My understanding on the Diebold issue is that ANYONE can go into MS Access and run:
DELETE votes WHERE candidate_id = 'notmyguy'
INSERT votes ('myguy')
There are things that make it more complicated. For example, #2 in the above assumes that the second guy is the one trying to vote twice, when it just as easily could have been someone who placed a few votes before polls open. Law says you can't turn guy number 2 away from the poll. In the paper world, you give him an affidavit ballot and sort it out later. Also, just having a 'voter id' would require new laws- the argument (typically from Democrats here) is that requiring one would disenfranchise those who lost/forgot/didn't get their ID. So law states that we show up, sign our name to a log, and vote. It's a common problem any software developer has faced: the user's requirements are illogical. They want a verifiable system with no verification. It takes educating the user- in this case lawmakers- before real, fair electronic voting can take place.
I live in Mississippi, where they're still untangling a mess made by malfunctioning electronic voting machines that do have a paper reciept deposited in lock boxes. As just an example of things that can still go wrong:
-Some poll workers didn't put reciepts in lock boxes.
-Some poll workers decided to "manually enter" data from back-up paper ballots once they got the machines working.
-Some reciepts/machines did not make it back to the main office until two days after elections.
-State law requires initials on paper reciepts. Some unititaled ones were counted anyway.
And before you come down too hard on Bush, it's the Dems who are benefiting here. From a developer standpoint it is clear to me that the problem is poor system design. Every company is trying to design an electronic equivalent to a paper process that is already suprisingly flawed. For example, because of civil rights issues, it is illegal to require a voter ID here. Which means in the electronic world, you cannot store a 1-to-1 relationship between a voter and a vote. What needs to be done is a standard design process: gather requirements, design the system, and implement it. Because state and federal laws come into play, legislatures should be envolved in the whole process and revamp laws where necessary. In the end, it all comes down to poor design.
I managed to barely get to the site, and thought this was interesting: The Eros Project is primarily sponsored by Beefjerky.com. You can support this critial legal work in progress by trying some delicious "Final Frontier Jerky" from Beefjerky.com. This is the beef jerky that is selected by Astronauts and has flown to Space three times.
No, I'm not making this up. I'm pretty sure these guys are just trying to bring attention to the issue- unless there's some evil conspiracy on the part of "Big Jerky"...
Glad someone picked up on that. Ultimately the problem is without God, there really is no logical foundation to do anything but try to improve one's own status (or rather maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain). Sometimes this involves co-operation and "trust", but more often than not it involves lieing, stealing, cheating, killing, etc.
As a footnote, no doubt some will read this and think "I'm atheist and have morals, how dare he..." or "GW has religion and he's the worst offender" But read carefully: I'm not saying you don't have morals, I'm saying you don't have a logical foundation to keep them. I'm also not saying everybody who "has religion" is moral- just that they have a logical foundation that if they followed could lead to a more honest society.
How can we keep corporate America honest?
This is clearly "spin" if I ever saw it. It's not just everybody's favorite whipping-boy "corporate America", but government, small business, large business, organizations, and individuals that lie. In short, the question should be: How can we keep anybody honest? There are several answers. Sites like Memory Hole, Archive, Wayback, etc. are good. Citizen's advocacy groups, and voting are other ways. Still another way is to seek to find the honest truth yourself and learn to discern fact from biased opinion.
True, and this is what I do in my webservice apps, where our own client talks to our own server. That resolves the security issue- or at least makes it harder to hack- but I still get nervous thinking about an app that is dependent on another company keeping servers up and DNS registered. Then again, I suppose it's no different from managing suppliers of other services.
I've often wondered about this as a potential problem for webservices and to a lesser degree, XSD specs and XML namespaces. Take for example MapPoint.NET - a pretty cool (if overpriced) service that benefits from a webservice model. But say MapPoint.net rolls back- even temporarily-to somewhere else. First, there's a potential security issue: the lucky individual would get tons of requests, possibly including security info. Second, any mission critical apps- would flop until things got squared away.
I guess these could all be overcome by good design, such as creating fall-back domains that the client knows to use, but I've yet to hear much talk of doing this.
Do you care to cite any sources for these "earth models", or should we take your word for it? I remember hearing in school in the 80s- from teachers and in the news media- that there would be no more oil by 2000. No more undeveloped land in the US by 1998. We would all fly on space planes by 2000. Excuse me for doubting your prediction, but it is hardly proven that there is even a global warming trend, much less that anything special will happen in 2050, though I am holding out hope for those space planes.
Setting aside for a second all the technical details about no sound in space, and speed of light and such, this is still an interesting concept- but not a new one at all.
