my question to software developers out there who are thinking of devoting any real effort to a corporate hackathon like this is: "Why?"'
Why... Well, if currently unemployed, you could do worse things with your time.
Perhaps you really like Campbells (can't say I understand it, but we've all met "corporation fans" who have some sick obsession with otherwise uninteresting companies), and just want to participate in anything they do.
Perhaps you just want access to the API to see if you can find a way to abuse the hell out of it - And, even if they take away your access in three weeks, you'll still have the knowledge of how it works in all its almost certainly insecure goodness; just watching, waiting for your chance, when they have something useful go live with it. Mwa-hahaha!
Or, because you work an insanely boring job and can sneak the work in "on the clock". And while I don't condone that, I consider this one the single most likely "real" answer (perhaps tied for unemployed, though the unemployed would do better to find even shit-work than gamble on a contest to pay the bills).
why would I want to swap the CPU for another architecture? Why would I want ARM in a high performance server?
Because your "high performance" server most likely has a very low demand for 90% of the day, serving up one or two requests a minute - Then needs to handle a few thousand requests per second at peak times.
Idling the horsepower without taking the server offline look very attractive to most datacenters. Current load-balancing farms can do this to some degree, but you can have a several minute lag on spinning up new instances, by which time the surge might have already passed. But having the high-end CPUs available on a few ms' notice while a quarter-watt ARM keeps the lights on? Pure magic!
If you run a dedicated and saturated render farm, you probably don't care about this.
I'd love to help. I assume you've got a SCSI adapter with onboard DDR in the IMAC all-in-one right? I know it's bitchy, but it's THERE!!!
Not at all bitchy, and since you alone responded to me as a non-AC, I'll discuss this with you.
You (and one of the ACs) make a great point - What I said could apply to a real, albeit obscure, situation, thereby making it all the more confusing.
The same applies to clips vs magazines - Clips really do exist, as something entirely distinct from magazines. Gun owners don't consider this a pedantic gripe, they consider it more of a litmus test of whether or not the speaker actually has enough of a clue to speak credibly on the issue.
Now, I tend to agree that arguing about the distinction doesn't really help move the discussion forward - So why can't the wrong side here say "Y'know what? Okay. Magazines. We want to ban high-capacity magazines. Happy now?", just to avoid the bickering? When you want to appeal to a particular audience, ridiculing the things they consider meaningful, however pointless it may appear to you, doesn't really get you off to a great start.
None of us want more kids to die. Damn me, though, if I'll take advice on gun safety from someone who has never come closer to one than the sidearm of the cop who pulls them over for speeding.
I think that about sums it up. There is no rational reason for these guns at all in a domestic setting except for their own sake.
The irony here comes from what guns actually injure people (whether accidental, self, or violent crime) - Not shotguns, not rifles, not even "assault-lookalike" rifles...
...but pistols.
Pistols - Coincidentally, the one form-factor of gun that does make sense to have around the house, in a relatively accessible location, to defend against a home invader.
No gangbanger-wannabe tries to hide an AR-15 under his hoodie. Kids don't accidentally shoot themselves with a shotgun they found in the nightstand. And you don't use a high-gas-volume round (rifle, shotgun) for suicide unless you only want to succeed in removing your face with a good chance of "missing" anything vital because the barrel flies out of your mouth too early.
So, looking at the facts, according to the FBI, the vast majority of gun-related injuries/crimes involve a small number of rounds from small-caliber pistols. And NY has banned... High capacity magazines and decorative long-guns.
Here's a better one: why don't we focus on the underlying issues rather than basically meaningless terminology that everybody involved understands what is meant anyway.
I know, right? We all know what it means, who cares about the pedantic "right" word?
Now as long as I have your attention... Would you mind giving me a hand upgrading the RAM in my hard drive? I can't seem to get the case off the monitor...
Also - seriously - stop trying to play suicide as rational in cases other than terminal illness.
IMO, 30 years in prison qualifies as a terminal illness.
Though I will grant that you made a good point in that he might not have gotten that heavy of a sentence. Let's call his decision "premature optimization", then, as a compromise.
It's seriously offensive and fucked up.
Welcome to the internet. Please check your tired morals at the door, and your complimentary handbasket has two uses.
Just because he killed himself does not mean that he was innocent of what he was charged with.
Here, let me quote what you responded to back for you: "Yes, Swartz did things that would justify some degree of punishment. Spending the best half of his life in a cage (which IMO made suicide an entirely rational decision in this case)? Not so much."
