I have no doubt that you're capable of writing bad code and putting it on an oversized mcu.
Surprise surprise, some people can write organized, minimalistic code. Some can even run a theorem prover on it, since it's organized.
I'm not sure why you're so desperate to want to believe that we can't check whether or not traffic light code correctly goes from green to yellow, never from green to red, for example. (That example being what one of the junior people I helped is doing right now). For some reason you have this need think "gee golly you never know with anyone's code, nobody can ever write a state machine where no transition from red to green is defined". Is that because you feel bad that YOU don't know how to define an FSM, so you can be sure that green can only be followed by yellow?
Sorry if nobody ever taught YOU, but in the example of the traffic light code my friend is proving, in fact it's easy to cast that as a mathematical object called a "finite state machine". The word "finite" in the title means there is a limited number of possiblities. It's NOT "well you never know, could be anything". Once you have it rendered as a finite state machine, there is all kinds of useful math to prove a lot of stuff about it. Even better, you don't have to DO that math - there are tools that will do it for you.
> And golly, if firmware had dozens or hundreds of lines of code, all firmware would run on 8 bit micros, and embedding programming wouldn't even involve considerations about code size.
In fact millions of 8-bit micros ARE sold every year. Each sold to the consumer with dozens to hundreds of lines of code in it. Another 10 million larger micros contain code that would fit on an 8-bit, but the designer wants to make use of an included hardware peripheral, such as an additional UART, etc.
You can say "oh golly gee, if that were true we'd have a bunch of 8-bit micros", but the fact is we have millions of new shipped every year, in addition to the hundred million or so already in operation.
A number of those are doing something that a 555 timer or similar could do, but the mcu is actually cheaper, especially since it doesn't need the external RC network that the 555 needs.
A significant number of the small micros, perhaps even a majority, are running code that can be automatically converted to a lookup table, or a simple state machine. Proving the correctness of a lookup table is trivial*.
You might find it interesting to Google "automated theroem prover" and maybe even download ACL2.
* Incidentally, if you have a function that has a small number of possible inputs and outputs, actually coding it as a look up table can be both fast and reliable.
The parent post is very informative, but won't be seen by a lot of people because it's AC and doesn't have its own subject line.
Quoting the AC:
17 USC 111(a): "Certain Exempted. The secondary transmission of a performance or display of a work embodied in a primary transmission is not an infringement of copyright if... the secondary transmission is not made by a cable system but is made by a governmental body, or other nonprofit organization, without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage, and without charge to the recipients of the secondary transmission other than assessments necessary to defray the actual and reasonable costs of maintaining and operating the secondary transmission service."
So the law is re-transmitting the broadcast is okay if it's done by a non-profit.
Note this is only about re-transmitting *broadcast* TV, which was already being sent out to everyone for free.
17 USC 111(a): "Certain Exempted. The secondary transmission of a performance or display of a work embodied in a primary transmission is not an infringement of copyright if... the secondary transmission is not made by a cable system but is made by a governmental body, or other nonprofit organization, without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage, and without charge to the recipients of the secondary transmission other than assessments necessary to defray the actual and reasonable costs of maintaining and operating the secondary transmission service."
The government doesn't treat of of their 20 billion documents as if they are Too Secret, because that would be totally unworkable. There aren't nearly enough basement servers and Reddit-using community college sysadmins to handle all of that data.
Why would YOU treat your Discus account or that place you ordered a USB cable from the same as the same security level as your bank account? Your 401k account with $350,000 in it needs to be secure. Your password for commenting on Fox News articles doesn't require the same security.
I have basically three passwords (really three patterns for passwords):
Sites I really don't care about. Post on a Fox News comment with my handle; I don't care. These all get almost the same trash password. I'm tempted to post that password here just to demonstrate how much it doesn't matter. This is most sites, which I'll only ever log into once or twice.
Sites I don't want you to have my password for, but it wouldn't do MAJOR damage.
