I'm sure these were as far as the bank could tell proper and secure transactions.
Based on what? That the thief had the routing and checking account numbers? Those numbers are so easy to get it's equivalent to no security at all.
Agreed.
But that's how checks themselves work. In fact, a number of companies now digitize and then destroy the paper checks you send them, see the Check 21 Act for more details.
It's up to you to catch mistakes as well as fraud. Heck, I can't remember if I've ever gotten a bank statement that didn't have a form on the back for you to fill out to balance your checkbook.
Obviously the account of this guy was too complicated for that, but as others have noted, it's a bit unlikely he was personally filling out 1,000 checks per month. This is the sort of thing you hire a bookkeeper as well as a CPA to manage.
And who does his taxes? It's very unlikely he does them on his own, and if he's not proactively managing his money he'll pay quite a bit extra to that CPA who will have to do a fair amount of forensic accounting just to reconstruct the last year's taxable transactions. That's an equivalent of the classic nightmare of a CPA being handed a shoe box full of receipts, etc....
How about if automated clearing house transfers only worked if you'd authorized the payee in advance?
This would probably mean some practices would need to change, but isn't that better than what we have now, where anybody you've ever written a check to can scoop money out of your account any time they want?
Indeed. Practices would have to change, and given the flakiness of people that would be impractical, plus it would cost a lot of money.
How many would fail to proactively notify their bank? Plus they'd have to tell the bank correctly some magic info identifying the payee. This would really only work if they were the ones to initiate the whole thing through the bank instead of through the billing company. Wikipedia says that in Western Europe both methods are used, frequently to the exclusion of paper checks altogether.
If you want to keep the current system (at least in part) but insert your authorization requirement, then how many people, if called up ($$$) or otherwise asked in some way to authorize a payee, would either reflexively OK or deny it?
In practice (and not just in the US), everyone works on the assumption of honesty and verifies after the fact. Since you really really should reconcile your accounts each month to catch honest errors, extending that requirement to catching fraud is the cheaper approach.
I do not believe he's telling the truth, and if he really is that stupid, and e.g. totally unable to hire a CPA for a few days of low impact forensic accounting, he deserves exactly what he got.
My parents are millionaires. They also did a lot of bookkeeping to get there (I can remember a number of nights when they were looking for the wrong transaction(s) that caused a balance mismatch). Nowadays they're retired and still check all their statements each month and reconcile those against their records.
I repeat: being rich does not absolve you of the duty to balance your checkbook.
Is it not the bank's responsibility to maintain security and keep secure transactions?
Then... Why the limitation of 50k$ when FDIC covers 100$k ?
I'm sure these were as far the the bank could tell proper and secure transactions. The issue here is that the account holder didn't notice for 15 months!
The FDIC protects you from bank failures, not something like this.
Bottom line: being wealthy does not absolve you of the duty to balance your checkbook. Do that every month and you'll catch that sort of thing in plenty of time to get a full refund.
if anyone gets hold of the magic combination of account number and bank routing number
Ummm, you do realize that's on the bottom of every check that you write (in MICR). That's how your check gets matched up to your account for processing....
In this context, it means the operation doesn't change state. Might not be strictly true for a web site (i.e. a log file is modified), but nothing significant is changed. Particularly, doing it multiple times will result in no noticeable change.
And don't forget the main rule here, no one is irreplaceable. No one! Not even you.
In a small startup, that's simply not true.
One bad hire, one founder who's not a competent manager will frequently kill the company. In my career, two companies failed because I separated from them. One of those companies had every chance of success, the managers just didn't grok that you weren't really done when version 1.0 was ready for beta testing....
And I've been in several small companies where one bad manager or the owner managed to wreck them, which I think reduces to the same thing you're denying.
Aha. You are correct indeed, says ms lang.
My memory remembered the majors as 6.1=EE and 6.3=CS, so I misremembered
6.070 as 6.170 substituting in {6.1} as EE.
And there's 6-2, which is both and is what most students in the department take today. There are very few 6-1s now, don't know how many 6-3s.
There's absolutely no mapping I'm aware of between the designations for majors and the course (class) numbers, besides all of Course 6 starting with 6 of course ^_^.
Who are you mangastudent? When were you there?
As for the first, that would be telling. As to the second, I'm a very early '80s undergraduate, but finances prevented me from finishing more than 3 semesters; having rich white trash parents was fatal for the higher education aspirations of my siblings and myself. Unfortunate that avoiding the free rider problem leaves people like us out in the cold....
I did a critical block of IT work for the department in the late '80s and have kept in close contact since then. 6.001 is all I've taken from them (after reading the Lambda the Ultimate papers), I'm otherwise academically an... eclectic chemist, you might say.
Mr. Lang, it is your memory that's off, you've got the course area and the scope of one of them wrong.
6.170 is the E.E. design course, which in the mid 80's meant creating hardware instantiated Robotron or centipede etc.
6.070 is the C.S. design course.
Introduction to electronics test equipment such as oscilloscopes, meters (voltage, resistance inductance, capacitance, etc.), and signal generators. Emphasizes individual instruction and development of skills, such as soldering, assembly, and troubleshooting. [...] Intended for students without a previous background in electronics....
If you've never held a soldering iron before, this is the course for you.
6.170 Laboratory in Software Engineering
Introduces concepts and techniques relevant to the production of large software systems. [...] Topics: modularity; specification; data abstraction; object modeling; design patterns; and testing. Several programming projects of varying size undertaken by students working individually and in groups.
This of course is your traditional Software Engineering course as that phrase is known in the industry. Was taught in CLU when I first learned about it and was changed to Java at some appropriate point. Will not be offered as such in the future, but that may be OK with 6.001 material being distributed into 6.01 and maybe 6.02 plus 6.005, and 6.005 being rounded out with more traditional Software Engineering material. I can see a new 6.17x that does a bit more SE plus the projects.