So, I would ask you bluntly - Do you believe what he did justifies spending 30 years in a cage?
Stuffing a laptop into a wiring closet that isnt yours is a serious CRIME.
A crime. Yes. B&E, arguably (if the average passer-by would have reason to believe they shouldn't peek inside). But a "serious" crime? Not talking about breaking into the Pentagon here; not even someone's home where we'd have a reasonable expectation that no one but the owners would casually stroll within a few feet of that spot; but a (literal) closet in the basement of the same building MIT that students occasionally turn into a giant game of Tetris as a prank. So your assertion of seriousness would depend on what he did with that laptop.
Even if he didnt take any data, the act of placing the laptop in the closet should be a felony in itself.
Why? Does littering normally count as a felony?
I guess we just have radically different ideas of justice, when copyright violation as a form of civil disobedience merits a 30 year stay in Club Fed. Yes, Swartz did things that would justify some degree of punishment. Spending the best half of his life in a cage (which IMO made suicide an entirely rational decision in this case)? Not so much.
Let's assume Swartz was completely in the right on all of his actions. What, precisely, would you have MIT and the US Government do differently to prevent this suicide? What actions of theirs do you find culpable for forcing Aaron Swartz into no other choice than to take his own life?
Let's assume you didn't mean that as a troll.
For a nonviolent crime with no victims and no damages (sorry, but we really need to move beyond considering people torrenting movies as "lost customers" - And even JSTOR, for all their other evils, did the right thing here and decided not to pursue any civil penalties), what would you consider a proportional reaction by the relevant authorities?
Ideally, this should never have reached the police intervention level (never mind the feds) - The only "real" offense here involves misusing access to MIT's network. A purely internal student misconduct disciplinary board could best have handled the whole affair with a semester or two of probation.
Once it did go to the police level - Okay, he technically committed a crime. Guilty as charged. Which better serves society and justice - 30 years in prison (or a death sentence, as it turns out), or 100 hours of community service?
Everyone, at every level of escalation here, should have taken a step back and considered what really happened. A kid abused his uni's access to a subscrption service to download more than he should have. That is not a fucking capital offense.
There are nearly a billion malnourished people in the world, but all of them could be lifted out of hunger with less than a quarter of the food wasted in Europe and North America. In a globalised food system, where we are all buying food in the same international market place, that means we're taking food out of the mouths of the poor.
Flaw: I can afford to import Mangoes from India, halfway around the planet. A malnourished kid in India can't afford to import cheeseburgers from the US.
"Starving kids in Africa" have very little to do with food availability, and everything to do with finding someone to pay for it.
But that is how it should be: not just every movie studio should be able to make a Cinderella movie
FTFY.
Yes, trademarks also need to expire (not claiming they legally do, but they must, eventually). Fortunately, on that front, We The People can influence policy, simply by using them "wrong": Every time you xerox a document, you ride an elevator, you wipe snot with a kleenex, you photoshop a picture - You help speed the demise of a trademark via genericization.
Either an underpaid version of a lawyer doing a job they'd rather not, or the bottom of the legal barrel that can't get a better job.
Are you aware that they are available to those charged in all criminal prosecutions?
Are you aware that the truth of that depends on your financial situation and willingness to bankrupt yourself defending against an opponent with essentially infinite resources?
The 6th amendment guarantees your right to counsel. It doesn't guarantee your right to free, or even necessarily very good counsel.
Suicide can only be blamed on the person that did it.
I absolutely agree with you.
That doesn't preclude charging the prosecutors with a whole array of harassment and misconduct-related actions.
Unfortunately, the US has a serious problem wherein prosecutors have effectively infinite resources to harass someone; on top of which, we reward them for convictions, not for serving justice. On the flip side of that, public defenders lose money for every hour they spend on a case vs working at their "real" jobs; and since they don't generally do it as their primary job (more like an act of compulsory charity on the side), they have little incentive to care how they perform in that role. Thus, you have a supposedly-antagonistic system where both sides have strong incentive to push everyone brought up on charges to settle, regardless of guilt.
You want to fix the system? We need to have "prosecutor pays" for privately retained defense; and we need to ban settlements entirely.
