The problem with holding the programmer responsible is that security is at least as dependent upon the actual installation and operation, as it is on secure coding. Apache is very secure-able; it just also has a variety of insecure ways to deploy it. You can't hold a programmer responsible for a client who doesn't provide a secure environment or correctly follow the implementation guide.
The practical effect of this would be that, in any real lawsuit, there would be years of discovery and litigation over exactly who was at fault, the programmer or the customer. And if you couldn't afford to fight that out, then you wouldn't risk it. Goodbye freelance web developers. Goodbye online ecommerce that costs less than six figures to deploy.
You might have an argument if CFCs were an absolute requirement for cheap, OTC inhalers. Given the size of the market, the pharmaceutical companies will find an alternative--just like the refrigerator manufacturers did. As a short-term solution, they can use HCFCs, which are damaging in the same way, but much less so because they break down sooner (one of the issues with CFCs is that they're very long-lived, giving them time to get to the stratosphere).
The concerns of people who depend on cheap inhalers are important, but that's not a reason to prevent a switch that shouldn't affect you. It's not an either-or situation.
In point of fact, in the twenty years since CFCs were generally banned, the hole in the ozone layer has shrunk by 50%. Banning CFCs is one of the most effective environmental policies we've seen to date, after the recovery of the Great Lakes following the control of emissions that caused "acid rain".
It is possible to 1) see an environmental problem, 2) determine that it's being caused by us, 3) control or eliminate what we're doing to cause it, and so 4) repair the damage we're doing to ourselves by shitting up our environment.
The bailouts from 2008 weren't about sound assets, they were about preventing the sociopaths in Manhattan from driving the world economy over a cliff. For all that we should have built a barrier around Wall St. and burned everything in it, the consequences of doing so were far worse than bailing them out.
That said, the banks did have normal banking arms that were typically sound operations with sufficient assets to guarantee their depositors. It's just that, in addition to all that, there was a pyramid scheme of CDOs and whatnot that was like a toxic waste dump for the finance industry.
The bank loans out your money with the plausible expectation of being repaid, and a repayable debt is an asset. They may not have cash on hand to cover every depositor, but they have assets to do so. In the event of a bank run, they could borrow against those assets to get the cash they need.
Full-Tilt poker was actually removing money from the pool of player's money, and paying it to themselves, reducing the actual assets held by the company, not just cash-on-hand. If every player cashed out, there'd simply be nothing to give the latecomers.
Haven't those premiums increased more in most other states?
In some, yes, but in most others, no, IIRC. Texas has been held up as an example of unreasonable malpractice premiums just because its rate increases are vastly out of line with the potential liability, especially since the caps put in place were explicitly designed to trigger reductions in premiums.
However, the cost of malpractice goes beyond lawsuits and insurance.
To a degree, yes, but the high cost of defensive medecine isn't the medicine itself, it's due to another perverse incentive built into the U.S. health care system, namely that 1) because hospitals are required to treat people who come to emergency rooms, regardless of their ability to pay, to the point of stabilization, and 2) because insurers don't control the providers costs, all medicine in the the U.S. is overpriced because providers overcharge insurers to cover the costs of providing health care to those who can't pay because they don't have or can't get health insurance.
To put it a bit more simply, there are various legal and moral requirements to provide health care that U.S. providers do actually provide to those who can't pay, and they cover the cost of providing those services by overcharging those who can pay. In one sense, the U.S. health care system does have universal coverage, it just has it in the most economically inefficient way possible.
The root flaw of the U.S. health care system is that, just because it's a (somewhat) free market, you have a bunch of independent agents each of whom has an incentive to gouge the other agents. Insurers dump high cost patients on the government; doctors and hospitals screw the insurers; the young and healthy don't buy into the system because they don't need health care right now, then they show up in the emergency room when it'll cost 10 or 20 times to treat them what it would cost if they just got regular checkups.
The reason that the UHC countries spend 45% less for what's objectively better medicine overall is that they've removed most of those perverse incentives.
And yet, Canada, England, and all those other countries with universal health care still have doctors and nurses, and those countries have longer life expectancies, lower infant mortality rates, better on virtually any aggregate health score you can name. By any statistical measure, citizens of UHC countries get far better health care than an American does.
provides legal protections against rampant malpractice lawsuits without merit, thus lessening the need for costly malpractice insurance.
