The authors state flat out: "Electronic voting raised President Bush's advantage from the tiny edge held in 2000 to a clearer margin of victory in 2004."
No self respecting scientist would state such an absurdly strong conclusion based on a simple correlation. At most, it could be claimed that there was a correlation between the use of electronic voting machines and Bush's margin.
The authors go on to show that Bush's percentage increased most over 2000 in the heavily Democratic counties. In other words, Republican counties stayed loyal to Bush, and he picked up some votes in Democratic counties. What's surprising about that? That's the nature of elections. People make choices that are often different from the way they voted last time or their party affiliation. That's why we have elections instead of just counting the number of voters registered to each party.
Baltimore is a city that celebrates any year the number of murders drops below 300. This in a population of 700,000. A friend of mine was shot a couple of blocks from her office, which is in a government building surrounded by surveillance cameras and populated by plenty of guards with guns. Luckily the guy was a poor shot armed only with a.22. The city is also broke, because anyone who can afford to leave usually does so at the first opportunity. There's no money for any more constables on patrol, so the cameras are the next best thing. The citizens of Baltimore are probably happy to have them, considering the current situation.
Years ago Donald Knuth (at least I think it was Knuth) wrote an interesting article about Zuse's programming language, called Plankalkul. Apparently it surpassed the features of Fortran, and incorporated things that didn't appear in programming languages until the advent of Algol 60. Really remarkable. Good thing Hitler was too dumb to put a significant development effort behind Zuse's work.
Since the government is busy sponsoring open source software, I think this warning falls (happily) on deaf ears.
For the most part it does, at least among government technocrats. Congress, however, is another story. These little think-tank pieces are always trotted out by Congresscritters pushing some agenda. This one will no doubt be latched onto by the anti free trade crowd. But just about every defense or science agency I know of is using lots of open source, and in a lot of cases contributing to it as well. Any high assurance software review requires access to source code. That's one of the big arguments as to why open source is good for security.
The engineering is also awfully hard. There was a good article in New Scientist last year (doesn't seem to be online though) that explained some of the weaknesses that occur in quantum crypto implementations. Nicholas Gisin, the Swiss researcher who holds the distance record for QKD, was quoted as saying that quantum crypto will probably never be totally secure in practice, even if it is in theory. The underlying physics is bulletproof, but the protocols, hardware, and software used to implement key distribution are where vulnerabilities creep in. The situation is analogous to conventional crypto in a lot of ways. The underlying math of AES, RSA and other algorithms, is really solid, but there are lots of ways to attack the software and hardware used in implementations.
Until recently the Los Alamos arXiv site was xxx.lanl.gov. I always assumed some porn-surfing alarms were going off every time I accessed quant-ph at LANL. Also wondered whether the guy that named a government server 'xxx' was a prankster or just completely clueless!
There's a lot wrong with what he said. If these incidents are true, then he was bound by law and duty to report them to his commander. He never reported anything (he just waited until he was back home and made sweeping allegations), and failing to do so was both immoral and illegal. . If false, then he is guilty of slander of the worst sort. In fact he claimed that atrocities were commonplace, which means he was slandering his fellow servicemen and disgracing his country.
It's to Kerry's benefit that the media are following this story, since he has some skeletons in his closet that are very serious. If the public comes to assume that things damaging to Kerry are hoaxes, it helps his chances. It really wouldn't matter much if he had appeared on stage with Jane Fonda. Clinton protested the war too. But Kerry accused US servicemen of atrocities and war crimes, and that's documented in his Congressional testimony. It looks like this photo was just a prank, but I'm sure Kerry would like people to believe that records of his testimony before Congress are just hoaxes too.
But you've got to admit there's a lot of humor in an outfit that sucks up millions of taxpayer dollars telling real businesses how they should make money.
Maybe 2000 BC - 800 BC, but not 200 AD - 1200 AD
on
Human Accomplishment
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· Score: 1
From 200 - 1200 AD other cultures (you forgot to mention India) were ahead of Europe in many ways, but not all, by a long shot. Around 800, Charlemagne's empire was inventing trial by jury, an advance in human rights yet to be adopted in many parts of the world today. Not long after that, cathedrals in France, Germany, and England were the equal of anything in the rest of the world in terms of both technology and art/architecture. But the real value of this book ought to be in identifying the characteristics that make advances possible.