Yes, that means every two-bit punk who shoplifts gets to hire Johnny Cochran. And yes, I realize how much the second point there would slow down the system - Or more accurately, it would mean nonviolent cases with no "real" damages, such as Swartz', would never have made it past a private student misconduct panel at MIT, and we'd have a brilliant but bored kid still alive.
I am an Australian. Assume this passes. How can I harden my computer against being used as a node in an ASIO botnet?
Now why oh why would you want to help the terrorists, Citizen?
More seriously, how would that play out in the courts, if you discovered your computer participating in a "legal" police operation and chose to clean their BS malware off?
Mod parent up (odd, I had a ton of points yesterday but none today).
Gerald Bull solved this problem 20-30 years ago. He even offered it to America, and we told him to kindly go fuck himself, so he did his work in Canada (actually right on the border, with his campus straddling both sides of the border).
Then the Jews decided he didn't deserve to continue living, so they sent a team of assassins to another sovereign country (without permission from that country) to kill him.
Hmm, violating national sovereignty to assassinate scientists... Where have I heard that before?. Oh, right... Looks like pretty standard operating procedure for our bestest buds in the world, killing geeks.
If I were a BOFH asked to "help out" with such a test, I'd talk about my pet peeve: transitive closure in SQL [ed.ac.uk]. Comes real handy in anything that deals with bills of material.
Recursive CTEs to the rescue!
Though I suppose the purists wouldn't consider that part of the core language. If you have a candidate for a SQL-heavy position that won't (or can't) use them, though - "Next candidate, please".
"The judge in the case declared that the district's compromise for the student (a badge without the battery) was sufficient"
Active RFID tags cost a fuckload of a lot more than passive ones, not to mention they occasionally need the battery replaced. Never mind the privacy issues here, why the hell do we allow public schools to waste so much taxpayer money on frivolous BS like this?
I have two passive RFID badges I use on a daily basis, and they do their thing just fine. Hold it up to the pad next to the door, the door goes "click", done.
In the process, Anonymous successfully managed to get the accused released by tainting the evidence. Congratulations, assholes.
Sorry, no.
For the same reason we rant against calling copyright violations "stealing", the fact that anonymous found it first doesn't have any impact on the admissibility of the evidence. The police, now that someone has shown them how to do their jobs, can go to the same "untainted" sources and obtain the same evidence with a clean chain of custody. Happy day!
Why does this section of rock appear to have a circle carved into it?
At first I considered that just a side effect of the DRT on soft rock (spinning wire brush = circular abrasions, duh), but if you look at the lower, pre-cleaned picture, you can still see the outline of the same pattern.
The simple fact is, nobody knows what will happen tomorrow, its the tools and experience you build TODAY which will give you more security than some misguided belief that your permanency equates to anything.
Although you have it 100% absolutely correct, you make the mistake of drastically overstating the odds of a 9-to-5 declaring you redundant "tomorrow". Yes, it can happen. Yes, it will happen to most of us at least a few times in our lives. Yes, it might even happen after a week on the job; but if you make it a week, you'll probably make it to your 6-month review. And if you make it past your six month review (which you will if you don't completely suck), they won't just randomly get rid of you unless their market heads South.
They just couldn't do it correctly while being quiet at a small desk in a room with 50 or 150 other people..
Y'know, I struggled to come up with an example to extend this scenario into the "real" working world, but I have to thank you for doing it for me so eloquently there.
Odds are also very good that both of them are smarter than you, BTW.
Oh, well then... I guess you win! Congratulations. Well played, sir, well played indeed!
but who could demonstrate competence in the subject matter in an in-person oral exam.
Funny thing about math - The problems presented to students on exams have actual correct answers. Not a matter of demonstrating "competence", but of getting that correct answer.
A bigger problem with that idea comes from how much it limits the possible scope of the questions asked. You don't "talk" your way through changing the order of a triple integral, you fill half a page with dense equations; and if someone can do that, what difference does it make if you read them the starting equation or the page already has it written at the top?
Call me cynical, but I would take the assertion they could do better on an oral math exam to mean they believe either that the medium wouldn't allow asking any "hard" questions will all sorts of scary notation, or that they could trick the professor into at least partially solving the problem for them. Or, I suppose, that they have no exposure to any math harder than basic algebra (and even then, I'd love to see someone "talk" their way through factoring an ugly multivariate polynomial).
Slashdot Mirror
my question to software developers out there who are thinking of devoting any real effort to a corporate hackathon like this is: "Why?"'
