Why on earth would I do that? I already know that there is no crypto technology that could be associated with a scanned ballot that would actually be secure against the attack I just described. That was my point.
Bush didn't count the war effort in the budget deficit, so when Obama updated the numbers to reflect reality, the hit showed up on his balance sheet. Similarly, Bush presided over the economy that created the need for deficit spending, but that shows up on Obama's balance sheet. You don't blame the CEO you hire to fix a failing company for the failures of his or her predecessor, even if it takes a while to turn the beast around.
Also, in order to sign a ballot you have to physically handle it, which means your fingerprints will be all over it. And you have to sign it with a physical pen. A suspect ballot should yield a lot of information to a forensic analysis.
How would that work? Suppose I get a ballot, and scan it, and that scan gets out. The "cryptographic signature" will be on every copy of the scan. How will they know which one is mine? I think in this case, if what you suggest were true, my vote would either not be counted, or would be swamped by all the hacked copies. Either way, I lose.
Cryptography isn't a magic want that you can wave over a security problem to make it go away. It's a useful tool, but this is a _really_ hard problem, and what's been proposed here is not in any way secure.
The NAACP story looks manufactured. It's only about twelve hours old. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, is reported about it once it's been properly investigated. I suspect that there will be no followups on the several dozen right-wing blogs that are currently the _only_ source for this story.
No, it's like letting people control the throttle in their car by reaching down into the footwell and tugging on the cable, rather than using a gas pedal.
Yes, representatives should do this. However, we have to hold their feet to the fire, or they won't. Currently, we are doing a really crappy job of holding their feet to the fire, and we're seeing the unfortunate results in stupid laws like the current software patent regime.
This would be true if there was limitless work for lawyers, and they could simply choose the most lucrative work. But that's not the case—lawyers, like contractors in any industry whose opportunities are affected by the laws the government writes, have a vested interest in supporting laws that increase demand for their work. Diamond v. Diehr could as easily have been called the Legal Profession Full Employment Act of 1981.
What kind of feed? If you've been leaving chicken feed, I doubt it'll get much traction. And you say you left it back at Dell, System 76, and so on, but where? Do they even know you left them a bribe? Maybe they just found some chicken feed and went "what? why is there chicken feed all over my desk?"
Buy a Nexus 10, install Ubuntu on it, and use an external keyboard. Bonus: you can use it in portrait mode for hacking code, and landscape mode for watching movies. Now if only they'd release the Nexus 13...
Actually, the reason I bought a glossy display instead of matte is that I enjoy chewing cud, and have a fuzzy coat. The guy was just being literal. Deal with it.
(And may I say that you humans really ought to think about those of us of the cloven-hoofed persuasion when designing keyboards? Do you have any _idea_ how hard it is to type on these things without articulable fingers?)
That doesn't really help. It helps with indentation, in that you can keep indenting and having lines of code that are the right width. But it doesn't actually get _more code on the screen_ in a useful way, because once the actual line of text, sans indentation, gets too wide, it's hard to grok it at a glance. What gets more code usefully on the screen is more vertical lines of resolution. However, there's a limit to this—if I turn my 1080p display on its side, I can get a really huge number of lines of code on the screen, but it doesn't actually improve things, because now the amount of screen that's at the ergonomically good position hasn't really changed, but there's a lot of screen above and below that. So I wind up wanting the code I'm actually looking at centered around the ideal height, and don't benefit that much from the extra lines of code.
The real solution to this is to go back to 80x25 screens, and better short-term memory. You think I'm joking, but I'm not.
By downtime I mean that when you are doing IT, sometimes you're in a crunch, and sometimes you aren't. When you aren't, there's a lot of across-the-cubicle-wall chatter, a lot of surfing oh, say, slashdot, and a lot of other stuff like that. During a big crunch you are constantly working, either fighting fires or grinding on a big project. I guess there are IT jobs where this is the case _all_ the time, but that's not normal, and for a reason—it's very hard to maintain that pace continuously without periods of slack; organizations that are tuned to keep things at that level of intensity either burn out their employees with great frequency, or simply fail to achieve their goals.
