Because a single database, once compromised, would compromise information for all fifty states.
Because my life history shouldn't be available to someone at the touch of a button.
Because my movements should not be monitored by my government. That is a presumption of my guilt. And a presumption of guilt on the part of my government is in itself a curtailment of my rights.
> But I go through this argument with my colleagues, who say that using short, descriptive variable names 'should' be enough as long as the code is well-organized.
Yeah, it should be enough, so long as you're writing a very well known algorithm. Like, say, heapsort. Small functions with no side effects, good variable names and scopes as limited as is reasonable for each variable. I mean, technically, the code tells you exactly what the code does.
Sheesh. Comments important. How important they are varies with the algorithms you're implementing. But they're important. Clear code with less commenting may be more valuable than complex code with more commenting. That's hard to call. But in the end, you have to know what code says. And if it's clear enough from the code, fine, then the code IS your comment. But that's not a safe habit to fall into, because then you have the mentality that code is always enough for a comment. This gets you into trouble. (Big trouble.) See any piece of complex C code. =)
More likely server admin not-thinking-ness, or not-understanding-the-point-of-ttl'ness.
DNS TTL's not that complicated, but then, DNS in general isn't that complicated and doesn't take that much effort to administer (depending on your load and set-up, of course. But certainly, DNS you are providing to clients, rather than the DNS you're setting up for your own domain, is practically ready-to-go-out-of-the-box.) My guess would be people simply play with/pick the numbers without much thought, possibly during set-up or when "tweaking," or to deal with one-time problems that crop up, and don't really think about all the ramifications of it, and/or forget to change it back.
I2 wasn't started because it was a research network... I2 was started because it was fast and cool and sounded that way on grant proposals.
Which begs the question... does piracy subvert the coolness of the network? Or does piracy enhance the coolness of the network?
Of course, the answer to that depends completely on where you've been indoctrinated, and if you're currently in a rebellion-against-indoctrination or embrace-the-indoctrination mood.
Actually, Not to go into the long history, but I've always thought Voyager was largely to blame for the downfall of the franchise. No, no, let me explain (briefly):
TNG - great, largely episodic, we got used to 2-parters, though.
DS9 - great, took a while to really get on its feet. It was competing with B5, which showed us that Yes, Story arcs longer than two episodes can work in sci-fi. It also gained its own momentum, shifting away from a purely episodic series into an ongoing bit of war. The war was the beginning of the end- they did it well enough, but it was responsible for trek getting away from being about ideas, and getting towards being about shooting the funny sci-fi weapons. When Voyager rolled around, this mentality had invaded the minds of the writers, and consistency had gone completely out the window.
Voyager really showed a lack of artistic understanding. They had one or two good actors, and I'll admit that for some of them I don't know if its the actor or the character that was bad- but for the most part, it lacked quality. The show got away from its core demographic and wound up with a much more transitory audience. So when Enterprise came along and actually had some decent writing again, much of the franchise audience was gone, and it had to start from scratch.
The most glaring example of artistic failure in Voy is, of course, the borg. There are others, but the power of the borg as an evil was in their evil, not in their weapons. When the ratings drooped, Voyager brought out the borg. It effectively transformed them from an unknowable menace that was so different from humanity that it was practically pure evil, to a bunch of pansy-ass default bad guys that drove around in blocks and spheres.
This sort of thing is, in the long run, going to save a great deal of time. Countless thousands of man-hours saved in essay grading for everything from weekly papers to standardized tests. But the cost associated with it is pretty high: such a system is inevitably going to grade for conformity.
Already, there is a great deal of belief that "this is the way x must be done," not because x is any better than y or z, but because it is written. The tools and opinions and beliefs that are rare, though they may be more valuable or better-written than those that are standard and conformist, will inevitably receive poorer scores in such systems.
That being said, they often receive poorer scores anyway. But it's a question of replacing a human grader, that may be small-minded or large-minded, with a computerized grader, that is quantifiably small-minded.
