The point is that grades are effectively meaningless; if you base your happiness around an arbitrary letter (like the subby apparently did) then you're going to end up envying people whose arbitrary letter is higher, rather than experiencing envy for any sort of rational reason.
I honestly never gave a damn about my grades. You can waste time cramming trivia and useless knowledge to ace the tests, but the true measure of your skills is in the mastery of the material, and the ability to put it to work in the real world.
That being said, I almost always experienced more satisfaction from a difficult C than an easy A. Where is the triumph when victory is but a foregone conclusion?
Typical science snobbery. Truth be told, some liberal arts people are quite accomplished in their fields, and do quality work that would be extremely to duplicate without a similar level of raw talent and time commitment.
The problem is not those people. The problem is that those people are able to coast to an amazing degree because the grading system favors the slackers who take those classes because they don't want to work.
So the real problem is twofold:
One, the truly excellent students aren't getting the sort of challenge that would allow them to hone their abilities to their limits.
Two, the quality of the whole discipline is being diluted by a bunch of crappy students doing mediocre work for a grade.
I witnessed this in liberal arts classes, I also witnessed it in some CS classes, where incompetent coders could pass the class based solely on the curve and their ability to parrot theory on the exams. Literally. I was in a class where a programming assignment's average grade was 7 out of 100.
No offense or anything, but I view most psychiatry on about the same level as religion, except without the morals. Aside from a few conditions with proven chemical or physical causes, the bulk of psychiatry lives in fuzzy experiments with fuzzy results that provide very few useful predictive theorems.
Of our currently cataloged set of mental illnesses, a minority of them respond well to a surgical/chemical course of treatment. This hasn't stopped the psych community from attempting to make everything into a chemically treatable neural disorder; seasonal affective disorder, restless leg syndrome, social anxiety disorder...Every one with it's own pills.
Anyway, I'm afraid you missed my point entirely. Consciousness != Spirituality. The physical body is a physical thing. It has physical properties, and one day a science may emerge that is capable of constructing an accurate model of the neuroprocesses that form the ephemeral nothing that we like to refer to as "consciousness". I do not think, however, that such an accomplishment will have much effect on the morals, ideals, and aspirations of our species as a whole, and that those attributes of the human animal will remain a thing apart; studied, discussed, and emulated, but never fully defined.
Well, just speaking of where I work right now, we have about 8 hours, so yea, certainly. Still, it's sustained transfer, which would certainly be hard to match for a TB of data, even on a big sexy RAID.
Better to treat the data as volatile and not have to hope the machine recognizes it's going to be out of power in time to backup critical data.
Well calories convert to joules, so say a 1500-calorie (kcal, because food calories are kilocalories for whatever reason) diet converts to (1,500,000 * 4.18) = 6,270,000 joules, which converts to about 2 kilowatt hours...So enough juice to run your microwave for a couple of hours, or a 100watt bulb for 20 hours.
Not too shabby for the amount of energy in a "Double Whopper" meal (with cheese) from Burger King.
I guess as long as we're imagining 1TB of RAM, we might as well imagine hard drives that can write 1TB in a couple of minutes...You'd need a STR of 3.5GB/s or better (to write a TB to disk in 5 minutes), and thats about 60 times the current rate.
Seems a bit like masturbation to me...If you've got a TB, just use it as volatile storage, write the stuff you want to keep to a HDD, and let the rest evaporate if the power goes down.
Mines open-ish. Anyone can connect to it, but it's throttled and doesn't allow access to my local network. I also do some blacklisting, more just so I don't have the outraged parents of my kids friends calling me up and asking me why I'm letting their kids surf horse porn on my internet connection (answer: forgot to pay the cable bill).
Before the kid thing got to be an issue I pretty much left it wide open, though I still locked it out of the local network. Just lowball the priority of traffic moving through that interface, so the neighbors porn surfing doesn't up my TFII latency, and I'm all good.
Anyway, in the true spirit of things, having an open WAP is a good excuse for anything that gets downloaded on your connection, so why worry that someone else might be downloading something illegal?
