They'll use RC4 if your browser says it wants to use RC4, but they also support stronger encryption. I mean, it's your data, your responsibility to pick a good cipher.
Sounds great, the government would just be a really big food bank then. Except Republicans would never go for that because it would put grocery stores out of business.
There are initiatives to do this in some places but it works a little different because I don't think anyone wants to start telling people what they can and can't eat. Instead, they will give you extra value for your food stamps if you use them at certain places or to buy certain things. For instance, in Massachusetts food stamps are accepted and worth double value at farmers markets. I think that's a great way to incentivize healthy food, I wish they would do it everywhere.
That is how academia works. You can never be 100% sure that something is secure without extensive evaluation and peer review. Ron Rivest has published hundreds of papers, it's guaranteed that some of them contain mistakes. Insinuating that he did it because the NSA told him too is patently ridiculous.
Oh sorry, I was speaking in reference to the "beyond hour of code" link they have to code.org, which is a ~20 hour course for K-8th grade students. It continues the "puzzle programming" tutorial with variables, loops and functions. I was talking about Scratch because it is the basis for the puzzle programming in both courses.
Sorry to reply again but I was pondering it some more and another angle occurred to me. Think about the way that C is parsed by a compiler. Every reserved word has a particular syntax that it follows, i.e. if() must contain a conditional statement and block of code to execute if the condition is true. Really, at a low level all languages are already formed in a "puzzle piece" kind of way. The compiler just parses in a tree and checks that all expressions match the correct form. All you have to do is make a puzzle piece for every kind of expression and you could easily turn C into a visual programming language. All they did on code.org was remove some of the cruftier parts of C that would make it less accessible to little kids. The majority of the functionality is retained though.
First off, who are you to tell people what coding is? Second, the puzzle blocks are basically one-to-one mappings to lines of C. The only difference is that you are dragging and dropping instead of typing out lines. Think of it like an accessibility layer on top of C for people that, for some reason, have trouble typing. I question whether you have really looked at the system at all. If you see a final program in Scratch, it looks very similar to a syntax highlighted C program.
That doesn't make a whole lot of sense though. Everyone knows that doctors make a lot of money, yet there isn't a huge surplus of doctors. If it really is that easy to be a programmer then people probably shouldn't be getting paid as much as they are. If, instead, it is a difficult thing which requires years of training, then introducing more people to it won't drastically change anything besides maybe increasing the levels of underrepresented minorities (a very good thing). It seems like they are just trying to rectify a market imbalance caused by the fact that many people are not aware of what CS is and what programming jobs entail. Eventually we would reach an equilibrium where people are paid a fair value for the work and skills involved.
You could say that about anything though. Kids who learn how to add and subtract thing they can do math. Well, they kind of can, and these kids can kind of code. I understand where you're coming from, but I don't think there is necessarily more of a problem with code.org than any other subject.
Nice humblebrag. The truth is, anyone with a CS degree and the desire to learn can figure those things out. You aren't a special snowflake because you managed to do it.
Oh man that is totally a thing that is going to happen, you are so smart. In fact, we should stop anyone from learning CS in the first place unless they commit ahead of time to being a fully trained software engineer (deviation penalized by jail time of course). That is the only way to prevent horrible situations like this.
That's the whole point, not everybody is good at a particular field of study or chooses it as a career.
What you don't seem to understand is that many, many people who are never exposed to CS in the first place and so they can't make an informed decision about their potential career. That is the gap code.org is trying to fill. If, along the way, they teach some kids procedural thinking skills and a little math, all the better.
What does this have to do with the article? People can't learn to produce good code if they have never heard of computer science. It has to happen in steps. The biggest benefit from code.org is that a large population of people who would have never been exposed to CS in the first place (including many underrepresented minorities) are getting a chance to experience it and see that it can be a fun and potentially lucrative job.
Or maybe it will teach kids a bit of problem solving skills and critical thinking, all the while exposing underrepresented minorities to CS and giving them potential path to a successful career that they otherwise might not have had. Oh and it's all free.
Your arrogance is staggering. Just because something isn't exactly like C, the end-all-be-all of languages, it's not real programming? It has all the basic constructs that you would want in a programming language, including variables, conditional statements, loops and even functions. Are you going to program a kernel in it? Of course not, but it very effectively gets across the ideas of programming to an elementary/middle school audience.
But that is the same situation you have with compilers. Making the most optimized assembly code involves complex calculations of instruction scheduling which a computer can do much better than a human. It is the same reason the people at Intel don't hand-code circuits any more: computers can do the computational intensive work of optimizing it better.
If the results and the verification information are posted publicly then ANYONE could verify, and it only takes one person to find the fraud. I guarantee you there are enough bored grad students that you couldn't possibly bribe them all.
Being able to prove that your vote was counted as you cast it is not the same as being able to prove who you voted for. This is already a solved problem, google Scantegrity.
Yes, there is significant work in this already. What you are describing is basically Punchscan or Scantegrity, except they have additional cryptographic protections to ensure anti-coercion. Instead of the list showing which candidate you voted for it has another random number which was assigned to the candidate you voted for on your specific ballot. That way anyone looking at the public list can tell if their vote was recorded the way they cast it but no one else can know who you voted for, even if you tell them your serial number. Those random numbers are then linked through a mixnet to actual candidates and the links are cryptographically audited for integrity (but without revealing them, i.e. zero knowledge proofs).
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They'll use RC4 if your browser says it wants to use RC4, but they also support stronger encryption. I mean, it's your data, your responsibility to pick a good cipher.
Lots of charter schools have union teachers so you have no idea what you're talking about.