Banking and email. Email is important because it can be used for password resets on other sites.
Based on 20 years in security, including over 10 years analyzing login data from people trying to log in with someone else's account, I think I'm reasonably secure. And I really only remember three password bases. Yeah an old version of my trash password is in the leaks. So what.
The other thing I do is add a couple of characters every year. That way the old password doesn't work, and I'm still using the memory of the password I was using ten years ago - just with more stuff added.
Yes, I can easily write software which is guaranteed to be perfect.
It prints "hello world!" and isn't written in PHP 4.:)
You actually can prove programs to be correct. It costs twenty times as much to develop provably correct software than normal software. That's actually reasonable for a lot of software that we think of as "firmware", or in fact we may think of it as hardware, but in fact there is software inside, dozens to hundreds of lines of code.
* In old PHP, "Hello world" had a security problem. It's been fixed.
Almost all of the comments on this article say "no". So I'll play Devil's advocate and say, in particular way.
Picture a house from the 1970s. Laughable style, right?
Yet Mount Vernon is stylish almost 300 years after it was built, and always has been. The Supreme Court building is impressive architecture almost two THOUSAND years after the design was first built. ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... )
In other areas of fashion and style, Levi's 501 jeans look as good today as they did 150 years ago. The two-button dark navy suit is timeless, and the Burberry trench coat.
A 20-year old Ford F-150 doesn't look outdated at all. Even a 30-year old model doesn't look particularly out of place today, it simply looks like a truck.
AI could very easily figure "these designs have been stylish for 200 years, they just might remain stylish for another 10 or 20 years".
PhantomFive asked "Indeed, how do you predict fads?" Perhaps you choose *style* over *fads*. We've all seen people ask questions like:
How do I use wget to read and reply to my daily email?
The answer, of course, is that there are plenty of very good ways to read, sort, and reply to email. Wget isn't one of them.
"How can you predict fads" [in order to look stylish in 10 years], is not the question, perhaps. Perhaps, in order to look stylish in 10 years, pay no attention to trends. Look stylish by being stylish, not by monkeying a tad, current or predicted.
Having said all of that, it does occur to me that several of today's 14-year old pop stars will be 19 year old pop stars in five years, when their fans are 19 and spending money at the mall. The best / most popular will still be popular in 10 years, when their fans, now in the mid-twenties, will have developed had a lot of their style tastes that they'll carry as a base for their aesthetic for decades after. Looking at the styles popular with 12-15 year olds MIGHT give some good hints about the styles those kids will still like ten years from now, after removing certain things like any particular bold color that is currently popular with kids. Particular bold colors come and go, of course.
I'm glad you pointed out that people can send a DMCA counterclaim. I wish more people knew about that. That's a very important part of DMCA, in my opinion. If you send a counterclaim, the service provider has to put the material back up, unless the complainant files suit in federal court. That's important!
On the topic of a penalty, imagine I steal $50 from you. You prove that I stole it, so I have to give the $50 back, and that's it. That's not a *penalty*. That's just "give it back".
Yes someone who makes a false DMCA claim is responsible for the expenses they cause, just as pretty much anyone is responsible for costs they cause in a wide variety of circumstances. That's not a penalty, that's just "you pay the cost of stuff you do".
I was involved in several rounds of comments and changes to DMCA and an actual penalty for reckless or negligent filing is the one thing we missed; we thought we had a pretty decent balance between the rights of copyright holders and those who use copyrighted worked (including the very important counterclaim provisions).
If I had to it to do over again, I'd advocate for a *penalty* for negilgent in addition to damages of the greater of treble damages or $1,000. Reckless notices would have a greater penalty, perhaps $10,000 or 5X damages.
I'd certainly agree that a teacher who always follows a rigid day-by-day formula, always teaching the exact same lesson on day #14, probably isn't doing a great job. (With some exceptions possible).