FYI, Texas instituted malpractice caps and protections several years ago that put it in line with Canada, I believe. Since those protections were put in place, malpractice premiums have increased 30%.
It's not the lawsuits driving up malpractice costs; it's the malpractice insurers gouging the doctors. It's a distraction anyway. Currently only 2.5% of U.S. health care dollars are in the area of malpractice lawsuits and insurance. To flesh out your latter point, 28% of U.S. health care dollars are spent on administration, compared to 16% in Canada.
code that relies on exception processing to try alternate methods or re-try will be a lot slower
If you're doing it this way, you're doing it wrong.
By definition, an Exception is something you don't expect to happen, even sometimes. You guard against it for the same reason that you check your return code in C even if you're certain the call will succeed: Because sometimes shit happens, and robust code demands that you fail gracefully when shit happens. Your catch code isn't for "oh, that didn't didn't work, let's try this", it's for "something happened, that, if I don't deal with it somehow, will crash my program." It's for "I'm bailing out because there's no reasonable way for me to continue." That programmers misuse Exceptions is an observation about programmers, not an indictment of the architectural reasons to use them.
Yes, it is an operating system--it uses a minimal C/x86 for interrupt dispatch, C++ for a HAL, and then loads a microkernel written in an extension of C#, with the extensions providing the process model. On top of that the rest of the OS is built. Singularity, like Plan 9, is a research OS to demonstrate (among other things) a process model that's provably secure.
The wikipedia entry is fine, and what I'm describing is what the entry has under "Security Design".
Singularity was basically a demonstrator for a particular process model that took full advantage of the kind of memory isolation that's possible in managed environments. It wasn't trying to prove that you could write an OS in C#, it was trying to (and did) prove that bringing the "managed" level down as low as possible, the basic process model could be provably secure (i.e., it's impossible to insecurely cross process boundaries).
It's a neat project that I hope continues since it wasn't trying to show off so much as demonstrate what should be possible in any language/VM.
That their test scores for computer literacy are higher in classrooms where they're actually using computers, rather than cardboard boxes with keyboards drawn on them.
It's not that people in BC would vote like Ontario does, it's that Ontario has a huge influence in federal elections. If you're watching returns and see that party X has basically won already, when you're in favour of party Y, then a lot of people just won't bother voting for Y because it makes no difference.
As a practical matter, this is big because Canada ties public funding of parties to popular vote share in federal elections: If your party wins 12% of the vote, you get 12% of the pie when the public money comes out. Depressing turnout for losing candidates in western provinces serves to cut money from them in the next election, creating lock-in for the party that wins Ontario.
It's a law from before daily tracking polls or the Internet (or even timeshifted TV channels from other regions).
I note that in the most recent federal election, polling was not any kind of a sufficient guide to who would win what. We have a 'first past the post system': how accurate polling translates to actual seat counts is quite difficult, and certainly not a useful guide to voters.
Seriously, it's not a huge burden to not see results until all the polls close.
There's a difference between not allowing people to see the data (which was not the case), and not gift wrapping it for people who can't and won't actually make use of it, who are demanding it only because the demand itself seems to demonstrate some flaw in the conclusions of people who actually work with it.
http://www.conservapedia.com/Conservapedia:Lenski_dialog. Read the talk page as well for an illuminating look at how a challenger of evolution simply won't wrap his head around the fact that the data shows what it shows, and doesn't even really know what he's asking for when he repeatedly demands the "raw data".
An excessive insistence on access to the "raw data" is a stalling tactic by climate deniers to tie up climate researchers in meaningless paperwork. People like yourself are useful idiots for those deniers.
The data was always widely available to any climatologist who wanted it. "Climategate" happened just because of the release of a bunch of emails between a wide variety of people who were already working with the data. It just wasn't conveniently available to people with little familiarity with climate science and little ability to do meaningful work with the data. Now it is. And now the climate deniers will find some other bogus point to harp on to delay making any policy changes based on the already voluminous data that shows climate change is real and man-made.
This isn't about transparency. This is about intellectual piety being manipulated for political purposes.
Slashdot Mirror
What does this even mean?
The problem with holding the programmer responsible is that security is at least as dependent upon the actual installation and operation, as it is on secure coding. Apache is very secure-able; it just also has a variety of insecure ways to deploy it. You can't hold a programmer responsible for a client who doesn't provide a secure environment or correctly follow the implementation guide.