Dinesh D'Souza has a pretty concise explanation in his article "How the West Grew Rich":
"If oppression and exploitation did not make the West rich and powerful, what did? The answer is that the West invented three institutions that never existed before: science, democracy, and capitalism. Each of these institutions is based on a universal human impulse that took on a very specific institutional expression in the history of the West.
First, science. Of course people everywhere want to learn about the world. The Chinese recorded the eclipses, the Hindus invented the number zero, the Mayans developed a sophisticated calendar. But science -- which means experimentation, and verification, and a "scientific method" that one writer has termed "the invention of invention" -- this is a Western institution.
Just like the impulse to learn, the impulse to barter and trade is universal. People in every culture exchange goods for mutual benefit. Money is not a Western invention. But capitalism -- which implies property rights, and courts to enforce them, and free trade, and stock exchanges, and institutions of credit, and double-entry bookkeeping -- this system developed in the West.
Finally, tribal participation is universal, but democracy -- which requires elections, and peaceful transitions of power, and separation of powers, and checks and balances -- is a Western institution.
None of this is to deny that the West, like every other culture, has shown itself to be arrogant and oppressive when it had the chance. Oppression and exploitation, however, were not the cause of Western success; they were the fruits of that success. Those who say America and the West have grown rich at their expense are simply wrong. The real cause of Western wealth and power is the dynamic interaction of science, capitalism and democracy. Working together, these institutions have created our commercial, technological, participatory society. "
Check out #24, which alerts us to "the convergence of Christian fundamentalism, white supremacy and Zionism". These wackos apparently think that Jews are joining the Aryan Nations. At least this article exposes the anti-Semitism on the far left for all to see.
I'm thinking of the poor unwashed masses rising up and overthrowing the rich elite minority. The french revolution, the american war of independance, the russians also killed off their royalty if I remember correctly. These days the people are the business leaders, and not royalty but they still have the same outlook on life.
Actually the American revolution was organized and led by people who of enormous wealth - Washington, Jefferson, the Lee and Randolph families, etc. So if you're right and history does repeat itself, I guess we can expect a revolution led by Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Ted Turner, backed by the (Sam) Walton, Rockefeller, and Kennedy families? Can't wait to see that.
Courts have held that all sorts of physical objects are Constitutionally protected expression, but the fact that some objects are patented does not seem to interfere with free expression. The same holds true for software patents. What sort of "expression" is interfered with by, say, the RSA algorithm? We now have thousands of software patents, including a lot that are plain stupid, but I can't think of one that interferes with free expression, as that term is normally understood. Only by treating all software as "expression" can software patents be considered to interfere. But the same things holds if we start by assuming that all physical objects are expression. Someone who wants to copy the design of a new OLED could then clam that existing patents are "interfereing with free expression." Salin is starting from a flawed premise.
It is to say, in effect, "Don't try to solve problems and invent solutions as you see fit; you or your software agents might independently write or invent something which the patent office's licensers have placed on the Index of Banned Algorithms; in which case, at their discretion, they can force you into an expensive, traumatic legal Inquisition..."
Engineers in other fields have had to deal with this issue for two centuries. Get over it. The same argument could be made for the developers of player pianos, which the author says *should* be patentable. If he wanted to argue against all patents, this would be a valid argument, but that's not what he's saying.
There are other problems as well with this "software is free speech" approach. Source code is text - so what? Circuits expressed as VHDL are text too, so are plans for any mechanical device. Since all of these are just text and pictures, why single out software?
"Faster, better, cheaper" was former NASA Administrator Goldin's favorite line. It worked well with Congress. Trouble is, he forgot the second half - you can't get all three. For years NASA was under a pressure to do things faster and cheaper, so "better" became a casualty. A couple of years ago I was at a NASA conference where a speaker started a sentence with "Former Administrator Goldin - I've waited so long to say that...", whereupon the audience erupted in cheers and applause.
Software can be done right. Anyone who doesn't believe this either (a) does not know how many millions of lines of software are involved in avionics and air traffic control, (b) never flies on an airplane, or (c) has a death wish. Of course I guess there's also a fourth possibility - when all else fails, blame the software. The space shuttle's record proves that software can be dependable, but also illustrates that making it that way is very, very expensive. Just a matter of priorities.
