the ultimate alternative would be no company willing to insure anyone with any sort of existing bad health.
I thought the whole point of employer-provided health insurance was that you were getting insurance for the group, not the individual. As it is, I don't see what the point of it is at all. Why bother going through your employer at all?
would you take a deal where someone wanted to pay you $100 for a 50:50 chance of you paying him or her $10000 next year?
Personally? No. But I don't have $10,000 to spend.
Incidently, what about HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. My understanding of this is that you can switch employers and health care companies without undergoing a new exclusion period.
For anyone with a kid or spouse with a pre-existing condition, the thought of no coverage, especially if the condition could dramatically worsen, is enough to keep them from even considering switching employers.
So, when you switch employers, your new health care company can deny coverage on pre-existing conditions? Wow, I didn't know that. That really sucks.
Which, is why I believe employeer-provided health insurance is evil. I don't believe in state-provided insurance either for all the inefficiences that come with socialism. I do advocate for personal health insurance, where you are personally responsible for each dollar spent for fees and it has no ties to your employer or any other group that would use it to coerce you into acting against your own best interests.
But can't personal health insurance companies raise your rates to any price for any reason? I've heard nightmares about people who sign up for health insurance, wait out the 12 month waiting period, then have their health insurance costs double in the next year. Basically, the insurance companies keep raising your rates until you've got to switch, and then you're stuck waiting another 12 months. With employer health coverage they're less likely to do that because the rate has to be the same across the board, right?
Aren't there non-profit health insurance companies out there? I think that'd be the best scenario. You'd get the cost benefits of government-provided health care with the added benefit of free market competition.
If everybody would get a raise significantly higher than the cost of living, things (produced by those employees) would become more expensive too, making the cost of living follow the increase.
You're forgetting the fact that most of the money in the country is controlled by people who don't work, and therefore wouldn't get a raise.
Why can't I buy *just a phone*? The original Motorola V (not the current bloated monster) and the Nokia 2110 were pretty much the perfect mobile phones
A good lawyer could try to make a fruit of the poison tree argument with that one.
I doubt they'd be successful though. The search itself was legal - you don't need proof beyond a reasonable doubt to conduct a search, only probable cause, and as long as it can be shown that the baggage scanner works most of the time that's sufficient for probable cause.
If the cops bust into your house without a warrant and find something that points them to other evidence ("I LEFT THE GUN IN THE DUMPSTER ON 8TH STREET" scrawled on your dry erase board for example) then that other evidence is also excluded from trial.
I'm pretty sure the cops don't need a warrant in order to search your luggage when you're boarding a plane. Even if they do, this is really a completely different argument, and has nothing to do with whether or not the baggage scanner is open source. I agree the fact that the cops can scan your luggage at all rests on shaky legal grounds, but this is a different argument.
Let's say the cops pull you over, and someone in your car tells them you have a gun, and they then search you and find a gun (which you are carrying illegally because you don't have a permit or whatever). Even if it is later found out that person in your car was a habitual liar, it doesn't exclude the fact that you did in fact have the gun. As long as the search was legal (and in that case it is under Terry v. Ohio), the fruit of the poison tree doctrine doesn't apply. The purpose of that doctrine is to discourage the police from making illegal searches.
Why start with breathalyzers, and not voting machines?
The constitutional issue is much clearer with breathalyzers.
So is this kind of ruling going to spread to radar detectors
You mean radar guns? If so, I would assume so (at least for criminal cases). If you really mean radar detectors, then no.
baggage-scanning equipment
Probably not. The scanning equipment is generally only used as an initial check, and not as the actual evidence in a trial. Once the scanner picks up the contraband, the baggage is confiscated and the actual contraband is retrieved. Whether or not the baggage-scanning equipment was malfunctioning would be rather irrelevant to a trial when you have the actual contraband itself confiscated from the baggage.
Obviously you wouldn't want your defense software etc to be open source
Maybe not open source, but public domain. All software created by the US government already is public domain, anyway. It might be classified, but that doesn't mean it's protected by copyright law.
