work? Requiring them to give back to you and community -- so you can turn around and sell too if you wish -- keeps an even playing field. Everyone contributed so everyone gets it. No one can unilaterally decide they're done contributing back; it's a requirement of the license.
Imagine being the author of a library that becomes used in OS X, and then Apple says "Sorry, that's proprietary, you can't reverse engineer our code" -- they took your code, the code you wrote 99% of, and effectively removed your freedom to use your own library just because they made a few changes and reissued under a new license. BSD allows this; GPL doesn't.
The only thing GPL really requires is that changes also be released GPL, so everyone can use it. Otherwise, it's the same as BSD. How is that taking away freedom? You can do anything you want with GPL, including launch a commercial company and sell it, EXCEPT screw people over by taking your ball and going home. Does it not occur to you as being a little suspicious that corporations, after years working with GPL software, are starting to turn to BSD in some cases? You use it as an example of GPL's "failure", but I see it as an impending crisis among BSD software, where in a few years corporations will fork and close these libraries and leave BSD'd software to decay. Remember that old "extend-embrace-extinguish" memo? Did you not learn from history? BSD can't prevent that, but GPL can because of its viral nature.
Now if you really think corporations getting to take your code for proprietary stuff is important, then by all means pick BSD. I'm not going to sit here and tell you what to do with your own hard work. It's a free country. But stop spreading such lies about the GPL. The GPL protects your freedom by preventing others from taking away your freedom.
But no one is trying to address the fact that HTML's layout system is designed for documents... Not for GUIs. We really need something like XUL or XAML made in to a web standard.
I have daydreamed a bit about using Qt's QML as a way of transferring GUI information/design for websites, rather than HTML documents. If you're not familiar, QML is a Javascript-syntax (superset?) markup for declarative programming of GUIs, and Qt5 and KDE's Plasma 5 use it extensively. It's Javascript origins mean most people are already familiar with it, and could potentially repurpose/extend existing javascript engines for it rather than throwing it all out. I haven't done major projects with it, but I am a fan of KDE so I'm pretty convinced its powerful enough for general purpose web apps.
That being said...
That said JavaScript is garbage just like HTML and CSS for actual development and needs to be replaced with a sane language.
Javascript is not a great language so there's slight concern of any language based on javascript. But, maybe part of why javascript sucks so much is that HTML and CSS are not really designed to work together with it. A new language/engine designed to work with it, like Qt QML is, might be fine.
The boiled frogs weren't paying attention — that's how. Smooth-talking lawmakers were introducing these "common sense" laws, while the objections from the disheveled principled ones were dismissed as "extreme" and "partisan".
Or, you can cause a lot more damage to people and property with a motorvehicle compared to a bike or a horse, so it needed to be more regulated. People involved in car accidents likely appreciate the fact that cars are registered; remember the license plate and tell the authorities, even if they drive off, and we know who's responsible.
I imagine that trains and planes have more regulation for similar reasons; as we now know, you could potentially cause a plane to crash into a building, for example. A train derailed can hurt lots of people and destroy lots of cargo. There's large responsibility again, so we do extra checks. If something goes wrong, we now have a shortlist of people to investigate.
Not saying the system is perfect. I worry about the surveillance state too, and am not a fan of the TSA's decisions lately. But we must acknowledge that the current system evolved for reasons (like safety and responsibility) that need to be carefully balanced with our liberties. Don't "throw the baby out with the bathwater" as they say. But definitely voice concerns to your congresscritters, and keep it in mind in upcoming elections.
The official right to keep and bear arms is another — and even more painful — example. You don't need a Wikipedia article — it is right there in the Bill of Rights. And yet, even the most liberal parts of the country consider it a mere privilege...
Let me quote the 2nd Amendment for you:
Note that phrase "well regulated" in the actual literal text of the Bill of Rights. Very very few people say that all guns should be taken away; instead, the argument is that we should actually follow the constitution and regulate guns. This probably includes at a minimum some mandatory training in proper usage and storage of guns and related equipment (note that "regulated" in this context was decided by the Supreme Court to mean "training"), as well as proper background checks (which effectively is a check that a person has the appropriate training and discipline, and hasn't violated such discipline and laws in the past). The free-for-all we currently have, particularly in the form of gun show loopholes, is the opposite of "well regulated" and should be fixed.
People tend to forget the first half of the 2nd Amendment about the regulated militia, but it is important.
