Electronic voting machines are in virtually every way superior to paper voting machines.
They prevent you from accidentally submitting an invalid ballot.
Damn straight! You can do it so easily with some code like this:
public boolean isBallotValid() {
if (ballot.isRepublicanStraightTicket())
return true;
if (ballot.hasDemocratSelected())
return false
if (ballot.hasGreenOrPeaceAndFreedomSelected())
electrocuteUser();
Ummm, no. If, rather than starting/stopping you just maintain the average speed that you *were going to be traveling anyway* it doesn't obstruct anyone, everyone has a much smoother drive and you get there just as quickly/slowly as you would have anyhow.
Banks stop sending email! The reason people respond to phishing is because they are used to getting emails from their bank. Why does a bank need to send you email? If it's important they can call you or send a paper letter. If it's more advertising for their crap services they can spend the money to print it out and mail it or advertise on TV or something.
No, the reason Unix wasn't compromised was because people didn't know how to do it. The tools simply weren't available in the early days both cryptographical tools and hardware tools.
Unix passwords used to be encrypted with "crypt" which was a cipher based, roughly, on a German Enigma machine. Until the release of DES, Enigma was about the most advanced cryptography that anyone outside of intelligence agencies had any access to. Civilian cryptanalysis was almost non-existant so no one knew how to break it. Machines were pathetically slow so things like brute force attacks just didn't work.
The same goes true for wire traffic. A protocol analyzer in 1986 was an esoteric, *expensive* piece of equipment. You couldn't just walk up with a laptop (hey, what's that? - didn't exist in 1986) and plug it into the network and grab all the traffic. There weren't Ethernet ports in every office, either.
Times have changed and threats have changed. We used to worry about "war dialers" finding our unlisted modem numbers and people do password challenges. Tomorrow we may be worrying about people with quantum computers. Unix was secure in its time and continues to be secure. Windows has been insecure and continues to be insecure. Attach an unpatched XP box to the Internet and see how long before its owned.
You can usually set your watch by the Shinkansen. Japanese trains usually are run on schedule to at least the minute. When the train is late it's a big deal. They used to give out excuse slips if the train was significantly late so you could show your boss that the reason you were late was because the train screwed up.
Hmmm...I built my very first database application on top of Postgresql back in about 1997/98. I even wound up writing a JDBC driver to talk to Postgres to get things going. We ditched Postgres after getting funded for Oracle for both performance and credibility reasons (back in 1998 basing your company on Open Source was not an attractive thing for VC's) but I never had a problem figuring out things and I don't think I ever asked a question on a mailing list or forum.
However, I have found over the years that one of my key talents is being able to read documentation and figure things out so maybe the documentation was really hard for other people.
No, you do have to show ID. Based on a secret government rule, no less. http://www.papersplease.org/gilmore/ John Gilmore took it all the way to the Supreme Court and they declined to hear the case.
Well, the amount that you pay to get a patent is going to vary. If you're a small company and you pay your patent attorneys by the hour, it might run you $100K if there's a lot of office actions. If you're a large company you have patent attorneys on staff and you're constantly filing patents and your cost is much, much lower.
Large companies encourage lots of patents not because they think the individual patents are useful, really, but because having a patent PORTFOLIO is very valuable. When I was at Apple we were encouraged to file patents for just about anything that we thought was novel in what we were doing. The bar to starting the patent process was not very high. I have two patents that I was the primary inventor on from my time at Apple so I know of what I'm speaking - one is for something that I thought was relatively trivial but novel and the other is for something that took me the better part of six months to come up with. The attorneys didn't care one way or the other and when I try to read through the claims I'm damned if I can figure out what we did patent.
Patent portfolios are used by the large companies to keep small companies out. You'll find that a lot of the large companies simply cross-license their patent portfolios to each other at no charge. If you don't have a large enough patent portfolio you have to pay to not get sued.
Until a mole in your security organization steals a copy. A one-time pad may (if properly generated) be cryptographically secure but that doesn't make it totally secure in the real world.
Definitely an emphasis on being able to actually do things is important. However, once you're out in the real world you'll find that being able to clearly communicate is as important as being able to do things. When I was in high school I wrote lots and lots of papers and my teachers (in history and English) would continually tell me how important it was to do this since I would be writing lots of papers in college. When I got to college, studying CS, my experience was similar to yours - I wrote very few papers. The epiphany was when I realized that my high school teachers had not been lying - were I to have majored in English or history the way they did I would have been continually writing papers. They simply didn't realize that their college experience would be different from other majors.
