That brings to mind a quote attributed (incorrectly) to the French philosopher Voltaire: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Other quotes from Voltaire from that same page make sense to me, such as "It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one." [Innocent until proven guilty] and 'People sometimes say: "Common sense is quite rare." ' as well as "What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly — that is the first law of nature."
I would also insert a second layer of QA consisting of Project Managers and Product Managers. The primary QA guys are running regression tests and unit tests etc. You need to have someone actual sit down and drive the software too because Mercury and the like don't catch everything, especially logic and common sense things.
Automated tests are good and I prefer to write automated tests for all the software created by the developers with whom I work. But sometimes interactive tests are useful and/or necessary. Making sure that the core processing routine for your application does what it's supposed to do with known input? Automate that. Making sure that the interface (GUI, web page, etc.) passes the right stuff to the core processing routine when the user clicks on the nice shiny buttons? Harder to automate; it may be more cost-effective to create an interactive test for that.
From the article and it's referenced information, namely Secretary of State Scott Gessler's guidelines on the matter, ballots were to include limited identifying marks to ensure that the same ballot would not be counted twice when votes were tabulated, but that individuals would not have their ball it's unique identifier linked to their voter registration.
IMO a better solution to this problem is to give the person counting the ballot a stamp. When the counter counts a ballot, they stamp it in one specific corner. If a ballot already has a stamp, you don't count it again. Need to recount? Choose another corner to stamp.
They're not necessarily correlated. I created an account a while back (over a decade ago) under my college email address. I'd consider that to be when I "joined" Slashdot. After I graduated I lost access to that email address. Since I didn't remember the password for that old account, and didn't have access to the email address to which the password change email would be sent, that account is dead and so I created this new one. In hindsight, I should have changed the email on that old account to use an address to which I would retain access even after graduation, but hindsight is 20/20 and my foresight is significantly worse.
Depends on how big a blender you have. The brochure says the Cray 2 was 45 inches tall, 53 inches in diameter, and weighed 5500 pounds. [Aaaaaaand... cue the "Yo Momma" jokes.] According to Guinness, the world's largest blender was "4.79 m (16 ft 4 in) tall, 2.43 (8 ft) wide, 3.04 m (10 ft) deep and... [was used] to make a 1, 324 litre (291 gal / 350 US gal) smoothie." Assuming the smoothie ingredients weighed the same as water, the blender was able to handle just shy of 3000 pounds. That's well shy of the Cray 2's weight, but the Guinness article doesn't make it clear if that was the blender's maximum weight limit.
And before you try to "Whoosh" me... it's not a Whoosh if you enjoy figuring out the answer to the rhetorical question.
If a lawyer includes a text link to a website in a court filing, are they required to obtain permission from the site author to do so or be guilty of copyright infringement?
Can a future owner of that website rescind permission?
Do either of those answers change if the court filings are digitized and made available electronically through a website owned by the Dutch court system?
I've read reports of people sniping other types of camera with paintballs; what's the effective range on a paintball gun?
Or, relatively non-destructively: put a piece of duct tape or a piece of aluminum foil over the lens. If the cameras are high enough above the ground this could be a problem, but you may be able to do it with a long broom handle.
Donald Knuth has stated that after he dies, TeX's version number shall be fixed at pi and Metafont's version number shall be fixed at e. All remaining "bugs" will be reclassified as features at that time.
why do you think you can "know for sure" an actual vote count?
Where I vote, I have to give my name and address, receive a ballot, draw a line to connect an arrow for the candidate for whom I want to vote, and put the physical ballot in a ballot box. The people counting votes there have the actual physical pieces of paper; if someone claims that the vote count isn't correct they can do it again.
do you "know for sure" exactly how many people are in the US?
Why is that relevant? I don't know the family history of the turkey that my family has for Thanksgiving, but that doesn't prevent me from eating it.
of course not. but through statistical samples you can calculate a number that you have good faith in. fact: spend a billion dollars to hand-count every vote in the US, and here a big wooshing sound as thousand of tea-pottiers drop their "FRAUDZ!" and rail against wasteful gov't spending.
