You did *not* have *military* service to vote. You simply had to have served.
This is fine--I read the book only once. Mainly, I read that there is effectively a class system in place in the book, one with which many people in the USA would be uncomfortable. Finding ways to exclude people from government tends to grate against the history of US Constitutional amendments regarding citizenship and sufferage.
How would you feel if you spent hundreds of dollars on a robot that buttered your toast, only to find that it took more time to fill up the butter reservoir and clean the machine than it did to butter your toast in the first place?
Product development and marketing is designed to make potential customers not think about this. For example, those self-contained iced tea making machines are actually no faster than simply boiling the water in a microwave, brewing the tea, and dumping it over ice, but that doesn't stop millions of people from spending $20 on the machine. Effectively, electronic voting is riding on the tremendous marketing behind technology over the last two decades, and it appears tons of people got hooked and are now being reeled in.
Officials said they were unsure how many voters had to leave for work before the problem was fixed.
For example, how many of those people were middle-class workers who really had only two hours to go vote and get back to work, and how many of those people were white-collar workers who could pretty much take the whole day off and do the work later?
This is potentially a huge side-effect of technology in voting. 15% downtime for voting machines really can effectively disenfranchise people, but in very subtle and very hard to measure ways. The downtime for a piece of paper is 0%, unless it is on fire or wet, and the scalability of buying a big case of pencils for $10 means very high throughput at the polling stations, thus allowing more people to vote.
Something which tests knowledge of issues would be good, so that not just charisma and sound bites are important....
Robert Heinlein tests another approach in Starship Troopers (the book not the movie), where military service is a prerequisite for attaining citizenship--and the right to vote and run for office. I guess the idea is that the only people who can make good decisions about running a country are the ones who have put their lives on the line in its defense (i.e., they have a personal investment in its success).
However, politics in the USA would not allow such a scheme, or anything like it, to come about. History shows that inclusive policies are generally better than exclusive ones, such as the dramatic differences between Prohibition and Women's Sufferage. Creating a class system based artificially on military service would probably just make everyone miserable, create black markets, and increase crime rates. Hence, we are back to allowing nearly everyone to vote, for better and worse.
Or, this is very intelligently-done propoganda. It is always hard to tell how efforts like Slate fit into the broader interests of their parent companies.
How would you feel if you hired a lawyer for a lawsuit in a software-related case and later found out that this lawyer also does a lot of work for Microsoft? Should I believe that a computer consultant is objective, when his company has "Microsoft Certified" in bold letters on their website? Should I trust Slate, whose financial standing is undeniably rooted in MSN?
While there is nothing wrong with a person reading news and articles on MSN or Slate, that person should always keep an eye on other news sources, especially ones with different owners or public funding.
One problem with counting only advisories is simply that there are different levels of transparency to users and developers among Windows XP, Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS X. One thing the study doesn't mention (which is unknowable, so they conveniently brush it off as unimportant) is how many covered-up or known-only-by-crackers vulnerabilities exist in each platform.
Also, why didn't the study mention OpenBSD? What about default configurations? Where the documented vulnerabilities always relevant or were they very obscure (e.g., service X used by three people in Greenland)?
Quote: "The POSIX subsystem included with Windows NT and Windows 2000 is not included with Windows XP Professional. A new subsystem supporting the broad functionality found on most UNIX systems beyond the POSIX.1 standard is shipped as part of Interix 2.2."
I've seen Linux-distribution-specific checks in some configure scripts...quite annoying (especially on Solaris). I really wish all programmers who choose to use autoconf actually put forth the effort to make their software portable. If they don't want to do that amount of work, just give me a big configuration file that I can edit manually.
Oh and there are RPMS
The man page for rpm is 15 pages long. Also, installing a single RPM can quickly turn into a game of 52 Pickup.
this isn't reocket science
Troubleshooting compilation and installation issues is practically rocket science. I've been using UNIX for years and I still struggle sometimes to understand exactly why the linker failed or why a certain header file is generating syntax errors.
Quite honestly, the best installers I've experienced under UNIX really are the equivilent of setup.exe, because they are self-extracting shell scripts complete with prompts for the install directory and other parameters. It isn't really necessary all the time to have the software managed by the package database, and just deleting a directory tree is the best way to "uninstall".
but in both good and bad ways, arguably. For the better, Linux is getting more popular, more comprehensive, and more user-friendly. For the worse, it is more tempting for programmers to get "locked in" to Linux, either because of distribution-specific dependencies or GNU-specific dependencies. It is very important for programmers to remind themselves daily that there is more to the world than just Windows or Linux (such as Solaris, *BSD, Mac OS, etc.) and that POSIX exists for a very good reason.