The problem is not religion as a whole, it's the idiots who think that religion is something that is literally true.
Religion is a type of philosophical dualism. You believe in physical stuff, and you believe in spiritual stuff. There is no inherent problem with this because they have no points of congruity; science describes the physical, religion describes the spiritual. Simple. Even if you don't believe in the sky fairy or whatever, it's still somewhat beneficial to put some skull sweat into truth, beauty, morality, etc, so this is an idea that most people wouldn't find offensive. Likewise, even if you're a hardcore sky fairyist, you still need to be able to work your toaster, so it's important to understand the physical world.
But there is a certain type of person who is just unable to let it slide. They spend their time trying to say that their favorite side of the coin is the only side of the coin, and every other opinion is wrong; basically trying to turn a perfectly sensible and unobjectionable dualism into a crappy monism.
It's human nature. You can't fix it, and there is no way to sugar coat it so that the zealots will agree with you.
I'm not sure we're disagreeing...I know a lot of ways in which an electronic system could be compromised. My point is simply that, while a skilled individual must be in the mix somewhere, that doesn't mean that machines can only be compromised by skilled people.
For a ballot stuffing scenario, however, you need a lot more people because of the physical nature of the crime. To borrow your example; any moron can physically rob a bank, and a skilled individual can electronically loot the same amount of money; but in the former case you have to have enough people to physically move it and that's where the whole thing falls apart in a physical scenario...It's much easier to move large numbers around digitally.
Ever been to a polling place where they didn't check to see if you were a registered voter? When that polling place has a record of serving 5000 registered voters and no ballots to show for it, that is a pretty clear indication of fraud, don't you think?
Pardon the pun, but paper ballots leave a huge paper trail. They're physical objects; they exist, and therefore it is much harder to make them disappear than it is an ephemeral digital record.
These P.O.S machines didn't even have logging turned on. Fraud, no fraud, it'd be impossible to tell.
And while it may take an experienced person to write an exploit, it only takes a "retard" to load it.
Monkeying physical ballots can be done, sure. But you need a lot of people to do it. You need the poll workers, you need the ballot printers, you need the ballot box movers...And all this is for a polling place that may only serve a few hundred people. Now multiply that by the millions of voters in a general election. One person can keep a secret. A hundred? A thousand? Never.
Lost ballots are easy to track; just number them. If you can't find them, you know there is fraud.
Paper is cheap, paper is reliable. Paper doesn't require a ton of training or big fancy machines. Paper doesn't require we put our trust in anyone.
The problem with the technical systems is that they're complex, far far far more complex than they need to be. The more complex you make them, the more likely you are to have bugs, the more likely you are to have fraud, and the less likely you are to have someone who can spot the fraud.
Having a pile of for-profit companies putting together the machines is a terrible idea; we're already doing that. It's not working. Having them do it without a specific contract with a specific dollar figure on it is an even worse idea. It is always better to do a contract and set a finite price. Finally, the code has to be open source, which you'll never get from a for-profit.
The other participant "The grandson of Al Capone" never actually existed, and the only person who could have fathered said mythical grandson was Capone's only kid: Albert Francis Capone. That poor kid later changed his name to "Brown" and his entire criminal record consists of one arrest for misdemeanor shoplifting.
Dated myself...Should have said, "Can't even program their DVRs."
The fact remains that people who don't understand the issue have no basis for commenting on it. If there are reports of ballot tampering, and the machines are set up without logging (how is this even fucking possible in a supposedly secure system?), there is no way in hell that any non-technical user should be able to get away with being skeptical...If someone told them the goddamn machines were running Halo 3, they wouldn't have any way of telling.
These morons can't even program their VCRs and they're skeptical of tampering? I vote at a place where the people running the polls were alive when the results would have been passed using goddamn pony express, and they say the same crap here.
We seriously need to toss this crap in a landfill and go back to paper. Any idiot can figure out a paper system, and the system should have that sort of transparency.