The practical effect of this would be that, in any real lawsuit, there would be years of discovery and litigation over exactly who was at fault, the programmer or the customer. And if you couldn't afford to fight that out, then you wouldn't risk it. Goodbye freelance web developers. Goodbye online ecommerce that costs less than six figures to deploy.
What motive do the pharmaceutical companies have to even look for such an alternative without banning CFCs in inhalers?
You might have an argument if CFCs were an absolute requirement for cheap, OTC inhalers. Given the size of the market, the pharmaceutical companies will find an alternative--just like the refrigerator manufacturers did. As a short-term solution, they can use HCFCs, which are damaging in the same way, but much less so because they break down sooner (one of the issues with CFCs is that they're very long-lived, giving them time to get to the stratosphere).
The concerns of people who depend on cheap inhalers are important, but that's not a reason to prevent a switch that shouldn't affect you. It's not an either-or situation.
In point of fact, in the twenty years since CFCs were generally banned, the hole in the ozone layer has shrunk by 50%. Banning CFCs is one of the most effective environmental policies we've seen to date, after the recovery of the Great Lakes following the control of emissions that caused "acid rain".
It is possible to 1) see an environmental problem, 2) determine that it's being caused by us, 3) control or eliminate what we're doing to cause it, and so 4) repair the damage we're doing to ourselves by shitting up our environment.
The bailouts from 2008 weren't about sound assets, they were about preventing the sociopaths in Manhattan from driving the world economy over a cliff. For all that we should have built a barrier around Wall St. and burned everything in it, the consequences of doing so were far worse than bailing them out.
That said, the banks did have normal banking arms that were typically sound operations with sufficient assets to guarantee their depositors. It's just that, in addition to all that, there was a pyramid scheme of CDOs and whatnot that was like a toxic waste dump for the finance industry.
The bank loans out your money with the plausible expectation of being repaid, and a repayable debt is an asset. They may not have cash on hand to cover every depositor, but they have assets to do so. In the event of a bank run, they could borrow against those assets to get the cash they need.
Full-Tilt poker was actually removing money from the pool of player's money, and paying it to themselves, reducing the actual assets held by the company, not just cash-on-hand. If every player cashed out, there'd simply be nothing to give the latecomers.
With nearly 50% of the US paying no federal income tax
This is a lie.
Haven't those premiums increased more in most other states?
In some, yes, but in most others, no, IIRC. Texas has been held up as an example of unreasonable malpractice premiums just because its rate increases are vastly out of line with the potential liability, especially since the caps put in place were explicitly designed to trigger reductions in premiums.
However, the cost of malpractice goes beyond lawsuits and insurance.
To a degree, yes, but the high cost of defensive medecine isn't the medicine itself, it's due to another perverse incentive built into the U.S. health care system, namely that 1) because hospitals are required to treat people who come to emergency rooms, regardless of their ability to pay, to the point of stabilization, and 2) because insurers don't control the providers costs, all medicine in the the U.S. is overpriced because providers overcharge insurers to cover the costs of providing health care to those who can't pay because they don't have or can't get health insurance.
To put it a bit more simply, there are various legal and moral requirements to provide health care that U.S. providers do actually provide to those who can't pay, and they cover the cost of providing those services by overcharging those who can pay. In one sense, the U.S. health care system does have universal coverage, it just has it in the most economically inefficient way possible.
The root flaw of the U.S. health care system is that, just because it's a (somewhat) free market, you have a bunch of independent agents each of whom has an incentive to gouge the other agents. Insurers dump high cost patients on the government; doctors and hospitals screw the insurers; the young and healthy don't buy into the system because they don't need health care right now, then they show up in the emergency room when it'll cost 10 or 20 times to treat them what it would cost if they just got regular checkups.
The reason that the UHC countries spend 45% less for what's objectively better medicine overall is that they've removed most of those perverse incentives.
And yet, Canada, England, and all those other countries with universal health care still have doctors and nurses, and those countries have longer life expectancies, lower infant mortality rates, better on virtually any aggregate health score you can name. By any statistical measure, citizens of UHC countries get far better health care than an American does.
provides legal protections against rampant malpractice lawsuits without merit, thus lessening the need for costly malpractice insurance.
FYI, Texas instituted malpractice caps and protections several years ago that put it in line with Canada, I believe. Since those protections were put in place, malpractice premiums have increased 30%.