Games like Super Mario Brothers gave kids something to do and brought them together. Making games overtly political might, instead, polarize kids against eachother, because of how their parents will be buying the games. Instead of deciding whether a game is too mature or too childish, the parents will decide whether a game fits in with their political ideology. However, the child will be unaware of that decision--it's just a game to them. I'd rather see children understand via argument why government is too big or too small, for example, than have a pleasure-reinforcement mechanism encode it into their brain.
Nothing can refute the physical reality of higher speed + quadratically increasing kinetic energy + fixed human response time + fixed probability of random obstacles in road = higher chance of dying in an accident. Going from busy intersections to limited-access highways varys only "probability of random obstacles in road", and the data at NHTSA directly supports this.
What I wonder is how does the CLR handle combinations of object-oriented and functional languages.
Further, how do programmers handle combinations of such languages? How do debuggers handle them? Imagine debugging a multi-threaded object-oriented program written in three languages...yuck.
...it enables things like calling Ruby from C# and vice versa.
Generally, these features of the CLR have to be overrated, because the semantics differences among programming languages are so great that the CLR has to hit a hard wall at some point. Do all object-oriented languages resolve which method the call at run-time the same way? Do all programs treat arguments to functions in the same way? Just by asking these questions, I would bet that programming in a multi-language CLR environment would be prohibitively complex for any non-trivial project. I would imagine debugging would be a nightmare, too.
"Actuarial tables" sounds a lot like statistics...
Exactly, because actuarial tables are a way of statistically distributing risk over a given population. This is what insurance is. This is not secret, nor is it a lie. If you don't like how your insurance company distributes risk, there are 100 other insurances companies with different methods who will be happy to accept your premiums.
Where are most fatal crashes? On urban streets, generally intersections. Where are the fewest fatal crashes? Oh, why that would be the roads with the highest speeds.
This is an insufficient argument, because it focuses purely on a raw number of deaths (which is proportional to population density more than anything else). It ignores the risk for one person for a given number of miles driven on a given road. On a rural road, from experience, I can easily claim there are at least as many chances for accidents there as on any city street. Dogs, fallen trees, flooding, playing children, wild animals, you name it.
Since when do animals, children and cyclists hang out on Interstate highways??
All the time. I watched a pickup truck plow through a family of geese on a full-blown interstate highway once. I saw a family of deer in the median of another interstate highway. Once near St. Louis, just over a slight hill THERE WAS AN ORANGE BARREL HALFWAY INTO THE LANE. This, on top of all the idiots with cell phones, drunks and inattentive drivers, is why speeding ***DOES*** kill. Human reflex is a limited resource, and there is too much randomness in the world to justify that speeding is safe.
I do not condone doing 90MPH+ in a population center (i.e. center city Philly), but once you're out on the highway or the backroads, let loose. If your car has the speed and breaking distance, you have nothing to fear.
Animals, cyclists, and children become irrelevant outside of cities? In rural areas, especially those without leash laws, a dog can be sitting in the middle of the road around a blind curve. Good luck. Speeding is less about cops and quotas as it is about gambling with life itself.
If rabbits tell other rabbits that one particular "field" (the internet) is full of foxes, they'll stay away...
This is more a debate of whether average human intelligence is sufficient unseat the predator-prey cycle with respect to technology. Given that used car salespeople's reputations have remain unchanged for decades, I'm left wondering how the Internet will pan out. It'll be interesting, nontheless.
fix on an operating system other than Windows is typically ninety to a hundred days
The only thing I can think of is that he is taking common operating procedures out of context. If I run a Solaris box, for example, I generally don't want to go through the hassle of installing the recommended patches cluster every week...instead I would do it every ninety to a hundred days. It isn't like Solaris has a remote root exploit every week, either, even though it does bundle a web browser and e-mail program!
Slashdot Mirror
You did *not* have *military* service to vote. You simply had to have served.
This is fine--I read the book only once. Mainly, I read that there is effectively a class system in place in the book, one with which many people in the USA would be uncomfortable. Finding ways to exclude people from government tends to grate against the history of US Constitutional amendments regarding citizenship and sufferage.
How would you feel if you spent hundreds of dollars on a robot that buttered your toast, only to find that it took more time to fill up the butter reservoir and clean the machine than it did to butter your toast in the first place?