As for not being an American, congratulations. The salaries you're reporting sound pretty decent. But it sounds like you think they should be cut, because they aren't "working hard enough" to merit that kind of pay. So essentially your thesis is that the more money you earn, the more your life should suck; if someone's life doesn't suck as much as yours, they should be paid less. Do I really need to spell out how dumb this argument is?
The first comment I clicked on had been moderated -1, Troll, which indicates that several people with mod points thought it was a troll. You're right that it could be an opinion that you formed independently, that just seemed trollish to a few moderators. I called your "opinions" talking points because they are Republican talking points. Maybe you arrived at them independently, without listening to any Republicans, and without watching Fox News. But how would I know that?
So your point is that posts that were (IMHO rightly) modded "Troll" or "Flamebait" serve as proof that you genuinely hold these opinions, and that they are not "talking points?" That's bogus. Just because you think they are opinions that you arrived at independently, that doesn't mean that they aren't talking points that you've internalized and decided are your "opinions." That's how opinions form, in the absence of critical thought. That's not to say that you didn't critically think out these opinions; my point is simply that the fact that you can rant at length about your opinions doesn't mean that they aren't talking points.
There are some fundamental misunderstandings in here. First of all, what it means for the young to support you in your retirement is that they will be doing the work that puts food on your table, gas in your car, and so on. You will not. How this gets paid for is an interesting discussion to have, but if it gets paid for at all, they will be doing the work. So it's important that they be able to do the work.
As to your claim that the system isn't sustainable, this is typical poor-mouthing, and it's nonsense. The United States is a very wealthy nation, and we very definitely have the ability to pay for a modest retirement for every citizen. The reason we have such a big deficit is because we are not levying taxes, not because we are poor. Closing the social security gap is a simple matter of raising the self-employment tax cutoff up to $250k; this would have a modest impact on high-income Americans, no impact on low-income and middle-class Americans, and would be quite fair, given the problems with income distribution that you've alluded to.
What you've repeated above is a series of talking points that are used to perpetuate the current income disparity and taxation disparity in our country. It isn't true, and it's actively harmful to our country. It pains me to see people who should know better repeating this propaganda as if it were true.
Maybe. If you can scrape together the downpayment while renting. I had a house in San Francisco back when prices were about half what they are now, and paying the mortgage, taxes and insurance was pretty painful. That was on $100k/year. I guess on $160k/year you could do it, but it wouldn't be a comfortable, carefree living—you'd be living on the edge, wondering when your next pay cut would drive you over it.
Yeah, I pay taxes too, and I'm not a teacher. And yes, I think people who want to cut teachers' salaries to the bone are jerks and skinflints. These kids are going to be supporting you in your retirement. You need them to get a decent education. It's no joke. You are the evil boss here—you see them as a cost center, not a profit center, and so you want to minimize the cost, regardless of the long-term results. And you'll be whining twenty years down the road when there's nobody qualified to provide your health care, and nobody fixing the roads, and all the other things you decided were too expensive to fund with your precious tax money.
Argument by anecdote. Whatever. The teachers I know do spend time in the summer on professional development, but that's probably because I live in a progressive state where the state is willing to pay for things like that. If you live in a state where they try to milk the teachers for as little money as possible, it wouldn't surprise me if after a while they stop caring and just spend the summer in the garden.
In the IT world, you probably expect to get paid a decent salary, and if you're like most IT people, you have on times and off times, and during the off times you do a lot of stuff that would be hard to characterize as "work." Teachers are on every day they are in class, and they are on whenever they are grading papers. There are no slack times.
You're kidding, right? The evil capitalist who is oppressing them is you, demanding that teachers do incredibly hard work for crappy benefits and crappy pay. Just because someone is working a government job doesn't mean that there's no price pressure. The price pressure is actually worse, because jerks like you think it's perfectly fine to just keep cutting their pay year after year, and moreover think that they shouldn't be entitled to complain when you do.
Plus there's the whole teacher's strike in Chicago that's fresh in peoples' memory. And all the incredibly one-sided reporting that was done on it, of course...
Slashdot Mirror
Why on earth would I do that? I already know that there is no crypto technology that could be associated with a scanned ballot that would actually be secure against the attack I just described. That was my point.