It's worth 12 Engineering Design Points, and MIT EECS for as long as I've known it (late '80s) has had a major philosophical difference with the accreditation organization for it. EECS does not believe you can teach design per se, it must be in the context of actually designing things. So each accreditation cycle the department shows that for each major, the required subjects accumulate enough design work. So one way or another the projects of 6.170 or the like will be replicated in what replaces it.
Hmmm, maybe they'll provide a wider range of domains? Once nice thing about the two new core courses is that they along with 6.004 (which will be retained although slimmed down to 12 units as I recall) will set up a graduate for a embedded career very nicely. That's damned good, since if you want to stay a salaried programmer that's about the only safe domain past age 35-40. Not everyone wants to start a business or become a consultant (or a manager:-) when the conventional programming career path is over....
I dunno, sounds like the wussification of the MIT undergrad curriculum to me. Back in the day, my friends at MIT used to bat me over the head with how my Harvard education sucked because I didn't have to suffer through a manly class like 6.001.
Well, Harvard's undergraduate education in general and CS in particular may not "suck" because of this, but... there's no comparison in either. E.g. a friend who got a CS degree there in the end of the '80s said the only general math requirement at Harvard was proving you could do algebra. Whereas you cannot escape MIT with any major without a full year of the calculus (what most schools would cover in a minimum of three semesters) and calculus based physics (mechanics and E&M).
He was taking Harvard's famous "honors calculus" (at least the first term (which is no longer available)) and had wanted to go to MIT for the CS, but his father made him go so Harvard so this was overall a pretty big thing for him....
While our intro CS 50/51 classes may have been a modest step down, CS 121 (Theory of Computation) kicked their equivalent class' ass.:)
Entirely possible; any school can have a strong class or area. Did Harvard's CS department evolve out of its extremely strong math department? CS departments like that tend to be strong in theory for obvious reasons. All I can remember is the Mark I stuff which was quite applied, and I took your intro CS course in 1978 in the Summer School which was an excellent general programming introduction but wasn't attempting to be a foundational degree class.
However, if you look at the new 6.01, you'll quickly realize this change is not "wussification", quite to the contrary, it could easily be more difficult. Mostly, it's different, much more applied (robots), more pure engineering, which is the sort of thing you'd expect from both MIT and an EECS department that obviously evolved from an EE vs. Math department.
Now, with 6.170 being terminated (haven't heard any inside stories about that, last time I checked it was planned on being part of the new curriculum, but maybe they ran out of hours) and replaced by unknown as of now 6.17x courses, who can say, but based on what I now realize is out of date information "wussification" was not part of the plan.
The big motivations were to make the introductory core courses (6.01 and 6.02) both more interesting and a total integration of CS and EE, whereas the old longer core block of 6.001-4 had essentially no integration until you got to 6.004 (which did not have 6.003 as a prerequisite) and was very abstract in comparison.
Whereas in 6.01 you get your hands on virtual and real robots fairly quickly (you start out learning the basic 6.001 material in Python), learn some calculus beyond the first required course (which is AP Calculus BC), and it is intended to be in the fine MIT tradition of being "just barely possible" (to accomplish; rough paraphrase followed by a direct quote).
It's certainly more intense than 6.001 in that the latter had no prerequisites while 6.01 has the 2nd term of physics (E&M) as a corequisite (and therefore first term calculus and physics as prerequisites---no way could you do this course without a solid foundation in mechanics), plus you have to prove you have some minimum programming ability.
6.001 makes experienced LISPers sweat blood; I'm not sure I could do 6.01 at all (hard to say since I wouldn't want to take it in the first place, my interests here don't go beyond CS (which is why a lot of people are screaming for a return of 6.001)).
Wait till 6.01 settles down and is captured by the Open CourseWare people and try it out, you might find it to be fun if unlike me you like EE a lot.
Except that most of what was in 6.001 will be taught in Java in the new 6.005, which for its type of material is Not Even Wrong.
Even the AI course will be switched to Python. Very soon, the MIT EECS undergraduate curriculum will be entirely purged of Scheme/LISP, although due to some furious demand (especially outside of the department, since 6.001 is generally useful while the new introductory curriculum is strongly focused on both EE and CS) there is talk of a reduced, 3/4 size return of 6.001. Someday. Maybe.
As a Chemistry major who was fortunate to take 6.001 about the last time Sussman gave it, I'm not sure what to think about the changes. Programming languages and the content of 6.001 are the only things that I find really interesting in CS, and I think it's hard to deny that we're in a Dark Age in this general area.
And perhaps MIT is redefining what "CS" means in a good way, it's just not anything I'm very interested in, nor qualified to judge. Ableson and Sussman fully support the new curriculum BTW, and Hal has been heavily involved in the development of at least 6.01. Sussman has always believed introductory EE and CS should be taught together, and 6.01 and 6.02 most certainly do that.
On the bright side, the new introductory course 6.01 (don't know if this is true about 6.02) is very instructor intensive, enough so that they are enlisting all interested upperclassmen to help in the labs and such, which I think is a very good thing; you don't tend to really learn your subject until you try to teach it.
And with enrollment down so sharply, there are now likely enough professors and graduate students to support these new intense courses; MIT's historical practice of not allowing a fashionable department to get "too big" is once again validated (think of areo/astro in the '70s). The much lower enrollment is an opportunity to teach in a very different way, with more emphasis on building things, an MIT tradition from its founding.
But it is safe to say that an MIT CS or CS focused degree (most students do the combined major that is heavy in both) will mean something very different in four years.
