I'm in a Ph.D. program for CompSci right now, despite the fact I had a 2.5 undergraduate GPA. Great GRE scores and an excellent Real World employment history were what got me into the program.
If you're one hundred percent committed to academic excellence in your grad career and you've got a good employment history, then go for it. People do get second chances. I should know.
I'm a thirtysomething Ph.D. candidate in computer science. I travel a lot for conferences and meet a lot of undergraduates, both from top-tier schools and from small places nobody's ever heard of. I have yet to see any substantial difference in the undergraduate programs.
Let me repeat that: I have yet to see any substantial difference. On the other hand, I've seen tons of difference in undergraduates themselves.
When I was a high school senior I wanted to get into MIT. When I didn't get into MIT, I was crushed. After all, MIT was the place to be, right? It was a dynamic environment, it was the world leader in everything I wanted, it had luminaries like Ron Rivest, it was... etcetera. But I didn't understand the reason why MIT was all those things. MIT is what it is primarily because they do an excellent job of recruiting dynamic students, hard chargers who will self-organize, who will aggressively pursue excellence, who will do their own outside research, who don't settle for just getting good grades, who are willing to put in the hard work required to make all of this a reality.
And guess what? There are hundreds of thousands of highly dynamic students in undergraduate programs across the nation. All that you have to do is (a) be highly dynamic, and (b) seek out other highly dynamic students. Then you'll form the nerdcore of your department, and as long as you keep that nerdcore alive, great things can happen.
I started off at the University of Houston before transferring to a small liberal-arts college in the Midwest (Cornell, which is older than Cornell University). From there I got into the graduate program at the University of Iowa. None of these sound like top-tier schools, right?
And yet I've spoken at Black Hat, at CodeCon, at OSCON. I've been recognized by international organizations as a first-class expert in my field. My cell phone speed dial reads like a Who's Who of computer security. Not once has anyone, anyone, given a damn where I did my studies. All they've ever cared about is whether I'm dynamic, whether I've done my research, and whether I've got integrity.
You say you got into CMU? Congratulations. It's a good school. Here's what you should do to begin a path to success. First, figure out who your advisor is going to be. Send him or her an email as soon as you find out and ask for a meeting. At this meeting, talk to your advisor about your interests, about what you'd like to do, about things you know you don't like, about the whole nine yards. Your advisor will probably smile and nod and give you some good, if generic, advice.
Then come back two weeks later and do it again. This time, show your advisor something you've done in the last couple of weeks, something that wasn't assigned to you for class. Repeat this process every couple of weeks. Sooner or later your advisor will say "you know... you seem to really be interested in this. There's a research project I'm working on which could use some help. Would you be interested?"
And once that happens, brother, you are in. Throw yourself into the research. Ninety-five percent of the time it'll be boring crap, but five percent of the time it can be truly excellent. Plus, the lab will give you the chance to get practical, hands-on experience with the stuff that your classmates will only know from books. By the time you're a senior, you'll have your name on a couple of academic papers. You'll have traveled to a few conferences. You'll have met a lot of interesting people and you'll have some good contacts.
And then one day at a conference you'll bump into this little gnome of a man with an impish grin and a very quiet, friendly demeanor, and you'll talk shop for twenty minutes. He'll smile--he never stops smiling, really--and during small talk over lunch you'll mention something about your undergraduate days at Slippery Rock U
The major problem with your interpretation is that is is textually unsupportable.
Well-trained semiprofessional soldiers (very much like today's National Guard) were well-known to the Framers. The language used in the day was "select corps" or "elite corps". If the Framers intended the Second Amendment to apply to a group like that, the language would read "a well-regulated select corps...", not "a well-regulated militia".
The National Guard is not a militia, in the Second Amendment sense of the word. For further evidence of this look at The Federalist Papers, particularly Federalist 29, which uses both "select corps" and "militia"... and not interchangeably.
News flash: just because you're protected from the federal government doing something to you, doesn't mean you're protected from the state government doing something to you.
The Bill of Rights, as originally drafted, were only restrictions on the federal government. Many states had their own established churches, for instance. This was perfectly allowed under the First Amendment; after all, it wasn't the federal Congress that was establishing a religion, but a state Congress.
After the Civil War the Fourteenth Amendment was passed, which declared that certain protections from federal government also applied to the states. Suddenly, all the state-sanctioned churches lost their government funding. State police were no longer allowed to search without warrants. States were forbidden from instituting cruel and unusual punishment. Etcetera.
But, interestingly enough, the Second Amendment has never been held by SCOTUS to be part of the Fourteenth Amendment's incorporation effect. That means that any state or municipality can pass essentially any firearms law it wants, and still be on the right side of the Second Amendment fence.
Touchscreens have repeatedly failed when put into practice. The literature is replete with accounts of touchscreens being poorly aligned, so that voters who touch for candidate A wind up voting for candidate B instead. This is a catastrophic failure of the interface. Look into New York State and their Board of Elections for more details. At present, touchscreen technology needs to be considered extremely problematic; more reliable designs are needed.
Comparison to restaurants are inappropriate. Those machines are used every day, and machines used every day tend to be more reliable than ones only used once every couple of years. Moreover, the people who use the systems are intimately familiar with them from long experience. Most voters are almost entirely unfamiliar with the DRE systems they use.
With respect to whether a good DRE interface should be easier to use than paper and pencil, I can't talk intelligently about it. Ask Rice University, which is currently doing a lot of research into the human factors of voting. I will tell you, though, that this is a subtle field and the psychology grad students down there are getting some good research papers out of it, so I'd be suspicious of saying anything was obviously true. If it was obvious, we wouldn't need to do basic research.
With respect to printers, we are already seeing widespread reports of printer failures in elections--from VVPAT systems running out of ink (and nobody noticing), to print heads not working, to the wrong kind of paper being stockpiled, to... etcetera.
History strongly indicates that it is not as simple as you're making it out to be.
How do I feel about Open Voting? Well, I know some of the people involved, and they seem like decent sorts. On the other hand, their system exists only on paper. There are no prototypes to test. Almost any system can look like a good idea on paper. As soon as they actually implement it, I'm quite certain we'll discover the Open Voting model doesn't live up to all of its promises.
At this point, I'm finished with the thread. I'd strongly suggest that if you want to talk to others about electronic voting, that you first do research. Don't make claims without having either academic papers you can point to, real-world systems you can refer to, real-world election officials and election experiences, etcetera.
In theory, we should be able to have electronic machines that are actually easier to use than simple paper and pencil.
Please show me the theory that says a fully electronic DRE system with millions of lines of code and dozens of moving parts (the printer is an infamous source of hardware failure) can be made superior to a system involving a piece of paper and an ink pen.
I'm not being sarcastic. To the best of my knowledge, there is no such theoretical framework. Likewise, there's also no theoretical framework showing that it can't be done. This question is a giant unresolved one in the field. For some tasks, a piece of paper and an ink pen is a really, really hard combination to beat. (Which is as it should be. Over 2,138 years of paper balloting, we've learned a little about how to do paper elections passably well.) For some tasks, DRE makes a lot more sense. This is why most respectable modern systems are hybrids, attempting to get the best of both worlds.
Unfortunately the kinds of people capable of designing such systems
Such as...? What systems are you talking about? Are there actual prototypes to test, or is it just a paper design that has yet to be tested in real-world environments? Who are their designers?