Bush didn't count the war effort in the budget deficit, so when Obama updated the numbers to reflect reality, the hit showed up on his balance sheet. Similarly, Bush presided over the economy that created the need for deficit spending, but that shows up on Obama's balance sheet. You don't blame the CEO you hire to fix a failing company for the failures of his or her predecessor, even if it takes a while to turn the beast around.
Also, in order to sign a ballot you have to physically handle it, which means your fingerprints will be all over it. And you have to sign it with a physical pen. A suspect ballot should yield a lot of information to a forensic analysis.
How would that work? Suppose I get a ballot, and scan it, and that scan gets out. The "cryptographic signature" will be on every copy of the scan. How will they know which one is mine? I think in this case, if what you suggest were true, my vote would either not be counted, or would be swamped by all the hacked copies. Either way, I lose.
Cryptography isn't a magic want that you can wave over a security problem to make it go away. It's a useful tool, but this is a _really_ hard problem, and what's been proposed here is not in any way secure.
The NAACP story looks manufactured. It's only about twelve hours old. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, is reported about it once it's been properly investigated. I suspect that there will be no followups on the several dozen right-wing blogs that are currently the _only_ source for this story.
No, it's like letting people control the throttle in their car by reaching down into the footwell and tugging on the cable, rather than using a gas pedal.
Yes, representatives should do this. However, we have to hold their feet to the fire, or they won't. Currently, we are doing a really crappy job of holding their feet to the fire, and we're seeing the unfortunate results in stupid laws like the current software patent regime.
This would be true if there was limitless work for lawyers, and they could simply choose the most lucrative work. But that's not the case—lawyers, like contractors in any industry whose opportunities are affected by the laws the government writes, have a vested interest in supporting laws that increase demand for their work. Diamond v. Diehr could as easily have been called the Legal Profession Full Employment Act of 1981.
What kind of feed? If you've been leaving chicken feed, I doubt it'll get much traction. And you say you left it back at Dell, System 76, and so on, but where? Do they even know you left them a bribe? Maybe they just found some chicken feed and went "what? why is there chicken feed all over my desk?"
Buy a Nexus 10, install Ubuntu on it, and use an external keyboard. Bonus: you can use it in portrait mode for hacking code, and landscape mode for watching movies. Now if only they'd release the Nexus 13...
Actually, the reason I bought a glossy display instead of matte is that I enjoy chewing cud, and have a fuzzy coat. The guy was just being literal. Deal with it.
(And may I say that you humans really ought to think about those of us of the cloven-hoofed persuasion when designing keyboards? Do you have any _idea_ how hard it is to type on these things without articulable fingers?)
How about 1440x1920? Wouldn't that be sweet? Maybe with a butterfly keyboard?
That doesn't really help. It helps with indentation, in that you can keep indenting and having lines of code that are the right width. But it doesn't actually get _more code on the screen_ in a useful way, because once the actual line of text, sans indentation, gets too wide, it's hard to grok it at a glance. What gets more code usefully on the screen is more vertical lines of resolution. However, there's a limit to this—if I turn my 1080p display on its side, I can get a really huge number of lines of code on the screen, but it doesn't actually improve things, because now the amount of screen that's at the ergonomically good position hasn't really changed, but there's a lot of screen above and below that. So I wind up wanting the code I'm actually looking at centered around the ideal height, and don't benefit that much from the extra lines of code.
The real solution to this is to go back to 80x25 screens, and better short-term memory. You think I'm joking, but I'm not.
Feh, only in pesky parts of the world with 24-hour days instead of sensible 20-hour days. :)
FTFY.
By downtime I mean that when you are doing IT, sometimes you're in a crunch, and sometimes you aren't. When you aren't, there's a lot of across-the-cubicle-wall chatter, a lot of surfing oh, say, slashdot, and a lot of other stuff like that. During a big crunch you are constantly working, either fighting fires or grinding on a big project. I guess there are IT jobs where this is the case _all_ the time, but that's not normal, and for a reason—it's very hard to maintain that pace continuously without periods of slack; organizations that are tuned to keep things at that level of intensity either burn out their employees with great frequency, or simply fail to achieve their goals.