While I don't necessarily disagree with the overall thrust of your arguments (although I think everyone I've read in this thread so far is just looking at the failures and not the successes in current American business... creative destruction, baby!), your point about the Home Depot CEO getting that position at Chrysler is slightly off:
No way did that idiot, one of the most reviled CEOs in recent memory (check it out), get the position for his poor Home Depot performance and experience. He got it because he'd done supply chain stuff at GE (as I remember, it was something of that nature).
Doesn't disprove your point, of course. Without good design, engineering, and construction (the building of their vehicles), Chrysler is obviously doomed, no matter how efficient they are at squeezing the last drop of blood out of their suppliers. And Dalmer did a number on the design part of Chrysler, at minimum, quite a study in the destruction of shareholder value....
(Of course, it must be pointed out that the former "Big Three" US auto makers are doomed due to impossible promises they made to their unions many years ago to buy labor peace.. again, short term thinking that doomed them in the long term, absent government intervention, which isn't working so well now that the Japanese are making so many vehicles in the USA and doing so well at it.)
Wealth in its own way breeds crime of the sort we're talking about. I'm excluding "pure violence" that is not at least in part a means to an end of acquiring something; the 911 hacker is in this exclusion.
Banks, in a high trust society that allows their existence, breed wealth; putting your money in a bank has great benefits to you and the economy (for as long as that trust remains).
Wille Sutton is famously said to have answered the question of why he robbed banks, "That's where the money is." So in a sense you could say the concentration of assets that is necessary for a bank to function "breeds" various sorts of crimes against them (more types of crime now that banks do more things).
Technology in various direct and indirect ways makes us more wealthy, e.g how many of us have gained and/or maintained long distance friendships through the net? This can of course be used against us in direct (social engineering attacks, e.g. the worms that read address books) and less direct ways.
Although there's one key ingredient that not having read the fine article may not have been touched upon. Many sinners need temptation, but it takes more than just that for them to sin. Lowering the barriers to entry, lowering the chances of getting caught, increasing the payoff, all increase the temptation, but it still takes a fallible human to give in to that temptation to then commit a crime. (Some of course are sociopaths for whom the only question may be "can I get away with it?" (such people often have difficultly thinking ahead, so even that can be an issue).)
Hmmm, and if one goes so far as say without qualification that "technology breeds crime", well, that's not too far from saying "Any clothing that reveals more than face and hands breeds rape." I'm uncomfortable going that far....
They handcuffed the homeowner because he went out in his skivvies with a kitchen knife because he thought he heard people on the lawn. I guess he saved his door getting kicked in, but I'm not sure he sees it as a good thing.
When I think about it, his action coupled with his "choice" of clothes and weapon may have saved him/his family.
The police in good faith rushed to his house expecting something entirely different. When he walked out like that, I can't see it fitting any profile they expected to see, and that probably started to tip them off that all was not as it seemed.
It's what we have when we live in a post-911/tripwire society. Shoot first, ask questions later.
HELLO???
Try "Post-Nixon's initiation of the War On Drugs".
Now, it's perhaps unfair to blame you for not knowing the entire history of something that probably started before you were born (I was in grade school, but it had an "educational" impact back then), but... surely you've heard of no-knock warrants and their related atrocities which have been going on for decades and decades???
For the pre-calculus mathematics, UC-Berkeley would be your best bet. MIT caters to only students who have already taken calculus in high school.
Absolutely not true.
Not true in 1979 when I arrived only understanding differentiation, not true today; I'm about to restart my math myself (from fractions:-) and I checked a few days ago.
MIT only requires that you are ready for the calculus (with so few schools teaching AP calculus what else can they do?). They accommodate anyone from there to AP AB or BC calculus (or more, you can take the exam of any course you want...), and they have a LOT of experience in teaching it to people who aren't as into math as you might think.
E.g. first term calculus (18.01) covers the AP BC material, and today you have the option of stretching that over the short normal term and then the month of January (which will conveniently be invisible on your transcript:-). I don't think that will save you from having to do the required multi-variable calculus at speed after that, but I didn't check.
I was in a small cohort of students with very high verbals and enough math aptitude and background to survive, but not as a math or physics major. A number of us found each other, joked that we were admitted to keep the others sane (not true, but we took that as a duty anyway), and compensated by getting very good at restaurant bill arithmetic ^_^.
I sweated blood to e.g. get definite integration, especially since back then 18.01 was taught in just one rather short term, but one of the key things to realize here is that you don't have to study MIT's OCW available courses at an MIT pace.
CalTech is another matter altogether from what I've heard, and in retrospect it was fortunate they didn't admit me.
If the only way to get Linux on the desktop is to add a bunch of cutesy little gadgets/widgets/whatever so that some 13 year old somewhere says "wow, neat!" then flips on mtv, I hope it never happens.
Why ever not?
Linux is a good foundation, certainly better than [fill in the blank] Microsoft Windows. You run a Studly UberGeek distribution on top of the base kernel, she can run the upcoming Ubuntu Pretty Pony (thanks to Farmer Tim I think it was).
She's happy, you shouldn't be unhappy, all we need to do is to find people to make that Pretty Pony version without going blind.
Yes, when teenage and younger girls squeal "OMG!! Ponies!!!" when their Linux boots up and they log in, we will be that much closer to world domination.
Let's see Microsoft add that sort of value to Vista ^_^.
It's very simple: they're vandals who've found a particular fig leaf to plausibly clothe their destructive compulsions.
Somehow I can just imagine that you're one of those bitter twits who don't want to understand the notability criteria, and attack the editors trying to enforce them.
No.
There's several things going on here:
The general change of the design goal of Wikipedia that includes emphasizing notability (the mass purge of Fair Use (in the US, where e.g. we do have the DMCA to protect an org like Wikipedia) pictures would be another). I believe I understand the concept while at the same time disagreeing with where the editors have decided to draw the line---e.g. the mass purge of trivia.