In my opinion even classified information is used as a convenience rather than a necessity the majority of the time. I'd like to see a shift away from requiring secrets to be kept as much as possible. I'm sure some situations could be come up with where this would be very difficult, maybe even impossible, but in the long run I think we're better off moving in the direction of open disclosure.
Connecting two wireless networks may be 'cool,' but how many offices maintain two separate wireless networks?
Seems more likely to be used for using two wireless networks from different people than from a single one. Now you can have your laptop talk to your internal network at the same time you leech internet access off your neighbor. In a roaming application you can search out new wifi connections while maintaining your original one, and then hand off the connection seemlessly (for UDP or other non-connection based apps, anyway). Actually, with a properly established NAT network (using some help from a computer on a permanent link) you could hand off a live TCP connection.
My laptop currently has two wireless cards in it. One has Verizon Wireless Broadband Access and the other is plain old 54 meg wifi. When public access wifi becomes as widespread as Verizon's service I could drop the Verizon card and either add a second wifi card or use this software and have the extra PCMCIA slot. Then again, a better solution in that situation would be to set up a wifi card on my desktop machine and hard wire that machine to my wireless base station. So I guess roaming is the more practical application.
Plopping two WiFi devices (or more) between some type of routing app and I have _much_ faster bittorrent/LinuxISO/whatever downloads.
I doubt it. The two virtual WiFi devices will probably run at less than half the speed each.
Or if you're only worried about doubling the speed of the internet connection, and not the wireless, you're better off with a dedicated router hard wired to both internet connections with a single wireless network on the other end of the NAT.
If by "wrangled" you mean "took contributions that users gave to the community for free, and used them to make money" then yes. Wrangled. Our friends at GraceCDDBNote are great wranglers too.
Not to mention our friends at Slashdot.
Re:What other pre-web services are out there?
on
IMDb Turns 15
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I was wondering if any of you could name other Internet services that predate the web and still exist today.
Time magazine. That service predates even the Internet itself.
No, I haven't. But it does point out that you don't understand the problem. Some students get test anxiety. They can understand the concepts perfectly, but put them in a stressful situation and they can't communicate them properly.
I'm sorry, but I have to say "tough shit" to those students. Let them explain to whoever they show their grades to why they didn't score well, but if a student can't figure out how to take a test without getting stressed out then they don't have any sympathy from me.
It won't affect them in a working environment because rarely are you put in a situation where you have a small number of hours to solve a problem, with no reference materials, and a predetermined solution.
You're assuming that all tests take place over a small number of hours, have no reference materials, and have a predetermined solution. None of those are necessarily true.
Following your logic, should we remove all term papers from the curriculums because students have found a way to buy them?
I never said we should remove them from the curriculum, just from the grading scheme. Would I apply that to term papers? Maybe, but I was specifically talking about computer science classes.
Its not like it costs much more to launch 3 at once over the cost of launching the first one.
It's not? Doesn't putting 3 satellites in 3 separate orbits cost roughly 3 times as much as putting 1 satellite in 1 orbit? It's not like they can launch them all on the same rocket, because the satellites have to go into different orbits. In fact, I think you'd have to launch them at different times - just like the shuttle has to be launched at a particular time in order to meet up with the ISS.
Poking our head in the sand by legislating this isn't going to help.
I agree with your sentiment, but this isn't legislation, it's the application of long-standing common law to today's technology. Ultimately I don't think it'll do much good, especially due to the jurisdictional problems of enforcing laws on the Internet, but it seems to me like sound legal principle. If you intentionally modify someone's property, without their permisssion, to use it for your own purposes, that certainly should constitute a tort. "Without their permission" is the tough part, and it probably presents a huge loophole for people to get around, but in the case of spyware which exploits security holes in a web browser to automatically install itself upon visiting a website I think there is little argument that you made any attempt to get permission.
Ultimately, due to both the loopholes in the law and the jurisdictional issues, the best solution is a technical one. But that doesn't mean that common sense laws shouldn't continue to apply to the Internet.
If you're that good of a project manager, you should be able to make serious coin inside a corporation, with a lot less personal accountability (i.e. risk).
I doubt it. You see, corporations tend to make a profit. By running your own corporation, you get the benefits of a salary and the profits of the corporation. The risk is really not that much more, assuming you incorporate.