In the FOSS world the mantra is "shut up and show me the code". I'm asking you to put forth your own list of designers you feel are competent, why you feel they're competent, and what about their systems is such an improvement over the existing state of the art. Compare and contrast to Chaum's Punchscan, Rivest's triple-ballot, and the various mixin and visual cryptographic schemes.
The manual recount can be completely done by hand. The entire election can be completely done by hand. Punchscan systems can be done entirely via manual means. It's certainly within the realm of possibility to have a mapping function which can be done with no technology more advanced than a blind person with a nickel.
Imagine that when you cast your ballot, you have a little old lady recording your ballot serial number, as proof that the ballot was cast. When you cast your ballot, the ballot receipt (the half which is left with the counting authority) has a scratch-off panel on it. On top of the scratch-off panel is the ballot serial number. When you turn your ballot in, the little old lady checks to make sure the panel is intact. If it's not, then you get sent back to the booth to fill another ballot. You receive a photocopy of your ballot. Your photocopy has your letter selection and the serial number on it.
At the counting authority there are two teams operating under public scrutiny. The first team is not allowed to bring in any paper, pencils, PDAs, cell phones, whatever, and the public is allowed to stand over their shoulders if they so wish. The first team's only job is to check ballots as they come in, to make sure the serial numbers match the records of ballots cast.
Once the ballot is certified as "yes, this ballot was actually cast", the ballot is handed off to a blind person with a nickel. The public is allowed to watch the blind person very closely, but not to get so close they can read the ballot. The blind person uses the nickel to remove the scratch-off panel, and hands the ballot to the second team.
The second team is again operating under close public scrutiny. Now that the scratch-off panel is removed, the mapping between symbols and candidates is revealed. "Okay, so 'B' is really a vote for the Libertarian Party... okay, gotcha."
Store all the ballots. Need a recount? Just skip the ballot serial number check and the blind person with a nickel.
Punchscan would work, but my personal feeling is that the downsides (it's a bit confusing to the voter... and manual recounts involve cryptography) outweigh the advantages
Using Punchscan isn't confusing to the voter. Watch the Shockwave Flash video and presto, you know how the system works. Can you read? Can you use a highlighter pen? Great, you're ready to vote. By comparison, electronic voting machines are absolutely Byzantine in the complexity of their user interfaces.
What's confusing you are the questions of "so how do I know Punchscan really works?" And look: Punchscan is so simple that J. Random Slashdotter--me--can explain it to you in just a couple of messages. Now imagine if you were to ask "so how do I know Diebold's AccuVote TSx machine really works?" Imagine how many millions of messages that would take to explain all the code in it. And even then, you wouldn't have much in the way of assurances.
I'm blanking on the name of the vendor, but one vendor used a version of Windows for their DRE product. Their DRE product was actually reasonably good. You clicked on a checkbox to select a candidate, clicked "Continue", your vote was cast and the checkboxes were cleared, etcetera. Then Microsoft released a new version of Windows. MS declared that it was a bugfix release and there were no API changes, so the vendor applied the patch and sent it off to their clients.
It was then discovered that it was a bugfix and UI release. Particularly, the checkbox appearance had changed. When clicking on a checkbox, Windows would draw a small box around the checked element. This small box didn't vanish once the checkbox was deselected--it only went away by picking something else.
So the upshot of it was that the next voter in the booth could see how the voter previous to them voted. The entire secrecy of the ballot destroyed, because of a trivial change in UI. [*]
First, the Punchscan system really refers to a family of systems, not just one system. So it's inaccurate to talk about "the Punchscan system", much like it's inaccurate to refer to "the UNIX operating system". Not that this prevents us from using the inaccurate terminology--but you should be aware that something is being handwaved with that language. You'll see an example of this in a bit.
The manual recount is simple. The mapping between letters and numbers is a function requiring the ballot serial number and secret information which only the counting authority possesses. This is fairly basic cryptography. If you want a manual recount, no problem. Look at the original ballot halves--a paper record--and then, for each ballot, apply the mapping function to (ballot id, secret information) to figure out which candidate was voted for. Record votes manually for the appropriate candidates. Done.
(Please note that this possibility is not in the Punchscan Flash demo. However, it's not hard to imagine a Punchscan system where the counting authority keeps the original for recount purposes, and you go home with a photocopy. Like I said, Punchscan is a family of technologies, not one specific one, per se.)
You don't have to trust the machine to remember which candidate maps to which element. It's a mathematical transformation, and all of the necessary information is either on the ballot or in the hands of the counting authority. You don't have to trust the machine. If you voted for B and the published log shows you as recording B, then there is a deterministic one-to-one mapping present. The computer doesn't 'remember' which element maps to which.
Finally, open source voting software is not the panacea you seem to think it is. Australia has had GPLed election software for a few years now, and it's only marginally less cruddy than everything else. You cannot make a voting system trustworthy simply by sprinkling it with DFSG/OSI/FSF Software Licensing Fairy Dust.
According to the best research we have today, paperless systems will be insecure and subject to many different kinds of catastrophic failures. Open source, disclosed source, Free Software or proprietary code is all irrelevant.
Finally: it's 4:25am as I write this and I've been up for 22 hours. Please do not take this as an authoritative, considered statement. At best, you should take it as a roadmap for your own inquiry.
There are at least two very credible schemes that allow you to determine whether your vote was counted correctly (although perhaps not from a 'published result'). Two of them are David Chaum's Punchscan system, and Ron Rivest's Triple-Ballot System. There are another three or four I could mention, but the authors lack the immediate name recognition of Chaum or Rivest.
Please do basic research before making statements like this in the future.
(Why, yes, I am an NSF-funded voting security researcher. Obligatory disclosure: I know both Rivest and Chaum. They're part of the voting security research group I'm on.)
Howdy, Stu; nice low UID. As you can probably figure out, I've been here for a good while, too--not as long as you, but a good while.
I think what happened to Slashdot is it got popular, and nobody--least of all Taco--knows how to deal with popularity. When Slashdot was the land of five-digit UIDs, as it was when I came, there was no karma system, there was no friend or foe system. It wasn't needed; the place was small enough that people knew other people. You'd have a long and fruitful argument with someone else, and you'd look for that person in the comments. It's all good. It works.
The turning point was, I think, the Columbine shootings. The number of responses to Jon Katz's "Hellmouth" stories was astronomical, and deservedly so. After the Hellmouth stories, we began to see threads with 500 responses... then 700... and now Slashdot routinely breaks 2000 responses for stories of particular interest. With that kind of anonymity, it makes it very tempting for people to act as if there's nobody watching and no social consequences for action.
When people believe there are no social consequences for their actions, a lot of them will turn into barbarians (c.f. Penny Arcade). Belligerency rises. Topics which before would receive polite silence are now greeted with "WTF who cares about washed-up movie actors?!?". Tolerance has vanished, as has the willingness to learn; the power of the anonymity of crowds leads many people into the willingness to be jerks.
For a year now I've been seriously tempted to leave Slashdot. I'm tired of what you noticed as the disturbing trend. I'm tired of it, and I don't know why I keep on contributing my time and my thinking to a site which increasingly appears to value conformity over individuality, certainty over knowledge, the mob over the man.
Conformity over individuality? If I were to say, in a programming thread, that I think SML/NJ is one of the finest programming languages out there--and I do, and I have great reasons for believing so--I'll get a sea of anonymous cowards shouting down that SML/NJ is a crap tool and a lousy language and that's why nobody uses it. How many of these people will have ever written code in SML/NJ? How many of these people will have ever written more than a thousand lines in SML/NJ? How many of these people are qualified to have an opinion? How many of these people are condemning my choice not because my choice is bad, but because my choice isn't C (or whatever other languages are the choice-of-conformity on Slashdot)? The barbarians in the crowd condemn not "bad languages", but individuality.