Then there's disagreeing with its arbitrary application: the classic example is said to be a entry for every Pokemon, while e.g. other titles with similar structure (lots of criters) are denied anything in that direction.
Or the guy who got a web comic purged in an experiment: he set up 10 sock puppets which went undetected, cited totally wrong criteria like Alexia (sp.) ranking, etc. for a web comic he indeed thought should be deleted because it was too obscure. The process is broken.
And then, as anyone who reads my posting you're replying to will see, how various policies including but certainly not limited to notability---seeing as how I spend two paragraphs on "fact bombers" and mention notability in passing---are I think being used as cover by some people motivated by a destructive impulse that can be accurately labeled as vandalism. I have no idea what fraction of "deletionists" are these people, but to deny there can't be a large contingent of them is to ignore human nature and the evidence before our eyes.
Since notability wasn't the focus of my posting, was only 2 words out of 300, your reaction suggests to me that I stuck a nerve. I'll let you explain exactly what it was....
I also have to wonder about your projection of "bitter" onto me. Circumstances (being otherwise occupied) and caution prevented me from investing too much into Wikipedia before I noticed this sea change a few months ago.
To my memory, not a single thing I've added has been deleted as non-notable (I've only complained some times where I thought useful content in articles I care about has been purged). I'm sad to see that the Wikipedia has fallen to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy and that the experiment is over, but it's hardly the end of the world.
A lot of good was accomplished, a lot of good material (e.g math I'll be learning) may survive this change to something resembling 1930's Stalinism, and the lessons learned now and as we watch the end game of The Decline and Fall of the Wikipedia Empire will be useful.
Including how a founder of an organization should not have his financial interests aligned with a drastic change in policy. I doubt a cause and effect, but I also doubt Mr. Wales will be powerfully motivated to fix something that is both nearly impossible to improve for the better and that is also putting money in his pocket. And it looks very bad.
I'm already appliying some of these lessons learned to a wiki I'm involved with....
Yes, but what percentage of the US conservative population is so brazenly partisan that they'd be upset at a company for complying with a request to take down an ad from an organization who owns a copyright used in said ad?
(Trademark, not copyright.)
If you think this is the only example of Google's antipathy towards "Red State America", you haven't been paying attention....
And that gets to my point: I think Google perceives that it can afford to pull these sorts of stunts, or e.g. never making a special page for Memorial or Veterans Day, without significant cost. If they are proven wrong, it will be an expensive lesson of the sort a company can't turn around for a long time.
Until you care to estimate how large a fraction of Google's audience, now and in the medium term, has significant disposable income as well as access, I don't think your statistics are very interesting.
And any way you look at it, 1/3 of the population of the wealthiest country in the world is not a group you should go out of your way to scorn.
A solid 1/3 of the US is "conservative" / Republican (not the same 1/3s, BTW, especially as of late:-).
It says something about Google's perception of their position in the marketplace that they feel they can be so brazen. Pissing off that large a fraction of your customer base is not something you should do lightly... it's not written in stone that they will always provide the best search results (even if we can't foresee them getting a competitor that's at least as good, but perhaps... less evil...?).
I think you may not have used a recent version of the M1 Abrams ^_^.
From vague memory of King of the Killing Zone (get it! A great book on engineering, even on how a semi-PHB car executive pushed the design team on visual style... twice to massive benefit to the design!), it's got a handlebar that pretty much controls things, forward and reverse (two gears for the latter), and direction. Maybe some pedals as well, but it's got an automatic transmission.
Note that in general in every way but the cannon it's qualitatively superior to anything else out there (unless someone has gone to the expense of developing and fielding as good a fire control system). As for cost and fuel economy: what's the price of being second best in a war?
Back to topic: one of the lessons of the M1 that is generally applicable is that ergonomics count. "In war everything is easy, but even the most easy things are difficult". (I apply this dictum to panicked sysadmin work late at night.:-)
Good general design counts as well, e.g. the decision to have four men with one a loader: cheaper, smaller, one extra set of hands for maintenance (1/3 more) and the loader is the entry level position. Physically demanding, but conceptually simple, and it gets a crewman acclimated to the various issues of being in the tank (noise, movement, cramped quarters, etc.) Then he's in a good position to move up to gunner or driver if appropriate.
General lesson here: learning curves matter, a lot. The distance from loader to, say, platoon leader is great, perhaps about the same for user to wizard level sysadmin. But the individual steps aren't so high.
Similarly, for Linux staring out as a user should be easy (and not require an install, no more than a tank crew assembles their tank:-), and then should with some smoothness move on up. Apt-get and I assume the RPM world are a good example of this sort of thing, on the way to getting raw code and compiling it, etc.
I don't understand why people feel the need to delete things like that.
It's very simple: they're vandals who've found a particular fig leaf to plausibly clothe their destructive compulsions.
I just came across a good article that had "needs grammar improvement" and "needs citations" flags. After fixing one typo and indeed finding another that needed fixing, I figured I should check the talk page, and noted someone warning roughly "watch out, or a fact bomber will pepper this article with [citation needed] tags, and then delete it later when they aren't added."
Upon which I said "F... this." I'm sure that happens, and I'm not about to waste time on something even if there's only a 0.1% chance some jerk will delete it for the thrill of destroying other people's work.
Plain and simple, for me I observed too many articles that had been savaged by Wiki-lawyers claiming "not notable", "not encyclopedic", etc. etc. to want to waste my time on "non-controversial" pages. Even taking 35 seconds to carefully finish splicing two sentences together.
I don't see how this can be fixed, at all. These are on their face not unreasonable policies to have, but vandals will use them to justify their actions, and life is too short to fight this sort of thing.