In Presidential elections from 1940 to 2008, there were a total of around 1,472,558,000 votes. Let's assume that it costs $1 to count each vote. [That's a gross overestimate I believe, but let's go with it.] That means that counting votes _for the past 68 years_ would have cost about a billion and a half dollars. For 2008, it would have cost about 130 million dollars. For comparison, looking at the summary page for the 2008 federal budget, that's approximately a third to a half of the discretionary spending requested for the Executive Office of the President. The Department of Defense probably wastes $130 million annually on the cost of paper and ink or toner printing out the covers for their TPS reports.
I distinctly remember that when I started my current job over a decade ago, part of our introductory training dealt with prohibited countries where we were not allowed to do business. There were 8-10 countries on that list, and I remember three of them being Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. I don't remember the rest of the list. These restrictions are nothing new; my guess is that Blizzard recently stepped up enforcement from "Where did you say you were from? India? Sure, we trust you." to "Let's automatically try to detect where you're from. Iran? Sorry, we can't do business with you."
If your SO has read Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings or something similar, ask them if they've ever imagined themselves as part of the story. Do they envision themselves as Harry, Hermione, Ginny, or Gandalf? Do they ever think about fighting orcs like Aragorn, Eowyn, or Legolas? Role-playing is like that, just a bit more formalized. The DM is the author of the story, controlling the minor characters, but the players representing the stars contribute by describing what their characters do. But instead of just being able to say "I slide down the stairs on a shield, shooting and killing an orc each time." you need to roll dice and the better you roll, the more successful you are at the action you described your character taking.
If they haven't read HP or LOTR, use the metaphor of a game as an improv movie or TV show. The DM is the director, and controls most of what's going on in the game, but the players control the main characters and describe what those main characters do. In a live-action role playing game (or LARP) the players actually act as their characters; in a non-LARP RPG they instead just describe what their characters do.
Will any e-lock company dare to guarantee that their e-lock for hotel room will be hack-proof?
Of course not. Nobody has ever guaranteed such a thing, except for shady dealing liars with the worst security of all. Anybody who works in security knows that any system which protects something sufficiently valuable, or is sufficiently widely deployed will eventually come up against some lock pick or safe cracker who has enough intelligence, free time, and interest. it's just a question of how long it takes to happen, and how inconvenient it is when he shows up. Adding such a guarantee would just be a giant banner attracting more interest from such people.
Besides, there's always the social engineering approach to lockpicking, namely holding the person with the key at gunpoint/knifepoint until they open the door. I'm not going to link to the obvious XKCD.
Besides, this isn't software. If the guarantee is disproven, and you have to push out patches, you can't just put them on an FTP server. you have to build physical hardware, ship it out, etc. It would be unreasonable to expect any company to do all of that for free. In some cases a company will do a free, voluntary recall out of pocket for the sake of good PR. But, it's hardly something you can demand.
I imagine there's probably going to be at least one lawsuit out of this, and if it reaches discovery and there's evidence that the lock manufacturer was aware of the flaw and didn't fix it (because it would be too expensive, for instance) then they may wish they'd replaced the circuit board component for free.
I think NASA is as much of a drain on the nation's resources as Kentucky. Sure, they're stupid in Kentucky, but I didn't appreciate seeing all those tax-payer bought incredibly over priced apple laptops in mission control. Only the government would pay gobs of cash for a locked down version of BSD.
So what you're saying is basically "WTF has NASA done for me?" I'm curious what your impression is of the 2012 United States budget overall, where if you total the enacted discretionary and mandatory budgets NASA ranks 15th among agencies out of 22. The Department of Agriculture's budget was almost eight times that of NASA and the Department of Defense budget was almost THIRTY-eight times that of NASA's.To put it another way, NASA's budget is just over 2.5% of the DOD's and about one half of one percent of the overall budget. IMO the United States does need to tighten its financial belt, but worrying about NASA's budget is like worrying about whether your rice cake is four inches in diameter or five... right after you've eaten an entire Thanksgiving dinner.
And when the IDs are free and don't require any time to get them, then you can require photo IDs. At the moment there's no evidence that voter fraud, as in people pretending to be other people, is common enough to justify disenfranchising other voters. The GOP trots that out whenever they lose a close race, but the fact is that they have yet to show that there's any greater likelihood for one candidate or another to win based upon voter fraud or for it to of substantial volume.