Also, if you've been teaching trig for 12 years, and every year you make the lesson about right triangles over again, that would be silly. You'd be better off re-using last year's material, and the presenting a well-made lesson from someone who is really good at writing maths curriculum is probably even better. Either way, of course you're going to allot time for questions and make sure that your students are following along.
> Differential privacy is a rigorous mathematical definition of privacy...
That was informative, thank you.
Data which has been anonymized poorly, if the raw data is distributed rather than statistics, can sometimes be de-anonymized. I see differential privacy mathematically guarantees that the statistics they provide cannot be de-anonymized back to data about individuals.
It looks like we have some different points of view on an underlying principle. That's awesome, I love to hear different viewpoints.
You've also pointed out something I'm doing a bit wrong in a way, maybe.
> I mean, I can make a functional website by cutting and pasting code from the web together but that doesn't make a developer and if it does, not a good one.
Based on my 20 years developing software and web sites professionally, it's been my experience that developers who make full use of well-known, mature libraries and frameworks and both more productive and produce higher quality than those who have NIH syndrome, who write their own libraries and try to make their own Javascript to simulate "liquid" layouts. Understanding how to use a well-written library or framework is a lot faster *and* more effective than writing one. (Obviously using one without understanding it is just lazy.)
My experience, *most* teachers don't consistently produce better learning materials than the best teachers do, so their students would be better served by them choosing already-prepared lessons, rather than trying to assemble something while they're eating dinner. Same with the overall curriculum. Yes, they should *choose* when it's time to move to the next lesson, the next prepared lesson that is freely available to them.
I teach a lot at work. The last series I did was a deep dive into SQL, really understanding what it is about. The next is a CISSP course I'm teaching. For SQL and for most of my lessons I made all of the learning materials. For CISSP, maybe I'd be better off presenting well-made material. Obviously I'll choose which modules to present, and how much time to spend on each.
> lessons come pre planned and differentiated etc etc etc.
Think about what they teach in public school, as opposed to college. Arithmetic, reading, basic civics like "how a bill becomes a law".
They are teaching the same thing that 100,000 other schools are teaching at the same time, and the same thing they taught last year, and the year before, and they decade before. Algebra hasn't changed. Heck Schoolhouse Rock "I'm Just a Bill" is still better than whatever lesson most teachers would come up with and it's from 1976. So yeah those lessons do come pre-planned. If you're making your own lessons instead of using the lessons 100,000 other teachers are using for the topic, you're doing it wrong.
> assignments just appear and are magically marked
Uhm yeah there's this thing called a "computer". When I was in grade school it was called "Scantron". Now it's called the "form" tag.
Programmers who are accustomed to desktop applications, where there is one user, are in the habit of making things work. You click the button, it does the thing. Somebody calls someone else, they can see and hear each other.
Many of the "omg how stupid can you be?!" bugs are of the "make sure it does NOT work when it's not supposed to" variety. Once you connect an application to the internet, you have to think in terms of when things should NOT happen and test for that. Programmers who learned writing Windows desktop apps don't think in that frame of mind.
For decades one of the most popular sayings in programming was "garbage in, garbage out". That's no longer an acceptable way of thinking. That garbage that comes out, random bytes from RAM, can include your private key. Once your application is on the internet, it has to be "garbage is the default thing I'm expecting, and leads to DENIED out. Only if input exactly matches the specification will you get anything out". It's a different way of thinking.
> I'm not belittling teachers here but it's relatively low paid
Is it? Let's take a state with relatively low cost of living. Teachers are paid an average of $53,300 salary plus excellent retirement benefit for nine months of work. Summer school pays $30-$50/ hour plus a bonus of up to $10,000. So something like $65,000 in Texas. Texas teachers are required to work six hours a day, 187 days per year. That's not terrible.
The average house is also made of pine. What's the environmental impact of growing 100 pound pine tree vs 100 pounds of styrofoam?