One of my favorite passages in Tolkien's work is his story of the creation in The Silmarillion, where Middle Earth flows from the Music of the Ainur. As somebody else already posted, Aslan of C.S. Lewis's Narnia Chronicles sang Narnia into existence. And many Eastern religions have associated sound with creation. Even in Genesis (and later on in John) the creative force was the "Word of God".
I'll leave conclusions to the reader, but it does make one think- why do so many people (and now add some physicists) associate sound with the beginning of the Universe?
Recruits are tested, using a series of felt-tipped markers containing varying levels of the chemical butenol....The test is repeated three times for accuracy
So, they practice by sniffing markers? I guess they'd have to...
I would argue that Open Source and free software are not at all in conflict with true capitalism. You come close to saying as much by recognizing that Open Source does indeed work within a survival of the fittest free market very much like the one capitalism describes. Open Source is a very efficient method of making a quality product. As such, it should do very well in a capitalist system. It is no more in conflict with capitalism that the assembly line- it is in itself simply an innovative, efficient way to make software. I'll go out on a limb and say that I think open source can only really flourish in a capitalist system: where else would a person have the freedom and incentive to try such "crazy" ideas?
I think your post sets up a false dichotomy between "evil greedy capitalism" and "good kind open source". In reality, some people start businesses to help others and some people create free apps for personal gain. Capitalism is not merely about "making money", and I would question if open source is merely about "making software".
Given a simpler definition of the two- capitalism as the idea that a free market produces the best goods and services at the best price, and open source as an efficient way to create quality product- it is easy to see that they are not at all in conflict, but really go hand in hand.
If, however, you disagree, I'm interested in hearing the alternative. How do you propose open source should replace capitalism? Should this be a government-mandated change?
That's an interesting mod idea. What I don't get is how the me information gets programmed into the CPU in a really up useful fashion. I get the mod RFID idea, but if I'm trying to me remember say a grocery list, by the time I type it in up I may as well just bring the list on paper.
Actually, Whidbey is the code name for the next release of Visual Studio and.NET Framework. C# is just a part of it.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/productinfo/road map.aspx#whidbey
I was speaking figuratively on the money being "in the business's account". The second part you didn't read carefully enough.
I said, "where I get an equal fraction of the business that gains or looses value...". "That" refering to the fraction I own.
I'm not contending I get a share of the gains and losses (though many companies do still hand out dividends), rather that the fraction of the business I own, however miniscule, goes up and down in value depending on the value of the company.
You can always pick stocks in hindsight that did well.
You can also use various indicators to pick stocks that are likely to do well. Sometimes you will be wrong, but if you are right %60-%80 of the time, your gains exceed your losses and you make money. It's all math, and somehow I don't think that your petty, illogical arguments would do much to convince the millions of people who make money in the stock market every day.
Anyway, I'm not sure what your point is: I'm sorry if the fact that people buy and sell stocks offends you somehow.
By that logic, if a person had seen the "PC revolution" coming and invested in Microsoft and Apple, they wouldn't be any better off? It has nothing to do with them asking for my capital. It is merely where I choose to store my money: Either in a bank, where it is loaned to others and I get a fraction of any interest, or in a business's account, where I get an equal fraction of the business that gains or looses value depending on the value of the company. The later has more risk, but greater potential gain, especially if the business is growing, as I think many robotics companies are set to do.
Here's a question I don't see asked often enough on these kind of posts: What stocks should I invest in if I agree with this forecast? Not just the obvious, like Roomba (don't think they're public anyhow). But Intel,VIA,3COM, etc- who will be selling the software and hardware for the upcoming robot revolution?
You're half right, but confused on the.NET side. Mono implements.NET. ASPX uses.NET..NET is not a scripting laguage, but is compiled to IL code either directly (in the case of code-behind) or by the web server on the first request (when code-behind is not used). ASPX, then, is more similar to Java than to PHP. PHP is, however, similar to ASP in that both are scripting languages. Thus a more accurate comparison would be ASP to PHP and.NET to Java.
I think the point of the article though, is that the lines blur somewhat. PHP may not be the same architecture as Java, but well-written can scale as well. I suppose you could make the same case for ASP compared to ASPX. Before ASPX, there were already people compiling ASP to dlls or writing data-access code in C to be used from ASP. What ASPX and Java do, though, is help you to use this good architecture. With PHP and ASP, you can completely ignore any notion of n-tier architechture. With Java and.NET, I suppose it's possible, but less likely that you would combine business, data, and presentation into one layer.