The best advice I can give to you is to get your name out on forums (for job postings), check classifieds (like craigslist), check regular job sites (devbistro, etc.) and pursue every avenue to get your name and skillset in the public eye.
Then subcontract out all the work to people on rent-a-coder.
I wonder how hard it would be to make a nice profit here in the US consulting for US companies and subcontracting the work out to rent-a-coder and the likes. You'd have to have a thorough understanding of software architecture, but you could set yourself up with way too many contracts for you could complete on your own, and make some big bucks.
I never understood the CS professors who gave graded homework assignments in the first place. It was almost as bad as those that graded attendance.
In my opinion the only real use of grades is to show others, outside the university, how well you've mastered a particular subject, and the only way to do that is through testing. This is not to say that homework and attendance aren't important, at least for most students, but they are important in that they help a student to learn. Different students learn in different ways, and some students need to study more than others. Treating all students the same doesn't foster learning, it hinders it.
It's usually not much of a problem to find motherboards and power supplies to go along with your ram. The problem really becomes energy consumption. Yeah, you can take out the drives (and everything else), and leave just the mobo, power supply, fan, and memory, but that's still going to eat up too much power unless you've got a good use for the extra ram.
I got to thinking after reading this: what about using a battery-backed SDRAM module? This way you could keep the computer off, but the data would stay in ram. I'm not really sure how useful it'd be in itself, but apparently these things come as PCI cards so maybe they'll help. Here are some links I found in a quick google search: http://www.bentech-taiwan.com/memory_board.htm, http://www.vita.com/vmeprod/pmc/pmcmemory.shtml
Anyway, for most purposes I think just using a regular old motherboard will do. The issue is can you find a use for the ram which is more valuable than the cost of the electricity? For smaller bits of ram, I'm not so sure about that.
I didn't say you shouldn't store machine code in between runs of the software.
Seems like that'd be the definition of compilation.
All I am saying is move the compiler to the client machine (which is more trusted by users anyway) add a few safety & runtime features and distribute applications as bytecode or source rather than binary.
Like.Net or Java;)
Or C, or C++, or perl, or fortran, or any language. You don't have to use Java to distribute source. In fact, one of the main purposes of Java seems to be to obfuscate the source.
I'm not actually convinced that the advantages of local compilation outweigh the disadvantages in all situations, but for an awful lot of situations it does.
Memory allocation leaks, direct memory addressing errors, buffer over-runs and a lack of a good enforced security sandbox for the application, lack of garbage collection.
All of which can be resolved through compile-time and run time techniques without resorting to java. And in the case of garbage collection, you can choose to use garbage collection for some parts of the program and use explicit allocation for other parts.
I can't imagine you really think the recompilation of source code for N different platforms and the need to package separately for all those platforms too is actually a good thing in its-self?
Actually, yes, I do. I compile all the software I run on my Linux box from the source code, because this results in a better optimized binary. But my point was that recompiling an application a few times isn't that big of a deal. With JIT you actually have every user compiling their software every single time they run it. Makes no sense when you could have the author compile it 4 or 5 times for everyone.
There are many reasons why i'm sure VMs will win out, the performance penulty where there is one is small compared to the quite large gains in development speed and improved code quality in developing large scale apps.
Whether or not a language uses a VM has absolutely zero to do with development speed and code quality. A programming language is merely a way for a human to communicate an algorithm to a computer. Whether the computer is going to ultimately store that algorithm in machine code or byte code is irrelevant to how fast and accurately that communication can take place.
Compiling code to a native format will be slowly phased out in the same way that these days you don't often see people write CPU specific assembler.
But you seem to be ignoring the fact that writing CPU specific assembler is still being done by the compiler. Yes, I think writing software directly in C is going to be phased out, but unless the actual architecture of hardware changes I don't see any reason not to store machine code in between runs of the software. That seems to me like you're intentionally hamstringing the system.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing is, no one ever accused Siegenthaler of being a murderer.
the ultimate alternative would be no company willing to insure anyone with any sort of existing bad health.