Well, that theory holds less weight given that we have a period of Apple prosperity under Jobs, followed by a period of decline after Jobs, and then another period of prosperity after Jobs' return. Say what you will about him, he does have a measurable effect.
The thing about free designs is that they're generally the product of a small group of like-minded individuals who are setting out to fill a concrete need. It's a good design philosophy; concrete goal, tight group of knowledgeable, motivated people. The resulting products are usually solid.
They also tend to look like crap. OSS projects with really good interfaces are rare.
Apple doesn't actually tend to break much new ground. What they do is recognize a need that's being filled by an inferior product, and make a slick product to fill that niche. They have some of the best front-end designers in the business.
I know having something be pretty and functional is something that is often derided by the ubergeeks, but the real reason that we don't see huge gains as far as "Linux on the Desktop" is because the interface just isn't there. Even Ubuntu is lacking, though it's a much better attempt than any that have gone before.
With OSX Mac proved that you can take a BSD based system, throw a slick interface on it, and have an OS that, even when completely locked to proprietary hardware, is capable of agressively increasing market share.
This is something we should learn from, not something that we should dismiss as them being wrong.
Where modern management philosophies are mainly about touchy-feelie crap and corporate culture is trending toward openness, Apple stands out as a company where management is aggressive and dictatorial and corporate culture is supremely secretive.
If you want to call that "Evil" I suppose you can. I think, however, that design by committee only produces piles of steaming crap. There is definitely something to be said for a guy who has vision, and the force of personality to see it through.
Oh I've heard it more than once. Usually from lazy people who don't want to have to "support" multiple browsers.
I am a big believer in software restrictions, but they should be well thought out. Restricting things like Firefox tells your users that you don't know what the hell you're talking about, and it makes them more willing to disobey the rules.
"The DSM is usually reluctant to pathologize something unless it's really bothering the person themselves, or makes it impossible for them to live a normal life."
Not to be confused with "Seasonal Affective Disorder" (another real winner). The definition is vague, the symptoms can describe anyone who is uncomfortable in crowds, and yes, there is a pill. It's "Paxil" which is habit forming and has quite a colorful history: faked clinical trials, numerous lawsuits, all the way to a recent snafu where they dumped a batch on the market that was Ooops! missing the active ingredient...Did I mention it's habit forming? Lot of SAD people going into withdrawal while taking their pills. It's also another one where they marketed it agressively to kids, and, if you read the DSM definition of SAD, you'll find that kids who suffer it sometimes lack some of the vague-ass symptoms.
I don't trust the DSM anymore, frankly. The number of anxiety-style disorders that they've added in the last 20 years is staggering and obscene, and none of them have hard physical causes, and yet all of them respond to chemical treatment. That is extremely suspicious.
The fact that I treat all access to the systems as potentially harmful/hostile has no bearing on the way I treat users, when I deal with them at all. At no point have I suggested otherwise. I'm seldom unprofessional, and I'm usually willing to do extra work to get people access to things they need in a way that doesn't compromise my security.
But I am a pessimist. Things will go wrong. And they usually go wrong in a predictable manner. If I assume the worst from the start, and plan for it, then I can possibly limit the inevitable breach.
I'll be nice and say that there is a difference between teaching someone how to do something, and protecting something from unauthorized use.
I don't deal with users first. I deal with the security of financial systems, and customer data. At this point in my career, I deal with large systems. It is a position of extreme trust. If I believe that a provided service will cause an unacceptable risk in either of those areas, I stop it. I assign access to only those parts of the system that employees require for their jobs, and I monitor that usage for irregularities.
Frankly, I can't help but think you and the guy above are running businesses that don't deal with money or credit cards. Every company whose data I've been trusted with has been extremely aggressive about protecting it. Data integrity comes first. Systems integrity comes second. User friendly comes third.
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The point is that grades are effectively meaningless; if you base your happiness around an arbitrary letter (like the subby apparently did) then you're going to end up envying people whose arbitrary letter is higher, rather than experiencing envy for any sort of rational reason.