I agree, but I see FCC's version of HDTV as an obstacle to this technology- perhaps extending your 10-year prediction to more like 20 or 25 years. It's government-legislated technology, and it is already not anywhere near what could be acheived if markets dictated the best solution- which I think is your mega-band internet/tv/music/phone/etc. network. (Oh, and wireless and ubiquitous would be nice too.)
I see this sort of crap as proof of what I've been saying all along: a government organization is incapable of designing and implementing this sort of technology effectively. You inevitably wind up with a lousy system that pushes other technologies out of the market.
As an artist and a programmer, I'm always fascinated by this sort of thing. I think people who have skills in both have a good edge, and not just for the obvious reasons like "we can make cool Doom characters."
I think there's alot of overlap. We typically think asthetics=subjective programming=objective, but there's alot of cross-over, maybe to the point where they are actually very similar. For example, any language generally provides many different ways of doing a task. The "beautiful" way is the one that is simple, fast, scalable, etc. There are rules (design patterns) for helping you come up with that "beautiful" code, but any coder will tell you there's more to it than just following rules (otherwise code generators would replace us all!).
Similarly, with painting or other arts, where one might expect more subjectivity, there are rules for creating beautiful work: It helps to work general to specific, light to dark, etc. There's even mathematical principals such as symmetry, golden mean and fibonacci sequence that come into play.
I haven't read the book, but I agree with the idea that there's something about people that makes us want to see beautiful things, and that there are rules for beauty that cross cultures and disciplines. Personally, i think it is that we recognize what Mandelbrot called "The Fingerprint of God". Agree or no, I think most would agree software is better when it tries to accomplish "beauty" both in the UI and in the code itself.
I was going to have to post this if someone else didn't. VB.NET and C# are both languages that compile to Intermediate Language, which runs on the Common Language Runtime. Common, as in, all languages have these libraries in common. As for Microsoft dropping it, that's debateable, especially in apps like Excel, where it serves as a scripting language that novice users can pick up to, say, tie in a web service- <sarcasm>assuming they don't go "out of style" like XML and Java. </sarcasm>
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding on the Diebold issue is that ANYONE can go into MS Access and run:
DELETE votes WHERE candidate_id = 'notmyguy'
INSERT votes ('myguy')
There are things that make it more complicated. For example, #2 in the above assumes that the second guy is the one trying to vote twice, when it just as easily could have been someone who placed a few votes before polls open. Law says you can't turn guy number 2 away from the poll. In the paper world, you give him an affidavit ballot and sort it out later. Also, just having a 'voter id' would require new laws- the argument (typically from Democrats here) is that requiring one would disenfranchise those who lost/forgot/didn't get their ID. So law states that we show up, sign our name to a log, and vote. It's a common problem any software developer has faced: the user's requirements are illogical. They want a verifiable system with no verification. It takes educating the user- in this case lawmakers- before real, fair electronic voting can take place.
I live in Mississippi, where they're still untangling a mess made by malfunctioning electronic voting machines that do have a paper reciept deposited in lock boxes. As just an example of things that can still go wrong:
-Some poll workers didn't put reciepts in lock boxes.
-Some poll workers decided to "manually enter" data from back-up paper ballots once they got the machines working.
-Some reciepts/machines did not make it back to the main office until two days after elections.
-State law requires initials on paper reciepts. Some unititaled ones were counted anyway.
And before you come down too hard on Bush, it's the Dems who are benefiting here. From a developer standpoint it is clear to me that the problem is poor system design. Every company is trying to design an electronic equivalent to a paper process that is already suprisingly flawed. For example, because of civil rights issues, it is illegal to require a voter ID here. Which means in the electronic world, you cannot store a 1-to-1 relationship between a voter and a vote. What needs to be done is a standard design process: gather requirements, design the system, and implement it. Because state and federal laws come into play, legislatures should be envolved in the whole process and revamp laws where necessary. In the end, it all comes down to poor design.
I managed to barely get to the site, and thought this was interesting:
The Eros Project is primarily sponsored by Beefjerky.com. You can support this critial legal work in progress by trying some delicious "Final Frontier Jerky" from Beefjerky.com. This is the beef jerky that is selected by Astronauts and has flown to Space three times.
No, I'm not making this up. I'm pretty sure these guys are just trying to bring attention to the issue- unless there's some evil conspiracy on the part of "Big Jerky"...
Glad someone picked up on that. Ultimately the problem is without God, there really is no logical foundation to do anything but try to improve one's own status (or rather maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain). Sometimes this involves co-operation and "trust", but more often than not it involves lieing, stealing, cheating, killing, etc.