Why... Well, if currently unemployed, you could do worse things with your time.
Perhaps you really like Campbells (can't say I understand it, but we've all met "corporation fans" who have some sick obsession with otherwise uninteresting companies), and just want to participate in anything they do.
Perhaps you just want access to the API to see if you can find a way to abuse the hell out of it - And, even if they take away your access in three weeks, you'll still have the knowledge of how it works in all its almost certainly insecure goodness; just watching, waiting for your chance, when they have something useful go live with it. Mwa-hahaha!
Or, because you work an insanely boring job and can sneak the work in "on the clock". And while I don't condone that, I consider this one the single most likely "real" answer (perhaps tied for unemployed, though the unemployed would do better to find even shit-work than gamble on a contest to pay the bills).
why would I want to swap the CPU for another architecture? Why would I want ARM in a high performance server?
Because your "high performance" server most likely has a very low demand for 90% of the day, serving up one or two requests a minute - Then needs to handle a few thousand requests per second at peak times.
Idling the horsepower without taking the server offline look very attractive to most datacenters. Current load-balancing farms can do this to some degree, but you can have a several minute lag on spinning up new instances, by which time the surge might have already passed. But having the high-end CPUs available on a few ms' notice while a quarter-watt ARM keeps the lights on? Pure magic!
If you run a dedicated and saturated render farm, you probably don't care about this.
I'd love to help. I assume you've got a SCSI adapter with onboard DDR in the IMAC all-in-one right? I know it's bitchy, but it's THERE!!!
Not at all bitchy, and since you alone responded to me as a non-AC, I'll discuss this with you.
You (and one of the ACs) make a great point - What I said could apply to a real, albeit obscure, situation, thereby making it all the more confusing.
The same applies to clips vs magazines - Clips really do exist, as something entirely distinct from magazines. Gun owners don't consider this a pedantic gripe, they consider it more of a litmus test of whether or not the speaker actually has enough of a clue to speak credibly on the issue.
Now, I tend to agree that arguing about the distinction doesn't really help move the discussion forward - So why can't the wrong side here say "Y'know what? Okay. Magazines. We want to ban high-capacity magazines. Happy now?", just to avoid the bickering? When you want to appeal to a particular audience, ridiculing the things they consider meaningful, however pointless it may appear to you, doesn't really get you off to a great start.
None of us want more kids to die. Damn me, though, if I'll take advice on gun safety from someone who has never come closer to one than the sidearm of the cop who pulls them over for speeding.
I think that about sums it up. There is no rational reason for these guns at all in a domestic setting except for their own sake.
The irony here comes from what guns actually injure people (whether accidental, self, or violent crime) - Not shotguns, not rifles, not even "assault-lookalike" rifles...
...but pistols.
Pistols - Coincidentally, the one form-factor of gun that does make sense to have around the house, in a relatively accessible location, to defend against a home invader.
No gangbanger-wannabe tries to hide an AR-15 under his hoodie. Kids don't accidentally shoot themselves with a shotgun they found in the nightstand. And you don't use a high-gas-volume round (rifle, shotgun) for suicide unless you only want to succeed in removing your face with a good chance of "missing" anything vital because the barrel flies out of your mouth too early.
So, looking at the facts, according to the FBI, the vast majority of gun-related injuries/crimes involve a small number of rounds from small-caliber pistols. And NY has banned... High capacity magazines and decorative long-guns.
Cue the golf-clap.
Here's a better one: why don't we focus on the underlying issues rather than basically meaningless terminology that everybody involved understands what is meant anyway.
I know, right? We all know what it means, who cares about the pedantic "right" word?
Now as long as I have your attention... Would you mind giving me a hand upgrading the RAM in my hard drive? I can't seem to get the case off the monitor...
Also - seriously - stop trying to play suicide as rational in cases other than terminal illness.
IMO, 30 years in prison qualifies as a terminal illness.
Though I will grant that you made a good point in that he might not have gotten that heavy of a sentence. Let's call his decision "premature optimization", then, as a compromise.
It's seriously offensive and fucked up.
Welcome to the internet. Please check your tired morals at the door, and your complimentary handbasket has two uses.
Just because he killed himself does not mean that he was innocent of what he was charged with.
Here, let me quote what you responded to back for you: "Yes, Swartz did things that would justify some degree of punishment. Spending the best half of his life in a cage (which IMO made suicide an entirely rational decision in this case)? Not so much."