However, my writing skills have been invaluable to me since. Thanks to those endless term papers that I wrote back in high school I can:
Write a technical specification Write a manual Write a business plan Put together a presentation that explains a concept or a product and explain it to another group of engineers or a group of customers or investors.
As a result (and along with my technical abilities) I've been a tech lead, a manager, a vice president and now the CEO of a company (small but growing rapidly). I've worked with a number of engineers along the way who were technically competent but unable to communicate what they were doing to anyone else which is just not useful in a team engineering environment and makes them much less valuable.
Also, when I was in college I remember in my compiler construction class at least one student had someone's compiler from the year before and was passing it off as their own. It's no harder to plagarize code than it is to plagarize a paper. You're only cheating yourself though.
Really, the right way to handle these things would be to have you write the code, then write a paper explaining how it works and the design decisions you made and then have you defend that in front of the class and take questions. That'll separate those who actually did the work from those who did not pretty quickly but it takes a lot of time to do that (which is why it's usually only done for graduate theses)
Well, I think you need to get out a little more often.
Java is primarily used as the backend for internet applications these days. There's not that many Java user apps if that's what you're thinking of, but things like JBoss and Tomcat are widely deployed on Linux and other Unix platforms. Eclipse (a Java IDE) runs very well on Linux though the typical corporate development environment is probably more like development using JBuilder/Eclipse/NetBeans on Windows and deploying on either Unix, Linux or Windows backends.
I think it's time to write a new disk utility that instead of zeroing out MP3 file data overwrites it with pr0n downloaded from the Internet and other believable data.
Well, how much are you willing to risk? Mounting a defense in one of these cases can run into 100's of thousands of dollars. You (or your lawyer) is risking that you will win the case and then be able to get the money out of the RIAA in a timely fashion. Even if you win, they will probably try to draw out paying your legal fees for as long as possible.
Even if.Net (or Java) were truly cross-platform (write once, test once, run everywhere), these things would not get huge traction in the *nix markets because the approach seems at odds with the OS.
So, Java is supposedly the most popular programming language on the planet according to one thing I saw recently. It's certainly widely used and lots of systems are implemented in it. Windows is not the big Java platform since if you're in a MS only environment.NET is easier to use. If Java isn't being used on Unix where is it being used? Mac OS X?
We already have to deal with intoxicated people operating cars, planes, and other potentially lethal machinery. How much worse would things be if now, in addition to those, you've got people high on ecstasy or marijuana? What about heroin? Would bystander deaths double? Triple? Some of the effects of these drugs make alcohol pale in comparison. Probably not much worse. We already have strong laws and strong enforcement against things like drunk driving. Drug usage would not become acceptable overnight, merely not criminal. Drug testing would not go away. Heroin usage is pretty much self-correcting.
If we removed the criminal penalties and a large amount of the money from the drug trade the hope would be that the criminal element associated with drugs would fade away. When you talk about bystander deaths from drugs, you need to balance it against the current fallout from the war on drugs - those killed by bullets from drug-cash fueled gangs, the lives wrecked by putting people in prison for possessing a few ounces of an illegal substance, the loss of our freedoms and liberties to allow our government to try to tackle an impossible job.
When the authorities can keep the prisons "drug-free" they can start arguing that they can win the war on drugs. So far I've seen no evidence that it is possible.
People like to explain that the "war on drugs" is failing and how eventually the government will have no choice but to legalize these substances. They even go on to say how great it would be for everyone because then the government will be able to collect taxes in the same manner they do with tobacco. Last time I checked, not very many people grow tobacco in their backyards and make cigarettes in their basements. Why does anyone think dealers give the government a cut of their lucrative business? So, why don't people grow tobacco in their own backyards and make their own cigarettes? It's because even at $5 a pack it's a lot cheaper and easier to buy a package of cigarettes than it is to grow and roll your own. When you buy drugs you're not just paying for the cost of cultivation and processing - you're paying for the risks that the distributors are taking with being arrested and put in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. Look at what the people in Columbia are paid for the raw coca leaves - it's nowhere near the price paid for cocaine or crack on the street in the US. The cost of processing is not that great. What you're paying for is all of the risks taken by the distributors. Remove the risks and the price will come down. Remove the money and the drug gangs will disappear.