As a footnote, no doubt some will read this and think "I'm atheist and have morals, how dare he..." or "GW has religion and he's the worst offender" But read carefully: I'm not saying you don't have morals, I'm saying you don't have a logical foundation to keep them. I'm also not saying everybody who "has religion" is moral- just that they have a logical foundation that if they followed could lead to a more honest society.
How can we keep corporate America honest?
This is clearly "spin" if I ever saw it. It's not just everybody's favorite whipping-boy "corporate America", but government, small business, large business, organizations, and individuals that lie. In short, the question should be: How can we keep anybody honest? There are several answers. Sites like Memory Hole, Archive, Wayback, etc. are good. Citizen's advocacy groups, and voting are other ways. Still another way is to seek to find the honest truth yourself and learn to discern fact from biased opinion.
True, and this is what I do in my webservice apps, where our own client talks to our own server. That resolves the security issue- or at least makes it harder to hack- but I still get nervous thinking about an app that is dependent on another company keeping servers up and DNS registered. Then again, I suppose it's no different from managing suppliers of other services.
I've often wondered about this as a potential problem for webservices and to a lesser degree, XSD specs and XML namespaces. Take for example MapPoint.NET - a pretty cool (if overpriced) service that benefits from a webservice model. But say MapPoint.net rolls back- even temporarily-to somewhere else. First, there's a potential security issue: the lucky individual would get tons of requests, possibly including security info. Second, any mission critical apps- would flop until things got squared away. I guess these could all be overcome by good design, such as creating fall-back domains that the client knows to use, but I've yet to hear much talk of doing this.
Do you care to cite any sources for these "earth models", or should we take your word for it? I remember hearing in school in the 80s- from teachers and in the news media- that there would be no more oil by 2000. No more undeveloped land in the US by 1998. We would all fly on space planes by 2000. Excuse me for doubting your prediction, but it is hardly proven that there is even a global warming trend, much less that anything special will happen in 2050, though I am holding out hope for those space planes.
So, Slashdot, where should our money be? What stocks look good for the next tech boom, and who will be the next dot-com-bust?
Setting aside for a second all the technical details about no sound in space, and speed of light and such, this is still an interesting concept- but not a new one at all.
One of my favorite passages in Tolkien's work is his story of the creation in The Silmarillion, where Middle Earth flows from the Music of the Ainur. As somebody else already posted, Aslan of C.S. Lewis's Narnia Chronicles sang Narnia into existence. And many Eastern religions have associated sound with creation. Even in Genesis (and later on in John) the creative force was the "Word of God".
I'll leave conclusions to the reader, but it does make one think- why do so many people (and now add some physicists) associate sound with the beginning of the Universe?
This Nanotech Research Facility was built by a team of Circus Midgets for Georgia Tech
Recruits are tested, using a series of felt-tipped markers containing varying levels of the chemical butenol....The test is repeated three times for accuracy
So, they practice by sniffing markers? I guess they'd have to...
There's nothing there about French Honeys.
I would argue that Open Source and free software are not at all in conflict with true capitalism. You come close to saying as much by recognizing that Open Source does indeed work within a survival of the fittest free market very much like the one capitalism describes. Open Source is a very efficient method of making a quality product. As such, it should do very well in a capitalist system. It is no more in conflict with capitalism that the assembly line- it is in itself simply an innovative, efficient way to make software. I'll go out on a limb and say that I think open source can only really flourish in a capitalist system: where else would a person have the freedom and incentive to try such "crazy" ideas?
I think your post sets up a false dichotomy between "evil greedy capitalism" and "good kind open source". In reality, some people start businesses to help others and some people create free apps for personal gain. Capitalism is not merely about "making money", and I would question if open source is merely about "making software". Given a simpler definition of the two- capitalism as the idea that a free market produces the best goods and services at the best price, and open source as an efficient way to create quality product- it is easy to see that they are not at all in conflict, but really go hand in hand.
If, however, you disagree, I'm interested in hearing the alternative. How do you propose open source should replace capitalism? Should this be a government-mandated change?
That's an interesting mod idea. What I don't get is how the me information gets programmed into the CPU in a really up useful fashion. I get the mod RFID idea, but if I'm trying to me remember say a grocery list, by the time I type it in up I may as well just bring the list on paper.
Actually, Whidbey is the code name for the next release of Visual Studio and .NET Framework. C# is just a part of it.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/productinfo/road map.aspx#whidbey
You should have SEEN the 600 that got away!
NEW! Bankruptcy special! Buy 1 X10 Super-Delux Cameramatic 5000 and get your own pop-under Javascript Code FREE!