In general I'd conclude the stark change from exponential growth to outright declines shows a tipping point in psychic feedback. Wikipedia has gotten so notable itself that the game has changed for every page in it.
All this has pushed me further into my hunkered down mode of ferociously guarding a very few pages on topics I care very much about, and not contributing to the general quality at all. This experiment named "Wikipedia" has done something useful, produced something useful, but has now reached its natural limit.
Well, with so many venues where your can write, for each you have to decide what level of quality you're going to shoot for beyond merely communicating. Slashdot postings for the most part don't demand high polish.
Regardless, these many venues certainly encourage you to write, and that's by far the most important thing for everyone concerned. Think about it, in a period in which there were fears that the written word would die (TV and all that), instead we've got more people writing than I'm sure in any period of history.
His point about independent editors is well taken. One of the things I've done for a decade to improve my language skills is free editing (fiction and technical non-fiction) for people or efforts on the net who can't afford to pay money. In addition to the practice/experience, it pays off handsomely pure enjoyment, and I have absolutely no trouble spending all the time I want doing it.
I don't do that much of it, but "an army of Davids" doing this sort of thing in such a low friction system can make a big difference.
This is a line that Microsoft up to now has refused to cross.
A pretty important line, in my book.
Now, my backup email account is with Hotmail due to it being in existence far before Gmail and of course inertia, but this is one thing that does not encourage me to change that.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed.
But that's how checks themselves work. In fact, a number of companies now digitize and then destroy the paper checks you send them, see the Check 21 Act for more details.
It's up to you to catch mistakes as well as fraud. Heck, I can't remember if I've ever gotten a bank statement that didn't have a form on the back for you to fill out to balance your checkbook.
Obviously the account of this guy was too complicated for that, but as others have noted, it's a bit unlikely he was personally filling out 1,000 checks per month. This is the sort of thing you hire a bookkeeper as well as a CPA to manage.
And who does his taxes? It's very unlikely he does them on his own, and if he's not proactively managing his money he'll pay quite a bit extra to that CPA who will have to do a fair amount of forensic accounting just to reconstruct the last year's taxable transactions. That's an equivalent of the classic nightmare of a CPA being handed a shoe box full of receipts, etc....
Indeed. Practices would have to change, and given the flakiness of people that would be impractical, plus it would cost a lot of money.
How many would fail to proactively notify their bank? Plus they'd have to tell the bank correctly some magic info identifying the payee. This would really only work if they were the ones to initiate the whole thing through the bank instead of through the billing company. Wikipedia says that in Western Europe both methods are used, frequently to the exclusion of paper checks altogether.
If you want to keep the current system (at least in part) but insert your authorization requirement, then how many people, if called up ($$$) or otherwise asked in some way to authorize a payee, would either reflexively OK or deny it?
In practice (and not just in the US), everyone works on the assumption of honesty and verifies after the fact. Since you really really should reconcile your accounts each month to catch honest errors, extending that requirement to catching fraud is the cheaper approach.
I do not believe he's telling the truth, and if he really is that stupid, and e.g. totally unable to hire a CPA for a few days of low impact forensic accounting, he deserves exactly what he got.
My parents are millionaires. They also did a lot of bookkeeping to get there (I can remember a number of nights when they were looking for the wrong transaction(s) that caused a balance mismatch). Nowadays they're retired and still check all their statements each month and reconcile those against their records.
I repeat: being rich does not absolve you of the duty to balance your checkbook.
I'm sure these were as far the the bank could tell proper and secure transactions. The issue here is that the account holder didn't notice for 15 months!
The FDIC protects you from bank failures, not something like this.
Bottom line: being wealthy does not absolve you of the duty to balance your checkbook. Do that every month and you'll catch that sort of thing in plenty of time to get a full refund.
Ummm, you do realize that's on the bottom of every check that you write (in MICR). That's how your check gets matched up to your account for processing....
Nah, even more likely:
It is pitch black. You are the grue.
idempotent, I think.
In this context, it means the operation doesn't change state. Might not be strictly true for a web site (i.e. a log file is modified), but nothing significant is changed. Particularly, doing it multiple times will result in no noticeable change.
In a small startup, that's simply not true.
One bad hire, one founder who's not a competent manager will frequently kill the company. In my career, two companies failed because I separated from them. One of those companies had every chance of success, the managers just didn't grok that you weren't really done when version 1.0 was ready for beta testing....
And I've been in several small companies where one bad manager or the owner managed to wreck them, which I think reduces to the same thing you're denying.
And there's 6-2, which is both and is what most students in the department take today. There are very few 6-1s now, don't know how many 6-3s.
There's absolutely no mapping I'm aware of between the designations for majors and the course (class) numbers, besides all of Course 6 starting with 6 of course ^_^.
As for the first, that would be telling. As to the second, I'm a very early '80s undergraduate, but finances prevented me from finishing more than 3 semesters; having rich white trash parents was fatal for the higher education aspirations of my siblings and myself. Unfortunate that avoiding the free rider problem leaves people like us out in the cold....
I did a critical block of IT work for the department in the late '80s and have kept in close contact since then. 6.001 is all I've taken from them (after reading the Lambda the Ultimate papers), I'm otherwise academically an ... eclectic chemist, you might say.
This of course is your traditional Software Engineering course as that phrase is known in the industry. Was taught in CLU when I first learned about it and was changed to Java at some appropriate point. Will not be offered as such in the future, but that may be OK with 6.001 material being distributed into 6.01 and maybe 6.02 plus 6.005, and 6.005 being rounded out with more traditional Software Engineering material. I can see a new 6.17x that does a bit more SE plus the projects.