Personally, I haven't taken any illegal drugs since college (about 20 years ago) and I didn't take too many back then. They bore me - I'd rather spend an evening reading a good book than getting high on something. What I don't care for is the destruction that the war on drugs is causing to our society. No knock searches, not being able to possess large amounts of cash, arbitrary confiscation of property on the suspicion that it was acquired illegally, intrusive controls in our banking system to check for money laundering, young kids with assault rifles. All of these are the fallout from the war on drugs and none of them really work because the rewards for dealing and distributing drugs continue to outweight the risks of dealing and distributing drugs.
Our housekeeper likes to do that. All of the stuff in neat piles. Unfortunately there's no organization to the piles and she inserts things into the piles so you can't just look at the top for things that have recently disappeared.
Start showing up at Congresscritters' doors with a dump truck full of money. Seriously. The MPAA and RIAA have been lobbying, hard, to get this stuff in place to protect their little industry. And it is a *little* industry. The record industry, as a whole, grossed about $40 billion last year. In contrast, IBM had revenue of $91 billion dollars in 2005. Yet these little schmucks have managed to screw up the whole computing and consumer electronics industry with their nonsense. Why? Because they were much more effective at lobbying.
So on the "more" page there's a total of 39 things listed, half of which are re-uses of the search engine and most of which don't make any money. Google is currently employing about 8000 people. So, 200 people per product? Google is seriously bloated. Just wait until they hit a cash crunch and watch the heads start to fly.
Apple used to share a shuttle bus from the Caltrain station to other companies in Cupertino. The biggest problem with it was that the shuttle bus ran on 9-5 type hours. Used to be a great way to get out of meetings, though. "Oh, look at the time - I've gotta go or one of you is going to have to drive me back up to the City."
I would say that a typical system admin in the Bay Area is making at least $50K. It's not a matter of moving to the Mid-west, you just need to get a job that pays properly. Different regions have different pay scales. It's kind of like saying "If you can't make it on $10K a year in the Mid-West you should be thinking about moving to Mexico".
Slashdot Mirror
Electronic voting machines are in virtually every way superior to paper voting machines.
They prevent you from accidentally submitting an invalid ballot.
Damn straight! You can do it so easily with some code like this:
public boolean isBallotValid()
{
if (ballot.isRepublicanStraightTicket())
return true;
if (ballot.hasDemocratSelected())
return false
if (ballot.hasGreenOrPeaceAndFreedomSelected())
electrocuteUser();
return false;
}
Ummm, no. If, rather than starting/stopping you just maintain the average speed that you *were going to be traveling anyway* it doesn't obstruct anyone, everyone has a much smoother drive and you get there just as quickly/slowly as you would have anyhow.
Banks stop sending email! The reason people respond to phishing is because they are used to getting emails from their bank. Why does a bank need to send you email? If it's important they can call you or send a paper letter. If it's more advertising for their crap services they can spend the money to print it out and mail it or advertise on TV or something.
No, the reason Unix wasn't compromised was because people didn't know how to do it. The tools simply weren't available in the early days both cryptographical tools and hardware tools.
Unix passwords used to be encrypted with "crypt" which was a cipher based, roughly, on a German Enigma machine. Until the release of DES, Enigma was about the most advanced cryptography that anyone outside of intelligence agencies had any access to. Civilian cryptanalysis was almost non-existant so no one knew how to break it. Machines were pathetically slow so things like brute force attacks just didn't work.
The same goes true for wire traffic. A protocol analyzer in 1986 was an esoteric, *expensive* piece of equipment. You couldn't just walk up with a laptop (hey, what's that? - didn't exist in 1986) and plug it into the network and grab all the traffic. There weren't Ethernet ports in every office, either.
Times have changed and threats have changed. We used to worry about "war dialers" finding our unlisted modem numbers and people do password challenges. Tomorrow we may be worrying about people with quantum computers. Unix was secure in its time and continues to be secure. Windows has been insecure and continues to be insecure. Attach an unpatched XP box to the Internet and see how long before its owned.
Us old guys were busy working back when /. started so we didn't find it right away and get low number ID's.
You can usually set your watch by the Shinkansen. Japanese trains usually are run on schedule to at least the minute. When the train is late it's a big deal. They used to give out excuse slips if the train was significantly late so you could show your boss that the reason you were late was because the train screwed up.