Of course the concrete foundation is a large percentage of the weight, and as I mentioned concrete is the one building material that really does matter.
Which is the best place to try to help the environment. The production of:
A) Stuff that is used briefly and then the average family throws away thousands of pounds of it, such as packaging.
B) Stuff that is made one time and used for 50 years.
The average person uses far more consumer packaging and other consumer goods in their lifetime than building materials. On balance, it the production of the building materials for my house just don't make any significant difference. I bought the walls once, I buy beverages and food every day. We use electricity every day. The stuff we buy over and over and over again are going to have far more impact.
The exception, perhaps, is concrete only regarding CO2. That's a significant number, if you focus just on CO2 as opposed to environmental concerns generally. It would be cool to have a process for producing a concrete-like product which sequesters carbon as part of the material, and that's not at all far-fetched.
> ugh to Article I Section 9 that also mentions the federal government is bound in the same way as the states against making Ex Post Facto law
And what has SCOTUS said about the ex post facto clause for 220 years running?
Here's the thing. There are people who don't know something (all of us); then there are stupid people who have trouble learning; then there are the REALLY stupid people, the intentionally ignorant, those who refuse to learn anything new. Rather they stick to their first guess no matter what information is put before them. Only the last group is doomed to everlasting ignorance.
> was invalid because it violated Art. 1 Sec. 10. of the U.S. Constitution forbidding states to pass laws interfering with contracts
Did you see that part about "forbidding states" that you copy-pasted? Article 1 Section 10 starts with "No state shall". It goes in to say states can't sign treaties or coin money. Would you like to now argue that the federal government can't sign treaties because Section 10 says states can't?
Good point on slavery being a Constitutional amendment.
However re:
> as congress did not have the authority to do so with a resolution for it would be an ex post facto law
Again, see Calder v Bull or pretty much every Supreme Court ruling in the history of the country. Within 10 years of the Constitution being ratified, the Court cleared up any misunderstandings anyone might have about that. Just in case people hadn't heard Thomas Jefferson when he explained they ex post facto and attainder together on purpose, they are talking about ex post facto laws that result in attainder (punishment for a serious crime). Congress may not create a retroactive punishment either by convicting someone of an existing offense or by creating a retroactive offense.
Again, you can dream up whatever you want to dream up, but for 220 years the Supreme Court keeps saying you're idea is wrong.
As Thomas Jefferson said of ex post facto laws "The federal constitution indeed interdicts them in criminal cases only". The Supreme Court has been consistent on this point since at least Calder vs Bull (1798).
> if you make a contract that is lawful at the time made, or you begin engaging in an activity, then congress cannot, and it would be unconstitutional for them to in any way attempt to invalidate your lawful contract or restrain your continued performance of your contract or activity after the fact
Congress can in fact nullify a contract for the sale of slaves, or for the delivery of whiskey, and has done so. What they can't do is make it a crime to have done those things in the past.
They can't make it a *crime* for a social network to have had more than 100 million users in 2015 and Zuckerberg in jail for what happened in 2015. They absolutely CAN say that starting next year, any social network which has over 100 million users will be divided up. If you want to argue otherwise, please cite a case for your assertion. It is my memory that the government did indeed free the slaves, prior terms of service notwithstanding. What they didn't do was criminally prosecute slave owners for having owned slaves in the past.
If I brainstorm a bunch of ideas with co-workers, I try to present the best ideas to management, rather than every idea that came up. Sometimes a hybrid of multiple different ideas from the brainstorming session sounds better than the original ideas, or even inverting the idea.
It's entirely possible that some of the ideas were presented to top management without this particular document being presented.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no doubt that you're capable of writing bad code and putting it on an oversized mcu.
Surprise surprise, some people can write organized, minimalistic code. Some can even run a theorem prover on it, since it's organized.