Product development and marketing is designed to make potential customers not think about this. For example, those self-contained iced tea making machines are actually no faster than simply boiling the water in a microwave, brewing the tea, and dumping it over ice, but that doesn't stop millions of people from spending $20 on the machine. Effectively, electronic voting is riding on the tremendous marketing behind technology over the last two decades, and it appears tons of people got hooked and are now being reeled in.
Officials said they were unsure how many voters had to leave for work before the problem was fixed.
For example, how many of those people were middle-class workers who really had only two hours to go vote and get back to work, and how many of those people were white-collar workers who could pretty much take the whole day off and do the work later?
This is potentially a huge side-effect of technology in voting. 15% downtime for voting machines really can effectively disenfranchise people, but in very subtle and very hard to measure ways. The downtime for a piece of paper is 0%, unless it is on fire or wet, and the scalability of buying a big case of pencils for $10 means very high throughput at the polling stations, thus allowing more people to vote.
Something which tests knowledge of issues would be good, so that not just charisma and sound bites are important....
Robert Heinlein tests another approach in Starship Troopers (the book not the movie), where military service is a prerequisite for attaining citizenship--and the right to vote and run for office. I guess the idea is that the only people who can make good decisions about running a country are the ones who have put their lives on the line in its defense (i.e., they have a personal investment in its success).
However, politics in the USA would not allow such a scheme, or anything like it, to come about. History shows that inclusive policies are generally better than exclusive ones, such as the dramatic differences between Prohibition and Women's Sufferage. Creating a class system based artificially on military service would probably just make everyone miserable, create black markets, and increase crime rates. Hence, we are back to allowing nearly everyone to vote, for better and worse.
Or, this is very intelligently-done propoganda. It is always hard to tell how efforts like Slate fit into the broader interests of their parent companies.
How would you feel if you hired a lawyer for a lawsuit in a software-related case and later found out that this lawyer also does a lot of work for Microsoft? Should I believe that a computer consultant is objective, when his company has "Microsoft Certified" in bold letters on their website? Should I trust Slate, whose financial standing is undeniably rooted in MSN?
While there is nothing wrong with a person reading news and articles on MSN or Slate, that person should always keep an eye on other news sources, especially ones with different owners or public funding.
One problem with counting only advisories is simply that there are different levels of transparency to users and developers among Windows XP, Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS X. One thing the study doesn't mention (which is unknowable, so they conveniently brush it off as unimportant) is how many covered-up or known-only-by-crackers vulnerabilities exist in each platform.
Also, why didn't the study mention OpenBSD? What about default configurations? Where the documented vulnerabilities always relevant or were they very obscure (e.g., service X used by three people in Greenland)?
I think this article smells biased.
cygwin has a port of sshd
I think it can be argued that Windows + cygwin != Windows.
I finally remembered where I read it: Windows POSIX Compliance.
Quote: "The POSIX subsystem included with Windows NT and Windows 2000 is not included with Windows XP Professional. A new subsystem supporting the broad functionality found on most UNIX systems beyond the POSIX.1 standard is shipped as part of Interix 2.2."
Devil's Advocate:
./configure
how about
I've seen Linux-distribution-specific checks in some configure scripts...quite annoying (especially on Solaris). I really wish all programmers who choose to use autoconf actually put forth the effort to make their software portable. If they don't want to do that amount of work, just give me a big configuration file that I can edit manually.
Oh and there are RPMS
The man page for rpm is 15 pages long. Also, installing a single RPM can quickly turn into a game of 52 Pickup.
this isn't reocket science
Troubleshooting compilation and installation issues is practically rocket science. I've been using UNIX for years and I still struggle sometimes to understand exactly why the linker failed or why a certain header file is generating syntax errors.
Quite honestly, the best installers I've experienced under UNIX really are the equivilent of setup.exe, because they are self-extracting shell scripts complete with prompts for the install directory and other parameters. It isn't really necessary all the time to have the software managed by the package database, and just deleting a directory tree is the best way to "uninstall".
I think it's the reverse; Windows seems to be getting more POSIX-like with each release.
I'm 98% positive that I read that Microsoft dropped the POSIX layer in Win XP. You have to use third-party add-ons like Cygwin, Mingw, etc. for POSIX.
but in both good and bad ways, arguably. For the better, Linux is getting more popular, more comprehensive, and more user-friendly. For the worse, it is more tempting for programmers to get "locked in" to Linux, either because of distribution-specific dependencies or GNU-specific dependencies. It is very important for programmers to remind themselves daily that there is more to the world than just Windows or Linux (such as Solaris, *BSD, Mac OS, etc.) and that POSIX exists for a very good reason.