I thought the whole point of employer-provided health insurance was that you were getting insurance for the group, not the individual. As it is, I don't see what the point of it is at all. Why bother going through your employer at all?
would you take a deal where someone wanted to pay you $100 for a 50:50 chance of you paying him or her $10000 next year?
Personally? No. But I don't have $10,000 to spend.
Incidently, what about HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. My understanding of this is that you can switch employers and health care companies without undergoing a new exclusion period.
For anyone with a kid or spouse with a pre-existing condition, the thought of no coverage, especially if the condition could dramatically worsen, is enough to keep them from even considering switching employers.
So, when you switch employers, your new health care company can deny coverage on pre-existing conditions? Wow, I didn't know that. That really sucks.
Which, is why I believe employeer-provided health insurance is evil. I don't believe in state-provided insurance either for all the inefficiences that come with socialism. I do advocate for personal health insurance, where you are personally responsible for each dollar spent for fees and it has no ties to your employer or any other group that would use it to coerce you into acting against your own best interests.
But can't personal health insurance companies raise your rates to any price for any reason? I've heard nightmares about people who sign up for health insurance, wait out the 12 month waiting period, then have their health insurance costs double in the next year. Basically, the insurance companies keep raising your rates until you've got to switch, and then you're stuck waiting another 12 months. With employer health coverage they're less likely to do that because the rate has to be the same across the board, right?
Aren't there non-profit health insurance companies out there? I think that'd be the best scenario. You'd get the cost benefits of government-provided health care with the added benefit of free market competition.
If everybody would get a raise significantly higher than the cost of living, things (produced by those employees) would become more expensive too, making the cost of living follow the increase.
You're forgetting the fact that most of the money in the country is controlled by people who don't work, and therefore wouldn't get a raise.
Why can't I buy *just a phone*? The original Motorola V (not the current bloated monster) and the Nokia 2110 were pretty much the perfect mobile phones
Can't you still buy one of them?
A good lawyer could try to make a fruit of the poison tree argument with that one.
I doubt they'd be successful though. The search itself was legal - you don't need proof beyond a reasonable doubt to conduct a search, only probable cause, and as long as it can be shown that the baggage scanner works most of the time that's sufficient for probable cause.
If the cops bust into your house without a warrant and find something that points them to other evidence ("I LEFT THE GUN IN THE DUMPSTER ON 8TH STREET" scrawled on your dry erase board for example) then that other evidence is also excluded from trial.
I'm pretty sure the cops don't need a warrant in order to search your luggage when you're boarding a plane. Even if they do, this is really a completely different argument, and has nothing to do with whether or not the baggage scanner is open source. I agree the fact that the cops can scan your luggage at all rests on shaky legal grounds, but this is a different argument.
Let's say the cops pull you over, and someone in your car tells them you have a gun, and they then search you and find a gun (which you are carrying illegally because you don't have a permit or whatever). Even if it is later found out that person in your car was a habitual liar, it doesn't exclude the fact that you did in fact have the gun. As long as the search was legal (and in that case it is under Terry v. Ohio), the fruit of the poison tree doctrine doesn't apply. The purpose of that doctrine is to discourage the police from making illegal searches.
Why start with breathalyzers, and not voting machines?
The constitutional issue is much clearer with breathalyzers.
So is this kind of ruling going to spread to radar detectors
You mean radar guns? If so, I would assume so (at least for criminal cases). If you really mean radar detectors, then no.
baggage-scanning equipment
Probably not. The scanning equipment is generally only used as an initial check, and not as the actual evidence in a trial. Once the scanner picks up the contraband, the baggage is confiscated and the actual contraband is retrieved. Whether or not the baggage-scanning equipment was malfunctioning would be rather irrelevant to a trial when you have the actual contraband itself confiscated from the baggage.
automated video cameras
What are they?
Obviously you wouldn't want your defense software etc to be open source
Maybe not open source, but public domain. All software created by the US government already is public domain, anyway. It might be classified, but that doesn't mean it's protected by copyright law.
In my opinion even classified information is used as a convenience rather than a necessity the majority of the time. I'd like to see a shift away from requiring secrets to be kept as much as possible. I'm sure some situations could be come up with where this would be very difficult, maybe even impossible, but in the long run I think we're better off moving in the direction of open disclosure.