I'm not sure why you're so desperate to want to believe that we can't check whether or not traffic light code correctly goes from green to yellow, never from green to red, for example. (That example being what one of the junior people I helped is doing right now). For some reason you have this need think "gee golly you never know with anyone's code, nobody can ever write a state machine where no transition from red to green is defined". Is that because you feel bad that YOU don't know how to define an FSM, so you can be sure that green can only be followed by yellow?
Sorry if nobody ever taught YOU, but in the example of the traffic light code my friend is proving, in fact it's easy to cast that as a mathematical object called a "finite state machine". The word "finite" in the title means there is a limited number of possiblities. It's NOT "well you never know, could be anything". Once you have it rendered as a finite state machine, there is all kinds of useful math to prove a lot of stuff about it. Even better, you don't have to DO that math - there are tools that will do it for you.
> And golly, if firmware had dozens or hundreds of lines of code, all firmware would run on 8 bit micros, and embedding programming wouldn't even involve considerations about code size.
In fact millions of 8-bit micros ARE sold every year. Each sold to the consumer with dozens to hundreds of lines of code in it. Another 10 million larger micros contain code that would fit on an 8-bit, but the designer wants to make use of an included hardware peripheral, such as an additional UART, etc.
You can say "oh golly gee, if that were true we'd have a bunch of 8-bit micros", but the fact is we have millions of new shipped every year, in addition to the hundred million or so already in operation.
A number of those are doing something that a 555 timer or similar could do, but the mcu is actually cheaper, especially since it doesn't need the external RC network that the 555 needs.
A significant number of the small micros, perhaps even a majority, are running code that can be automatically converted to a lookup table, or a simple state machine. Proving the correctness of a lookup table is trivial*.
You might find it interesting to Google "automated theroem prover" and maybe even download ACL2.
* Incidentally, if you have a function that has a small number of possible inputs and outputs, actually coding it as a look up table can be both fast and reliable.
The parent post is very informative, but won't be seen by a lot of people because it's AC and doesn't have its own subject line.
Quoting the AC:
17 USC 111(a): "Certain Exempted. The secondary transmission of a performance or display of a work embodied in a primary transmission is not an infringement of copyright if... the secondary transmission is not made by a cable system but is made by a governmental body, or other nonprofit organization, without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage, and without charge to the recipients of the secondary transmission other than assessments necessary to defray the actual and reasonable costs of maintaining and operating the secondary transmission service."
So the law is re-transmitting the broadcast is okay if it's done by a non-profit.
Note this is only about re-transmitting *broadcast* TV, which was already being sent out to everyone for free.
17 USC 111(a): "Certain Exempted. The secondary transmission of a performance or display of a work embodied in a primary transmission is not an infringement of copyright if... the secondary transmission is not made by a cable system but is made by a governmental body, or other nonprofit organization, without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage, and without charge to the recipients of the secondary transmission other than assessments necessary to defray the actual and reasonable costs of maintaining and operating the secondary transmission service."
Law says it's legal if it's non-profit.
I was writing / editing that post super quickly because it was time for Scrum.
I murdered the English language.
The government doesn't treat of of their 20 billion documents as if they are Too Secret, because that would be totally unworkable. There aren't nearly enough basement servers and Reddit-using community college sysadmins to handle all of that data.
Why would YOU treat your Discus account or that place you ordered a USB cable from the same as the same security level as your bank account? Your 401k account with $350,000 in it needs to be secure. Your password for commenting on Fox News articles doesn't require the same security.
I have basically three passwords (really three patterns for passwords):
Sites I really don't care about. Post on a Fox News comment with my handle; I don't care. These all get almost the same trash password. I'm tempted to post that password here just to demonstrate how much it doesn't matter. This is most sites, which I'll only ever log into once or twice.
Sites I don't want you to have my password for, but it wouldn't do MAJOR damage.
Banking and email. Email is important because it can be used for password resets on other sites.