It's worth 12 Engineering Design Points, and MIT EECS for as long as I've known it (late '80s) has had a major philosophical difference with the accreditation organization for it. EECS does not believe you can teach design per se, it must be in the context of actually designing things. So each accreditation cycle the department shows that for each major, the required subjects accumulate enough design work. So one way or another the projects of 6.170 or the like will be replicated in what replaces it.
Hmmm, maybe they'll provide a wider range of domains? Once nice thing about the two new core courses is that they along with 6.004 (which will be retained although slimmed down to 12 units as I recall) will set up a graduate for a embedded career very nicely. That's damned good, since if you want to stay a salaried programmer that's about the only safe domain past age 35-40. Not everyone wants to start a business or become a consultant (or a manager :-) when the conventional programming career path is over....
Well, Harvard's undergraduate education in general and CS in particular may not "suck" because of this, but ... there's no comparison in either. E.g. a friend who got a CS degree there in the end of the '80s said the only general math requirement at Harvard was proving you could do algebra. Whereas you cannot escape MIT with any major without a full year of the calculus (what most schools would cover in a minimum of three semesters) and calculus based physics (mechanics and E&M).
He was taking Harvard's famous "honors calculus" (at least the first term (which is no longer available)) and had wanted to go to MIT for the CS, but his father made him go so Harvard so this was overall a pretty big thing for him....
Entirely possible; any school can have a strong class or area. Did Harvard's CS department evolve out of its extremely strong math department? CS departments like that tend to be strong in theory for obvious reasons. All I can remember is the Mark I stuff which was quite applied, and I took your intro CS course in 1978 in the Summer School which was an excellent general programming introduction but wasn't attempting to be a foundational degree class.
However, if you look at the new 6.01, you'll quickly realize this change is not "wussification", quite to the contrary, it could easily be more difficult. Mostly, it's different, much more applied (robots), more pure engineering, which is the sort of thing you'd expect from both MIT and an EECS department that obviously evolved from an EE vs. Math department.
Now, with 6.170 being terminated (haven't heard any inside stories about that, last time I checked it was planned on being part of the new curriculum, but maybe they ran out of hours) and replaced by unknown as of now 6.17x courses, who can say, but based on what I now realize is out of date information "wussification" was not part of the plan.
The big motivations were to make the introductory core courses (6.01 and 6.02) both more interesting and a total integration of CS and EE, whereas the old longer core block of 6.001-4 had essentially no integration until you got to 6.004 (which did not have 6.003 as a prerequisite) and was very abstract in comparison.
Whereas in 6.01 you get your hands on virtual and real robots fairly quickly (you start out learning the basic 6.001 material in Python), learn some calculus beyond the first required course (which is AP Calculus BC), and it is intended to be in the fine MIT tradition of being "just barely possible" (to accomplish; rough paraphrase followed by a direct quote).
It's certainly more intense than 6.001 in that the latter had no prerequisites while 6.01 has the 2nd term of physics (E&M) as a corequisite (and therefore first term calculus and physics as prerequisites---no way could you do this course without a solid foundation in mechanics), plus you have to prove you have some minimum programming ability.
6.001 makes experienced LISPers sweat blood; I'm not sure I could do 6.01 at all (hard to say since I wouldn't want to take it in the first place, my interests here don't go beyond CS (which is why a lot of people are screaming for a return of 6.001)).
Wait till 6.01 settles down and is captured by the Open CourseWare people and try it out, you might find it to be fun if unlike me you like EE a lot.
Except that most of what was in 6.001 will be taught in Java in the new 6.005, which for its type of material is Not Even Wrong.
Even the AI course will be switched to Python. Very soon, the MIT EECS undergraduate curriculum will be entirely purged of Scheme/LISP, although due to some furious demand (especially outside of the department, since 6.001 is generally useful while the new introductory curriculum is strongly focused on both EE and CS) there is talk of a reduced, 3/4 size return of 6.001. Someday. Maybe.
I've just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the MIT computer science program permanently.
As a Chemistry major who was fortunate to take 6.001 about the last time Sussman gave it, I'm not sure what to think about the changes. Programming languages and the content of 6.001 are the only things that I find really interesting in CS, and I think it's hard to deny that we're in a Dark Age in this general area.
And perhaps MIT is redefining what "CS" means in a good way, it's just not anything I'm very interested in, nor qualified to judge. Ableson and Sussman fully support the new curriculum BTW, and Hal has been heavily involved in the development of at least 6.01. Sussman has always believed introductory EE and CS should be taught together, and 6.01 and 6.02 most certainly do that.
On the bright side, the new introductory course 6.01 (don't know if this is true about 6.02) is very instructor intensive, enough so that they are enlisting all interested upperclassmen to help in the labs and such, which I think is a very good thing; you don't tend to really learn your subject until you try to teach it.
And with enrollment down so sharply, there are now likely enough professors and graduate students to support these new intense courses; MIT's historical practice of not allowing a fashionable department to get "too big" is once again validated (think of areo/astro in the '70s). The much lower enrollment is an opportunity to teach in a very different way, with more emphasis on building things, an MIT tradition from its founding.
But it is safe to say that an MIT CS or CS focused degree (most students do the combined major that is heavy in both) will mean something very different in four years.
While I don't necessarily disagree with the overall thrust of your arguments (although I think everyone I've read in this thread so far is just looking at the failures and not the successes in current American business ... creative destruction, baby!), your point about the Home Depot CEO getting that position at Chrysler is slightly off:
No way did that idiot, one of the most reviled CEOs in recent memory (check it out), get the position for his poor Home Depot performance and experience. He got it because he'd done supply chain stuff at GE (as I remember, it was something of that nature).