Sounds great, the government would just be a really big food bank then. Except Republicans would never go for that because it would put grocery stores out of business.
There are initiatives to do this in some places but it works a little different because I don't think anyone wants to start telling people what they can and can't eat. Instead, they will give you extra value for your food stamps if you use them at certain places or to buy certain things. For instance, in Massachusetts food stamps are accepted and worth double value at farmers markets. I think that's a great way to incentivize healthy food, I wish they would do it everywhere.
'more that', instead of 'more that'
So much irony it is delicious...
Rofl so the NSA maybe having compromised one RNG which nobody even uses is as bad as child molestation. Get some freaking perspective.
That is how academia works. You can never be 100% sure that something is secure without extensive evaluation and peer review. Ron Rivest has published hundreds of papers, it's guaranteed that some of them contain mistakes. Insinuating that he did it because the NSA told him too is patently ridiculous.
They can have whatever laws they want, it doesn't matter when they don't have the resources to enforce them. Bad comparison.
Oh sorry, I was speaking in reference to the "beyond hour of code" link they have to code.org, which is a ~20 hour course for K-8th grade students. It continues the "puzzle programming" tutorial with variables, loops and functions. I was talking about Scratch because it is the basis for the puzzle programming in both courses.
Sorry to reply again but I was pondering it some more and another angle occurred to me. Think about the way that C is parsed by a compiler. Every reserved word has a particular syntax that it follows, i.e. if() must contain a conditional statement and block of code to execute if the condition is true. Really, at a low level all languages are already formed in a "puzzle piece" kind of way. The compiler just parses in a tree and checks that all expressions match the correct form. All you have to do is make a puzzle piece for every kind of expression and you could easily turn C into a visual programming language. All they did on code.org was remove some of the cruftier parts of C that would make it less accessible to little kids. The majority of the functionality is retained though.
First off, who are you to tell people what coding is? Second, the puzzle blocks are basically one-to-one mappings to lines of C. The only difference is that you are dragging and dropping instead of typing out lines. Think of it like an accessibility layer on top of C for people that, for some reason, have trouble typing. I question whether you have really looked at the system at all. If you see a final program in Scratch, it looks very similar to a syntax highlighted C program.
That doesn't make a whole lot of sense though. Everyone knows that doctors make a lot of money, yet there isn't a huge surplus of doctors. If it really is that easy to be a programmer then people probably shouldn't be getting paid as much as they are. If, instead, it is a difficult thing which requires years of training, then introducing more people to it won't drastically change anything besides maybe increasing the levels of underrepresented minorities (a very good thing). It seems like they are just trying to rectify a market imbalance caused by the fact that many people are not aware of what CS is and what programming jobs entail. Eventually we would reach an equilibrium where people are paid a fair value for the work and skills involved.
You could say that about anything though. Kids who learn how to add and subtract thing they can do math. Well, they kind of can, and these kids can kind of code. I understand where you're coming from, but I don't think there is necessarily more of a problem with code.org than any other subject.
Nice humblebrag. The truth is, anyone with a CS degree and the desire to learn can figure those things out. You aren't a special snowflake because you managed to do it.
Oh man that is totally a thing that is going to happen, you are so smart. In fact, we should stop anyone from learning CS in the first place unless they commit ahead of time to being a fully trained software engineer (deviation penalized by jail time of course). That is the only way to prevent horrible situations like this.
That's the whole point, not everybody is good at a particular field of study or chooses it as a career.
What you don't seem to understand is that many, many people who are never exposed to CS in the first place and so they can't make an informed decision about their potential career. That is the gap code.org is trying to fill. If, along the way, they teach some kids procedural thinking skills and a little math, all the better.
What does this have to do with the article? People can't learn to produce good code if they have never heard of computer science. It has to happen in steps. The biggest benefit from code.org is that a large population of people who would have never been exposed to CS in the first place (including many underrepresented minorities) are getting a chance to experience it and see that it can be a fun and potentially lucrative job.
Or maybe it will teach kids a bit of problem solving skills and critical thinking, all the while exposing underrepresented minorities to CS and giving them potential path to a successful career that they otherwise might not have had. Oh and it's all free.
Your arrogance is staggering. Just because something isn't exactly like C, the end-all-be-all of languages, it's not real programming? It has all the basic constructs that you would want in a programming language, including variables, conditional statements, loops and even functions. Are you going to program a kernel in it? Of course not, but it very effectively gets across the ideas of programming to an elementary/middle school audience.
But that is the same situation you have with compilers. Making the most optimized assembly code involves complex calculations of instruction scheduling which a computer can do much better than a human. It is the same reason the people at Intel don't hand-code circuits any more: computers can do the computational intensive work of optimizing it better.
If that was true then pretty much every widely-used crypto system (AES, RSA, El Gamal, etc) would be "broken".
If the results and the verification information are posted publicly then ANYONE could verify, and it only takes one person to find the fraud. I guarantee you there are enough bored grad students that you couldn't possibly bribe them all.
This is a solved problem, see Scantegrity.
Being able to prove that your vote was counted as you cast it is not the same as being able to prove who you voted for. This is already a solved problem, google Scantegrity.
Yes, there is significant work in this already. What you are describing is basically Punchscan or Scantegrity, except they have additional cryptographic protections to ensure anti-coercion. Instead of the list showing which candidate you voted for it has another random number which was assigned to the candidate you voted for on your specific ballot. That way anyone looking at the public list can tell if their vote was recorded the way they cast it but no one else can know who you voted for, even if you tell them your serial number. Those random numbers are then linked through a mixnet to actual candidates and the links are cryptographically audited for integrity (but without revealing them, i.e. zero knowledge proofs).