Certainty over knowledge? Take a look at how many people are just dead certain of things that just aren't so. If someone condemns C++ because it's not typesafe, if they phrase it loudly and with great certainty, they'll get modded up to +5, despite the fact it's barkingly wrong. (Any realistic C++ program will make extensive use of type safety.) But if someone makes a careful and articulate post explaining the things they know for a fact, the things they suspect might be true, and the things they just don't know on... these people aren't heeded. Because on Slashdot, it's all about the certainty, not the knowledge, and especially not the knowledge that your knowledge has limits.
The mob over the man? This one can be shown just by looking at any thread. There's a definite mob mentality here, and I don't like it.
Taco, if you're reading this--what do you think about all this? Can you give me, and/or other long-time Slashdotters who feel likewise, hope for the future? What's going on here?
Why am I still here?
I'm not being sarcastic, I'm not being insolent. I'd like to stay here. I'm just not certain there's a reason to anymore.
What was the name of that chinese scientist who got sent to jail??
Wen Ho Lee. The case against him crumbled in a major way. He plead guilty to one minor count, and the government quickly trumpeted this as a victory. At sentencing, Dr. Lee was sentenced to time served and was released with the court's apologies. The judge was clearly of the opinion that Dr. Lee had been treated shamefully by the prosecution.
I remember reading that most of the Uranium in the world was in Africa
Don't believe everything you read. Uranium is found damn near everywhere: granite, gravel... uranium is cheap and available from many different sources.
How difficult is [refining] to detect?
Short answer: very. We didn't know the North Koreans were refining plutonium until they claimed to have a nuke. We didn't know about the Iranian refining program until Iranian exile groups came forward with the information.
Even fairly basic physics really, really hurts without you knowing calculus.
Not really. Physics is the science of making empirically testable statements about nature--that's all. You don't need calculus in order to show gravity pulls objects down at the same speed. You don't need calculus to show how sunlight shows us the earth is round, and what the earth's size is. You don't need calculus to... etc.
Modern physics as we know it is heavily calculus-based, yes, and for good reason: you use the best tools available for the job, and by the time college students are taking college physics, they overwhelmingly have access to the tool of calculus.
But you can do a lot of really fun and interesting physics without ever touching a calculus textbook. Whenever I go out on a hike with my nephews, we do physics; what can we learn from how a hawk drops on a rabbit? What can we learn from the shape of the moon? What can we learn from...
All of this is physics; some of it is surprisingly sophisticated physics; and none of it requires more than fifth-grade math.
I wasn't learning how to program a computer from David; I was learning how to think about computation.
Wikipedia has an excellent article on the Y-combinator, for instance. It's not just a matter of programming; it's a matter of learning how to think about programs, and one which requires a surprising lot of math. Did I understand every nuance of the lambda calculus? Of course not, and I still don't. But I learned enough to be able to understand a deeply complex mathematical topic.
I agree with you that simple computer programming is something that's not all that difficult, nor should we be all that surprised when kids learn it. Where I disagree with you is in what I see as your implicit statement that kids cannot learn things which "require an understanding of math that simply takes some time to comprehend and grasp".
The time required is much, much less than most people believe. It takes truly excellent teachers in order to do it, but it can be done--and without turning the kid into a nervous burned-out wreck, as happens to many child prodigies.
First, congratulations to her: yes, it's an accomplishment. The only reason we think it's a major accomplishment, though, is we've been fooled into thinking kids can't learn complex things. We mistakenly think that kids are capable of much less than they are--not because the kids can't perform up to their capability, but because the educational system doesn't do the kids justice.
I was lucky. When I was in elementary school and showed a real gift for computers, several teachers went considerably out of their way to put me in groups of people who knew what they were doing. By the time I was nine, I was spending my summers in the local community college's computer lab. I wasn't taking college courses, no, but my teachers hooked me up with a student named David Carlson and asked if he could just spend an hour each week answering my questions.
David became my best friend in no time flat. An hour a week turned into a considerably more during the summertime, between his jobs and other commitments. I learned LISP from David (on a Symbolics LISP Machine--talk about your sexy hardware). Shortly after I turned ten, David showed me the Y-combinator. It took me a few weeks to understand it, but when I did--whoa! I was blinded, just blinded, by the beauty of it.
Then we moved away to a different city, different school system. Supposedly this one was much better, but there were no longer any teachers who'd go out of their way to recruit college students into letting me hang out with them for a while. They expected me to go through the exact same hoops as anyone else. I wasn't even allowed to take Programming in BASIC at the high school level. No more LISP Machines for me. From '86 to '92, I had no access to any machines more powerful than an Apple IIgs, and no languages more powerful than Basic. I wouldn't get access to a LISP environment again until I got to college in '94.
Now I'm a graduate student. Last semester I took a course in programming language theory, where we were exposed to the beauty of the Y-combinator. And to think... I knew the Y-combinator when I was just ten years old, just due to the kindness of a smart college student who wasn't smart enough to know "the Y-combinator is too much for kids".
David Carlson was the finest teacher I ever had, because he didn't have preconceptions about what I could or couldn't learn. And as soon as we moved away and my education got turned over to bureaucrats who were concerned about "age-appropriate academic skills", I got left out in the cold.
David died a couple of years ago of brain cancer, way before his time; he was barely forty. He left behind a wife and kids, and you know what? I think those kids are going to turn out to be geniuses. Because he and his wife were too damn dumb to know their kids couldn't possibly learn things.
ObDisclosure: a Federal judge who was appointed by Reagan and elevated to the appellate bench by Bush considers me to be an archconservative.
ABORTION: Opposed to Roe v Wade, generally in favor of a woman's right to choose. Roe was a fishing trip in the Constitution in search of a justification: the right to abortion is inferred from the Constitutional right to privacy, which itself is inferred from the Fourth Amendment. That double layer of indirection gets the same kind of visceral response from me that a doubly-dereferenced pointer does in C--somewhere along the line, someone did an awful hack. But just because I'm opposed to Roe doesn't mean I'm opposed to a woman's ability to choose. I find abortion morally reprehensible and disgusting, but I acknowledge people have sincere differences of opinion on it. If I'm going to respect freedom, I have to start by not forcing my moral code on others.
SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE: Enthusiastically in favor, and not because I'm irreligious. I'm a Christian without apology and wish for my faith to flourish. Wherever I look in Europe, state involvement in churches almost inevitably leads towards the apathy of the population towards the church. I want America to be more religious, not less, and for that reason it's critically important government stay entirely out of religious affairs. However, that also means the government can't demand that all mention of God be banned from the public sphere. If a school will rent auditorium space for a private function, the school has to be obligated to rent auditorium space for a religious function. If an astronaut on a spacewalk is so overwhelmed by the sight of Creation that he feels compelled to pray, NASA can't tell him "uh... sorry, but church-and-state means we've got to tell you to wait on that until you're not on the NASA payroll."
PRO-CORPORATE: The only conservatives I know who are in favor of corporations are those that have never read Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Adam Smith--not exactly a friend of socialists--in his entire groundbreaking monograph had not one word of praise for businessmen. He only said that their net effects on the system were positive, even while their motivations were venal and negative. The Enron, MCI-WorldCom, Adelphia, etc. scandals have just reinforced, in my mind, Smith's prescience. Love business, but hate businessmen.
