Hmmm. Just a quick question, but *has* RHAT really demonstrated a profit yet? I was under the impression that they weren't expected to do so for a few years, but eh.
{shrug} I still think mandatory sentencing like that is a tad silly, 'tho, given that it drastically reduces, or even negates, the discretion of the judge...
Legislators usually aren't experienced judges, and they sure ain't being paid to be judges. All that for a few percentage points?
It's pretty limited in practice here, given that many, many services and near-necessities require filling out forms w/ such data, or providing photo IDs or what-not.
I suppose a whole horde of people might be able to burden 'em with FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests, given that this is at least partly Government-directed, but AFAIK there's no legal basis on which a citizen can absolutely refuse to allow, say, license data to be tracked as long as he wants his license.
Re: your cases: You're not telling the whole story.
* I remember precisely one such publicized case in the nation, and it was the result of a three-strikes law. Harsh? Arguably too much so -- but don't make the perp look like an angel, eh?
* No NSA-sponsored backdoor has been demonstrated. The NSA ain't stupid -- if there's a true backdoor, it'd be better hidden.
* You can use all the cryptography software you want, you just can't export it or provide it to a foreign national.
* Just about every major government spies on every other nation in the world, often specifically on other corporations and for their own. There are known cases of intelligence officers eavesdropping on travelling businessmen, and I'm not just talking 'bout the CIA here.
If you don't mind tying yourself down to X, XForms ain't bad at all -- it includes a good graphical forms layout manager, and lets you specify callbacks and such. Plus, it's pure C.
Dunno 'bout you, but I found it much easier to use than the AWT's event model. That's largely because I feel a tad too constrained by the OO-ness of Java...
The language of abstract mathematics and symbolic logic; those who have a good background with manipulating abstract concepts, proof techiques, and rule-based evaluation will have a much better ability to understand programming.
You might as well distinguish between conceptual programming (determing an algorithm), and pure coding (implementing that algorithm, with full knowledge of all the idiosyncracies of whatever tool you're using).
As for the coding language of choice, that depends. Do you want them to be able to code quickly, or do you want to enforce structure, or... ? I'm biased towards C or Pascal, but eh.
Yeah, it depended upon the version of the test. 'suppose the raw scores were sometimes higher than they expected, and thus the bar was sometimes raised a little.
It was specifically renormalized and simplified in 1996, in an explicit attempt to get the average scores back towards 500 in each category. For example, they made it vastly easier to get a perfect score in math, in terms of the number of questions that one can miss. It used to be that a missing a single one could drop you to a 780...
There's not much reason to do that unless they either felt the test was fundamentally broken, or they felt that the average score *should* be higher.
Hmmm. If memory serves, some European nations do something that approaches this.
On the basis of examinations, students can get shunted towards academic pursuits (that is, a funded college education); specialized, vocational training; or possibly entering straight into the workforce... The thing is, they do not seem to share the attitude that everybody can, and probably should, go to at least some academic college if they only try.
Suppose I ask you to recite the verses from the Illiad. Fine. Then, let's say in the meantime, I'm loading a Kalashnikov and frequently calibrating its sights while aiming straight towards you, and occasionally firing long bursts right past your face... is that going to impact your performance? Probably, even if you're absolutely sure that I'm not really going to shoot you. Does it mean that reciting the epics under more normal circumstances is somehow a broken test? Now, if the gun isn't there but you still feel threatened by me anyway, is the test therefore broken? Obviously not.
Is chess biased towards, say, Russians? Obviously not; yet you'll find a pretty large number of Russians among the (modern and historical) top chess players of the world. That means you have to ask why... In the same way, absolutely nothing says that the academic performance among people of all ethnicities is equal, and that the SAT should confirm that. To claim that failure to show this -- instead of asking whether performance is the same -- is a flaw with the test, is as silly as believing that the SAT is a perfectly valid indicator of college success or that it is a massive factor in admissions, when neither is truly the case. In regards to the former, assorted studies have shown that the linkage is not clear-cut; as for the latter, it is just a single factor and not one for prospective collegians to obsess about.