Also, I dislike the generalizations and use of the word "liberal" as if its always a negative thing. It is fine to say you have a disagreement with a stance, but let's please not demonize groups of people and pretend that we aren't what we are -- a country with a diverse set of beliefs that really isn't easily categorized.
As an aside, If you want your freedoms and the constitution respected more, vote for Bernie Sanders. He has said no to surveillance state, no to perpetual war, no to corporate control of the economy and elections, and coming from a small state, he is very moderate on gun regulation. Let's all agree to stop voting for the typical establishment candidates and vote for candidates like Bernie if we want to see real results.
The real threat here is Millennials. They're an entire generation of people who've deluded themselves into believing that they stand for freedom and openness, yet in practice they're actually among the most virulent perpetrators of censorship and the suppression of free expression.
If you express an opinion that they dislike, they don't engage in discussion. They just shut you down, typically using a system that's without any sort of an appeal process, or due process of any sort.
Whoa, bit of an over-generalization there, don't you think? If you want to engage in generational blame, I could also easily blame the baby boomers that currently dominate congressional leadership, and feel the need to regulate things they don't understand (and laugh off the fact they don't understand technology, which always irritates me). The internet started free, and deteriorated into spying and other things under the boomers' watch, you know. Many Millennials only recent gained the ability to run for Senate, for example, and most are not even eligible to run for President. The generation hasn't even had an opportunity to contribute to governance much yet, and you already blame them?
Really, the issue is we've gone through a massive cultural shift in the 20ish years since the internet became mainstream. We can talk to people around the world, and learn about cultures and viewpoints we didn't before. We don't need commercial media as much, because my twitter stream shows me real time events in the middle east, for example, and aggregated together, probably much less biased. Just facts. The Internet allows us to seek our own knowledge and not be fully reliant on corporate media. I think what you will see is that a cross-section of people that have used the internet since its early days -- all generations but probably leaning more toward Millennials -- respect this freedom and independence, and want to protect it.
Meanwhile there seems to be a counter-culture that takes the corporate viewpoint a little too seriously -- some young people too but in my anecdotal experience, tends to be older people, I think because they grew up only having corporate media as single source of news -- and these people use the internet as a way to stay attached to people like them. Like-minded viewpoints. I have had the misfortune of stumbling across some of these on a number of social websites; they are groups for hate and fear-mongering. Where a person used to be the weirdo in town, now they can talk to other weirdos and pump themselves up and pretend they are majorities. It is these people that shut down all dissent and disagreeing viewpoints. They want to live in their own bubble; they are "proud conservatives that watch Fox News" for example, and seem to be proud of the fact that they stay in their bubble. I am not a fan of the current Republican candidates, but I still watch their debates because I want to know more about the viewpoints. There are those that refuse to hear anything outside of their viewpoint, and it really weirds me out.
So what we have is a cultural war -- do we see the internet as stay free, open, independent, allowing anyone to become a contributor and not just a bystander? Or do we see the internet as a way of segregating ourselves from other conflicting viewpoints? Really, this came about because of the rapid shift of computers and the internet and really the globalization of the economy. Our culture changed so quickly that I don't think everyone has caught up yet, and there's disagreement about how we should feel about the rapid shift..
If you agree with me, and the internet should stay free and independent, then it is our responsibility to speak up. Government in this country is still the people and laws -- if current representatives don't hear your pleas, start running for office yourself. Doesn't strictly have to be the US congress either; run for state congress, or even county-level or city-council. Mayors and county executives wield a large amount of power but we tend to ignore them. If you aren't willing to try something, then I don't believe you get to have much room to complain about government.
I don't know specifics of this project or the religious complaint against it, but consider this:
Some projects may have an environmental or "beauty" impact (what if the top of the mountain has a beautiful view, and the project is about to cut down all the trees in the area and limit access to that view?). This telescope may do something like that. People are upset at losing a natural resource: the beauty of nature in their area. It should be a national park for future generations to enjoy the same view I enjoyed, they might say.
So, they go to complain. But saying "I don't like this because it will ruin my view" will get everyone to laugh at you. "This is the cost of doing business", they tell you, "It's good for the local economy, and science, and whatever else." So they get ignored during the meeting and everyone goes about their business, not including the protestors.
The protestors are frustrated but realize that the US takes freedom of religion very seriously. Suddenly the idea is to call the land sacred and that will get some more legitimate discussion on the topic -- no one wants to be seen as discriminating against a religion. Now, media is covering the loss of environment since you called it sacred. Now, business and project leaders are calling you to make deals. Now, you're included in the process.