No doubt there will be cries for each. "Little Johny's smarter than your computer thinks," and "The Computer knows that Little Johnny is smarter than you think."
Oh wait, I mentioned "real life" and "party" on slashdot in the same sentence. Don't I get shot now, or something?
In truth, I suspect we'll find an equilibrium. Computers evolved with monitors instead of speakers that echoed recorded text because humans are designed to gather more video than audio. I suspect, with IM, we'll find some range of conversational styles develops, with throughput and comfort warring with one another.
Language does change, of course, in response to new pressures, technologies, and environments. But there's also an advantage to having a language that is, in many ways, both constant and common. For one thing, language evolves differently in different environments - lacking rules to standard written english, or allowing them to migrate too far according to the dynamic in a particular environment or socioeconomic class results in both a limitation on personal mobility and a limitation on ability to effectively communicate.
Language will inevitably be changed by the way that we communicate, but the hope is that that will not make the great works of the past inaccessible, and that it will not have a negative influence on existing patterns of communication. The more the language changes, the less accessible are Beowulf (already pretty far-gone,) Chaucer, Milton, and even Shakespeare.
The jokes in the corridors about the one-button nature of the apple mouse are certainly many, but I've also heard some interesting discussion that it has a positive influence on UI design. Notably, because you're limiting the default user inputs to one button, you're requiring designers to think meaningfully about what the most important features are, and to put them someplace readily accessible. In other words, it makes it less tempting to just pour more and more "features" into the right-mouse-button menu.
Illustrate the principles behind debugging. Bring in a fellow software engineer and hit him with a bat until he does what you want him to do. Every once in a while, pause and look at him closely. Appear perplexed at first, but then let a look of realization and amazement come into your eyes, tap him lightly with the bat in four places, and have him hum nicely before being replaced by a younger software engineer that has to go through the whole process all over again.
Oh, come on, Buckaroo Banzai was a hard-rocking particle physicist neurosurgeon who saved the world from invaders from the 8th dimension.
Mmmm... come to think of it, maybe they're both fictional. Say, I wonder if a fictional character's ever been confirmed by the senate before...
There's been a lot of discussion about this...
on
Women Leaving I.T.
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· Score: 1
in acadamia, as various schools try to pump up the number of women in computer science. As I recall, they found that men were likely to go into Comp Sci because they were interested in it and/or enjoyed it, whereas women were more likely to go into it for practical reasons. For example, the number of women that take CS courses because it will help them in whatever other discipline they are in was pretty high.
There's also the fact that a great preponderance of CS profs are male. Now, I'm hardly a fan of sexism (otherwise called affirmative action by gender) in the professor selection process, but the likelihood of women going on to take more advanced CS courses was, if I recall correctly, heavily correlated with whether men or women taught their intro class. Of course, that's based on statistics at one institution, so it's probably a bit more complicated than that, but my bet would be there's still some correlation. I have no idea how the gender breakdown of intro course profs has shifted over the last few years, though.
I don't know that it's a question of not differentiating between ethics and rules. In this particular case, it seems that there's an ethical violation, although I'd consider it fairly small. The physical analogue for me is: one person jimmies a window at the admissions office, sneaks in, and grabs a look at his file. Along the way, he shows a few hundred people how to jimmy the window. Then a lot of them do, either out of curiosity to see if they got in, or curiosity to see if the window will open that easily, or any other reason. Is it unethical? Yeah. Is it unethical on a scale that means you should no longer be accepted to the school? Probably not. A stern talking to, maybe a fine.
That being said, colleges, as a general rule, don't teach ethics. There's a lot of dissemination of political views in the classrooms, for good and evil. Oh, they generally punish you if you plagiarize and they catch you, either by suspending or expelling you. But ethics? Personal values? For the most part, these are things you have before you go, or you'll never pick them up at school. And for the degree that they're refined, that's mostly something that's done as a function of your peer group, rather than your institution.