STEM-CELL RESEARCH: It's mainly the evangelical wing of the conservative movement which is against this. The rest of the conservatives love it. I'm all in favor of it.
ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS: I'm opposed to dumb environmental regulations. For instance, the danger of DDT was grossly overhyped; used responsibly, DDT was about the most effective pesticide for the buck. The environmental studies condemning DDT have often been criticized for various flaws. History also shows DDT can be used effectively; India has used DDT for twenty-five years to control mosquitos, and their ecosystem doesn't seem to be in danger of imminent collapse. Now, during the time DDT has been banned, how many people have died from (preventable) malaria? Tens of millions. Tens of millions of people died, just so we could feel good about banning a pesticide which could be used safely and cheaply. I'm not recommending the US go back to DDT today--we're a wealthy country, and we can afford other insecticides with less environmental impact--but for the love of God, two million people die each year of malaria in developing countries which can't afford modern insecticides, and we tell them that in the interests of the environment we won't let them use a cheap insecticide which they can afford? (Word of warning: DDT is still a very hot topic. I'm not presenting this as Absolute Truth. I'm only trying to get people to see there's always more than one side to a story.)
THE UNITED NATIONS: Generally in favor of it, as it was originally envisioned. The UN was originally a cle
The University of Iowa has a fairly good computer graphics crowd--Jim Cremer, Chris Wyman and others are actively engaged in this field. It's worth taking a look at.
ObDisclosure: I'm a grad student there, although not in computer graphics.
George Washington was called "Town Burner" by the Iroquois due to a set of military strategies Washington formulated early on in his career as an Army officer:
The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements.
Those were the marching orders Washington gave to General Sullivan.
If you were to ask the Iroquois whether Washington's official policy of burning civilian settlements to the ground rises to the level of terrorism, I'm sure they'd say yes. If you ask other tribes, they'd probably say no. And if you ask non-indigenous Americans, most of us say he's the Father of Our Country, First in War, First in Peace, First in the Hearts of his Countrymen.
We can understand the past without either condoning Washington's grievous sins, or dismissing his stellar accomplishments. Washington was a great man, who erred just as greatly.
But it is a mistake to think we can draw equivalencies between the Washingtons and Mandelas, and the Osama bin Ladens. Great men sometimes err greatly; but murderers committed to nothing but an ideology of murder will never be great.
You're right; my statistics were in error. I foolishly considered only one possibility (all Republican appointees) and not all possibilities.
I made another goof. Generally speaking, Dad's colleagues don't wear their appointments on their sleeve. New judges come on and old judges retire, and the dynamic changes from year to year. Since the last time I bothered to learn the political makeup of the court, President Bush has appointed a few new judges. It's now significantly skewed towards Republican appointees. The 97% unanimity figure dates from a few years ago, though, prior to the new wave of appointees.
The problem with that interpretation is it presumes that prior to any decision, the judge doesn't care if the case has reversible error.
Judges always strive to manage the case in such a manner that all parties receive a fair trial. As long as all parties receive a fair trial, no appeal will be successful.
Part of fairness is making no decision before its time. Judges do not make decisions on facts before it's necessary to make those decisions. E.g., it may be necessary to decide whether evidence was collected legally before the trial ends--after all, without that decision, how's the trial to go forward?--but decisions about who's won and who's lost wait until after the close of the trial. Those decisions aren't made--in fact, they aren't even considered--until after the close of the trial.
We non-lawyers think of judges as impartial watchers of the courtroom. Sometimes they are. Most of the time, though, they pick a winner and spend the rest of the case guiding the decision the way they think it should go and covering themselves for appeal.
Dad is a Federal circuit court judge (former Chief Judge of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals) and my cousin is on the Michigan state bench. That's the Honorable David R. Hansen and the Honorable Katherine L. Hansen, respectively. Dad was appointed to the state bench in 1976 by the (Republican) Governor Robert Ray; he was appointed to the Federal bench for the District of Northern Iowa in 1986 by President Ronald Reagan; he was appointed to the appellate bench by President George H.W. Bush. Officially, Dad has no political party--he's not allowed to, as part of the Federal code of judicial ethics--but I think you can probably figure out from his appointment history that Teddy Kennedy doesn't send him Christmas cards.
My cousin Katherine, on the other hand, was appointed to the Michigan state bench by Governor Jennifer M. Granholm. Governor Granholm, as you are no doubt aware, is so far in the left wing of the Democratic Party that she was honored with floor time at the last National Convention. I'm not sure whether her judicial ethics allow her to have a party affiliation or not, but... you can draw your own conclusions.
Why does this matter? Because whether I look at a Federal judge repeatedly appointed by Republicans, or whether I look at a State judge appointed by a dyed-in-the-wool lefty Democrat, I see the same thing: namely, brother, you are wrong, and have no idea just how wrong you are.
Judges try very hard to be impartial in all hearings... impartial to the point of rudeness. If you step into court and claim that the sky is blue, both Dad and Katherine will interrupt you to ask whether you're going to introduce meterologic testimony into the record attesting to that fact. (Well, Katherine would probably have the good grace to wait until you were finished. Dad's approach is the kinder of the two, though; when Katherine quietly pulls the rug out from under your feet, thoroughly confounding the last ten minutes of your argument, you long for the rough kindness of an interruption.)
It makes it hell trying to have normal conversations with them, by the by; they have a very hard time disengaging from judicial-think. When I say that I think I did well on an exam, Dad wants to know precisely what evidence leads me to that conclusion. When I talk to Katherine and mention that I have a paper submitted to Black Hat 2005, Katherine doesn't say "that's nice"; she insists that I sit her down and teach her enough computational theory so that she can decide for herself my odds of getting published.
Both of them live and die by a mantra: neither one of them gives half a damn what you know, they only care what you can prove.
Nor are they "watchers" of the court in any sense. They are the administrators of the court. They're the ones who decide the ground rules of the court hearing. They decide these ground rules based on pleadings; attorneys for one side say that under one Supreme Court ruling, the standard for evidence should be this, while attorneys for the other side say that decision didn't foresee this particular eventuality and it should be discarded. Only a fool would claim they are "watchers". They are not combatants in the courtroom, in the sense of trial lawyers, no, but they are both the arbiters of fairness and the executors of decisions. If you're able to convince the judge of a fact, then brother, your job is done. At that point the other attorney isn't fighting you anymore, he's fighting the judge, and that's a fight the other lawyer is--with greater than 90% certainty--going to lose.
Impartiality is difficult to attain. The best solution judges have found, either on the Left or on the Right, is ruthless, r
Here's the thing: I can't tell if you're kidding or not. Because sure, there's something to be said for the "security companies are blowing problems out of proportion" idea.
On the other hand, your nick is Saeed al-Sahaf.
So I can't help but wonder if there's going to be a follow-up about how at this moment you're personally grilling the stomachs of script kiddies in hell or something.
(For Slashdotters with no sense of history: Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf was the Iraqi press secretary during the Gulf War. He was famous for his surrealistic press conferences which were completely detached from reality, like when he challenged reporters to claim there was even one American in Baghdad, as an M1A1 tank was clearly visible rolling down a street in the background.)
The article's summation is far more accurate than Slashdot. In TFA, a researcher says our minds don't work like digital computers.
The Slashdot headline says our minds don't work like computers, end of sentence.