Hmmm...I built my very first database application on top of Postgresql back in about 1997/98. I even wound up writing a JDBC driver to talk to Postgres to get things going. We ditched Postgres after getting funded for Oracle for both performance and credibility reasons (back in 1998 basing your company on Open Source was not an attractive thing for VC's) but I never had a problem figuring out things and I don't think I ever asked a question on a mailing list or forum.
However, I have found over the years that one of my key talents is being able to read documentation and figure things out so maybe the documentation was really hard for other people.
No, you do have to show ID. Based on a secret government rule, no less. http://www.papersplease.org/gilmore/ John Gilmore took it all the way to the Supreme Court and they declined to hear the case.
Well, the amount that you pay to get a patent is going to vary. If you're a small company and you pay your patent attorneys by the hour, it might run you $100K if there's a lot of office actions. If you're a large company you have patent attorneys on staff and you're constantly filing patents and your cost is much, much lower.
Large companies encourage lots of patents not because they think the individual patents are useful, really, but because having a patent PORTFOLIO is very valuable. When I was at Apple we were encouraged to file patents for just about anything that we thought was novel in what we were doing. The bar to starting the patent process was not very high. I have two patents that I was the primary inventor on from my time at Apple so I know of what I'm speaking - one is for something that I thought was relatively trivial but novel and the other is for something that took me the better part of six months to come up with. The attorneys didn't care one way or the other and when I try to read through the claims I'm damned if I can figure out what we did patent.
Patent portfolios are used by the large companies to keep small companies out. You'll find that a lot of the large companies simply cross-license their patent portfolios to each other at no charge. If you don't have a large enough patent portfolio you have to pay to not get sued.
Impeachment is a political process. If you can get the votes to impeach you can make it for any kind of "crime" you want.
Until a mole in your security organization steals a copy. A one-time pad may (if properly generated) be cryptographically secure but that doesn't make it totally secure in the real world.
Definitely an emphasis on being able to actually do things is important. However, once you're out in the real world you'll find that being able to clearly communicate is as important as being able to do things. When I was in high school I wrote lots and lots of papers and my teachers (in history and English) would continually tell me how important it was to do this since I would be writing lots of papers in college. When I got to college, studying CS, my experience was similar to yours - I wrote very few papers. The epiphany was when I realized that my high school teachers had not been lying - were I to have majored in English or history the way they did I would have been continually writing papers. They simply didn't realize that their college experience would be different from other majors.
However, my writing skills have been invaluable to me since. Thanks to those endless term papers that I wrote back in high school I can:
Write a technical specification
Write a manual
Write a business plan
Put together a presentation that explains a concept or a product and explain it to another group of engineers or a group of customers or investors.
As a result (and along with my technical abilities) I've been a tech lead, a manager, a vice president and now the CEO of a company (small but growing rapidly). I've worked with a number of engineers along the way who were technically competent but unable to communicate what they were doing to anyone else which is just not useful in a team engineering environment and makes them much less valuable.
Also, when I was in college I remember in my compiler construction class at least one student had someone's compiler from the year before and was passing it off as their own. It's no harder to plagarize code than it is to plagarize a paper. You're only cheating yourself though.
Really, the right way to handle these things would be to have you write the code, then write a paper explaining how it works and the design decisions you made and then have you defend that in front of the class and take questions. That'll separate those who actually did the work from those who did not pretty quickly but it takes a lot of time to do that (which is why it's usually only done for graduate theses)
We're trying to. That's the whole point of exporting those nutjobs. Toxic waste to China, Jehovah's Witnesses to the UK.
Those who can't criticize
Well, I think you need to get out a little more often.
Java is primarily used as the backend for internet applications these days. There's not that many Java user apps if that's what you're thinking of, but things like JBoss and Tomcat are widely deployed on Linux and other Unix platforms. Eclipse (a Java IDE) runs very well on Linux though the typical corporate development environment is probably more like development using JBuilder/Eclipse/NetBeans on Windows and deploying on either Unix, Linux or Windows backends.
I think it's time to write a new disk utility that instead of zeroing out MP3 file data overwrites it with pr0n downloaded from the Internet and other believable data.
Well, how much are you willing to risk? Mounting a defense in one of these cases can run into 100's of thousands of dollars. You (or your lawyer) is risking that you will win the case and then be able to get the money out of the RIAA in a timely fashion. Even if you win, they will probably try to draw out paying your legal fees for as long as possible.
Even if .Net (or Java) were truly cross-platform (write once, test once, run everywhere), these things would not get huge traction in the *nix markets because the approach seems at odds with the OS.