Based on 20 years in security, including over 10 years analyzing login data from people trying to log in with someone else's account, I think I'm reasonably secure. And I really only remember three password bases. Yeah an old version of my trash password is in the leaks. So what.
The other thing I do is add a couple of characters every year. That way the old password doesn't work, and I'm still using the memory of the password I was using ten years ago - just with more stuff added.
Yes, I can easily write software which is guaranteed to be perfect.
It prints "hello world!" and isn't written in PHP 4. :)
You actually can prove programs to be correct. It costs twenty times as much to develop provably correct software than normal software. That's actually reasonable for a lot of software that we think of as "firmware", or in fact we may think of it as hardware, but in fact there is software inside, dozens to hundreds of lines of code.
* In old PHP, "Hello world" had a security problem. It's been fixed.
Almost all of the comments on this article say "no".
So I'll play Devil's advocate and say, in particular way.
Picture a house from the 1970s. Laughable style, right?
Yet Mount Vernon is stylish almost 300 years after it was built, and always has been. The Supreme Court building is impressive architecture almost two THOUSAND years after the design was first built. ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... )
In other areas of fashion and style, Levi's 501 jeans look as good today as they did 150 years ago. The two-button dark navy suit is timeless, and the Burberry trench coat.
A 20-year old Ford F-150 doesn't look outdated at all. Even a 30-year old model doesn't look particularly out of place today, it simply looks like a truck.
AI could very easily figure "these designs have been stylish for 200 years, they just might remain stylish for another 10 or 20 years".
PhantomFive asked "Indeed, how do you predict fads?" Perhaps you choose *style* over *fads*. We've all seen people ask questions like:
How do I use wget to read and reply to my daily email?
The answer, of course, is that there are plenty of very good ways to read, sort, and reply to email. Wget isn't one of them.
"How can you predict fads" [in order to look stylish in 10 years], is not the question, perhaps. Perhaps, in order to look stylish in 10 years, pay no attention to trends. Look stylish by being stylish, not by monkeying a tad, current or predicted.
Having said all of that, it does occur to me that several of today's 14-year old pop stars will be 19 year old pop stars in five years, when their fans are 19 and spending money at the mall. The best / most popular will still be popular in 10 years, when their fans, now in the mid-twenties, will have developed had a lot of their style tastes that they'll carry as a base for their aesthetic for decades after. Looking at the styles popular with 12-15 year olds MIGHT give some good hints about the styles those kids will still like ten years from now, after removing certain things like any particular bold color that is currently popular with kids. Particular bold colors come and go, of course.
I'm glad you pointed out that people can send a DMCA counterclaim. I wish more people knew about that. That's a very important part of DMCA, in my opinion. If you send a counterclaim, the service provider has to put the material back up, unless the complainant files suit in federal court. That's important!
On the topic of a penalty, imagine I steal $50 from you. You prove that I stole it, so I have to give the $50 back, and that's it. That's not a *penalty*. That's just "give it back".
Yes someone who makes a false DMCA claim is responsible for the expenses they cause, just as pretty much anyone is responsible for costs they cause in a wide variety of circumstances. That's not a penalty, that's just "you pay the cost of stuff you do".
I was involved in several rounds of comments and changes to DMCA and an actual penalty for reckless or negligent filing is the one thing we missed; we thought we had a pretty decent balance between the rights of copyright holders and those who use copyrighted worked (including the very important counterclaim provisions).
If I had to it to do over again, I'd advocate for a *penalty* for negilgent in addition to damages of the greater of treble damages or $1,000. Reckless notices would have a greater penalty, perhaps $10,000 or 5X damages.
I'd certainly agree that a teacher who always follows a rigid day-by-day formula, always teaching the exact same lesson on day #14, probably isn't doing a great job. (With some exceptions possible).
Also, if you've been teaching trig for 12 years, and every year you make the lesson about right triangles over again, that would be silly. You'd be better off re-using last year's material, and the presenting a well-made lesson from someone who is really good at writing maths curriculum is probably even better. Either way, of course you're going to allot time for questions and make sure that your students are following along.