Each spring I review resumes from computer science majors as potential summer student hires. They consistently divide into two groups: about 1/3 with As and Bs in C.S. and similarly good grades in other classes; and the rest making Cs and Ds in their C.S. classes, and better grades in everything else. They obviously don't have the interest and/or ability for computer science, but they are trying to get the degree because they think it's a ticket to automatic hiring. I never hired any of them though. Like the original poster said - better quality than quantity.
"... developers are put out of jobs in favor of using free (as in beer) code."
Actually I think Bruce Sterling has it right - open source is "free, like a puppy". It needs plenty of care and feeding, so it's better that the IT budget gets spent on people to do that instead of supporting huge licensng fees.
If only a "licensed professional engineer" can use the title "engineer", then nearly all of NASA's engineers DON'T qualify. Same goes for most EEs and MEs. All of these people are by any reasonable definition "engineers" but they don't hold their services out to the public the way that civil engineers do.
There really must be more to this story than what is given in this article, since it was big news *several year ago* when Texas became the first state to license software engineers as PEs. Incidentally, the ACM has taken a position against licensing software engineers, while the IEEE is moving forward with the idea. See http://www.acm.org/serving/se_policy/selep_main.ht ml
for more on this. This ACM position paper also notes the fact that Texas did decide some time ago to develop a software engineer licensing program.
So if Ca. Congresscritter Berman's cyber vigilante bill passes, there will be a surefire method of dealing with pesky business competitors: attack their systems on the pretext that they might have some of your copyrighted data. If they report the breakin, they'll get bad publicity. If they don't report it, have your lawyers point out that fact to the appropriate authorites and they get busted for not reporting the breakin, also generating bad publicity for them.
On the upside, this looks like a full-employment bill for security types.
Slashdot Mirror
The authors state flat out: "Electronic voting raised President Bush's advantage from the tiny edge held in 2000 to a clearer margin of victory in 2004."
No self respecting scientist would state such an absurdly strong conclusion based on a simple correlation. At most, it could be claimed that there was a correlation between the use of electronic voting machines and Bush's margin.
The authors go on to show that Bush's percentage increased most over 2000 in the heavily Democratic counties. In other words, Republican counties stayed loyal to Bush, and he picked up some votes in Democratic counties. What's surprising about that? That's the nature of elections. People make choices that are often different from the way they voted last time or their party affiliation. That's why we have elections instead of just counting the number of voters registered to each party.
Baltimore is a city that celebrates any year the number of murders drops below 300. This in a population of 700,000. A friend of mine was shot a couple of blocks from her office, which is in a government building surrounded by surveillance cameras and populated by plenty of guards with guns. Luckily the guy was a poor shot armed only with a .22. The city is also broke, because anyone who can afford to leave usually does so at the first opportunity. There's no money for any more constables on patrol, so the cameras are the next best thing. The citizens of Baltimore are probably happy to have them, considering the current situation.
Years ago Donald Knuth (at least I think it was Knuth) wrote an interesting article about Zuse's programming language, called Plankalkul. Apparently it surpassed the features of Fortran, and incorporated things that didn't appear in programming languages until the advent of Algol 60. Really remarkable. Good thing Hitler was too dumb to put a significant development effort behind Zuse's work.
The engineering is also awfully hard. There was a good article in New Scientist last year (doesn't seem to be online though) that explained some of the weaknesses that occur in quantum crypto implementations. Nicholas Gisin, the Swiss researcher who holds the distance record for QKD, was quoted as saying that quantum crypto will probably never be totally secure in practice, even if it is in theory. The underlying physics is bulletproof, but the protocols, hardware, and software used to implement key distribution are where vulnerabilities creep in. The situation is analogous to conventional crypto in a lot of ways. The underlying math of AES, RSA and other algorithms, is really solid, but there are lots of ways to attack the software and hardware used in implementations.
Until recently the Los Alamos arXiv site was xxx.lanl.gov. I always assumed some porn-surfing alarms were going off every time I accessed quant-ph at LANL. Also wondered whether the guy that named a government server 'xxx' was a prankster or just completely clueless!