1) WiFi/Net access is a luxury. It is not a basic utility and should not be considered one. The availability of massive quantities of information to the public might be in the general interest, but they can go to a library.
2) Net access is becoming a utility. It is as necessary to the everyday life of the average american as running water and electricity. Remember, we started out without them. At what point does Net Access work that way? We're not quite at that debate yet. We probably won't be there for a while, although maybe it'll be considered if and when somebody establishes a monopoly.
3) Incentive. Are communities providing free wifi to encourage businesses to move in/stay local? This seems the best reason to do it. Although it might be better addressed by providing a tax incentive to businesses to provide indoor coverage than by a government-controlled system that's going to be inefficiently managed. [As a side-note, are these systems going to remain as open as they are after the first few major hacks from such points? What about liability for the Wireless Access provider? Does he have any responsibility to be sure his hardware isn't being used for malicious purposes, or is it like a payphone in the back of your business?]
> the source and object code of all electronic voting machines to be open and readable by the public.
Heh... requiring object code to be readable by the public, now there's a whole new challenge. Let's add another three years to high school and cut english altogether. Either that or come up with turing complete object code that was also gramatically correct. And, say, in rhyming iambic pentameter for fun.
> Congress was going to get involved by investigating the scandal and that there was a large class action lawsuit against the private firm.
Wonderful timing on the new legislation to limit class action lawsuits, isn't it? Not that class action lawsuits are good... they tend to line the lawyers' pockets rather than helping the people that were hurt. But they do have that whole punishment aspect. Maybe checkpoint should be required to publish the SSNs of their board of directors on the web. Just for an hour.
No, maybe not that. But they should hardly get away scott-free. Maybe a year's profits should go to fight identity theft. Or some such. Ah, well.
When I was in Canada last, I noticed google automatically redirected you to Google.ca, presumably based on my ISP.
That being said, I didn't care enough at the time to try to get around it, so google.com may have been perfectly available.
Interesting... and did I say that the government should regulate it? No, you leapt to a conclusion. I said a company should be responsible. Responsibility isn't an inherently legislated idea, and there is a difference between legal liability and responsibility. Because you can do a thing does not mean that you should do a thing. The first amendment gives me the right to say a lot of things, and I'll go a long ways to defend it. But that doesn't mean that a lot of those things wouldn't be wrong to say. You need only look to the hate-mongers of the world to see that.
A difference exists between what is regulated and what is right. And a company, like an individual, should be responsible in its actions. Not because its feet will be held to the fire by government or the public, though in some cases they will be, but because it is the right thing to do. Living in a free society, by some standards, means that there are a lot of things that we can do- but we don't just do what we can do, we do what we should do. There is a distinction.
I'm not claiming the kid's not responsible for his actions - I'm claiming the company should be responsible for theirs too. If I train someone to kill, I'm responsible for that. If I teach someone that they'll get rewarded for stealing cars and killing commuters or pedestrians, I'm responsible for that too. If I teach a man to do wrong, I have done wrong myself. Not the wrong that he does - I did not shoot a man, or rob a bank, or do whatever it is that I have taught or encouraged him to do. But the act of encouraging him to do wrong, that act is wrong too.
War movies generally had a strong sense of right and wrong attached to them, with the belief that the side you're following is doing right. It's hardly the same as Grand Theft Auto.
Of course the parents are responsible, but that doesn't mean that they're the only ones that are. A company should be responsible for the content of the product that they're marketing.
It's easy to forget that there are real people whose dreams are being taken advantage of here. Not the publish america people- but their authors. Some of the rationalizations they come up with to explain the sting:
Slashdot Mirror
Am I the only one that saw the headline and thought of a new FBI internet tap with a friendly plant-like image?
Because a single database, once compromised, would compromise information for all fifty states.
Because my life history shouldn't be available to someone at the touch of a button.
Because my movements should not be monitored by my government. That is a presumption of my guilt. And a presumption of guilt on the part of my government is in itself a curtailment of my rights.