Connecting two wireless networks may be 'cool,' but how many offices maintain two separate wireless networks?
Seems more likely to be used for using two wireless networks from different people than from a single one. Now you can have your laptop talk to your internal network at the same time you leech internet access off your neighbor. In a roaming application you can search out new wifi connections while maintaining your original one, and then hand off the connection seemlessly (for UDP or other non-connection based apps, anyway). Actually, with a properly established NAT network (using some help from a computer on a permanent link) you could hand off a live TCP connection.
My laptop currently has two wireless cards in it. One has Verizon Wireless Broadband Access and the other is plain old 54 meg wifi. When public access wifi becomes as widespread as Verizon's service I could drop the Verizon card and either add a second wifi card or use this software and have the extra PCMCIA slot. Then again, a better solution in that situation would be to set up a wifi card on my desktop machine and hard wire that machine to my wireless base station. So I guess roaming is the more practical application.
Plopping two WiFi devices (or more) between some type of routing app and I have _much_ faster bittorrent/LinuxISO/whatever downloads.
I doubt it. The two virtual WiFi devices will probably run at less than half the speed each.
Or if you're only worried about doubling the speed of the internet connection, and not the wireless, you're better off with a dedicated router hard wired to both internet connections with a single wireless network on the other end of the NAT.
If by "wrangled" you mean "took contributions that users gave to the community for free, and used them to make money" then yes. Wrangled. Our friends at GraceCDDBNote are great wranglers too.
Not to mention our friends at Slashdot.
I was wondering if any of you could name other Internet services that predate the web and still exist today.
Time magazine. That service predates even the Internet itself.
No, I haven't. But it does point out that you don't understand the problem. Some students get test anxiety. They can understand the concepts perfectly, but put them in a stressful situation and they can't communicate them properly.
I'm sorry, but I have to say "tough shit" to those students. Let them explain to whoever they show their grades to why they didn't score well, but if a student can't figure out how to take a test without getting stressed out then they don't have any sympathy from me.
It won't affect them in a working environment because rarely are you put in a situation where you have a small number of hours to solve a problem, with no reference materials, and a predetermined solution.
You're assuming that all tests take place over a small number of hours, have no reference materials, and have a predetermined solution. None of those are necessarily true.
Following your logic, should we remove all term papers from the curriculums because students have found a way to buy them?
I never said we should remove them from the curriculum, just from the grading scheme. Would I apply that to term papers? Maybe, but I was specifically talking about computer science classes.
Its not like it costs much more to launch 3 at once over the cost of launching the first one.
It's not? Doesn't putting 3 satellites in 3 separate orbits cost roughly 3 times as much as putting 1 satellite in 1 orbit? It's not like they can launch them all on the same rocket, because the satellites have to go into different orbits. In fact, I think you'd have to launch them at different times - just like the shuttle has to be launched at a particular time in order to meet up with the ISS.
Poking our head in the sand by legislating this isn't going to help.
I agree with your sentiment, but this isn't legislation, it's the application of long-standing common law to today's technology. Ultimately I don't think it'll do much good, especially due to the jurisdictional problems of enforcing laws on the Internet, but it seems to me like sound legal principle. If you intentionally modify someone's property, without their permisssion, to use it for your own purposes, that certainly should constitute a tort. "Without their permission" is the tough part, and it probably presents a huge loophole for people to get around, but in the case of spyware which exploits security holes in a web browser to automatically install itself upon visiting a website I think there is little argument that you made any attempt to get permission.
Ultimately, due to both the loopholes in the law and the jurisdictional issues, the best solution is a technical one. But that doesn't mean that common sense laws shouldn't continue to apply to the Internet.
It's because some students do better in practical work than they do on tests. Also, there are good tests and bad tests.
You've answered the problem in your first sentence with your second.
Some instructors have never learned how to create an exam that tests your knowledge with clear, concise questions.
Agreed, some instructors suck.
Coding assignments allow honest students to overcome those limitations.
There's no reason a test can't involve coding.
If you're that good of a project manager, you should be able to make serious coin inside a corporation, with a lot less personal accountability (i.e. risk).