So, I would ask you bluntly - Do you believe what he did justifies spending 30 years in a cage?
FFS, he was NOT a student. They had no purvue over him! The authorities were the only ones who did!!!
Okay, so strike that line and go with the "community service" option. It doesn't change much.
Stuffing a laptop into a wiring closet that isnt yours is a serious CRIME.
A crime. Yes. B&E, arguably (if the average passer-by would have reason to believe they shouldn't peek inside). But a "serious" crime? Not talking about breaking into the Pentagon here; not even someone's home where we'd have a reasonable expectation that no one but the owners would casually stroll within a few feet of that spot; but a (literal) closet in the basement of the same building MIT that students occasionally turn into a giant game of Tetris as a prank. So your assertion of seriousness would depend on what he did with that laptop.
Even if he didnt take any data, the act of placing the laptop in the closet should be a felony in itself.
Why? Does littering normally count as a felony?
I guess we just have radically different ideas of justice, when copyright violation as a form of civil disobedience merits a 30 year stay in Club Fed. Yes, Swartz did things that would justify some degree of punishment. Spending the best half of his life in a cage (which IMO made suicide an entirely rational decision in this case)? Not so much.
Let's assume Swartz was completely in the right on all of his actions. What, precisely, would you have MIT and the US Government do differently to prevent this suicide? What actions of theirs do you find culpable for forcing Aaron Swartz into no other choice than to take his own life?
Let's assume you didn't mean that as a troll.
For a nonviolent crime with no victims and no damages (sorry, but we really need to move beyond considering people torrenting movies as "lost customers" - And even JSTOR, for all their other evils, did the right thing here and decided not to pursue any civil penalties), what would you consider a proportional reaction by the relevant authorities?
Ideally, this should never have reached the police intervention level (never mind the feds) - The only "real" offense here involves misusing access to MIT's network. A purely internal student misconduct disciplinary board could best have handled the whole affair with a semester or two of probation.
Once it did go to the police level - Okay, he technically committed a crime. Guilty as charged. Which better serves society and justice - 30 years in prison (or a death sentence, as it turns out), or 100 hours of community service?
Everyone, at every level of escalation here, should have taken a step back and considered what really happened. A kid abused his uni's access to a subscrption service to download more than he should have. That is not a fucking capital offense.
There are nearly a billion malnourished people in the world, but all of them could be lifted out of hunger with less than a quarter of the food wasted in Europe and North America. In a globalised food system, where we are all buying food in the same international market place, that means we're taking food out of the mouths of the poor.
Flaw: I can afford to import Mangoes from India, halfway around the planet. A malnourished kid in India can't afford to import cheeseburgers from the US.
"Starving kids in Africa" have very little to do with food availability, and everything to do with finding someone to pay for it.
Ah, good catch, thanks for the correction. Yes, escalator. :)
But that is how it should be: not just every movie studio should be able to make a Cinderella movie
FTFY.
Yes, trademarks also need to expire (not claiming they legally do, but they must, eventually). Fortunately, on that front, We The People can influence policy, simply by using them "wrong": Every time you xerox a document, you ride an elevator, you wipe snot with a kleenex, you photoshop a picture - You help speed the demise of a trademark via genericization.
Do you know what a public defender is?
Either an underpaid version of a lawyer doing a job they'd rather not, or the bottom of the legal barrel that can't get a better job.
Are you aware that they are available to those charged in all criminal prosecutions?
Are you aware that the truth of that depends on your financial situation and willingness to bankrupt yourself defending against an opponent with essentially infinite resources?
The 6th amendment guarantees your right to counsel. It doesn't guarantee your right to free, or even necessarily very good counsel.
Suicide can only be blamed on the person that did it.
I absolutely agree with you.
That doesn't preclude charging the prosecutors with a whole array of harassment and misconduct-related actions.
Unfortunately, the US has a serious problem wherein prosecutors have effectively infinite resources to harass someone; on top of which, we reward them for convictions, not for serving justice. On the flip side of that, public defenders lose money for every hour they spend on a case vs working at their "real" jobs; and since they don't generally do it as their primary job (more like an act of compulsory charity on the side), they have little incentive to care how they perform in that role. Thus, you have a supposedly-antagonistic system where both sides have strong incentive to push everyone brought up on charges to settle, regardless of guilt.
You want to fix the system? We need to have "prosecutor pays" for privately retained defense; and we need to ban settlements entirely.