Had TFSH (The Fine Slashdot Headline) been accurate, this would've been a mind-blowing result and in need of some extraordinarily strong evidence to support such an extraordinary claim. The question of whether the human mind--sentience, consciousness, and all that goes with it--is a computable process is one of the most wide-open questions in AI research right now. It's so wide-open that nobody wants to approach it directly; it's seen as too difficult a problem.
But no, that's not what these guys discovered at all. They just discovered the brain doesn't discretize data. Significant result. Impressive. I'd like to see significant evidence. But it's very, very wrong to summarize it as "our brains don't work like computers". That's not what they proved at all.
Just once, I'd like to see a Slashdot editor read an article critically, along with the submitter's blurb, before posting it.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude. Bother. Seriously.
I'm in a Ph.D. program for CompSci right now, despite the fact I had a 2.5 undergraduate GPA. Great GRE scores and an excellent Real World employment history were what got me into the program.
If you're one hundred percent committed to academic excellence in your grad career and you've got a good employment history, then go for it. People do get second chances. I should know.
I'm a thirtysomething Ph.D. candidate in computer science. I travel a lot for conferences and meet a lot of undergraduates, both from top-tier schools and from small places nobody's ever heard of. I have yet to see any substantial difference in the undergraduate programs.
Let me repeat that: I have yet to see any substantial difference. On the other hand, I've seen tons of difference in undergraduates themselves.
When I was a high school senior I wanted to get into MIT. When I didn't get into MIT, I was crushed. After all, MIT was the place to be, right? It was a dynamic environment, it was the world leader in everything I wanted, it had luminaries like Ron Rivest, it was... etcetera. But I didn't understand the reason why MIT was all those things. MIT is what it is primarily because they do an excellent job of recruiting dynamic students, hard chargers who will self-organize, who will aggressively pursue excellence, who will do their own outside research, who don't settle for just getting good grades, who are willing to put in the hard work required to make all of this a reality.
And guess what? There are hundreds of thousands of highly dynamic students in undergraduate programs across the nation. All that you have to do is (a) be highly dynamic, and (b) seek out other highly dynamic students. Then you'll form the nerdcore of your department, and as long as you keep that nerdcore alive, great things can happen.
I started off at the University of Houston before transferring to a small liberal-arts college in the Midwest (Cornell, which is older than Cornell University). From there I got into the graduate program at the University of Iowa. None of these sound like top-tier schools, right?
And yet I've spoken at Black Hat, at CodeCon, at OSCON. I've been recognized by international organizations as a first-class expert in my field. My cell phone speed dial reads like a Who's Who of computer security. Not once has anyone, anyone, given a damn where I did my studies. All they've ever cared about is whether I'm dynamic, whether I've done my research, and whether I've got integrity.
You say you got into CMU? Congratulations. It's a good school. Here's what you should do to begin a path to success. First, figure out who your advisor is going to be. Send him or her an email as soon as you find out and ask for a meeting. At this meeting, talk to your advisor about your interests, about what you'd like to do, about things you know you don't like, about the whole nine yards. Your advisor will probably smile and nod and give you some good, if generic, advice.
Then come back two weeks later and do it again. This time, show your advisor something you've done in the last couple of weeks, something that wasn't assigned to you for class. Repeat this process every couple of weeks. Sooner or later your advisor will say "you know... you seem to really be interested in this. There's a research project I'm working on which could use some help. Would you be interested?"
And once that happens, brother, you are in. Throw yourself into the research. Ninety-five percent of the time it'll be boring crap, but five percent of the time it can be truly excellent. Plus, the lab will give you the chance to get practical, hands-on experience with the stuff that your classmates will only know from books. By the time you're a senior, you'll have your name on a couple of academic papers. You'll have traveled to a few conferences. You'll have met a lot of interesting people and you'll have some good contacts.
And then one day at a conference you'll bump into this little gnome of a man with an impish grin and a very quiet, friendly demeanor, and you'll talk shop for twenty minutes. He'll smile--he never stops smiling, really--and during small talk over lunch you'll mention something about your undergraduate days at Slippery Rock U
The major problem with your interpretation is that is is textually unsupportable.
Well-trained semiprofessional soldiers (very much like today's National Guard) were well-known to the Framers. The language used in the day was "select corps" or "elite corps". If the Framers intended the Second Amendment to apply to a group like that, the language would read "a well-regulated select corps...", not "a well-regulated militia".
The National Guard is not a militia, in the Second Amendment sense of the word. For further evidence of this look at The Federalist Papers, particularly Federalist 29, which uses both "select corps" and "militia"... and not interchangeably.
News flash: just because you're protected from the federal government doing something to you, doesn't mean you're protected from the state government doing something to you.
The Bill of Rights, as originally drafted, were only restrictions on the federal government. Many states had their own established churches, for instance. This was perfectly allowed under the First Amendment; after all, it wasn't the federal Congress that was establishing a religion, but a state Congress.
After the Civil War the Fourteenth Amendment was passed, which declared that certain protections from federal government also applied to the states. Suddenly, all the state-sanctioned churches lost their government funding. State police were no longer allowed to search without warrants. States were forbidden from instituting cruel and unusual punishment. Etcetera.
But, interestingly enough, the Second Amendment has never been held by SCOTUS to be part of the Fourteenth Amendment's incorporation effect. That means that any state or municipality can pass essentially any firearms law it wants, and still be on the right side of the Second Amendment fence.
Touchscreens have repeatedly failed when put into practice. The literature is replete with accounts of touchscreens being poorly aligned, so that voters who touch for candidate A wind up voting for candidate B instead. This is a catastrophic failure of the interface. Look into New York State and their Board of Elections for more details. At present, touchscreen technology needs to be considered extremely problematic; more reliable designs are needed.
Comparison to restaurants are inappropriate. Those machines are used every day, and machines used every day tend to be more reliable than ones only used once every couple of years. Moreover, the people who use the systems are intimately familiar with them from long experience. Most voters are almost entirely unfamiliar with the DRE systems they use.
With respect to whether a good DRE interface should be easier to use than paper and pencil, I can't talk intelligently about it. Ask Rice University, which is currently doing a lot of research into the human factors of voting. I will tell you, though, that this is a subtle field and the psychology grad students down there are getting some good research papers out of it, so I'd be suspicious of saying anything was obviously true. If it was obvious, we wouldn't need to do basic research.
With respect to printers, we are already seeing widespread reports of printer failures in elections--from VVPAT systems running out of ink (and nobody noticing), to print heads not working, to the wrong kind of paper being stockpiled, to... etcetera.
History strongly indicates that it is not as simple as you're making it out to be.
How do I feel about Open Voting? Well, I know some of the people involved, and they seem like decent sorts. On the other hand, their system exists only on paper. There are no prototypes to test. Almost any system can look like a good idea on paper. As soon as they actually implement it, I'm quite certain we'll discover the Open Voting model doesn't live up to all of its promises.
At this point, I'm finished with the thread. I'd strongly suggest that if you want to talk to others about electronic voting, that you first do research. Don't make claims without having either academic papers you can point to, real-world systems you can refer to, real-world election officials and election experiences, etcetera.
I'm not being sarcastic. To the best of my knowledge, there is no such theoretical framework. Likewise, there's also no theoretical framework showing that it can't be done. This question is a giant unresolved one in the field. For some tasks, a piece of paper and an ink pen is a really, really hard combination to beat. (Which is as it should be. Over 2,138 years of paper balloting, we've learned a little about how to do paper elections passably well.) For some tasks, DRE makes a lot more sense. This is why most respectable modern systems are hybrids, attempting to get the best of both worlds.Such as...? What systems are you talking about? Are there actual prototypes to test, or is it just a paper design that has yet to be tested in real-world environments? Who are their designers?