I honestly never gave a damn about my grades. You can waste time cramming trivia and useless knowledge to ace the tests, but the true measure of your skills is in the mastery of the material, and the ability to put it to work in the real world.
That being said, I almost always experienced more satisfaction from a difficult C than an easy A. Where is the triumph when victory is but a foregone conclusion?
Typical science snobbery. Truth be told, some liberal arts people are quite accomplished in their fields, and do quality work that would be extremely to duplicate without a similar level of raw talent and time commitment.
The problem is not those people. The problem is that those people are able to coast to an amazing degree because the grading system favors the slackers who take those classes because they don't want to work.
So the real problem is twofold:
One, the truly excellent students aren't getting the sort of challenge that would allow them to hone their abilities to their limits.
Two, the quality of the whole discipline is being diluted by a bunch of crappy students doing mediocre work for a grade.
I witnessed this in liberal arts classes, I also witnessed it in some CS classes, where incompetent coders could pass the class based solely on the curve and their ability to parrot theory on the exams. Literally. I was in a class where a programming assignment's average grade was 7 out of 100.
No offense or anything, but I view most psychiatry on about the same level as religion, except without the morals. Aside from a few conditions with proven chemical or physical causes, the bulk of psychiatry lives in fuzzy experiments with fuzzy results that provide very few useful predictive theorems.
Of our currently cataloged set of mental illnesses, a minority of them respond well to a surgical/chemical course of treatment. This hasn't stopped the psych community from attempting to make everything into a chemically treatable neural disorder; seasonal affective disorder, restless leg syndrome, social anxiety disorder...Every one with it's own pills.
Anyway, I'm afraid you missed my point entirely. Consciousness != Spirituality. The physical body is a physical thing. It has physical properties, and one day a science may emerge that is capable of constructing an accurate model of the neuroprocesses that form the ephemeral nothing that we like to refer to as "consciousness". I do not think, however, that such an accomplishment will have much effect on the morals, ideals, and aspirations of our species as a whole, and that those attributes of the human animal will remain a thing apart; studied, discussed, and emulated, but never fully defined.
Well, just speaking of where I work right now, we have about 8 hours, so yea, certainly. Still, it's sustained transfer, which would certainly be hard to match for a TB of data, even on a big sexy RAID.
Better to treat the data as volatile and not have to hope the machine recognizes it's going to be out of power in time to backup critical data.
Well calories convert to joules, so say a 1500-calorie (kcal, because food calories are kilocalories for whatever reason) diet converts to (1,500,000 * 4.18) = 6,270,000 joules, which converts to about 2 kilowatt hours...So enough juice to run your microwave for a couple of hours, or a 100watt bulb for 20 hours.
Not too shabby for the amount of energy in a "Double Whopper" meal (with cheese) from Burger King.
I guess as long as we're imagining 1TB of RAM, we might as well imagine hard drives that can write 1TB in a couple of minutes...You'd need a STR of 3.5GB/s or better (to write a TB to disk in 5 minutes), and thats about 60 times the current rate.
Seems a bit like masturbation to me...If you've got a TB, just use it as volatile storage, write the stuff you want to keep to a HDD, and let the rest evaporate if the power goes down.
Mines open-ish. Anyone can connect to it, but it's throttled and doesn't allow access to my local network. I also do some blacklisting, more just so I don't have the outraged parents of my kids friends calling me up and asking me why I'm letting their kids surf horse porn on my internet connection (answer: forgot to pay the cable bill).
Before the kid thing got to be an issue I pretty much left it wide open, though I still locked it out of the local network. Just lowball the priority of traffic moving through that interface, so the neighbors porn surfing doesn't up my TFII latency, and I'm all good.
Anyway, in the true spirit of things, having an open WAP is a good excuse for anything that gets downloaded on your connection, so why worry that someone else might be downloading something illegal?
The problem is not religion as a whole, it's the idiots who think that religion is something that is literally true.