Good god. That's about as bad as race norming. Why would it be the ETS's job to "compensate" -- a student w/o the skills is a student w/o the skills even if one can point the finger o' blame at the poor schmuck's environment or background.
Hmmm, nothing found on ets.org; apparently they don't feel like publicizing how they normalize? Either that, or the documents just aren't indexed.
Oh bloody hell, USA Today uses javascript.
Well, it was the first link that popped up w/ the keyword "sat". I'm not going to give them a credit card # for a 247-word article, 'tho.
Oh, here's an ABC News story on it. Keep in mind that they tend to sensationalize a tad, 'tho, and also do *not* visit with an option like "warn me about every cookie" when loading images. BAD idea. 'k. From the story, it is not an SAT score bonus; it is, instead, a label applied to those that do 200 pts better than expected, according to their formula, in an apparent attempt to figure out who's beating the odds.
The net effect, of course, is that those who come from absolutely fanatical private schools and families where most everybody happens to be a postdoc is not going to be labelled a Striver, unless perhaps the student contrives to fail all his courses and the entire city's taken a strict vow of poverty.
Heh. Race and gender are both variables. I'd like to see how much of a difference they make, and whether people are going to start screaming racism... anybody here ever read "The Bell Curve"? Interesting stuff, and it's massively documented compared to the usual PC attacks on it.
It wasn't that long ago that (literally) every single state in the Union claimed to be above-average in test scores, because they used data from different tests and years. Heh. Ah, Lake Wobegon...
This does tie in with the possible discrepancy regarding (not that these are reliable...) SAT scores, which have, apparently, stagnated, versus grades (rising, at least considering that more high schoolers are getting straight A's.) The inflation has got to be bothering college admissions officers...
Is social promotion still common? I was under the impression that in name, it wasn't, but that the standards tend to be sufficiently low such that de facto, it is.
Should the schools still set the standards, or the states, or the nation? In any case, the standards could probably rise a tad; if memory serves, they have dropped considerably over this century. The third case (national control) isn't going to happen as long as the GOP controls Congress (which, of course, could end soon); and both the second and third tend to lead to teachers "teaching the test" (which is a problem anyway w/ the standardized tests).
Then y'all run into the business about whether tests are fair and such.
As for holding teachers accountable, speaking as a resident of PA (which has in past years had the most teacher strikes of any state in the nation...), it ain't gonna happen unless you either break the unions completely, or find additional leverage. AFAIK, the major unions all oppose any form of merit pay (be it bonuses, raises or whatever). Why lose a good thing (for them, not the students...) ?
There's little gain in cracking/vandalizing a web page (unless you're being hired to do so...), except for reputation, ego or pride. The negative is that conceivably one could gain a felony conviction and jail time, which would probably put a huge damper on one's future -- and that's a pretty poor tradeoff. One could get a reputation by going around and murdering random people with, say, a chainsaw, but the cost-benefit analysis is pretty poor there too (likely endings: life imprisonment, shot by cop, or a years-delayed death sentence. It's not exactly compensated for by a badass reputation.), and it doesn't happen too often.
On the other hand, it's quite possible to live by robbery, burglary or drug-dealing (at least until you get caught)... and drug abuse tends to have a self-perpetuating psychological bonus, however temporary. That's their gain, and many will take the chance of getting busted.
... or other fun stuff like former paramours of first people alleging cocaine abuse by a certain highly-placed ex-Governor while in office, or whether Congressional minority party "investigators" coached witnesses on how and when to take the 5th, or so forth.
Or, the fact that the UN is still trying to force ethnicities that bitterly hate each other to remain in the same nation...
Or, that the fact that most watchers of the national news here have absolutely no clue where East Timor and Somalia are, or remember our most recent excursion to the latter.
Sure, might as well distract 'em. Toss 'em a story that people think they understand.
If you waive your right to a speedy trial, you deserve what you get.
It's standard practice to move inmates far from their homes. It's SOP because you want to keep them away from their contacts and their previous environment as much as possible, because otherwise you get cases like the leader of the OGs quite probably running his narcotics business from jail.
If you damage a web site, any admin worth his salt knows that he quite possibly has to reinstall the whole damn thing, *AND* warn all his users who may now disappear due to a lack of trust. That's damage. It's more destructive than littering, unless the latter includes, say, littering with attache cases lined with RDX and timed fuses.