So what I pose to you is: is it possible that many of these "mythological" arguments in court are not actually completely sincere beliefs, but rather attempts to not be entirely trampled by the system? That freedom of religion is essentially a court "hack" that puts you on more equal footing?
So, a posix OS GUI client [I use linux] would be needed? Anybody who knows thunderbird and another have any ideas, based on experience with both?
I personally use KMail (and really the whole Kontact suite) under KDE. It's very nice, has a lot of features, pretty slick integration between apps. I actually think I might prefer it better than Thunderbird.
As KDE now uses Qt5, I think it is easier in theory to port to Windows, but I don't know if anyone has done so yet. I'd like to see more of those apps on other OSes, as I feel like options for Windows/Mac are rapidly dwindling. Losing Thunderbird would be a pretty big blow, unless the community can really rise up and take care of it (similar to the founding of Open Document Foundation for LibreOffice). You pretty much have to use some flavor of Linux or BSD if you expect any freedom or privacy these days.
Possibly the proliferation of mobile devices (iOS and Android) has made the ability for alternate desktops like Linux to become more common place possible; more people are used to the idea of "we need to use open protocols so everything interoperates now", whereas not that long ago I felt like the decision was "Everyone uses Windows, why we would ever think of anything else?". That's been at least one positive. So maybe more open desktops will catch on now that it's not as weird.
Mozilla, I have actually donated to you in the past, but I have to admit my faith and continued donations are really starting to waiver lately.
Don't get me wrong; its not because of the Australis and UI changes that many people complain about. I actually enjoy those changes, the cross-platform consistency it brought. That's not the issue.
The issue to me is that I feel like you're slowly abandoning your principles:
If you need money, tell us how it is. Lay out your plan for the next 3 years (a very specific vision!), estimate a figure of money, and maybe we can crowdsource it to happen. I think people are less likely to donate if they can't get clarity into what the money is used for (I know I'm that way).
I think that plan/vision needs to say more specifics like: we're campaigning against all kinds of ads, especially ones that track you and hurt your privacy; we're abandoning 3rd party proprietary things built in to our browser; we're re-focusing on our needs on your security and privacy. We're going to have the most secure browser on the planet, implementing the following list of protocols and standards, we're researching some new protocols and standards and working with the community on them. We're going 64 bit on Windows to take full advantage of performance and security extensions in modern OSes. We're going to make crypto more easy and transparent, both TLS in the browser, but especially we're going to refocus our efforts on Thunderbird and making your email safe with built in idiot-proof PGP encryption and signing. We're also going to work with web vendors to start implementing their own encryption, meaning when you get a notice from your bank, we expect it to be signed by your bank's encryption key and it all happens automagically to keep you safe.
If I don't start seeing more concrete things like this working for the betterment of the internet and my security and privacy on the internet, then my donation dollars will start looking for other projects. I want to know you're working for me, and not using me only to generate money.
... It's called taxes. You pay an amount proportional to your income, plus or minus adjustments based on your personal situation.
Public universities, colleges, tech schools, etc., should be completely free to all citizens, paid for by tax dollars. This is an investment in our citizens and our culture and worth the tax money. Most students on average would pay the money back and then some in taxes over their working lifetimes anyway, so it's a net win. Plus, studies have shown that we could offer free tuition and actually SAVE money from our federal budget compared to the enormous amount of money we dump on banks to prop up the failing student loan "industry".
It's obscene what we're allowing to happen to our young people; starting life with a massive debt really puts a huge roadblock on the path to prosperity and happiness, one that is not easily overcome, even when working hard. My wife had private loans for an average cost university. They make the loans sound so simple, but by the time you graduate you have 8+ loans (at least one for each semester, but possibly more since sometimes a bank is not willing to give a loan for the complete cost of a semester, so you have to get another one from someone else to finish it out) each with a minimum of at least $50 and before you know it, your monthly minimum is a mortgage payment of $600+ a month. So we're effectively requiring students to pay a mortgage right out of school (on top of the real rent/mortgage and cost of living). But then when students ask for higher wages to pay that bill, many of the older generation scoff and call the kids "entitled". If companies and HR want to continue demanding degrees for every position, then they need to pay the cost of doing business and raise wages.