Religion is a type of philosophical dualism. You believe in physical stuff, and you believe in spiritual stuff. There is no inherent problem with this because they have no points of congruity; science describes the physical, religion describes the spiritual. Simple. Even if you don't believe in the sky fairy or whatever, it's still somewhat beneficial to put some skull sweat into truth, beauty, morality, etc, so this is an idea that most people wouldn't find offensive. Likewise, even if you're a hardcore sky fairyist, you still need to be able to work your toaster, so it's important to understand the physical world.
But there is a certain type of person who is just unable to let it slide. They spend their time trying to say that their favorite side of the coin is the only side of the coin, and every other opinion is wrong; basically trying to turn a perfectly sensible and unobjectionable dualism into a crappy monism.
It's human nature. You can't fix it, and there is no way to sugar coat it so that the zealots will agree with you.
Uh..."Satanicpuppy"
Just sayin...
I'm not sure we're disagreeing...I know a lot of ways in which an electronic system could be compromised. My point is simply that, while a skilled individual must be in the mix somewhere, that doesn't mean that machines can only be compromised by skilled people.
For a ballot stuffing scenario, however, you need a lot more people because of the physical nature of the crime. To borrow your example; any moron can physically rob a bank, and a skilled individual can electronically loot the same amount of money; but in the former case you have to have enough people to physically move it and that's where the whole thing falls apart in a physical scenario...It's much easier to move large numbers around digitally.
Ever been to a polling place where they didn't check to see if you were a registered voter? When that polling place has a record of serving 5000 registered voters and no ballots to show for it, that is a pretty clear indication of fraud, don't you think?
Pardon the pun, but paper ballots leave a huge paper trail. They're physical objects; they exist, and therefore it is much harder to make them disappear than it is an ephemeral digital record.
These P.O.S machines didn't even have logging turned on. Fraud, no fraud, it'd be impossible to tell.
And while it may take an experienced person to write an exploit, it only takes a "retard" to load it.
Monkeying physical ballots can be done, sure. But you need a lot of people to do it. You need the poll workers, you need the ballot printers, you need the ballot box movers...And all this is for a polling place that may only serve a few hundred people. Now multiply that by the millions of voters in a general election. One person can keep a secret. A hundred? A thousand? Never.
Lost ballots are easy to track; just number them. If you can't find them, you know there is fraud.
Paper is cheap, paper is reliable. Paper doesn't require a ton of training or big fancy machines. Paper doesn't require we put our trust in anyone.
The problem with the technical systems is that they're complex, far far far more complex than they need to be. The more complex you make them, the more likely you are to have bugs, the more likely you are to have fraud, and the less likely you are to have someone who can spot the fraud.
Having a pile of for-profit companies putting together the machines is a terrible idea; we're already doing that. It's not working. Having them do it without a specific contract with a specific dollar figure on it is an even worse idea. It is always better to do a contract and set a finite price. Finally, the code has to be open source, which you'll never get from a for-profit.
The other participant "The grandson of Al Capone" never actually existed, and the only person who could have fathered said mythical grandson was Capone's only kid: Albert Francis Capone. That poor kid later changed his name to "Brown" and his entire criminal record consists of one arrest for misdemeanor shoplifting.
The election guy sounds like a complete moron.
Dated myself...Should have said, "Can't even program their DVRs."
The fact remains that people who don't understand the issue have no basis for commenting on it. If there are reports of ballot tampering, and the machines are set up without logging (how is this even fucking possible in a supposedly secure system?), there is no way in hell that any non-technical user should be able to get away with being skeptical...If someone told them the goddamn machines were running Halo 3, they wouldn't have any way of telling.
These morons can't even program their VCRs and they're skeptical of tampering? I vote at a place where the people running the polls were alive when the results would have been passed using goddamn pony express, and they say the same crap here.
We seriously need to toss this crap in a landfill and go back to paper. Any idiot can figure out a paper system, and the system should have that sort of transparency.
Well, that theory holds less weight given that we have a period of Apple prosperity under Jobs, followed by a period of decline after Jobs, and then another period of prosperity after Jobs' return. Say what you will about him, he does have a measurable effect.