As for not being an American, congratulations. The salaries you're reporting sound pretty decent. But it sounds like you think they should be cut, because they aren't "working hard enough" to merit that kind of pay. So essentially your thesis is that the more money you earn, the more your life should suck; if someone's life doesn't suck as much as yours, they should be paid less. Do I really need to spell out how dumb this argument is?
The first comment I clicked on had been moderated -1, Troll, which indicates that several people with mod points thought it was a troll. You're right that it could be an opinion that you formed independently, that just seemed trollish to a few moderators. I called your "opinions" talking points because they are Republican talking points. Maybe you arrived at them independently, without listening to any Republicans, and without watching Fox News. But how would I know that?
So your point is that posts that were (IMHO rightly) modded "Troll" or "Flamebait" serve as proof that you genuinely hold these opinions, and that they are not "talking points?" That's bogus. Just because you think they are opinions that you arrived at independently, that doesn't mean that they aren't talking points that you've internalized and decided are your "opinions." That's how opinions form, in the absence of critical thought. That's not to say that you didn't critically think out these opinions; my point is simply that the fact that you can rant at length about your opinions doesn't mean that they aren't talking points.
There are some fundamental misunderstandings in here. First of all, what it means for the young to support you in your retirement is that they will be doing the work that puts food on your table, gas in your car, and so on. You will not. How this gets paid for is an interesting discussion to have, but if it gets paid for at all, they will be doing the work. So it's important that they be able to do the work.
As to your claim that the system isn't sustainable, this is typical poor-mouthing, and it's nonsense. The United States is a very wealthy nation, and we very definitely have the ability to pay for a modest retirement for every citizen. The reason we have such a big deficit is because we are not levying taxes, not because we are poor. Closing the social security gap is a simple matter of raising the self-employment tax cutoff up to $250k; this would have a modest impact on high-income Americans, no impact on low-income and middle-class Americans, and would be quite fair, given the problems with income distribution that you've alluded to.
What you've repeated above is a series of talking points that are used to perpetuate the current income disparity and taxation disparity in our country. It isn't true, and it's actively harmful to our country. It pains me to see people who should know better repeating this propaganda as if it were true.
Word.
Maybe. If you can scrape together the downpayment while renting. I had a house in San Francisco back when prices were about half what they are now, and paying the mortgage, taxes and insurance was pretty painful. That was on $100k/year. I guess on $160k/year you could do it, but it wouldn't be a comfortable, carefree living—you'd be living on the edge, wondering when your next pay cut would drive you over it.
Yeah, I pay taxes too, and I'm not a teacher. And yes, I think people who want to cut teachers' salaries to the bone are jerks and skinflints. These kids are going to be supporting you in your retirement. You need them to get a decent education. It's no joke. You are the evil boss here—you see them as a cost center, not a profit center, and so you want to minimize the cost, regardless of the long-term results. And you'll be whining twenty years down the road when there's nobody qualified to provide your health care, and nobody fixing the roads, and all the other things you decided were too expensive to fund with your precious tax money.
Argument by anecdote. Whatever. The teachers I know do spend time in the summer on professional development, but that's probably because I live in a progressive state where the state is willing to pay for things like that. If you live in a state where they try to milk the teachers for as little money as possible, it wouldn't surprise me if after a while they stop caring and just spend the summer in the garden.
In the IT world, you probably expect to get paid a decent salary, and if you're like most IT people, you have on times and off times, and during the off times you do a lot of stuff that would be hard to characterize as "work." Teachers are on every day they are in class, and they are on whenever they are grading papers. There are no slack times.
You're kidding, right? The evil capitalist who is oppressing them is you, demanding that teachers do incredibly hard work for crappy benefits and crappy pay. Just because someone is working a government job doesn't mean that there's no price pressure. The price pressure is actually worse, because jerks like you think it's perfectly fine to just keep cutting their pay year after year, and moreover think that they shouldn't be entitled to complain when you do.
Plus there's the whole teacher's strike in Chicago that's fresh in peoples' memory. And all the incredibly one-sided reporting that was done on it, of course...