Games like Super Mario Brothers gave kids something to do and brought them together. Making games overtly political might, instead, polarize kids against eachother, because of how their parents will be buying the games. Instead of deciding whether a game is too mature or too childish, the parents will decide whether a game fits in with their political ideology. However, the child will be unaware of that decision--it's just a game to them. I'd rather see children understand via argument why government is too big or too small, for example, than have a pleasure-reinforcement mechanism encode it into their brain.
I read other people's magazines when I visit their house, because I'm cheap.
Nothing can refute the physical reality of higher speed + quadratically increasing kinetic energy + fixed human response time + fixed probability of random obstacles in road = higher chance of dying in an accident. Going from busy intersections to limited-access highways varys only "probability of random obstacles in road", and the data at NHTSA directly supports this.
What I wonder is how does the CLR handle combinations of object-oriented and functional languages.
Further, how do programmers handle combinations of such languages? How do debuggers handle them? Imagine debugging a multi-threaded object-oriented program written in three languages...yuck.
...it enables things like calling Ruby from C# and vice versa.
Generally, these features of the CLR have to be overrated, because the semantics differences among programming languages are so great that the CLR has to hit a hard wall at some point. Do all object-oriented languages resolve which method the call at run-time the same way? Do all programs treat arguments to functions in the same way? Just by asking these questions, I would bet that programming in a multi-language CLR environment would be prohibitively complex for any non-trivial project. I would imagine debugging would be a nightmare, too.
"Actuarial tables" sounds a lot like statistics...
Exactly, because actuarial tables are a way of statistically distributing risk over a given population. This is what insurance is. This is not secret, nor is it a lie. If you don't like how your insurance company distributes risk, there are 100 other insurances companies with different methods who will be happy to accept your premiums.
Where are most fatal crashes? On urban streets, generally intersections. Where are the fewest fatal crashes? Oh, why that would be the roads with the highest speeds.
This is an insufficient argument, because it focuses purely on a raw number of deaths (which is proportional to population density more than anything else). It ignores the risk for one person for a given number of miles driven on a given road. On a rural road, from experience, I can easily claim there are at least as many chances for accidents there as on any city street. Dogs, fallen trees, flooding, playing children, wild animals, you name it.
Since when do animals, children and cyclists hang out on Interstate highways??
All the time. I watched a pickup truck plow through a family of geese on a full-blown interstate highway once. I saw a family of deer in the median of another interstate highway. Once near St. Louis, just over a slight hill THERE WAS AN ORANGE BARREL HALFWAY INTO THE LANE. This, on top of all the idiots with cell phones, drunks and inattentive drivers, is why speeding ***DOES*** kill. Human reflex is a limited resource, and there is too much randomness in the world to justify that speeding is safe.
Fallacious reasoning like this is also why people play lotteries and visit casinos. Do you feel lucky?
I do not condone doing 90MPH+ in a population center (i.e. center city Philly), but once you're out on the highway or the backroads, let loose. If your car has the speed and breaking distance, you have nothing to fear.
Animals, cyclists, and children become irrelevant outside of cities? In rural areas, especially those without leash laws, a dog can be sitting in the middle of the road around a blind curve. Good luck. Speeding is less about cops and quotas as it is about gambling with life itself.
If rabbits tell other rabbits that one particular "field" (the internet) is full of foxes, they'll stay away...
This is more a debate of whether average human intelligence is sufficient unseat the predator-prey cycle with respect to technology. Given that used car salespeople's reputations have remain unchanged for decades, I'm left wondering how the Internet will pan out. It'll be interesting, nontheless.
fix on an operating system other than Windows is typically ninety to a hundred days
The only thing I can think of is that he is taking common operating procedures out of context. If I run a Solaris box, for example, I generally don't want to go through the hassle of installing the recommended patches cluster every week...instead I would do it every ninety to a hundred days. It isn't like Solaris has a remote root exploit every week, either, even though it does bundle a web browser and e-mail program!
Batteries are sensitive to temperature. I guess this has to do with them delivering energy via a chemical reaction.
You are a criminal (if what you say is actually true), but you are probably so self-centered to have never thought of that.
...Infinite Improbability Computers.... ...all you get out are invoices for $200 hammers.
Actually, that would be a Unity Probability Tabulatrix.