From an ethical POV, you're perfectly right. If a sysadmin has reason to believe (perhaps because the intruder left a note) that security has been compromised, it's his duty not to trust the intruder -- since if the intruder were really a "white hat", he'd instead be auditing source code and sending in patches, and a root compromise is a root compromise that basically demands a reinstall.
In some countries, however, it's perfectly legal to crack a system you don't own, without their cooperation, without telling them, and even stealing (non-classified) information in the process, IIRC. The US happens not to be one of them, and with darn good reason.
(Hm. Does Hasbro own GT Interactive? And, if so, has Hasbro released a statement?).
I'm seeing two scenarios here.
The less sinister version is that somebody at GT thought that this was a publicly redistributable game (somehow; I don't know the game, so can't comment on licensing terms, or how clear it'd be -- so this scenario might be impossible) and thought that they might as well make a buck. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but sillier things have happened.
The more sinister option is that GT knew full well that it was not legitimate to redistribute that (legally, not just ethically), but made the calculation that they would, most likely, come out fiscally ahead somehow. If so, it would appear that they have miscalculated, as this publicity is not going to be good for them...
One-time-upgrade cost meaning that it's an up-front fee: pay once, get shipped licenses and CDs (once), in constrast to either subscription (e.g. MSDN somehow doesn't seem like a corporate thing to buy. Eh.) or a lifetime of free upgrades (for just download time. I'm just counting major versions here, not SPs/SRs/hotfixes, which generally are downloadable if encumbered by notices that they're unsupported or such. Home users might get an Office or Windows upgrade w/ their new machines, but that's just pre-paid, not truly free...).
As for macro languages, I was under the impression that Excel macros might actually be used by people doing accounting, or perhaps trying to generate presentations for their bosses. Eh. The users might not use that stuff explicitly (or even knowingly), though, in which case as long as the sysadmins can fix things, unhappiness will be minimized. True.
You'd have to physically secure the machine, and remove / prevent installation of all forms of removable bootable media, including floppy drives and CDs. As other posters have noted, the OS cannot stop a floppy boot because the OS is not loaded before the boot starts.
Caveat: if you do your own, personal kernel mods, scramble the file system in a particular way, keep the modified kernel on a floppy that is secure at ALL times, and you never ever let the key out -- you still won't prevent a boot, but you might be able to prevent (meaningful) filesystem access. Then, the most that anybody can do is take the drive (or take a clone) and work on it in their own time.
BIOS protection can be undone, given time and, say, a screwdriver (if no lock), or sufficient cutting/drilling equipment. Remove the battery, or find the mobo manual and check for the jumper that resets to factory settings.
There's a heftier cost to, say, a business than the sticker price.
Even if an IT director chose to get the Windows version of StarOffice (in constrast to hiring, say, Unix-aware sysadmins, switching boxes, and adding a LOT of expense), you have to get the users trained for the new software.
This includes special capabilities like macro languages, templates and so forth, giving the whole company an at-least-one-time productivity hit. You might also have to check about interoperability with clients' systems if you're transferring saved documents and clients decide to go with a newer Office version using yet another file format...
Compare that w/ the $300/seat (well, only if you can't negotiate a site license or other deal...) one-time upgrade cost. Unless MS dev's go insane and start tweaking like madmen, most upgrades won't be removing depended-upon features, nor make them less accessible. There's less training time associated with that.
If, say, an employee makes $70K/year, assuming perhaps 50 wks work/year at a fudgy 60h/wk, that comes out to ~$23.33/hr. So a break-even point might be 12 hours of completely lost productivity assuming no other costs and you accept those dodgy numbers as remotely correct. Keep in mind that I'm ignoring any additional support costs, as well...
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Hmmm. Just a quick question, but *has* RHAT really demonstrated a profit yet? I was under the impression that they weren't expected to do so for a few years, but eh.
...and make that a low-level airburst nuclear detonation, too (it has to be in the atmosphere, if memory serves)...
{shrug} I still think mandatory sentencing like that is a tad silly, 'tho, given that it drastically reduces, or even negates, the discretion of the judge...