In the FOSS world the mantra is "shut up and show me the code". I'm asking you to put forth your own list of designers you feel are competent, why you feel they're competent, and what about their systems is such an improvement over the existing state of the art. Compare and contrast to Chaum's Punchscan, Rivest's triple-ballot, and the various mixin and visual cryptographic schemes.
Imagine that when you cast your ballot, you have a little old lady recording your ballot serial number, as proof that the ballot was cast. When you cast your ballot, the ballot receipt (the half which is left with the counting authority) has a scratch-off panel on it. On top of the scratch-off panel is the ballot serial number. When you turn your ballot in, the little old lady checks to make sure the panel is intact. If it's not, then you get sent back to the booth to fill another ballot. You receive a photocopy of your ballot. Your photocopy has your letter selection and the serial number on it.
At the counting authority there are two teams operating under public scrutiny. The first team is not allowed to bring in any paper, pencils, PDAs, cell phones, whatever, and the public is allowed to stand over their shoulders if they so wish. The first team's only job is to check ballots as they come in, to make sure the serial numbers match the records of ballots cast.
Once the ballot is certified as "yes, this ballot was actually cast", the ballot is handed off to a blind person with a nickel. The public is allowed to watch the blind person very closely, but not to get so close they can read the ballot. The blind person uses the nickel to remove the scratch-off panel, and hands the ballot to the second team.
The second team is again operating under close public scrutiny. Now that the scratch-off panel is removed, the mapping between symbols and candidates is revealed. "Okay, so 'B' is really a vote for the Libertarian Party... okay, gotcha."
Store all the ballots. Need a recount? Just skip the ballot serial number check and the blind person with a nickel.
Using Punchscan isn't confusing to the voter. Watch the Shockwave Flash video and presto, you know how the system works. Can you read? Can you use a highlighter pen? Great, you're ready to vote. By comparison, electronic voting machines are absolutely Byzantine in the complexity of their user interfaces.
What's confusing you are the questions of "so how do I know Punchscan really works?" And look: Punchscan is so simple that J. Random Slashdotter--me--can explain it to you in just a couple of messages. Now imagine if you were to ask "so how do I know Diebold's AccuVote TSx machine really works?" Imagine how many millions of messages that would take to explain all the code in it. And even then, you wouldn't have much in the way of assurances.
I'm blanking on the name of the vendor, but one vendor used a version of Windows for their DRE product. Their DRE product was actually reasonably good. You clicked on a checkbox to select a candidate, clicked "Continue", your vote was cast and the checkboxes were cleared, etcetera. Then Microsoft released a new version of Windows. MS declared that it was a bugfix release and there were no API changes, so the vendor applied the patch and sent it off to their clients.
It was then discovered that it was a bugfix and UI release. Particularly, the checkbox appearance had changed. When clicking on a checkbox, Windows would draw a small box around the checked element. This small box didn't vanish once the checkbox was deselected--it only went away by picking something else.
So the upshot of it was that the next voter in the booth could see how the voter previous to them voted. The entire secrecy of the ballot destroyed, because of a trivial change in UI. [*]
Given a choice between a fancy elec
First, the Punchscan system really refers to a family of systems, not just one system. So it's inaccurate to talk about "the Punchscan system", much like it's inaccurate to refer to "the UNIX operating system". Not that this prevents us from using the inaccurate terminology--but you should be aware that something is being handwaved with that language. You'll see an example of this in a bit.
The manual recount is simple. The mapping between letters and numbers is a function requiring the ballot serial number and secret information which only the counting authority possesses. This is fairly basic cryptography. If you want a manual recount, no problem. Look at the original ballot halves--a paper record--and then, for each ballot, apply the mapping function to (ballot id, secret information) to figure out which candidate was voted for. Record votes manually for the appropriate candidates. Done.
(Please note that this possibility is not in the Punchscan Flash demo. However, it's not hard to imagine a Punchscan system where the counting authority keeps the original for recount purposes, and you go home with a photocopy. Like I said, Punchscan is a family of technologies, not one specific one, per se.)
You don't have to trust the machine to remember which candidate maps to which element. It's a mathematical transformation, and all of the necessary information is either on the ballot or in the hands of the counting authority. You don't have to trust the machine. If you voted for B and the published log shows you as recording B, then there is a deterministic one-to-one mapping present. The computer doesn't 'remember' which element maps to which.
Finally, open source voting software is not the panacea you seem to think it is. Australia has had GPLed election software for a few years now, and it's only marginally less cruddy than everything else. You cannot make a voting system trustworthy simply by sprinkling it with DFSG/OSI/FSF Software Licensing Fairy Dust.
According to the best research we have today, paperless systems will be insecure and subject to many different kinds of catastrophic failures. Open source, disclosed source, Free Software or proprietary code is all irrelevant.
Finally: it's 4:25am as I write this and I've been up for 22 hours. Please do not take this as an authoritative, considered statement. At best, you should take it as a roadmap for your own inquiry.
There are at least two very credible schemes that allow you to determine whether your vote was counted correctly (although perhaps not from a 'published result'). Two of them are David Chaum's Punchscan system, and Ron Rivest's Triple-Ballot System. There are another three or four I could mention, but the authors lack the immediate name recognition of Chaum or Rivest.
Please do basic research before making statements like this in the future.
(Why, yes, I am an NSF-funded voting security researcher. Obligatory disclosure: I know both Rivest and Chaum. They're part of the voting security research group I'm on.)
Howdy, Stu; nice low UID. As you can probably figure out, I've been here for a good while, too--not as long as you, but a good while.
I think what happened to Slashdot is it got popular, and nobody--least of all Taco--knows how to deal with popularity. When Slashdot was the land of five-digit UIDs, as it was when I came, there was no karma system, there was no friend or foe system. It wasn't needed; the place was small enough that people knew other people. You'd have a long and fruitful argument with someone else, and you'd look for that person in the comments. It's all good. It works.
The turning point was, I think, the Columbine shootings. The number of responses to Jon Katz's "Hellmouth" stories was astronomical, and deservedly so. After the Hellmouth stories, we began to see threads with 500 responses... then 700... and now Slashdot routinely breaks 2000 responses for stories of particular interest. With that kind of anonymity, it makes it very tempting for people to act as if there's nobody watching and no social consequences for action.
When people believe there are no social consequences for their actions, a lot of them will turn into barbarians (c.f. Penny Arcade). Belligerency rises. Topics which before would receive polite silence are now greeted with "WTF who cares about washed-up movie actors?!?". Tolerance has vanished, as has the willingness to learn; the power of the anonymity of crowds leads many people into the willingness to be jerks.
For a year now I've been seriously tempted to leave Slashdot. I'm tired of what you noticed as the disturbing trend. I'm tired of it, and I don't know why I keep on contributing my time and my thinking to a site which increasingly appears to value conformity over individuality, certainty over knowledge, the mob over the man.