I was speaking figuratively on the money being "in the business's account". The second part you didn't read carefully enough.
I said, "where I get an equal fraction of the business that gains or looses value...". "That" refering to the fraction I own.
I'm not contending I get a share of the gains and losses (though many companies do still hand out dividends), rather that the fraction of the business I own, however miniscule, goes up and down in value depending on the value of the company.
You can always pick stocks in hindsight that did well.
You can also use various indicators to pick stocks that are likely to do well. Sometimes you will be wrong, but if you are right %60-%80 of the time, your gains exceed your losses and you make money. It's all math, and somehow I don't think that your petty, illogical arguments would do much to convince the millions of people who make money in the stock market every day.
Anyway, I'm not sure what your point is: I'm sorry if the fact that people buy and sell stocks offends you somehow.
By that logic, if a person had seen the "PC revolution" coming and invested in Microsoft and Apple, they wouldn't be any better off? It has nothing to do with them asking for my capital. It is merely where I choose to store my money: Either in a bank, where it is loaned to others and I get a fraction of any interest, or in a business's account, where I get an equal fraction of the business that gains or looses value depending on the value of the company. The later has more risk, but greater potential gain, especially if the business is growing, as I think many robotics companies are set to do.
I hope that clears it up for you.
Here's a question I don't see asked often enough on these kind of posts: What stocks should I invest in if I agree with this forecast? Not just the obvious, like Roomba (don't think they're public anyhow). But Intel,VIA,3COM, etc- who will be selling the software and hardware for the upcoming robot revolution?
You're half right, but confused on the .NET side. Mono implements .NET. ASPX uses .NET. .NET is not a scripting laguage, but is compiled to IL code either directly (in the case of code-behind) or by the web server on the first request (when code-behind is not used). ASPX, then, is more similar to Java than to PHP. PHP is, however, similar to ASP in that both are scripting languages. Thus a more accurate comparison would be ASP to PHP and .NET to Java.
.NET, I suppose it's possible, but less likely that you would combine business, data, and presentation into one layer.
I think the point of the article though, is that the lines blur somewhat. PHP may not be the same architecture as Java, but well-written can scale as well. I suppose you could make the same case for ASP compared to ASPX. Before ASPX, there were already people compiling ASP to dlls or writing data-access code in C to be used from ASP. What ASPX and Java do, though, is help you to use this good architecture. With PHP and ASP, you can completely ignore any notion of n-tier architechture. With Java and
I agree, but I see FCC's version of HDTV as an obstacle to this technology- perhaps extending your 10-year prediction to more like 20 or 25 years. It's government-legislated technology, and it is already not anywhere near what could be acheived if markets dictated the best solution- which I think is your mega-band internet/tv/music/phone/etc. network. (Oh, and wireless and ubiquitous would be nice too.)
I see this sort of crap as proof of what I've been saying all along: a government organization is incapable of designing and implementing this sort of technology effectively. You inevitably wind up with a lousy system that pushes other technologies out of the market.
As an artist and a programmer, I'm always fascinated by this sort of thing. I think people who have skills in both have a good edge, and not just for the obvious reasons like "we can make cool Doom characters."
I think there's alot of overlap. We typically think asthetics=subjective programming=objective, but there's alot of cross-over, maybe to the point where they are actually very similar. For example, any language generally provides many different ways of doing a task. The "beautiful" way is the one that is simple, fast, scalable, etc. There are rules (design patterns) for helping you come up with that "beautiful" code, but any coder will tell you there's more to it than just following rules (otherwise code generators would replace us all!).
Similarly, with painting or other arts, where one might expect more subjectivity, there are rules for creating beautiful work: It helps to work general to specific, light to dark, etc. There's even mathematical principals such as symmetry, golden mean and fibonacci sequence that come into play.
I haven't read the book, but I agree with the idea that there's something about people that makes us want to see beautiful things, and that there are rules for beauty that cross cultures and disciplines. Personally, i think it is that we recognize what Mandelbrot called "The Fingerprint of God". Agree or no, I think most would agree software is better when it tries to accomplish "beauty" both in the UI and in the code itself.
I was going to have to post this if someone else didn't. VB.NET and C# are both languages that compile to Intermediate Language, which runs on the Common Language Runtime. Common, as in, all languages have these libraries in common. As for Microsoft dropping it, that's debateable, especially in apps like Excel, where it serves as a scripting language that novice users can pick up to, say, tie in a web service- <sarcasm>assuming they don't go "out of style" like XML and Java. </sarcasm>