.NET is easier to use. If Java isn't being used on Unix where is it being used? Mac OS X?
So, Java is supposedly the most popular programming language on the planet according to one thing I saw recently. It's certainly widely used and lots of systems are implemented in it. Windows is not the big Java platform since if you're in a MS only environment
Great, so you've got all the functions on your phone but they all suck.
We already have to deal with intoxicated people operating cars, planes, and other potentially lethal machinery. How much worse would things be if now, in addition to those, you've got people high on ecstasy or marijuana? What about heroin? Would bystander deaths double? Triple? Some of the effects of these drugs make alcohol pale in comparison.
Probably not much worse. We already have strong laws and strong enforcement against things like drunk driving. Drug usage would not become acceptable overnight, merely not criminal. Drug testing would not go away. Heroin usage is pretty much self-correcting.
If we removed the criminal penalties and a large amount of the money from the drug trade the hope would be that the criminal element associated with drugs would fade away. When you talk about bystander deaths from drugs, you need to balance it against the current fallout from the war on drugs - those killed by bullets from drug-cash fueled gangs, the lives wrecked by putting people in prison for possessing a few ounces of an illegal substance, the loss of our freedoms and liberties to allow our government to try to tackle an impossible job.
When the authorities can keep the prisons "drug-free" they can start arguing that they can win the war on drugs. So far I've seen no evidence that it is possible.
People like to explain that the "war on drugs" is failing and how eventually the government will have no choice but to legalize these substances. They even go on to say how great it would be for everyone because then the government will be able to collect taxes in the same manner they do with tobacco. Last time I checked, not very many people grow tobacco in their backyards and make cigarettes in their basements. Why does anyone think dealers give the government a cut of their lucrative business?
So, why don't people grow tobacco in their own backyards and make their own cigarettes? It's because even at $5 a pack it's a lot cheaper and easier to buy a package of cigarettes than it is to grow and roll your own. When you buy drugs you're not just paying for the cost of cultivation and processing - you're paying for the risks that the distributors are taking with being arrested and put in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. Look at what the people in Columbia are paid for the raw coca leaves - it's nowhere near the price paid for cocaine or crack on the street in the US. The cost of processing is not that great. What you're paying for is all of the risks taken by the distributors. Remove the risks and the price will come down. Remove the money and the drug gangs will disappear.
Personally, I haven't taken any illegal drugs since college (about 20 years ago) and I didn't take too many back then. They bore me - I'd rather spend an evening reading a good book than getting high on something. What I don't care for is the destruction that the war on drugs is causing to our society. No knock searches, not being able to possess large amounts of cash, arbitrary confiscation of property on the suspicion that it was acquired illegally, intrusive controls in our banking system to check for money laundering, young kids with assault rifles. All of these are the fallout from the war on drugs and none of them really work because the rewards for dealing and distributing drugs continue to outweight the risks of dealing and distributing drugs.
Our housekeeper likes to do that. All of the stuff in neat piles. Unfortunately there's no organization to the piles and she inserts things into the piles so you can't just look at the top for things that have recently disappeared.
Start showing up at Congresscritters' doors with a dump truck full of money. Seriously. The MPAA and RIAA have been lobbying, hard, to get this stuff in place to protect their little industry. And it is a *little* industry. The record industry, as a whole, grossed about $40 billion last year. In contrast, IBM had revenue of $91 billion dollars in 2005. Yet these little schmucks have managed to screw up the whole computing and consumer electronics industry with their nonsense. Why? Because they were much more effective at lobbying.
So on the "more" page there's a total of 39 things listed, half of which are re-uses of the search engine and most of which don't make any money. Google is currently employing about 8000 people. So, 200 people per product? Google is seriously bloated. Just wait until they hit a cash crunch and watch the heads start to fly.
Apple used to share a shuttle bus from the Caltrain station to other companies in Cupertino. The biggest problem with it was that the shuttle bus ran on 9-5 type hours. Used to be a great way to get out of meetings, though. "Oh, look at the time - I've gotta go or one of you is going to have to drive me back up to the City."
I would say that a typical system admin in the Bay Area is making at least $50K. It's not a matter of moving to the Mid-west, you just need to get a job that pays properly. Different regions have different pay scales. It's kind of like saying "If you can't make it on $10K a year in the Mid-West you should be thinking about moving to Mexico".