So like you said, balance.
What you said is true, but not relevant.
Google is distributing statistics about large populations, not tokenized data about individuals.
Tokenized data (raw data with names replaced by numbers) can sometimes be de-anonymized. That's not what Google is doing.
> Differential privacy is a rigorous mathematical definition of privacy ...
That was informative, thank you.
Data which has been anonymized poorly, if the raw data is distributed rather than statistics, can sometimes be de-anonymized. I see differential privacy mathematically guarantees that the statistics they provide cannot be de-anonymized back to data about individuals.
It looks like we have some different points of view on an underlying principle. That's awesome, I love to hear different viewpoints.
You've also pointed out something I'm doing a bit wrong in a way, maybe.
> I mean, I can make a functional website by cutting and pasting code from the web together but that doesn't make a developer and if it does, not a good one.
Based on my 20 years developing software and web sites professionally, it's been my experience that developers who make full use of well-known, mature libraries and frameworks and both more productive and produce higher quality than those who have NIH syndrome, who write their own libraries and try to make their own Javascript to simulate "liquid" layouts. Understanding how to use a well-written library or framework is a lot faster *and* more effective than writing one. (Obviously using one without understanding it is just lazy.)
My experience, *most* teachers don't consistently produce better learning materials than the best teachers do, so their students would be better served by them choosing already-prepared lessons, rather than trying to assemble something while they're eating dinner. Same with the overall curriculum. Yes, they should *choose* when it's time to move to the next lesson, the next prepared lesson that is freely available to them.
I teach a lot at work. The last series I did was a deep dive into SQL, really understanding what it is about. The next is a CISSP course I'm teaching. For SQL and for most of my lessons I made all of the learning materials. For CISSP, maybe I'd be better off presenting well-made material. Obviously I'll choose which modules to present, and how much time to spend on each.
Rural Australia is exactly why Martin Dougiamas made the premier open source Learning Management System, Moodle. It's very good.
> lessons come pre planned and differentiated etc etc etc.
Think about what they teach in public school, as opposed to college. Arithmetic, reading, basic civics like "how a bill becomes a law".
They are teaching the same thing that 100,000 other schools are teaching at the same time, and the same thing they taught last year, and the year before, and they decade before. Algebra hasn't changed. Heck Schoolhouse Rock "I'm Just a Bill" is still better than whatever lesson most teachers would come up with and it's from 1976. So yeah those lessons do come pre-planned. If you're making your own lessons instead of using the lessons 100,000 other teachers are using for the topic, you're doing it wrong.
> assignments just appear and are magically marked
Uhm yeah there's this thing called a "computer". When I was in grade school it was called "Scantron". Now it's called the "form" tag.
Programmers who are accustomed to desktop applications, where there is one user, are in the habit of making things work. You click the button, it does the thing. Somebody calls someone else, they can see and hear each other.
Many of the "omg how stupid can you be?!" bugs are of the "make sure it does NOT work when it's not supposed to" variety. Once you connect an application to the internet, you have to think in terms of when things should NOT happen and test for that. Programmers who learned writing Windows desktop apps don't think in that frame of mind.
For decades one of the most popular sayings in programming was "garbage in, garbage out". That's no longer an acceptable way of thinking. That garbage that comes out, random bytes from RAM, can include your private key. Once your application is on the internet, it has to be "garbage is the default thing I'm expecting, and leads to DENIED out. Only if input exactly matches the specification will you get anything out". It's a different way of thinking.
> I'm not belittling teachers here but it's relatively low paid
Is it? Let's take a state with relatively low cost of living.
Teachers are paid an average of $53,300 salary plus excellent retirement benefit for nine months of work. Summer school pays $30-$50/ hour plus a bonus of up to $10,000. So something like $65,000 in Texas. Texas teachers are required to work six hours a day, 187 days per year. That's not terrible.