Legislators usually aren't experienced judges, and they sure ain't being paid to be judges. All that for a few percentage points?
It's pretty limited in practice here, given that many, many services and near-necessities require filling out forms w/ such data, or providing photo IDs or what-not.
I suppose a whole horde of people might be able to burden 'em with FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests, given that this is at least partly Government-directed, but AFAIK there's no legal basis on which a citizen can absolutely refuse to allow, say, license data to be tracked as long as he wants his license.
Re: your cases: You're not telling the whole story.
* I remember precisely one such publicized case in the nation, and it was the result of a three-strikes law. Harsh? Arguably too much so -- but don't make the perp look like an angel, eh?
* No NSA-sponsored backdoor has been demonstrated. The NSA ain't stupid -- if there's a true backdoor, it'd be better hidden.
* You can use all the cryptography software you want, you just can't export it or provide it to a foreign national.
* Just about every major government spies on every other nation in the world, often specifically on other corporations and for their own. There are known cases of intelligence officers eavesdropping on travelling businessmen, and I'm not just talking 'bout the CIA here.
If you don't mind tying yourself down to X, XForms ain't bad at all -- it includes a good graphical forms layout manager, and lets you specify callbacks and such. Plus, it's pure C.
Dunno 'bout you, but I found it much easier to use than the AWT's event model. That's largely because I feel a tad too constrained by the OO-ness of Java...
The language of abstract mathematics and symbolic logic; those who have a good background with manipulating abstract concepts, proof techiques, and rule-based evaluation will have a much better ability to understand programming.
You might as well distinguish between conceptual programming (determing an algorithm), and pure coding (implementing that algorithm, with full knowledge of all the idiosyncracies of whatever tool you're using).
As for the coding language of choice, that depends. Do you want them to be able to code quickly, or do you want to enforce structure, or... ? I'm biased towards C or Pascal, but eh.
Yeah, it depended upon the version of the test. 'suppose the raw scores were sometimes higher than they expected, and thus the bar was sometimes raised a little.
Let's hope the operating system is stable and doesn't require a reboot for a kernel patch... heh.
It was specifically renormalized and simplified in 1996, in an explicit attempt to get the average scores back towards 500 in each category. For example, they made it vastly easier to get a perfect score in math, in terms of the number of questions that one can miss. It used to be that a missing a single one could drop you to a 780...
There's not much reason to do that unless they either felt the test was fundamentally broken, or they felt that the average score *should* be higher.
Hmmm. If memory serves, some European nations do something that approaches this.
On the basis of examinations, students can get shunted towards academic pursuits (that is, a funded college education); specialized, vocational training; or possibly entering straight into the workforce... The thing is, they do not seem to share the attitude that everybody can, and probably should, go to at least some academic college if they only try.
Suppose I ask you to recite the verses from the Illiad. Fine. Then, let's say in the meantime, I'm loading a Kalashnikov and frequently calibrating its sights while aiming straight towards you, and occasionally firing long bursts right past your face... is that going to impact your performance? Probably, even if you're absolutely sure that I'm not really going to shoot you. Does it mean that reciting the epics under more normal circumstances is somehow a broken test? Now, if the gun isn't there but you still feel threatened by me anyway, is the test therefore broken? Obviously not.
Is chess biased towards, say, Russians? Obviously not; yet you'll find a pretty large number of Russians among the (modern and historical) top chess players of the world. That means you have to ask why... In the same way, absolutely nothing says that the academic performance among people of all ethnicities is equal, and that the SAT should confirm that. To claim that failure to show this -- instead of asking whether performance is the same -- is a flaw with the test, is as silly as believing that the SAT is a perfectly valid indicator of college success or that it is a massive factor in admissions, when neither is truly the case. In regards to the former, assorted studies have shown that the linkage is not clear-cut; as for the latter, it is just a single factor and not one for prospective collegians to obsess about.
Good god. That's about as bad as race norming. Why would it be the ETS's job to "compensate" -- a student w/o the skills is a student w/o the skills even if one can point the finger o' blame at the poor schmuck's environment or background.