Conformity over individuality? If I were to say, in a programming thread, that I think SML/NJ is one of the finest programming languages out there--and I do, and I have great reasons for believing so--I'll get a sea of anonymous cowards shouting down that SML/NJ is a crap tool and a lousy language and that's why nobody uses it. How many of these people will have ever written code in SML/NJ? How many of these people will have ever written more than a thousand lines in SML/NJ? How many of these people are qualified to have an opinion? How many of these people are condemning my choice not because my choice is bad, but because my choice isn't C (or whatever other languages are the choice-of-conformity on Slashdot)? The barbarians in the crowd condemn not "bad languages", but individuality.
Certainty over knowledge? Take a look at how many people are just dead certain of things that just aren't so. If someone condemns C++ because it's not typesafe, if they phrase it loudly and with great certainty, they'll get modded up to +5, despite the fact it's barkingly wrong. (Any realistic C++ program will make extensive use of type safety.) But if someone makes a careful and articulate post explaining the things they know for a fact, the things they suspect might be true, and the things they just don't know on... these people aren't heeded. Because on Slashdot, it's all about the certainty, not the knowledge, and especially not the knowledge that your knowledge has limits.
The mob over the man? This one can be shown just by looking at any thread. There's a definite mob mentality here, and I don't like it.
Taco, if you're reading this--what do you think about all this? Can you give me, and/or other long-time Slashdotters who feel likewise, hope for the future? What's going on here?
Why am I still here?
I'm not being sarcastic, I'm not being insolent. I'd like to stay here. I'm just not certain there's a reason to anymore.
Modern physics as we know it is heavily calculus-based, yes, and for good reason: you use the best tools available for the job, and by the time college students are taking college physics, they overwhelmingly have access to the tool of calculus.
But you can do a lot of really fun and interesting physics without ever touching a calculus textbook. Whenever I go out on a hike with my nephews, we do physics; what can we learn from how a hawk drops on a rabbit? What can we learn from the shape of the moon? What can we learn from...
All of this is physics; some of it is surprisingly sophisticated physics; and none of it requires more than fifth-grade math.
I wasn't learning how to program a computer from David; I was learning how to think about computation.
Wikipedia has an excellent article on the Y-combinator, for instance. It's not just a matter of programming; it's a matter of learning how to think about programs, and one which requires a surprising lot of math. Did I understand every nuance of the lambda calculus? Of course not, and I still don't. But I learned enough to be able to understand a deeply complex mathematical topic.
I agree with you that simple computer programming is something that's not all that difficult, nor should we be all that surprised when kids learn it. Where I disagree with you is in what I see as your implicit statement that kids cannot learn things which "require an understanding of math that simply takes some time to comprehend and grasp".
The time required is much, much less than most people believe. It takes truly excellent teachers in order to do it, but it can be done--and without turning the kid into a nervous burned-out wreck, as happens to many child prodigies.
First, congratulations to her: yes, it's an accomplishment. The only reason we think it's a major accomplishment, though, is we've been fooled into thinking kids can't learn complex things. We mistakenly think that kids are capable of much less than they are--not because the kids can't perform up to their capability, but because the educational system doesn't do the kids justice.
I was lucky. When I was in elementary school and showed a real gift for computers, several teachers went considerably out of their way to put me in groups of people who knew what they were doing. By the time I was nine, I was spending my summers in the local community college's computer lab. I wasn't taking college courses, no, but my teachers hooked me up with a student named David Carlson and asked if he could just spend an hour each week answering my questions.
David became my best friend in no time flat. An hour a week turned into a considerably more during the summertime, between his jobs and other commitments. I learned LISP from David (on a Symbolics LISP Machine--talk about your sexy hardware). Shortly after I turned ten, David showed me the Y-combinator. It took me a few weeks to understand it, but when I did--whoa! I was blinded, just blinded, by the beauty of it.
Then we moved away to a different city, different school system. Supposedly this one was much better, but there were no longer any teachers who'd go out of their way to recruit college students into letting me hang out with them for a while. They expected me to go through the exact same hoops as anyone else. I wasn't even allowed to take Programming in BASIC at the high school level. No more LISP Machines for me. From '86 to '92, I had no access to any machines more powerful than an Apple IIgs, and no languages more powerful than Basic. I wouldn't get access to a LISP environment again until I got to college in '94.
Now I'm a graduate student. Last semester I took a course in programming language theory, where we were exposed to the beauty of the Y-combinator. And to think... I knew the Y-combinator when I was just ten years old, just due to the kindness of a smart college student who wasn't smart enough to know "the Y-combinator is too much for kids".
David Carlson was the finest teacher I ever had, because he didn't have preconceptions about what I could or couldn't learn. And as soon as we moved away and my education got turned over to bureaucrats who were concerned about "age-appropriate academic skills", I got left out in the cold.
David died a couple of years ago of brain cancer, way before his time; he was barely forty. He left behind a wife and kids, and you know what? I think those kids are going to turn out to be geniuses. Because he and his wife were too damn dumb to know their kids couldn't possibly learn things.
ObDisclosure: a Federal judge who was appointed by Reagan and elevated to the appellate bench by Bush considers me to be an archconservative.
ABORTION: Opposed to Roe v Wade, generally in favor of a woman's right to choose. Roe was a fishing trip in the Constitution in search of a justification: the right to abortion is inferred from the Constitutional right to privacy, which itself is inferred from the Fourth Amendment. That double layer of indirection gets the same kind of visceral response from me that a doubly-dereferenced pointer does in C--somewhere along the line, someone did an awful hack. But just because I'm opposed to Roe doesn't mean I'm opposed to a woman's ability to choose. I find abortion morally reprehensible and disgusting, but I acknowledge people have sincere differences of opinion on it. If I'm going to respect freedom, I have to start by not forcing my moral code on others.
SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE: Enthusiastically in favor, and not because I'm irreligious. I'm a Christian without apology and wish for my faith to flourish. Wherever I look in Europe, state involvement in churches almost inevitably leads towards the apathy of the population towards the church. I want America to be more religious, not less, and for that reason it's critically important government stay entirely out of religious affairs. However, that also means the government can't demand that all mention of God be banned from the public sphere. If a school will rent auditorium space for a private function, the school has to be obligated to rent auditorium space for a religious function. If an astronaut on a spacewalk is so overwhelmed by the sight of Creation that he feels compelled to pray, NASA can't tell him "uh... sorry, but church-and-state means we've got to tell you to wait on that until you're not on the NASA payroll."
PRO-CORPORATE: The only conservatives I know who are in favor of corporations are those that have never read Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Adam Smith--not exactly a friend of socialists--in his entire groundbreaking monograph had not one word of praise for businessmen. He only said that their net effects on the system were positive, even while their motivations were venal and negative. The Enron, MCI-WorldCom, Adelphia, etc. scandals have just reinforced, in my mind, Smith's prescience. Love business, but hate businessmen.
STEM-CELL RESEARCH: It's mainly the evangelical wing of the conservative movement which is against this. The rest of the conservatives love it. I'm all in favor of it.
ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS: I'm opposed to dumb environmental regulations. For instance, the danger of DDT was grossly overhyped; used responsibly, DDT was about the most effective pesticide for the buck. The environmental studies condemning DDT have often been criticized for various flaws. History also shows DDT can be used effectively; India has used DDT for twenty-five years to control mosquitos, and their ecosystem doesn't seem to be in danger of imminent collapse. Now, during the time DDT has been banned, how many people have died from (preventable) malaria? Tens of millions. Tens of millions of people died, just so we could feel good about banning a pesticide which could be used safely and cheaply. I'm not recommending the US go back to DDT today--we're a wealthy country, and we can afford other insecticides with less environmental impact--but for the love of God, two million people die each year of malaria in developing countries which can't afford modern insecticides, and we tell them that in the interests of the environment we won't let them use a cheap insecticide which they can afford? (Word of warning: DDT is still a very hot topic. I'm not presenting this as Absolute Truth. I'm only trying to get people to see there's always more than one side to a story.)