I doubt it. You see, corporations tend to make a profit. By running your own corporation, you get the benefits of a salary and the profits of the corporation. The risk is really not that much more, assuming you incorporate.
The best advice I can give to you is to get your name out on forums (for job postings), check classifieds (like craigslist), check regular job sites (devbistro, etc.) and pursue every avenue to get your name and skillset in the public eye.
Then subcontract out all the work to people on rent-a-coder.
I wonder how hard it would be to make a nice profit here in the US consulting for US companies and subcontracting the work out to rent-a-coder and the likes. You'd have to have a thorough understanding of software architecture, but you could set yourself up with way too many contracts for you could complete on your own, and make some big bucks.
Or placing ads in classifieds across the country.
Not just any ads, but "tiny little ads".
I never understood the CS professors who gave graded homework assignments in the first place. It was almost as bad as those that graded attendance.
In my opinion the only real use of grades is to show others, outside the university, how well you've mastered a particular subject, and the only way to do that is through testing. This is not to say that homework and attendance aren't important, at least for most students, but they are important in that they help a student to learn. Different students learn in different ways, and some students need to study more than others. Treating all students the same doesn't foster learning, it hinders it.
It's usually not much of a problem to find motherboards and power supplies to go along with your ram. The problem really becomes energy consumption. Yeah, you can take out the drives (and everything else), and leave just the mobo, power supply, fan, and memory, but that's still going to eat up too much power unless you've got a good use for the extra ram.
I got to thinking after reading this: what about using a battery-backed SDRAM module? This way you could keep the computer off, but the data would stay in ram. I'm not really sure how useful it'd be in itself, but apparently these things come as PCI cards so maybe they'll help. Here are some links I found in a quick google search: http://www.bentech-taiwan.com/memory_board.htm, http://www.vita.com/vmeprod/pmc/pmcmemory.shtml
Anyway, for most purposes I think just using a regular old motherboard will do. The issue is can you find a use for the ram which is more valuable than the cost of the electricity? For smaller bits of ram, I'm not so sure about that.
I didn't say you shouldn't store machine code in between runs of the software.
Seems like that'd be the definition of compilation.
All I am saying is move the compiler to the client machine (which is more trusted by users anyway) add a few safety & runtime features and distribute applications as bytecode or source rather than binary.
Like .Net or Java ;)
Or C, or C++, or perl, or fortran, or any language. You don't have to use Java to distribute source. In fact, one of the main purposes of Java seems to be to obfuscate the source.
I'm not actually convinced that the advantages of local compilation outweigh the disadvantages in all situations, but for an awful lot of situations it does.
Memory allocation leaks, direct memory addressing errors, buffer over-runs and a lack of a good enforced security sandbox for the application, lack of garbage collection.
All of which can be resolved through compile-time and run time techniques without resorting to java. And in the case of garbage collection, you can choose to use garbage collection for some parts of the program and use explicit allocation for other parts.
I can't imagine you really think the recompilation of source code for N different platforms and the need to package separately for all those platforms too is actually a good thing in its-self?
Actually, yes, I do. I compile all the software I run on my Linux box from the source code, because this results in a better optimized binary. But my point was that recompiling an application a few times isn't that big of a deal. With JIT you actually have every user compiling their software every single time they run it. Makes no sense when you could have the author compile it 4 or 5 times for everyone.
There are many reasons why i'm sure VMs will win out, the performance penulty where there is one is small compared to the quite large gains in development speed and improved code quality in developing large scale apps.
Whether or not a language uses a VM has absolutely zero to do with development speed and code quality. A programming language is merely a way for a human to communicate an algorithm to a computer. Whether the computer is going to ultimately store that algorithm in machine code or byte code is irrelevant to how fast and accurately that communication can take place.
Compiling code to a native format will be slowly phased out in the same way that these days you don't often see people write CPU specific assembler.
But you seem to be ignoring the fact that writing CPU specific assembler is still being done by the compiler. Yes, I think writing software directly in C is going to be phased out, but unless the actual architecture of hardware changes I don't see any reason not to store machine code in between runs of the software. That seems to me like you're intentionally hamstringing the system.
Well, that answers that. I guess the two are fairly close to identical in terms of security.