Hmmm, nothing found on ets.org; apparently they don't feel like publicizing how they normalize? Either that, or the documents just aren't indexed.
Oh bloody hell, USA Today uses javascript.
Well, it was the first link that popped up w/ the keyword "sat". I'm not going to give them a credit card # for a 247-word article, 'tho.
Oh, here's an ABC News story on it. Keep in mind that they tend to sensationalize a tad, 'tho, and also do *not* visit with an option like "warn me about every cookie" when loading images. BAD idea. 'k. From the story, it is not an SAT score bonus; it is, instead, a label applied to those that do 200 pts better than expected, according to their formula, in an apparent attempt to figure out who's beating the odds.
The net effect, of course, is that those who come from absolutely fanatical private schools and families where most everybody happens to be a postdoc is not going to be labelled a Striver, unless perhaps the student contrives to fail all his courses and the entire city's taken a strict vow of poverty.
Heh. Race and gender are both variables. I'd like to see how much of a difference they make, and whether people are going to start screaming racism... anybody here ever read "The Bell Curve"? Interesting stuff, and it's massively documented compared to the usual PC attacks on it.
It wasn't that long ago that (literally) every single state in the Union claimed to be above-average in test scores, because they used data from different tests and years. Heh. Ah, Lake Wobegon...
This does tie in with the possible discrepancy regarding (not that these are reliable...) SAT scores, which have, apparently, stagnated, versus grades (rising, at least considering that more high schoolers are getting straight A's.) The inflation has got to be bothering college admissions officers...
Is social promotion still common? I was under the impression that in name, it wasn't, but that the standards tend to be sufficiently low such that de facto, it is.
Should the schools still set the standards, or the states, or the nation? In any case, the standards could probably rise a tad; if memory serves, they have dropped considerably over this century. The third case (national control) isn't going to happen as long as the GOP controls Congress (which, of course, could end soon); and both the second and third tend to lead to teachers "teaching the test" (which is a problem anyway w/ the standardized tests).
Then y'all run into the business about whether tests are fair and such.
As for holding teachers accountable, speaking as a resident of PA (which has in past years had the most teacher strikes of any state in the nation...), it ain't gonna happen unless you either break the unions completely, or find additional leverage. AFAIK, the major unions all oppose any form of merit pay (be it bonuses, raises or whatever). Why lose a good thing (for them, not the students...) ?
There's a large difference, 'tho.
There's little gain in cracking/vandalizing a web page (unless you're being hired to do so...), except for reputation, ego or pride. The negative is that conceivably one could gain a felony conviction and jail time, which would probably put a huge damper on one's future -- and that's a pretty poor tradeoff. One could get a reputation by going around and murdering random people with, say, a chainsaw, but the cost-benefit analysis is pretty poor there too (likely endings: life imprisonment, shot by cop, or a years-delayed death sentence. It's not exactly compensated for by a badass reputation.), and it doesn't happen too often.
On the other hand, it's quite possible to live by robbery, burglary or drug-dealing (at least until you get caught)... and drug abuse tends to have a self-perpetuating psychological bonus, however temporary. That's their gain, and many will take the chance of getting busted.
... or other fun stuff like former paramours of first people alleging cocaine abuse by a certain highly-placed ex-Governor while in office, or whether Congressional minority party "investigators" coached witnesses on how and when to take the 5th, or so forth.
Or, the fact that the UN is still trying to force ethnicities that bitterly hate each other to remain in the same nation...
Or, that the fact that most watchers of the national news here have absolutely no clue where East Timor and Somalia are, or remember our most recent excursion to the latter.
Sure, might as well distract 'em. Toss 'em a story that people think they understand.
If you waive your right to a speedy trial, you deserve what you get.
It's standard practice to move inmates far from their homes. It's SOP because you want to keep them away from their contacts and their previous environment as much as possible, because otherwise you get cases like the leader of the OGs quite probably running his narcotics business from jail.
If you damage a web site, any admin worth his salt knows that he quite possibly has to reinstall the whole damn thing, *AND* warn all his users who may now disappear due to a lack of trust. That's damage. It's more destructive than littering, unless the latter includes, say, littering with attache cases lined with RDX and timed fuses.