So tuition should be free to everyone, at any time, funded by taxes from individuals and businesses alike. Aside from obvious young adults age 18-22, I think we should encourage anyone of any age to attend college whenever they wish, and push the idea of microdegrees or certifications or badges, or whatever you want to call them. Why shouldn't a 30, 40, 50 year old be able to attend an engineering seminar to brush up on skills? Or a history class for fun (better use of time than sitting in front of the TV!)? We should encourage everyone to pursue life-long learning, not just the fresh-out-of-high-school crowd. We can do that when tuition is free and there is no financial risk to giving it a try and backing out later if demands of life (kids, work, etc.) prove too much that particular semester.
Bernie Sanders has called for tax-funded tuition-free universities. If you want to see this too, chip in a few bucks to his campaign.
Continuing the fine tradition of not RTFA around here, I didn't read the research paper but I did skim wikipedia's entry.
Nowhere do I see any mention of authenticity. This is as important as confidentiality and integrity. I'm not saying there isn't a solution (I'm not a cryptographer) but I wonder if anyone has any insight or links to a solution if it exists.
Here's the scenario. Homomorphic encryption lets us keep the data constantly encrypted, maintaining confidentiality. Ok, that's cool for data breaches, we stay much better protected from loss of confidentiality.
But what if a malicious actor purposely performs an operation on the data? Changing genomic data in this case might mess up diagnoses/research, etc. Future applications could be stuff like medical billing -- if its easy to tack on another bill, even if you don't know previous bills because its encrypted? Is there any mechanism that checks that the operation we perform on the encrypted data was authorized, i.e., that I am a manager allowed to do the operation and I specifically consent to performing the operation? Typical integrity checks wouldn't catch this; integrity is correctness of the data, which means it will only verify the computation was performed correctly and then move on. Authenticity is a different issue.
I would suspect Microsoft Research thought of this. My question is: is there a countermeasure that can be described as part of the algorithm? Or is the countermeasure "be careful with any software that uses this algorithm, make sure it checks authenticity before applying operations!". If the solution is for developers to be careful, I'm not convinced the algorithm made anything better. Many developers do not know cryptography and may assume safety, or may not have the time and resources due to a manager driving a hard deadline; in these cases, "we use MS's algorithm!" can get advertised without any increase in safety (and possibly even a decrease, as some might look to this as a crutch and reason why they can cut corners...).
Wow, where do you get such a negative attitude toward taxes?
Look the best way to look at it is the following: just by existing, you require stuff. Food, clothing, shelter, and then the slightly more luxurious things such as heating your home in winter (unless you use lumber you chopped yourself exclusively), or using internet to leave the comment. Unless you don't use the internet or electricity and don't have a job and feed yourself exclusively through farming, then you use or require something provided by the public.
Oh, but "I pay for my own internet/electricity/whatever", right? Something like $1 of every internet bill I get is a "Universal Access Fee", which gives people in the middle of nowhere access. Why? because business decided that it's not worthwhile to support you, and we as a society decided it was worthwhile to do. So, we pay a fee (tax, really) that subsidizes costs. Electricity is generated from things dug up from the ground, and that may have caused environmental issues to another region. To be fair to them, we help them clean it up. Goods are trucked in via roads that were paid for by the public. Your healthcare, even if you paid totally out of pocket for doctor and medicine, largely came about due to the US government guaranteeing student loans for doctors (otherwise, banks would not provide such a large amount of money with no collateral) and the fact that public tax money helps subsidize medical research (even if that research ends up owned by a private company, but that's an ethical issue for another day...).
Essentially, by existing, you require stuff, and some of that stuff is not something a free market will support. Too much risk, not enough reward, whatever. So, we as a society get together every once and while and say "Well this needs done anyway, so if business won't do it, how do we pay for it?". We negotiate a small amount every citizen pays into the pool to do these things, and send everyone a bill for the services. This bill from the government is called "taxes".. What, you expect everything to be for free?
Taxes is the bill you get for society to provide you with a modern lifestyle. Now the nice thing about it is that this bill is somewhat negotiable; through voting and our system of representatives, you are more than welcome to be part of the process and haggle for cost and even which services we consider important enough to do/offer. If all you do is complain online and never be involved in government affairs, you're kind of missing the point of living in a democratic society.
So, stop complaining and pay your damn bills. If you're not happy with the service/cost, feel free to get involved in government and change it. At least you have a chance with government... if you're unhappy with your private sector service, they just tell you to get lost.
My wife has written many collegiate level textbooks and they are used at many different schools. She netted a whopping $600 in royalties for 2014. The authors are not getting rich on sales of textbooks. Their salaries dwarf what they earn for publications.
Next conspiracy theory ...