'nuff said.
> But I go through this argument with my colleagues, who say that using short, descriptive variable names 'should' be enough as long as the code is well-organized.
Yeah, it should be enough, so long as you're writing a very well known algorithm. Like, say, heapsort. Small functions with no side effects, good variable names and scopes as limited as is reasonable for each variable. I mean, technically, the code tells you exactly what the code does.
Sheesh. Comments important. How important they are varies with the algorithms you're implementing. But they're important. Clear code with less commenting may be more valuable than complex code with more commenting. That's hard to call. But in the end, you have to know what code says. And if it's clear enough from the code, fine, then the code IS your comment. But that's not a safe habit to fall into, because then you have the mentality that code is always enough for a comment. This gets you into trouble. (Big trouble.) See any piece of complex C code. =)
> Scientists at Ohio State University have taken a step toward the development of quantum computers by making tiny holes that contain nothing at all
In related news, Ohio State University has recieved research funding from the NSA to perform Ear Exams on all members of Congress twice a year...
More likely server admin not-thinking-ness, or not-understanding-the-point-of-ttl'ness.
DNS TTL's not that complicated, but then, DNS in general isn't that complicated and doesn't take that much effort to administer (depending on your load and set-up, of course. But certainly, DNS you are providing to clients, rather than the DNS you're setting up for your own domain, is practically ready-to-go-out-of-the-box.) My guess would be people simply play with/pick the numbers without much thought, possibly during set-up or when "tweaking," or to deal with one-time problems that crop up, and don't really think about all the ramifications of it, and/or forget to change it back.
I2 wasn't started because it was a research network... I2 was started because it was fast and cool and sounded that way on grant proposals.
Which begs the question... does piracy subvert the coolness of the network? Or does piracy enhance the coolness of the network?
Of course, the answer to that depends completely on where you've been indoctrinated, and if you're currently in a rebellion-against-indoctrination or embrace-the-indoctrination mood.
> After TOS, TNG, DS9, and Voyager,
*coughs pointedly*
Actually, Not to go into the long history, but I've always thought Voyager was largely to blame for the downfall of the franchise. No, no, let me explain (briefly):
TNG - great, largely episodic, we got used to 2-parters, though.
DS9 - great, took a while to really get on its feet. It was competing with B5, which showed us that Yes, Story arcs longer than two episodes can work in sci-fi. It also gained its own momentum, shifting away from a purely episodic series into an ongoing bit of war. The war was the beginning of the end- they did it well enough, but it was responsible for trek getting away from being about ideas, and getting towards being about shooting the funny sci-fi weapons. When Voyager rolled around, this mentality had invaded the minds of the writers, and consistency had gone completely out the window.
Voyager really showed a lack of artistic understanding. They had one or two good actors, and I'll admit that for some of them I don't know if its the actor or the character that was bad- but for the most part, it lacked quality. The show got away from its core demographic and wound up with a much more transitory audience. So when Enterprise came along and actually had some decent writing again, much of the franchise audience was gone, and it had to start from scratch.
The most glaring example of artistic failure in Voy is, of course, the borg. There are others, but the power of the borg as an evil was in their evil, not in their weapons. When the ratings drooped, Voyager brought out the borg. It effectively transformed them from an unknowable menace that was so different from humanity that it was practically pure evil, to a bunch of pansy-ass default bad guys that drove around in blocks and spheres.
This sort of thing is, in the long run, going to save a great deal of time. Countless thousands of man-hours saved in essay grading for everything from weekly papers to standardized tests. But the cost associated with it is pretty high: such a system is inevitably going to grade for conformity.
Already, there is a great deal of belief that "this is the way x must be done," not because x is any better than y or z, but because it is written. The tools and opinions and beliefs that are rare, though they may be more valuable or better-written than those that are standard and conformist, will inevitably receive poorer scores in such systems.
That being said, they often receive poorer scores anyway. But it's a question of replacing a human grader, that may be small-minded or large-minded, with a computerized grader, that is quantifiably small-minded.