It's not the lawsuits driving up malpractice costs; it's the malpractice insurers gouging the doctors. It's a distraction anyway. Currently only 2.5% of U.S. health care dollars are in the area of malpractice lawsuits and insurance. To flesh out your latter point, 28% of U.S. health care dollars are spent on administration, compared to 16% in Canada.
Yes, because argument by soundbite works so well to establish policy. Just look at Washington!
code that relies on exception processing to try alternate methods or re-try will be a lot slower
If you're doing it this way, you're doing it wrong.
By definition, an Exception is something you don't expect to happen, even sometimes. You guard against it for the same reason that you check your return code in C even if you're certain the call will succeed: Because sometimes shit happens, and robust code demands that you fail gracefully when shit happens. Your catch code isn't for "oh, that didn't didn't work, let's try this", it's for "something happened, that, if I don't deal with it somehow, will crash my program." It's for "I'm bailing out because there's no reasonable way for me to continue." That programmers misuse Exceptions is an observation about programmers, not an indictment of the architectural reasons to use them.
... the satellite sent "Thank you for not including an odor sensor in my analytics package."
However, this remains true: every /. poster who disagrees with you, is like Hitler.
Yes, it is an operating system--it uses a minimal C/x86 for interrupt dispatch, C++ for a HAL, and then loads a microkernel written in an extension of C#, with the extensions providing the process model. On top of that the rest of the OS is built. Singularity, like Plan 9, is a research OS to demonstrate (among other things) a process model that's provably secure.
The wikipedia entry is fine, and what I'm describing is what the entry has under "Security Design".
Singularity was basically a demonstrator for a particular process model that took full advantage of the kind of memory isolation that's possible in managed environments. It wasn't trying to prove that you could write an OS in C#, it was trying to (and did) prove that bringing the "managed" level down as low as possible, the basic process model could be provably secure (i.e., it's impossible to insecurely cross process boundaries).
It's a neat project that I hope continues since it wasn't trying to show off so much as demonstrate what should be possible in any language/VM.
That their test scores for computer literacy are higher in classrooms where they're actually using computers, rather than cardboard boxes with keyboards drawn on them.
They have the vast majority of core PHP functions implemented in JavaScript.
I just threw up in my mouth.
It's been working for the oil companies for decades now, hasn't it?
He didn't refer to us as "Soviet Canuckistan". It gets better.
Yeah, not really.
It's not that people in BC would vote like Ontario does, it's that Ontario has a huge influence in federal elections. If you're watching returns and see that party X has basically won already, when you're in favour of party Y, then a lot of people just won't bother voting for Y because it makes no difference.
As a practical matter, this is big because Canada ties public funding of parties to popular vote share in federal elections: If your party wins 12% of the vote, you get 12% of the pie when the public money comes out. Depressing turnout for losing candidates in western provinces serves to cut money from them in the next election, creating lock-in for the party that wins Ontario.
It's a law from before daily tracking polls or the Internet (or even timeshifted TV channels from other regions).
I note that in the most recent federal election, polling was not any kind of a sufficient guide to who would win what. We have a 'first past the post system': how accurate polling translates to actual seat counts is quite difficult, and certainly not a useful guide to voters.
Seriously, it's not a huge burden to not see results until all the polls close.
Your reading comprehension needs work.
You're right: your "justice" analogy is terrible.
There's a difference between not allowing people to see the data (which was not the case), and not gift wrapping it for people who can't and won't actually make use of it, who are demanding it only because the demand itself seems to demonstrate some flaw in the conclusions of people who actually work with it.
http://www.conservapedia.com/Conservapedia:Lenski_dialog. Read the talk page as well for an illuminating look at how a challenger of evolution simply won't wrap his head around the fact that the data shows what it shows, and doesn't even really know what he's asking for when he repeatedly demands the "raw data".
An excessive insistence on access to the "raw data" is a stalling tactic by climate deniers to tie up climate researchers in meaningless paperwork. People like yourself are useful idiots for those deniers.
The data was always widely available to any climatologist who wanted it. "Climategate" happened just because of the release of a bunch of emails between a wide variety of people who were already working with the data. It just wasn't conveniently available to people with little familiarity with climate science and little ability to do meaningful work with the data. Now it is. And now the climate deniers will find some other bogus point to harp on to delay making any policy changes based on the already voluminous data that shows climate change is real and man-made.
This isn't about transparency. This is about intellectual piety being manipulated for political purposes.