Doesn't disprove your point, of course. Without good design, engineering, and construction (the building of their vehicles), Chrysler is obviously doomed, no matter how efficient they are at squeezing the last drop of blood out of their suppliers. And Dalmer did a number on the design part of Chrysler, at minimum, quite a study in the destruction of shareholder value....
(Of course, it must be pointed out that the former "Big Three" US auto makers are doomed due to impossible promises they made to their unions many years ago to buy labor peace .. again, short term thinking that doomed them in the long term, absent government intervention, which isn't working so well now that the Japanese are making so many vehicles in the USA and doing so well at it.)
Wealth in its own way breeds crime of the sort we're talking about. I'm excluding "pure violence" that is not at least in part a means to an end of acquiring something; the 911 hacker is in this exclusion.
Banks, in a high trust society that allows their existence, breed wealth; putting your money in a bank has great benefits to you and the economy (for as long as that trust remains).
Wille Sutton is famously said to have answered the question of why he robbed banks, "That's where the money is." So in a sense you could say the concentration of assets that is necessary for a bank to function "breeds" various sorts of crimes against them (more types of crime now that banks do more things).
Technology in various direct and indirect ways makes us more wealthy, e.g how many of us have gained and/or maintained long distance friendships through the net? This can of course be used against us in direct (social engineering attacks, e.g. the worms that read address books) and less direct ways.
Although there's one key ingredient that not having read the fine article may not have been touched upon. Many sinners need temptation, but it takes more than just that for them to sin. Lowering the barriers to entry, lowering the chances of getting caught, increasing the payoff, all increase the temptation, but it still takes a fallible human to give in to that temptation to then commit a crime. (Some of course are sociopaths for whom the only question may be "can I get away with it?" (such people often have difficultly thinking ahead, so even that can be an issue).)
Hmmm, and if one goes so far as say without qualification that "technology breeds crime", well, that's not too far from saying "Any clothing that reveals more than face and hands breeds rape." I'm uncomfortable going that far....
When I think about it, his action coupled with his "choice" of clothes and weapon may have saved him/his family.
The police in good faith rushed to his house expecting something entirely different. When he walked out like that, I can't see it fitting any profile they expected to see, and that probably started to tip them off that all was not as it seemed.
HELLO???
Try "Post-Nixon's initiation of the War On Drugs".
Now, it's perhaps unfair to blame you for not knowing the entire history of something that probably started before you were born (I was in grade school, but it had an "educational" impact back then), but ... surely you've heard of no-knock warrants and their related atrocities which have been going on for decades and decades???
Bipartisian and nothing to do with the GWOT.
Absolutely not true.
Not true in 1979 when I arrived only understanding differentiation, not true today; I'm about to restart my math myself (from fractions :-) and I checked a few days ago.
MIT only requires that you are ready for the calculus (with so few schools teaching AP calculus what else can they do?). They accommodate anyone from there to AP AB or BC calculus (or more, you can take the exam of any course you want...), and they have a LOT of experience in teaching it to people who aren't as into math as you might think.
E.g. first term calculus (18.01) covers the AP BC material, and today you have the option of stretching that over the short normal term and then the month of January (which will conveniently be invisible on your transcript :-). I don't think that will save you from having to do the required multi-variable calculus at speed after that, but I didn't check.
I was in a small cohort of students with very high verbals and enough math aptitude and background to survive, but not as a math or physics major. A number of us found each other, joked that we were admitted to keep the others sane (not true, but we took that as a duty anyway), and compensated by getting very good at restaurant bill arithmetic ^_^.
I sweated blood to e.g. get definite integration, especially since back then 18.01 was taught in just one rather short term, but one of the key things to realize here is that you don't have to study MIT's OCW available courses at an MIT pace.
CalTech is another matter altogether from what I've heard, and in retrospect it was fortunate they didn't admit me.
Why ever not?
Linux is a good foundation, certainly better than [fill in the blank] Microsoft Windows. You run a Studly UberGeek distribution on top of the base kernel, she can run the upcoming Ubuntu Pretty Pony (thanks to Farmer Tim I think it was).
She's happy, you shouldn't be unhappy, all we need to do is to find people to make that Pretty Pony version without going blind.
Yes, when teenage and younger girls squeal "OMG!! Ponies!!!" when their Linux boots up and they log in, we will be that much closer to world domination .
Let's see Microsoft add that sort of value to Vista ^_^.
No.
There's several things going on here:
The general change of the design goal of Wikipedia that includes emphasizing notability (the mass purge of Fair Use (in the US, where e.g. we do have the DMCA to protect an org like Wikipedia) pictures would be another). I believe I understand the concept while at the same time disagreeing with where the editors have decided to draw the line---e.g. the mass purge of trivia.
Then there's disagreeing with its arbitrary application: the classic example is said to be a entry for every Pokemon, while e.g. other titles with similar structure (lots of criters) are denied anything in that direction.
Or the guy who got a web comic purged in an experiment: he set up 10 sock puppets which went undetected, cited totally wrong criteria like Alexia (sp.) ranking, etc. for a web comic he indeed thought should be deleted because it was too obscure. The process is broken.
And then, as anyone who reads my posting you're replying to will see, how various policies including but certainly not limited to notability---seeing as how I spend two paragraphs on "fact bombers" and mention notability in passing---are I think being used as cover by some people motivated by a destructive impulse that can be accurately labeled as vandalism. I have no idea what fraction of "deletionists" are these people, but to deny there can't be a large contingent of them is to ignore human nature and the evidence before our eyes.
Since notability wasn't the focus of my posting, was only 2 words out of 300, your reaction suggests to me that I stuck a nerve. I'll let you explain exactly what it was....
I also have to wonder about your projection of "bitter" onto me. Circumstances (being otherwise occupied) and caution prevented me from investing too much into Wikipedia before I noticed this sea change a few months ago.