THE UNITED NATIONS: Generally in favor of it, as it was originally envisioned. The UN was originally a cle
The University of Iowa has a fairly good computer graphics crowd--Jim Cremer, Chris Wyman and others are actively engaged in this field. It's worth taking a look at.
ObDisclosure: I'm a grad student there, although not in computer graphics.
If you were to ask the Iroquois whether Washington's official policy of burning civilian settlements to the ground rises to the level of terrorism, I'm sure they'd say yes. If you ask other tribes, they'd probably say no. And if you ask non-indigenous Americans, most of us say he's the Father of Our Country, First in War, First in Peace, First in the Hearts of his Countrymen.
We can understand the past without either condoning Washington's grievous sins, or dismissing his stellar accomplishments. Washington was a great man, who erred just as greatly.
But it is a mistake to think we can draw equivalencies between the Washingtons and Mandelas, and the Osama bin Ladens. Great men sometimes err greatly; but murderers committed to nothing but an ideology of murder will never be great.
You're right; my statistics were in error. I foolishly considered only one possibility (all Republican appointees) and not all possibilities.
I made another goof. Generally speaking, Dad's colleagues don't wear their appointments on their sleeve. New judges come on and old judges retire, and the dynamic changes from year to year. Since the last time I bothered to learn the political makeup of the court, President Bush has appointed a few new judges. It's now significantly skewed towards Republican appointees. The 97% unanimity figure dates from a few years ago, though, prior to the new wave of appointees.
The problem with that interpretation is it presumes that prior to any decision, the judge doesn't care if the case has reversible error.
Judges always strive to manage the case in such a manner that all parties receive a fair trial. As long as all parties receive a fair trial, no appeal will be successful.
Part of fairness is making no decision before its time. Judges do not make decisions on facts before it's necessary to make those decisions. E.g., it may be necessary to decide whether evidence was collected legally before the trial ends--after all, without that decision, how's the trial to go forward?--but decisions about who's won and who's lost wait until after the close of the trial. Those decisions aren't made--in fact, they aren't even considered--until after the close of the trial.
It's not a "sometimes they're impartial".
And they're not "watchers".
And if you think either is true, then you don't understand the judiciary at all. Those are two glaring, egregious errors to make.
Dad is a Federal circuit court judge (former Chief Judge of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals) and my cousin is on the Michigan state bench. That's the Honorable David R. Hansen and the Honorable Katherine L. Hansen, respectively. Dad was appointed to the state bench in 1976 by the (Republican) Governor Robert Ray; he was appointed to the Federal bench for the District of Northern Iowa in 1986 by President Ronald Reagan; he was appointed to the appellate bench by President George H.W. Bush. Officially, Dad has no political party--he's not allowed to, as part of the Federal code of judicial ethics--but I think you can probably figure out from his appointment history that Teddy Kennedy doesn't send him Christmas cards.
My cousin Katherine, on the other hand, was appointed to the Michigan state bench by Governor Jennifer M. Granholm. Governor Granholm, as you are no doubt aware, is so far in the left wing of the Democratic Party that she was honored with floor time at the last National Convention. I'm not sure whether her judicial ethics allow her to have a party affiliation or not, but... you can draw your own conclusions.
Why does this matter? Because whether I look at a Federal judge repeatedly appointed by Republicans, or whether I look at a State judge appointed by a dyed-in-the-wool lefty Democrat, I see the same thing: namely, brother, you are wrong, and have no idea just how wrong you are.
Judges try very hard to be impartial in all hearings... impartial to the point of rudeness. If you step into court and claim that the sky is blue, both Dad and Katherine will interrupt you to ask whether you're going to introduce meterologic testimony into the record attesting to that fact. (Well, Katherine would probably have the good grace to wait until you were finished. Dad's approach is the kinder of the two, though; when Katherine quietly pulls the rug out from under your feet, thoroughly confounding the last ten minutes of your argument, you long for the rough kindness of an interruption.)
It makes it hell trying to have normal conversations with them, by the by; they have a very hard time disengaging from judicial-think. When I say that I think I did well on an exam, Dad wants to know precisely what evidence leads me to that conclusion. When I talk to Katherine and mention that I have a paper submitted to Black Hat 2005, Katherine doesn't say "that's nice"; she insists that I sit her down and teach her enough computational theory so that she can decide for herself my odds of getting published.
Both of them live and die by a mantra: neither one of them gives half a damn what you know, they only care what you can prove.
Nor are they "watchers" of the court in any sense. They are the administrators of the court. They're the ones who decide the ground rules of the court hearing. They decide these ground rules based on pleadings; attorneys for one side say that under one Supreme Court ruling, the standard for evidence should be this, while attorneys for the other side say that decision didn't foresee this particular eventuality and it should be discarded. Only a fool would claim they are "watchers". They are not combatants in the courtroom, in the sense of trial lawyers, no, but they are both the arbiters of fairness and the executors of decisions. If you're able to convince the judge of a fact, then brother, your job is done. At that point the other attorney isn't fighting you anymore, he's fighting the judge, and that's a fight the other lawyer is--with greater than 90% certainty--going to lose.
Impartiality is difficult to attain. The best solution judges have found, either on the Left or on the Right, is ruthless, r
Um, dude?
Here's the thing: I can't tell if you're kidding or not. Because sure, there's something to be said for the "security companies are blowing problems out of proportion" idea.
On the other hand, your nick is Saeed al-Sahaf.
So I can't help but wonder if there's going to be a follow-up about how at this moment you're personally grilling the stomachs of script kiddies in hell or something.
(For Slashdotters with no sense of history: Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf was the Iraqi press secretary during the Gulf War. He was famous for his surrealistic press conferences which were completely detached from reality, like when he challenged reporters to claim there was even one American in Baghdad, as an M1A1 tank was clearly visible rolling down a street in the background.)
Hell, in 2005 people still scoff at C++ for being "bloated" or "slow", just like people scoff at Java for being "slow".
In reality, C++ is often faster than C, and Java is plenty capable of handling 90% or more of what until recently has been C's exclusive purview.
That said, I still prefer LISP.
Lawbreaker! Around here we obey c!
c = 299792458 m/s
1609.344 meters per mile
c = 186282.39 miles per second
You're breaking the Universal Speed Limit, citizen. Could I please see your license, registration, and proof of insurance for relativistic travel?
The article's summation is far more accurate than Slashdot. In TFA, a researcher says our minds don't work like digital computers.
The Slashdot headline says our minds don't work like computers, end of sentence.
Had TFSH (The Fine Slashdot Headline) been accurate, this would've been a mind-blowing result and in need of some extraordinarily strong evidence to support such an extraordinary claim. The question of whether the human mind--sentience, consciousness, and all that goes with it--is a computable process is one of the most wide-open questions in AI research right now. It's so wide-open that nobody wants to approach it directly; it's seen as too difficult a problem.
But no, that's not what these guys discovered at all. They just discovered the brain doesn't discretize data. Significant result. Impressive. I'd like to see significant evidence. But it's very, very wrong to summarize it as "our brains don't work like computers". That's not what they proved at all.
Just once, I'd like to see a Slashdot editor read an article critically, along with the submitter's blurb, before posting it.