No doubt there will be cries for each. "Little Johny's smarter than your computer thinks," and "The Computer knows that Little Johnny is smarter than you think."
Prepare for a new generation of controversy...
In real life, we call it a "party."
Oh wait, I mentioned "real life" and "party" on slashdot in the same sentence. Don't I get shot now, or something?
In truth, I suspect we'll find an equilibrium. Computers evolved with monitors instead of speakers that echoed recorded text because humans are designed to gather more video than audio. I suspect, with IM, we'll find some range of conversational styles develops, with throughput and comfort warring with one another.
Language does change, of course, in response to new pressures, technologies, and environments. But there's also an advantage to having a language that is, in many ways, both constant and common. For one thing, language evolves differently in different environments - lacking rules to standard written english, or allowing them to migrate too far according to the dynamic in a particular environment or socioeconomic class results in both a limitation on personal mobility and a limitation on ability to effectively communicate.
Language will inevitably be changed by the way that we communicate, but the hope is that that will not make the great works of the past inaccessible, and that it will not have a negative influence on existing patterns of communication. The more the language changes, the less accessible are Beowulf (already pretty far-gone,) Chaucer, Milton, and even Shakespeare.
The jokes in the corridors about the one-button nature of the apple mouse are certainly many, but I've also heard some interesting discussion that it has a positive influence on UI design. Notably, because you're limiting the default user inputs to one button, you're requiring designers to think meaningfully about what the most important features are, and to put them someplace readily accessible. In other words, it makes it less tempting to just pour more and more "features" into the right-mouse-button menu.
Illustrate the principles behind debugging. Bring in a fellow software engineer and hit him with a bat until he does what you want him to do. Every once in a while, pause and look at him closely. Appear perplexed at first, but then let a look of realization and amazement come into your eyes, tap him lightly with the bat in four places, and have him hum nicely before being replaced by a younger software engineer that has to go through the whole process all over again.
Oh, come on, Buckaroo Banzai was a hard-rocking particle physicist neurosurgeon who saved the world from invaders from the 8th dimension.
Mmmm... come to think of it, maybe they're both fictional. Say, I wonder if a fictional character's ever been confirmed by the senate before...
in acadamia, as various schools try to pump up the number of women in computer science. As I recall, they found that men were likely to go into Comp Sci because they were interested in it and/or enjoyed it, whereas women were more likely to go into it for practical reasons. For example, the number of women that take CS courses because it will help them in whatever other discipline they are in was pretty high. There's also the fact that a great preponderance of CS profs are male. Now, I'm hardly a fan of sexism (otherwise called affirmative action by gender) in the professor selection process, but the likelihood of women going on to take more advanced CS courses was, if I recall correctly, heavily correlated with whether men or women taught their intro class. Of course, that's based on statistics at one institution, so it's probably a bit more complicated than that, but my bet would be there's still some correlation. I have no idea how the gender breakdown of intro course profs has shifted over the last few years, though.
Oh, yes, I can see how it's a fairness issue. It has nothing to do with a state budget issue. It's completely about fairness.
Say, we should find the highest sales tax in the country and raise the rest of the country's sales tax to that level too. It's only fair.
I don't know that it's a question of not differentiating between ethics and rules. In this particular case, it seems that there's an ethical violation, although I'd consider it fairly small. The physical analogue for me is: one person jimmies a window at the admissions office, sneaks in, and grabs a look at his file. Along the way, he shows a few hundred people how to jimmy the window. Then a lot of them do, either out of curiosity to see if they got in, or curiosity to see if the window will open that easily, or any other reason. Is it unethical? Yeah. Is it unethical on a scale that means you should no longer be accepted to the school? Probably not. A stern talking to, maybe a fine.