What course did she write a textbook for? Upperlevel books probably don't have as many students. In any case, the way to go these days is self publishing through Amazon or Lulu. Keep the profits for yourself and professors that work with you to edit the book. Pearson and other publishers rip you off. I think publishers are at this point almost obsolete. (I know, editors are good, and they may get you some publicity, but neither of those is worth how much they rip students off and how much they keep themselves)
At a normal university, there would be conflict-of-interest policies that apply and would probably prevent a department from forming a policy to require a course purchase which benefits a faculty member financially. At Cal State Fullerton, either there aren't any strong policies, or they are being ignored, apparently.
I can agree with that. I wrote a small book for a course, back at my old university. I was not allowed to make a profit from the book in any class that I taught. It was picked up by another neighboring university though, and that was ok (though I keep the price low anyway, about $30 right now, only a small profit, because I don't believe in $100+ books, education should be more or less free).
As a former university and tech school mathematics instructor, I'm happy to throw in my take on it.
Most textbooks are absolutely dull, and are full of extremely contrived examples designed to "show how useful the subject is". Many subjects are extremely useful, but perhaps to only certain fields, so it's sometimes difficult to explain the utility to a first undergraduate course in the subject. This makes many students bored because they're smart enough to realize they're essentially being lied to -- the examples are obviously contrived and lame. Furthermore, it pushes this idea that unless there's a "practical way to make money" on the subject, it's worthless, which is absolutely not true. We should encourage philosophical thought for its own sake, and recognize that such thought sometimes leads to great discoveries long term, even if we don't know how its useful right this minute.
So that being said, the textbook industry knows Education is a buzz word in politics. They know getting Good Jobs (TM) is another buzzword. So they rewrite the textbooks every year now. The actual content doesn't change (or at least not for the best; I think they often just remove content!), they just swap chapters around, and most importantly, tailor the contrived examples to the buzzword industry of the year. They can then go around convincing politicians, school districts, and universities that their books "prepare students to enter the workforce" and you absolutely need the latest edition or your students won't have the advantage others' do. It's kind of a bullying -- they make the professors feel bad, and if they manage to stand up, then they go to the school board or university administration to get their book in.
To convince people of the book, they spam free copies of the book to everyone. They hand out swag at conferences, reminding them of how awesome they are for publishing. They get name recognition.
Professors then start to feel bad that maybe my students are not receiving the same advantage as everyone else, let me use what they all use. Going through graduate school, I had my share of completely awful textbooks for courses. Couldn't learn a damn thing from them. We asked the professor about it (several different ones for different classes) and the response was almost always "this is the standard textbook nationwide on this topic".
Having a standard breeds mediocrity in some sense. To me, University is meant to open your mind to new ideas. I think they should be a little different between semesters and professors. Shake it up. Cover a few new topics, especially if the students seem interested. Throw out a few topics because maybe there's little interest. Why not tailor it to what the students want, rather than university and accreditation boards? I know, losing accreditation would be bad, but that's exactly my point -- the system has damaged what it means to have a university education. You just go through an assembly line, rather than being encouraged to explore your interested. Classes like linear algebra are amazingly useful, but (1) not every applied field in the world needs it, so I can see some instances where you don't want to cover all the nuances; (2) linear algebra is a very large subject and so even if a student should learn it, the question becomes: what part of linear algebra? What should be the focus of the class? We need professors willing to change it up based on student needs and interests. We're teaching kids how to learn, not rote memory -- if we do a good job, then even if we don't cover everything, students will know how to find and learn what they need in the future!
Finally, many textbooks themselves were not written because of someone's passion to educate, but rather to fulfill a bullet point for a PhD or tenure. Check the introduction/forward of any textbook; most of them will say "This grew out of work I did for my PhD....". It is almost verbatim someone's PhD thesis, but somehow undergraduates are expected to follow a PhD thesis on a subject (remembe
Certainly, not every programmer with a strong background in math is like this. But I've worked with people who are proud of their math ability, and who would be the first to tell you how critical math is to programming, who write terrible code ... They pride themselves on their "uncommon" ability to keep lots and lots abstract details "in their heads," and in their "analytical" skills.
Throughout elementary, middle, high school and even into college (dependent a bit on major), we tell kids that "math" is learning your times tables, balancing a checkbook, and basically arithmetic skills. There's some algebra thrown in there in high school but for the most part, most people think of math as doing arithmetic. I'll give you an example. My mother says "You're so good at math!" whenever she's baking cookies and asks me how much flour to use if she wants to double the recipe and she typically uses 1/3 cup of flour. This isn't unusual; I heard this all through my life, from family, friends and even teachers.