Well, you've been bringing up the m/r/m people repeatedly. Got some names and cases for us?
From an ethical POV, you're perfectly right. If a sysadmin has reason to believe (perhaps because the intruder left a note) that security has been compromised, it's his duty not to trust the intruder -- since if the intruder were really a "white hat", he'd instead be auditing source code and sending in patches, and a root compromise is a root compromise that basically demands a reinstall.
In some countries, however, it's perfectly legal to crack a system you don't own, without their cooperation, without telling them, and even stealing (non-classified) information in the process, IIRC. The US happens not to be one of them, and with darn good reason.
(Hm. Does Hasbro own GT Interactive? And, if so, has Hasbro released a statement?).
I'm seeing two scenarios here.
The less sinister version is that somebody at GT thought that this was a publicly redistributable game (somehow; I don't know the game, so can't comment on licensing terms, or how clear it'd be -- so this scenario might be impossible) and thought that they might as well make a buck. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but sillier things have happened.
The more sinister option is that GT knew full well that it was not legitimate to redistribute that (legally, not just ethically), but made the calculation that they would, most likely, come out fiscally ahead somehow. If so, it would appear that they have miscalculated, as this publicity is not going to be good for them...
Worse still, add a util.StarOffice interface to the Java API...
;)
Ewwwwwwwww.
Betcha MS wouldn't even pretend to fully support that version. Heh.
One-time-upgrade cost meaning that it's an up-front fee: pay once, get shipped licenses and CDs (once), in constrast to either subscription (e.g. MSDN somehow doesn't seem like a corporate thing to buy. Eh.) or a lifetime of free upgrades (for just download time. I'm just counting major versions here, not SPs/SRs/hotfixes, which generally are downloadable if encumbered by notices that they're unsupported or such. Home users might get an Office or Windows upgrade w/ their new machines, but that's just pre-paid, not truly free...).
As for macro languages, I was under the impression that Excel macros might actually be used by people doing accounting, or perhaps trying to generate presentations for their bosses. Eh. The users might not use that stuff explicitly (or even knowingly), though, in which case as long as the sysadmins can fix things, unhappiness will be minimized. True.
You'd have to physically secure the machine, and remove / prevent installation of all forms of removable bootable media, including floppy drives and CDs. As other posters have noted, the OS cannot stop a floppy boot because the OS is not loaded before the boot starts.
Caveat: if you do your own, personal kernel mods, scramble the file system in a particular way, keep the modified kernel on a floppy that is secure at ALL times, and you never ever let the key out -- you still won't prevent a boot, but you might be able to prevent (meaningful) filesystem access. Then, the most that anybody can do is take the drive (or take a clone) and work on it in their own time.
BIOS protection can be undone, given time and, say, a screwdriver (if no lock), or sufficient cutting/drilling equipment. Remove the battery, or find the mobo manual and check for the jumper that resets to factory settings.
There's a heftier cost to, say, a business than the sticker price.
Even if an IT director chose to get the Windows version of StarOffice (in constrast to hiring, say, Unix-aware sysadmins, switching boxes, and adding a LOT of expense), you have to get the users trained for the new software.
This includes special capabilities like macro languages, templates and so forth, giving the whole company an at-least-one-time productivity hit. You might also have to check about interoperability with clients' systems if you're transferring saved documents and clients decide to go with a newer Office version using yet another file format...
Compare that w/ the $300/seat (well, only if you can't negotiate a site license or other deal...) one-time upgrade cost. Unless MS dev's go insane and start tweaking like madmen, most upgrades won't be removing depended-upon features, nor make them less accessible. There's less training time associated with that.
If, say, an employee makes $70K/year, assuming perhaps 50 wks work/year at a fudgy 60h/wk, that comes out to ~$23.33/hr. So a break-even point might be 12 hours of completely lost productivity assuming no other costs and you accept those dodgy numbers as remotely correct. Keep in mind that I'm ignoring any additional support costs, as well...
Hmmm. Mathematicians giving tech support... now that might be interesting.
Customer: Can you please help me? My computer stopped working.
Techie: Let's start with the base case. First, completely disassemble your computer, making sure to lay out the parts in order...
;)