To my memory, not a single thing I've added has been deleted as non-notable (I've only complained some times where I thought useful content in articles I care about has been purged). I'm sad to see that the Wikipedia has fallen to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy and that the experiment is over, but it's hardly the end of the world.
A lot of good was accomplished, a lot of good material (e.g math I'll be learning) may survive this change to something resembling 1930's Stalinism, and the lessons learned now and as we watch the end game of The Decline and Fall of the Wikipedia Empire will be useful.
Including how a founder of an organization should not have his financial interests aligned with a drastic change in policy. I doubt a cause and effect, but I also doubt Mr. Wales will be powerfully motivated to fix something that is both nearly impossible to improve for the better and that is also putting money in his pocket. And it looks very bad.
I'm already appliying some of these lessons learned to a wiki I'm involved with....
(Trademark, not copyright.)
If you think this is the only example of Google's antipathy towards "Red State America", you haven't been paying attention....
And that gets to my point: I think Google perceives that it can afford to pull these sorts of stunts, or e.g. never making a special page for Memorial or Veterans Day, without significant cost. If they are proven wrong, it will be an expensive lesson of the sort a company can't turn around for a long time.
Until you care to estimate how large a fraction of Google's audience, now and in the medium term, has significant disposable income as well as access, I don't think your statistics are very interesting.
And any way you look at it, 1/3 of the population of the wealthiest country in the world is not a group you should go out of your way to scorn.
A solid 1/3 of the US is "conservative" / Republican (not the same 1/3s, BTW, especially as of late :-).
It says something about Google's perception of their position in the marketplace that they feel they can be so brazen. Pissing off that large a fraction of your customer base is not something you should do lightly ... it's not written in stone that they will always provide the best search results (even if we can't foresee them getting a competitor that's at least as good, but perhaps ... less evil...?).
I think you may not have used a recent version of the M1 Abrams ^_^.
From vague memory of King of the Killing Zone (get it! A great book on engineering, even on how a semi-PHB car executive pushed the design team on visual style ... twice to massive benefit to the design!), it's got a handlebar that pretty much controls things, forward and reverse (two gears for the latter), and direction. Maybe some pedals as well, but it's got an automatic transmission.
Note that in general in every way but the cannon it's qualitatively superior to anything else out there (unless someone has gone to the expense of developing and fielding as good a fire control system). As for cost and fuel economy: what's the price of being second best in a war?
Back to topic: one of the lessons of the M1 that is generally applicable is that ergonomics count. "In war everything is easy, but even the most easy things are difficult". (I apply this dictum to panicked sysadmin work late at night. :-)
Good general design counts as well, e.g. the decision to have four men with one a loader: cheaper, smaller, one extra set of hands for maintenance (1/3 more) and the loader is the entry level position. Physically demanding, but conceptually simple, and it gets a crewman acclimated to the various issues of being in the tank (noise, movement, cramped quarters, etc.) Then he's in a good position to move up to gunner or driver if appropriate.
General lesson here: learning curves matter, a lot. The distance from loader to, say, platoon leader is great, perhaps about the same for user to wizard level sysadmin. But the individual steps aren't so high.
Similarly, for Linux staring out as a user should be easy (and not require an install, no more than a tank crew assembles their tank :-), and then should with some smoothness move on up. Apt-get and I assume the RPM world are a good example of this sort of thing, on the way to getting raw code and compiling it, etc.
It's very simple: they're vandals who've found a particular fig leaf to plausibly clothe their destructive compulsions.
I just came across a good article that had "needs grammar improvement" and "needs citations" flags. After fixing one typo and indeed finding another that needed fixing, I figured I should check the talk page, and noted someone warning roughly "watch out, or a fact bomber will pepper this article with [citation needed] tags, and then delete it later when they aren't added."
Upon which I said "F... this." I'm sure that happens, and I'm not about to waste time on something even if there's only a 0.1% chance some jerk will delete it for the thrill of destroying other people's work.
Plain and simple, for me I observed too many articles that had been savaged by Wiki-lawyers claiming "not notable", "not encyclopedic", etc. etc. to want to waste my time on "non-controversial" pages. Even taking 35 seconds to carefully finish splicing two sentences together.
I don't see how this can be fixed, at all. These are on their face not unreasonable policies to have, but vandals will use them to justify their actions, and life is too short to fight this sort of thing.
In general I'd conclude the stark change from exponential growth to outright declines shows a tipping point in psychic feedback. Wikipedia has gotten so notable itself that the game has changed for every page in it.
All this has pushed me further into my hunkered down mode of ferociously guarding a very few pages on topics I care very much about, and not contributing to the general quality at all. This experiment named "Wikipedia" has done something useful, produced something useful, but has now reached its natural limit.
Well, with so many venues where your can write, for each you have to decide what level of quality you're going to shoot for beyond merely communicating. Slashdot postings for the most part don't demand high polish.
Regardless, these many venues certainly encourage you to write, and that's by far the most important thing for everyone concerned. Think about it, in a period in which there were fears that the written word would die (TV and all that), instead we've got more people writing than I'm sure in any period of history.
His point about independent editors is well taken. One of the things I've done for a decade to improve my language skills is free editing (fiction and technical non-fiction) for people or efforts on the net who can't afford to pay money. In addition to the practice/experience, it pays off handsomely pure enjoyment, and I have absolutely no trouble spending all the time I want doing it.
I don't do that much of it, but "an army of Davids" doing this sort of thing in such a low friction system can make a big difference.
Mostly good points, but, still:
This is a line that Microsoft up to now has refused to cross.
A pretty important line, in my book.
Now, my backup email account is with Hotmail due to it being in existence far before Gmail and of course inertia, but this is one thing that does not encourage me to change that.