Mathematics, however, is really just logical thinking. It is the art of logical reasoning about problems. Often applied to numbers, sure, but it doesn't have to be, or at least not in a concrete sense. It's more about reasoning about patterns, abstracting different types of problems (realizing that two problems you thought were different are actually the same type of problem!) There are whole college courses in mathematics I took back in the day where not a single number was written on the board. It was all symbols and functions and proving properties of things (meaning: what can I logically conclude about something based on this list of facts?). Being good at math really means being good at reasoning about problems, abstract away the difficulty, and notice patterns.
I think the disconnect is that there is a healthy population of people running around that declare themselves "good at math" because everyone they know (family friends teachers) tells them they are good at math... because they did arithmetic and basic algebra well. The end. I've met several people like that. Doing those things at a high school level is more about memorization (think: memorizing times tables, memorizing "FOIL" method for multiplying polynomials, memorizing quadratic formula, etc.) than logical reasoning. You might get a taste of that in high school geometry if you're lucky, but honestly even that seems to mostly be "memorize this proof about geometry" without really building logical reasoning skills that can be applied to other problems. You just do it for the sake of doing it, from the students' perspective.
The people that are "good at math" you meet that suck at programming are likely the people that fall into this category. They were great at K-12 math classes because they can memorize and hold a lot in their head, and they probably learned programming by the same method -- look at code (in a book, google search, whatever) and memorize the code. They memorize what functions do what, and how to throw things together, but they never really internalized that abstraction and problem solving that a true mathematical mind has. So they never really learned how the code goes together, or why one pattern is better than another. They just memorized an approach that worked in the past. I've seen a lot of that too unfortunately.
A real college level course in mathematics is really eye-opening (likewise, I think physics majors and a few others also experience this), and I think that ability to reason abstractly really does make a huge difference in how you approach problems. Even if you never directly use your math classes at your job, having gone through those classes permanently change how you think about and approach problems, and I think that is a huge benefit. It's a shame most people -- even the ones "good at math" -- never take one of those classes.
The (economic) question is however are those advances better (more progress/$) than direct funding of consumer products? Analysis shows no.
I am aware of such analyses, but do not know if such analysis is the consensus opinion or more a conjecture at this point.
I would still argue that overall the other benefits I listed imply that government funding of such things would be good. If nothing else, business is sometimes very risk averse, and once government research proves something is feasible, then they will jump on it (see the various businesses that have popped out of projects started at FFRDCs, for example). So such funding would then jumpstart consumer products that wouldn't have been tried in the first place by the private sector.
space exploration returns next to nothing, its basic economics
The problem with statements like this is that "basic economics" is not always correct. It is a model, and like all models, it is incredibly helpful at helping us understand things and make predictions, but it doesn't always reflect reality. Most economists didn't predict the debt bubbles and economic issues of the past decade, for example.
In any case, let me illustrate why it's actually a great thing to do space exploration, even when other things need done too (nothing is mutually exclusive):
There's probably even more arguments than this but here's for starters. We absolutely need to focus on our national infrastructure, our educational system and student debt, and other issues (shameless plug for Bernie Sanders goes here, as he's the only candidate really talking about all of these things), but I don't think any of that work says you can't also spend on science at the same time. In fact, I think it's a necessity.
Clue #1: a minimum wage job isn't something you should live off of. It is expressly for teenagers and for folks who use it as a stepping stone or fallback until something better comes along.
Who says? This is misinformation/propaganda being spread. If you look at the actual bill that instituted the minimum wage in the US (the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938), the law literally says the reasoning for setting the minimum wage is "Congress finds that ... labor conditions detrimental to the maintenance of the minimum standing of living necessary for health, efficiency, and general well-being of workers causes ..." and then goes on to list negative effects of not being paid enough to live. So yes, the law quite literally states that the minimum wage is something you're meant to live off of. (Feel free to read the law yourself on the Dept of Labor website.
This idea of "teenagers can do it" is only a ploy to make people complacent with low wages. Remember a teenager at 17/18 can easily be out living on their own and not have the support of family (for many reasons: family doesn't have ability to help, family has cancer and teenager needs to support them, family is crazy/insane/drug addicts, family is dead, etc.), and so even teenagers should make enough money to support themselves.
Clue #2: these jobs usually require little-to-no skill, and consequently do not bear the value of $15/hr at current inflation/valuation.