That being said, colleges, as a general rule, don't teach ethics. There's a lot of dissemination of political views in the classrooms, for good and evil. Oh, they generally punish you if you plagiarize and they catch you, either by suspending or expelling you. But ethics? Personal values? For the most part, these are things you have before you go, or you'll never pick them up at school. And for the degree that they're refined, that's mostly something that's done as a function of your peer group, rather than your institution.
It seems that there are three obvious sides here-
1) WiFi/Net access is a luxury. It is not a basic utility and should not be considered one. The availability of massive quantities of information to the public might be in the general interest, but they can go to a library.
2) Net access is becoming a utility. It is as necessary to the everyday life of the average american as running water and electricity. Remember, we started out without them. At what point does Net Access work that way? We're not quite at that debate yet. We probably won't be there for a while, although maybe it'll be considered if and when somebody establishes a monopoly.
3) Incentive. Are communities providing free wifi to encourage businesses to move in/stay local? This seems the best reason to do it. Although it might be better addressed by providing a tax incentive to businesses to provide indoor coverage than by a government-controlled system that's going to be inefficiently managed. [As a side-note, are these systems going to remain as open as they are after the first few major hacks from such points? What about liability for the Wireless Access provider? Does he have any responsibility to be sure his hardware isn't being used for malicious purposes, or is it like a payphone in the back of your business?]
Mmmm... just a few uninformed thoughts.
> the source and object code of all electronic voting machines to be open and readable by the public.
Heh... requiring object code to be readable by the public, now there's a whole new challenge. Let's add another three years to high school and cut english altogether. Either that or come up with turing complete object code that was also gramatically correct. And, say, in rhyming iambic pentameter for fun.> Congress was going to get involved by investigating the scandal and that there was a large class action lawsuit against the private firm.
Wonderful timing on the new legislation to limit class action lawsuits, isn't it? Not that class action lawsuits are good... they tend to line the lawyers' pockets rather than helping the people that were hurt. But they do have that whole punishment aspect. Maybe checkpoint should be required to publish the SSNs of their board of directors on the web. Just for an hour.
No, maybe not that. But they should hardly get away scott-free. Maybe a year's profits should go to fight identity theft. Or some such. Ah, well.
When I was in Canada last, I noticed google automatically redirected you to Google.ca, presumably based on my ISP. That being said, I didn't care enough at the time to try to get around it, so google.com may have been perfectly available.
Interesting... and did I say that the government should regulate it? No, you leapt to a conclusion. I said a company should be responsible. Responsibility isn't an inherently legislated idea, and there is a difference between legal liability and responsibility. Because you can do a thing does not mean that you should do a thing. The first amendment gives me the right to say a lot of things, and I'll go a long ways to defend it. But that doesn't mean that a lot of those things wouldn't be wrong to say. You need only look to the hate-mongers of the world to see that. A difference exists between what is regulated and what is right. And a company, like an individual, should be responsible in its actions. Not because its feet will be held to the fire by government or the public, though in some cases they will be, but because it is the right thing to do. Living in a free society, by some standards, means that there are a lot of things that we can do- but we don't just do what we can do, we do what we should do. There is a distinction.
I'm not claiming the kid's not responsible for his actions - I'm claiming the company should be responsible for theirs too. If I train someone to kill, I'm responsible for that. If I teach someone that they'll get rewarded for stealing cars and killing commuters or pedestrians, I'm responsible for that too. If I teach a man to do wrong, I have done wrong myself. Not the wrong that he does - I did not shoot a man, or rob a bank, or do whatever it is that I have taught or encouraged him to do. But the act of encouraging him to do wrong, that act is wrong too.
War movies generally had a strong sense of right and wrong attached to them, with the belief that the side you're following is doing right. It's hardly the same as Grand Theft Auto. Of course the parents are responsible, but that doesn't mean that they're the only ones that are. A company should be responsible for the content of the product that they're marketing.
It's easy to forget that there are real people whose dreams are being taken advantage of here. Not the publish america people- but their authors. Some of the rationalizations they come up with to explain the sting:
http://www.publishamerica.com/cgi-bin/pamessagebo