I think in that case, they meant preserving a line different from Chromium.
The average house is also made of pine. What's the environmental impact of growing 100 pound pine tree vs 100 pounds of styrofoam?
Of course the concrete foundation is a large percentage of the weight, and as I mentioned concrete is the one building material that really does matter.
Which is the best place to try to help the environment. The production of:
A) Stuff that is used briefly and then the average family throws away thousands of pounds of it, such as packaging.
B) Stuff that is made one time and used for 50 years.
The average person uses far more consumer packaging and other consumer goods in their lifetime than building materials. On balance, it the production of the building materials for my house just don't make any significant difference. I bought the walls once, I buy beverages and food every day. We use electricity every day. The stuff we buy over and over and over again are going to have far more impact.
The exception, perhaps, is concrete only regarding CO2. That's a significant number, if you focus just on CO2 as opposed to environmental concerns generally. It would be cool to have a process for producing a concrete-like product which sequesters carbon as part of the material, and that's not at all far-fetched.
> ugh to Article I Section 9 that also mentions the federal government is bound in the same way as the states against making Ex Post Facto law
And what has SCOTUS said about the ex post facto clause for 220 years running?
Here's the thing. There are people who don't know something (all of us); then there are stupid people who have trouble learning; then there are the REALLY stupid people, the intentionally ignorant, those who refuse to learn anything new. Rather they stick to their first guess no matter what information is put before them. Only the last group is doomed to everlasting ignorance.
> was invalid because it violated Art. 1 Sec. 10. of the U.S. Constitution forbidding states to pass laws interfering with contracts
Did you see that part about "forbidding states" that you copy-pasted? Article 1 Section 10 starts with "No state shall". It goes in to say states can't sign treaties or coin money. Would you like to now argue that the federal government can't sign treaties because Section 10 says states can't?
Good point on slavery being a Constitutional amendment.
However re:
> as congress did not have the authority to do so with a resolution for it would be an ex post facto law
Again, see Calder v Bull or pretty much every Supreme Court ruling in the history of the country. Within 10 years of the Constitution being ratified, the Court cleared up any misunderstandings anyone might have about that. Just in case people hadn't heard Thomas Jefferson when he explained they ex post facto and attainder together on purpose, they are talking about ex post facto laws that result in attainder (punishment for a serious crime). Congress may not create a retroactive punishment either by convicting someone of an existing offense or by creating a retroactive offense.
Again, you can dream up whatever you want to dream up, but for 220 years the Supreme Court keeps saying you're idea is wrong.
As Thomas Jefferson said of ex post facto laws "The federal constitution indeed interdicts them in criminal cases only". The Supreme Court has been consistent on this point since at least Calder vs Bull (1798).
> if you make a contract that is lawful at the time made, or you begin engaging in an activity, then congress cannot, and it would be unconstitutional for them to in any way attempt to invalidate your lawful contract or restrain your continued performance of your contract or activity after the fact
Congress can in fact nullify a contract for the sale of slaves, or for the delivery of whiskey, and has done so. What they can't do is make it a crime to have done those things in the past.
They can't make it a *crime* for a social network to have had more than 100 million users in 2015 and Zuckerberg in jail for what happened in 2015. They absolutely CAN say that starting next year, any social network which has over 100 million users will be divided up. If you want to argue otherwise, please cite a case for your assertion. It is my memory that the government did indeed free the slaves, prior terms of service notwithstanding. What they didn't do was criminally prosecute slave owners for having owned slaves in the past.
If I brainstorm a bunch of ideas with co-workers, I try to present the best ideas to management, rather than every idea that came up. Sometimes a hybrid of multiple different ideas from the brainstorming session sounds better than the original ideas, or even inverting the idea.
It's entirely possible that some of the ideas were presented to top management without this particular document being presented.