When the minimum wage was instituted in 1938, the many US jobs were in agriculture or simple manufacturing. I don't consider those jobs to be "high skill", but that doesn't mean they're not super important (without food, we die -- about as important as you can get! and manufacturing gave us the modern world, despite many of those jobs being just to screw the same bolt on over and over). So for one thing, skill does not equate with importance, and I think important jobs especially should be well paid.
Furthermore, have you seen secretary and human resources job these days? Also requires pretty low skill (mostly just typing and sending emails and filling out forms -- anyone who can read and write can do it, really), but look at how much these people make (in my area, you can get jobs in HR making upwards of $50k with only minimal experience, much above minimum wage). If we were going by your metric, these paper-pusher jobs should be making low pay and important jobs like farmers and restaurants that provide me food should be making more.
All of this is an aside from the real goal of minimum wage, which is that if you do ANY type of work for anyone, you're important to someone and should be able to support yourself doing that work. If you're not needed, why did the company hire you? I'm tired of this idea that companies are entitled to cheap labor; if your company requires effectively slave labor to exist, then how about we state the truth that your company is failing, not doing well, and maybe should go bankrupt due to mismanagement rather than keeping it chugging on the backs of the poor?
Clue #3: when you price human labor too high, automation becomes more attractive. There are already machines that can effectively replace fast-food cashiers, and are cheaper to operate and maintain than $15/hr people. There are also machines coming online that can operate the back-end of a fast food joint as well, which will also just come under the wire as being cheaper (but would come out ahead by being reliable, on-time, etc.)
That is going to happen no matter what because of corporate greed to always maximize profit. Even if we paid people $1/hr, at some point people would need to eat and sleep while a machine could work all night long straight, cranking out more widgets. We can't compete with technology.
What we instead need to do is have real discussion on what the future economy looks like when jobs are phased out by robo
From what I have seen, Mitre and NIST often show inaccurate CVSS scores on the CVE pages.
Have to stop you there, sorry for perhaps being a bit pedantic, but the NIST score is more or less the "official" score of a vulnerability, given how closely they work with organizations like MITRE. The CVSS scoring rules have some nuance to them, and in some scenarios the official rules on scoring a vector is not what you'd expect. NIST tries to follow the official scoring rules as strictly as possible. You may not agree with the rules (and many people don't, I'm not trying to knock you), but technically their scores are the most accurate.
CVSS recently released v3.0 scoring in order to try to address some criticisms in scoring. It did this by upgrading its base vector to be a bit more easily comprehensible by adding obvious metrics like "user interaction required", which was previously embedded in "access complexity" in v2. I think in general I like the concepts and it makes it easier for the most part, but time will tell if the general public agrees. The sticking point I think is the idea of scope, which is not a bad idea in general, but the definition seems a little fuzzy to me. We may have only shifted where the nuance is, and so disagreement in scoring may continue into the future.
In order for the metric to be truly useful, every organization has to localize measurement to their environment and each vendor needs to measure impact against their use or non-use of the underlying code. At the end of the day, it's all about risk measurement, but with those steps you end up with a reasonably accurate assessment.
Exactly. CVSS allows for this by use of temporal and environmental scores, but unfortunately, most organizations don't use them. This means most people run around talking about the base score without a clear sense of how it applies to them. I've seen vulnerabilities with a base score of let's say 7.0 or so being knocked down to 1.5, after you factor in its temporal factors (such as a patch being available) and environmental factors (such as not very widely deployed). I wish more people would talk about the environmental factors. CERT is one of the few places that lists temporal and environmental metrics, though their database is not comprehensive.
CVSSv3.0 is weakest in the fact that they essentially threw out the environmental metrics; yeah, its technically there, but its shadow of its former self -- it doesn't include important metrics like population anymore. I hope they will put that back in for CVSSv3.1, and encourage more widespread adoption.
There is nothing wrong with the current system that wider spread adoption and education cannot fix. Part of the problem is the media hype surrounding the bugs. If every little issue wouldn't get a cute name -- Shellshock, Logjam, POODLE -- the reactions might be a little less kneejerk.
I agree, but education can sometimes take a while and be harder than you think. There's momentum -- and money -- behind the current system. You get everyone wound up, and then offer to sell a widget that "protects against it". There's a lot of snake oil for sale in the industry right now, and so far, companies and governments are eating up. It will continue as long as money is being made. The bigger question is, how do you make it more profitable to tell the truth about threats?