Yes, that means every two-bit punk who shoplifts gets to hire Johnny Cochran. And yes, I realize how much the second point there would slow down the system - Or more accurately, it would mean nonviolent cases with no "real" damages, such as Swartz', would never have made it past a private student misconduct panel at MIT, and we'd have a brilliant but bored kid still alive.
I am an Australian. Assume this passes. How can I harden my computer against being used as a node in an ASIO botnet?
Now why oh why would you want to help the terrorists, Citizen?
More seriously, how would that play out in the courts, if you discovered your computer participating in a "legal" police operation and chose to clean their BS malware off?
Mod parent up (odd, I had a ton of points yesterday but none today).
Gerald Bull solved this problem 20-30 years ago. He even offered it to America, and we told him to kindly go fuck himself, so he did his work in Canada (actually right on the border, with his campus straddling both sides of the border).
Then the Jews decided he didn't deserve to continue living, so they sent a team of assassins to another sovereign country (without permission from that country) to kill him.
Hmm, violating national sovereignty to assassinate scientists... Where have I heard that before?. Oh, right... Looks like pretty standard operating procedure for our bestest buds in the world, killing geeks.
If I were a BOFH asked to "help out" with such a test, I'd talk about my pet peeve: transitive closure in SQL [ed.ac.uk]. Comes real handy in anything that deals with bills of material.
Recursive CTEs to the rescue!
Though I suppose the purists wouldn't consider that part of the core language. If you have a candidate for a SQL-heavy position that won't (or can't) use them, though - "Next candidate, please".
"The judge in the case declared that the district's compromise for the student (a badge without the battery) was sufficient"
Active RFID tags cost a fuckload of a lot more than passive ones, not to mention they occasionally need the battery replaced. Never mind the privacy issues here, why the hell do we allow public schools to waste so much taxpayer money on frivolous BS like this?
I have two passive RFID badges I use on a daily basis, and they do their thing just fine. Hold it up to the pad next to the door, the door goes "click", done.
In the process, Anonymous successfully managed to get the accused released by tainting the evidence. Congratulations, assholes.
Sorry, no.
For the same reason we rant against calling copyright violations "stealing", the fact that anonymous found it first doesn't have any impact on the admissibility of the evidence. The police, now that someone has shown them how to do their jobs, can go to the same "untainted" sources and obtain the same evidence with a clean chain of custody. Happy day!
Why does this section of rock appear to have a circle carved into it?
At first I considered that just a side effect of the DRT on soft rock (spinning wire brush = circular abrasions, duh), but if you look at the lower, pre-cleaned picture, you can still see the outline of the same pattern.
The simple fact is, nobody knows what will happen tomorrow, its the tools and experience you build TODAY which will give you more security than some misguided belief that your permanency equates to anything.
Although you have it 100% absolutely correct, you make the mistake of drastically overstating the odds of a 9-to-5 declaring you redundant "tomorrow". Yes, it can happen. Yes, it will happen to most of us at least a few times in our lives. Yes, it might even happen after a week on the job; but if you make it a week, you'll probably make it to your 6-month review. And if you make it past your six month review (which you will if you don't completely suck), they won't just randomly get rid of you unless their market heads South.
Yes
They just couldn't do it correctly while being quiet at a small desk in a room with 50 or 150 other people..
Y'know, I struggled to come up with an example to extend this scenario into the "real" working world, but I have to thank you for doing it for me so eloquently there.
Odds are also very good that both of them are smarter than you, BTW.
Oh, well then... I guess you win! Congratulations. Well played, sir, well played indeed!
but who could demonstrate competence in the subject matter in an in-person oral exam.
Funny thing about math - The problems presented to students on exams have actual correct answers. Not a matter of demonstrating "competence", but of getting that correct answer.
A bigger problem with that idea comes from how much it limits the possible scope of the questions asked. You don't "talk" your way through changing the order of a triple integral, you fill half a page with dense equations; and if someone can do that, what difference does it make if you read them the starting equation or the page already has it written at the top?
Call me cynical, but I would take the assertion they could do better on an oral math exam to mean they believe either that the medium wouldn't allow asking any "hard" questions will all sorts of scary notation, or that they could trick the professor into at least partially solving the problem for them. Or, I suppose, that they have no exposure to any math harder than basic algebra (and even then, I'd love to see someone "talk" their way through factoring an ugly multivariate polynomial).