The thing about free designs is that they're generally the product of a small group of like-minded individuals who are setting out to fill a concrete need. It's a good design philosophy; concrete goal, tight group of knowledgeable, motivated people. The resulting products are usually solid.
They also tend to look like crap. OSS projects with really good interfaces are rare.
Apple doesn't actually tend to break much new ground. What they do is recognize a need that's being filled by an inferior product, and make a slick product to fill that niche. They have some of the best front-end designers in the business.
I know having something be pretty and functional is something that is often derided by the ubergeeks, but the real reason that we don't see huge gains as far as "Linux on the Desktop" is because the interface just isn't there. Even Ubuntu is lacking, though it's a much better attempt than any that have gone before.
With OSX Mac proved that you can take a BSD based system, throw a slick interface on it, and have an OS that, even when completely locked to proprietary hardware, is capable of agressively increasing market share.
This is something we should learn from, not something that we should dismiss as them being wrong.
Where modern management philosophies are mainly about touchy-feelie crap and corporate culture is trending toward openness, Apple stands out as a company where management is aggressive and dictatorial and corporate culture is supremely secretive.
If you want to call that "Evil" I suppose you can. I think, however, that design by committee only produces piles of steaming crap. There is definitely something to be said for a guy who has vision, and the force of personality to see it through.
No. We factored in the costs of losing our jobs because the PHBs wanted Exchange.
Seriously. I love Linux, but treating people like they're morons for having to support a Windows system is unrealistic.
Oh I've heard it more than once. Usually from lazy people who don't want to have to "support" multiple browsers.
I am a big believer in software restrictions, but they should be well thought out. Restricting things like Firefox tells your users that you don't know what the hell you're talking about, and it makes them more willing to disobey the rules.
"The DSM is usually reluctant to pathologize something unless it's really bothering the person themselves, or makes it impossible for them to live a normal life."
As a counter-example I call to your attention: Social Anxiety Disorder.
Not to be confused with "Seasonal Affective Disorder" (another real winner). The definition is vague, the symptoms can describe anyone who is uncomfortable in crowds, and yes, there is a pill. It's "Paxil" which is habit forming and has quite a colorful history: faked clinical trials, numerous lawsuits, all the way to a recent snafu where they dumped a batch on the market that was Ooops! missing the active ingredient...Did I mention it's habit forming? Lot of SAD people going into withdrawal while taking their pills. It's also another one where they marketed it agressively to kids, and, if you read the DSM definition of SAD, you'll find that kids who suffer it sometimes lack some of the vague-ass symptoms.
I don't trust the DSM anymore, frankly. The number of anxiety-style disorders that they've added in the last 20 years is staggering and obscene, and none of them have hard physical causes, and yet all of them respond to chemical treatment. That is extremely suspicious.
The fact that I treat all access to the systems as potentially harmful/hostile has no bearing on the way I treat users, when I deal with them at all. At no point have I suggested otherwise. I'm seldom unprofessional, and I'm usually willing to do extra work to get people access to things they need in a way that doesn't compromise my security.
But I am a pessimist. Things will go wrong. And they usually go wrong in a predictable manner. If I assume the worst from the start, and plan for it, then I can possibly limit the inevitable breach.
I'll be nice and say that there is a difference between teaching someone how to do something, and protecting something from unauthorized use.
I don't deal with users first. I deal with the security of financial systems, and customer data. At this point in my career, I deal with large systems. It is a position of extreme trust. If I believe that a provided service will cause an unacceptable risk in either of those areas, I stop it. I assign access to only those parts of the system that employees require for their jobs, and I monitor that usage for irregularities.
Frankly, I can't help but think you and the guy above are running businesses that don't deal with money or credit cards. Every company whose data I've been trusted with has been extremely aggressive about protecting it. Data integrity comes first. Systems integrity comes second. User friendly comes third.
Sure, sure, you clearly "know" me, you've clearly used one of my networks, you've clearly run through my approval process, blah blah blah.
Frankly, I don't know who pissed in your cornflakes, but you're trying to pick a fight, and I don't really want to play.