Organizations like CERT tend to straight talk it and provide honest feedback with their temporal and environmental scores, but they're not picked up in the media as much as these security start-ups that are out to cause a ruckuss and make money. The start-ups seem to me to be more marketing companies than security companies these days; they tend to overinflate the CVSS base score and talk it up by reaching out to media directly, when in reality, the base score itself may not be that high, nevermind that temporal and environmental factors might lower it more. Fear makes money right now.
Temporal and environmental factors and only be assessed by people in the know. Windows shops obviously don't care about Linux vulnerabilities and vice versa.The base ratings are strictly focused on the vulnerability. Other factors you need to determine yourself... And there's already a system for that.
Yeah that's kind of the problem, most companies don't use temporal or especially environmental factors. If you base everything on the base score only, you're not getting a really accurate feeling for the severity of the vulnerability.
The other problem is that CVEs tend to be treated in the researcher community as gold. You list CVEs on your resume, for example. CVEs are not meant to indicate severe vulnerabilities, or even all types of vulnerabilities -- many things that are important don't get CVEs, while many lame vulnerabilities do have a CVE. These systems need rethinking in general.
It's because BSD/MIT pretty much are cool with anything as long as you attribute the code to the original author. That is the main requirement of distribution. So proprietary is ok as long as somewhere deep in the credits they add the name of the original author.
GPL meanwhile requires not just attribution, but the availability of the full source code. So you can't be a proprietary trade secret with GPL code, so any proprietary software using GPL is in violation of the license and therefore copyright law. It's illegal.
You beat me to it :-)
To the original poster:
The GPL is "viral" in that if you use even a smattering of GPLed code, you are required to release ALL of your code as GPL as well.
It concerns me that you state you use example Apple code. What license is it? ("has its own terms" is completely unhelpful).
In general, you're restricted to using a license that is the most restrictive. The liberal licenses like BSD and MIT can morph into anything pretty much. GPL is one of the most restrictive on redistribution (RMS would say it preserves user freedoms by restricting developer distribution, and I would tend to agree with it; just throwing that in there because I don't mean restrictive in a negative sense here, only that it was designed to prevent people from running off with the code without contributing back to the community, so you can't just re-release GPLed code under MIT like you suggested). Apple's license may be open source or not; furthermore, there are known open source licenses that are NOT compatible with the GPL, so its entirely possible that the Apple code may not be distributed together with the GPL code. For reference, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/li....
It's possible your pro-bono advice is correct and this doesn't matter too much if you release it publicly and open source (it seems unlikely open source projects would sue other open source projects), but in case you ever plan on making money on this project (and even if you don't), to avoid any possible legal trouble you should choose the most restrictive license compatible with all licenses at play. Likely this means the GPL, but the wildcard is Apple. If you post the terms to it, we could probably help sort it out (with the usual IANAL caveat). Otherwise, you may need to rethink which libraries are included with your code and possibly even roll your own depending how niche it is.
Where do I get started building Android apps in C++? Inquiring minds suddenly want to know.
The latest versions of Qt5 support building Qt/C++ apps for Android and iOS. I've never tried it for more than running a few examples, but it seems pretty nice and easy, and I've really enjoyed Qt development for years now.
Really, with all the important issues that should occupy a president's attention, if this is even on your radar, you're not qualified for the job.
Converting to metric is not just a fun science nerd issue no one cares about.
Really it's an economic issue, and I'm surprised it hasn't been made more of a big deal. When we follow international standards, we can better share ideas and better trade goods. If the US used metric, we'd be in a much better position to sell our goods worldwide, as we wouldn't need to re-tool or re-calculate all the time.
Great example: our US engineers are mostly trained in the English system. My wife used to work in an industry that is now heavily developing and building things overseas. The American engineers had to build everything to metric standards, since they were building in India and what not, and really had trouble with it, as they weren't properly trained to do metric calculations and the equipment they wanted to buy from American companies didn't always come in a metric size. Instead, the engineers would have to half-ass some crazy scheme (like buying parts and then cutting them -- makes sense until you realize you'd have to pay field guys to do this 10,000 times) to get it to work. The quality suffers, and since there's all these problems, I get the sense that many international companies would rather just hire Germans or whatever to do it.
This is an anecdote of one industry, sure, but if our engineers were trained in metric, and our businesses made the jump to make metric products in the first place, we'd probably be a lot more competitive in the world market. We wouldn't need to spend all this extra time and money on customization, we could just do it. I imagine all this effort has long ago exceeded the cost of buying new tools once; we should have just switched then and told businessmen to shut up about costs.