There's a lot wrong with what he said. If these incidents are true, then he was bound by law and duty to report them to his commander. He never reported anything (he just waited until he was back home and made sweeping allegations), and failing to do so was both immoral and illegal. . If false, then he is guilty of slander of the worst sort. In fact he claimed that atrocities were commonplace, which means he was slandering his fellow servicemen and disgracing his country.
It's to Kerry's benefit that the media are following this story, since he has some skeletons in his closet that are very serious. If the public comes to assume that things damaging to Kerry are hoaxes, it helps his chances. It really wouldn't matter much if he had appeared on stage with Jane Fonda. Clinton protested the war too. But Kerry accused US servicemen of atrocities and war crimes, and that's documented in his Congressional
testimony. It looks like this photo was just a prank, but I'm sure Kerry would like people to believe that records of his testimony before Congress are just hoaxes too.
But you've got to admit there's a lot of humor in an outfit that sucks up millions of taxpayer dollars telling real businesses how they should make money.
Check out #24, which alerts us to "the convergence of Christian fundamentalism, white supremacy and Zionism". These wackos apparently think that Jews are joining the Aryan Nations. At least this article exposes the anti-Semitism on the far left for all to see.
Actually the American revolution was organized and led by people who of enormous wealth - Washington, Jefferson, the Lee and Randolph families, etc. So if you're right and history does repeat itself, I guess we can expect a revolution led by Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Ted Turner, backed by the (Sam) Walton, Rockefeller, and Kennedy families? Can't wait to see that.
Courts have held that all sorts of physical objects are Constitutionally protected expression, but the fact that some objects are patented does not seem to interfere with free expression. The same holds true for software patents. What sort of "expression" is interfered with by, say, the RSA algorithm? We now have thousands of software patents, including a lot that are plain stupid, but I can't think of one that interferes with free expression, as that term is normally understood. Only by treating all software as "expression" can software patents be considered to interfere. But the same things holds if we start by assuming that all physical objects are expression. Someone who wants to copy the design of a new OLED could then clam that existing patents are "interfereing with free expression." Salin is starting from a flawed premise.
Engineers in other fields have had to deal with this issue for two centuries. Get over it. The same argument could be made for the developers of player pianos, which the author says *should* be patentable. If he wanted to argue against all patents, this would be a valid argument, but that's not what he's saying.
There are other problems as well with this "software is free speech" approach. Source code is text - so what? Circuits expressed as VHDL are text too, so are plans for any mechanical device. Since all of these are just text and pictures, why single out software?
Software can be done right. Anyone who doesn't believe this either (a) does not know how many millions of lines of software are involved in avionics and air traffic control, (b) never flies on an airplane, or (c) has a death wish. Of course I guess there's also a fourth possibility - when all else fails, blame the software. The space shuttle's record proves that software can be dependable, but also illustrates that making it that way is very, very expensive. Just a matter of priorities.
Each spring I review resumes from computer science majors as potential summer student hires. They consistently divide into two groups: about 1/3 with As and Bs in C.S. and similarly good grades in other classes; and the rest making Cs and Ds in their C.S. classes, and better grades in everything else. They obviously don't have the interest and/or ability for computer science, but they are trying to get the degree because they think it's a ticket to automatic hiring. I never hired any of them though. Like the original poster said - better quality than quantity.
Actually I think Bruce Sterling has it right - open source is "free, like a puppy". It needs plenty of care and feeding, so it's better that the IT budget gets spent on people to do that instead of supporting huge licensng fees.
There really must be more to this story than what is given in this article, since it was big news *several year ago* when Texas became the first state to license software engineers as PEs. Incidentally, the ACM has taken a position against licensing software engineers, while the IEEE is moving forward with the idea. See http://www.acm.org/serving/se_policy/selep_main.ht ml
for more on this. This ACM position paper also notes the fact that Texas did decide some time ago to develop a software engineer licensing program.
So if Ca. Congresscritter Berman's cyber vigilante bill passes, there will be a surefire method of dealing with pesky business competitors: attack their systems on the pretext that they might have some of your copyrighted data. If they report the breakin, they'll get bad publicity. If they don't report it, have your lawyers point out that fact to the appropriate authorites and they get busted for not reporting the breakin, also generating bad publicity for them. On the upside, this looks like a full-employment bill for security types.