It's quite simply a way of discouraging the poor, elderly and minorities from voting for political reasons. If there's evidence of significant levels of voter fraud then the GOP has the duty to report it so that the individuals can be prosecuted. They don't because they can't.
Uh, until you stop being ignorant why don't you just let the adults speak on this?
Right now in the USA there are close to 3 million dead people who are registered to vote and voting.
Dead, deceased, buried and/or cremated people. Voting. Close to 3 million.. that we know about.
You'll never, ever guess which party they overwhelmingly vote for. That's right... Democrats.
Now these are facts. Maybe you really hate them and can't stand they are true. They are true anyway - get over yourself. I would LOVE to have state-issued photo ID required to vote. It would be great. Photo IDs are very low cost. If you simply cannot afford $10 every 5 years or so then you have bigger problems.
And of COURSE no one who's willing to commit voter fraud would be willing to do something so shocking as obtaining a fake ID. Only teenagers that want to get into bars or buy alcohol would do that.
And even if an ID were to cost $10 (in my state it's $25) it would also require taking a trip to town/city hall or a DMV/RMV which depending on where you are and how busy it is, may require the better part of a day waiting in line. For someone that's working two jobs or more (say two full time and a part time job) that may be a real hardship.
The only people who are against this are 1) racists who think just because you're black or Hispanic that you cannot afford $10 every 5 years or so, 2) people who want to commit voter fraud, 3) Democrats who benefit from voter fraud, or 4) well-meaning liberals who sincerely and completely wrongly believe that photo ID requirements would ever disenfranchise anyone. You see, none of these are valid.
While we're at it, let's try to defray the costs of the election by requiring each voter to chip in a few bucks when they put their ballot in the box. Surely everyone can afford $1 per election, right? There's nothing wrong with that, right?
Like so many good ideas that we should already be doing, the people who oppose this have no factual reason. Just pure emotion. They don't like something so they think none of the facts are worth investigating. Sigh. Maybe a country full of people like this deserves to fail. Maybe those of us with some sense who understand basic things like the importance of honest elections should find another country to relocate to and let the emotional non-thinkers reap what they sow.
I can think of other alternatives. One such alternative would be to send everyone a ballot through the mail in a nondescript envelope (basically expanding the existing absentee ballot process to everyone) and requiring them to fill in the ballot at the polling place. This would be easier if election day was a federal holiday and/or employers were required by law to allow workers time off to vote. Now true, people who are willing to commit voter fraud may also be willing to commit mail fraud... but if the envelopes are nondescript, the person committing the voter and mail frauds would need to intercept all the mail, and that's more likely to be noticed.
I haven't seen any clear way to calculate say an integral using something like c++ or c#.
Calculus is a study of continuous mathematics. C, C++, and every (?) other programming language work on principles of discrete mathematics, which is why you can read all about strange calculations with floating point variables.
Calculus is _one_ branch of mathematics. There are others, like numerical analysis, which deals in part with those "strange calculations with floating point variables." Take a look at the example in Wikipedia's article on loss of significance for an example of such an analysis.
\begin{LionelHutz} There's the truth *frowning and shakes his head* that we tell the IRS and anyone with a contract entitling them to a share of the profits, and the truth *grinning and nodding his head* that we tell our Swiss bank accounts. \end{LionelHutz}
Okay, Joe the janitor has filed 7,000 DMCA takedown notices this month... whoops, 6,999 of them were wrong. Looks like Joe is going to be spending a lot of time in prison. Looks like human resources is going to need to find a new Joe. Unless we can come up with something analogous to prison for a corporation, this won't work.
Although... what if you started fining/prosecuting the legal staff that prepared those legal declarations? But that would just replace Joe the janitor in my above description with Pamela the paralegal.
It would take 631 thousand years to crack just one of my passwords - and considering you may need to crack at least one other before you got to that one, I would say, go ahead and try - I'll wait...........
Or you could crack the password via social engineering, by doing something like setting up a website that asks people to enter their password and indicates how long it would take to crack that password.... Sometimes the weak link in the chain is technological, sometimes it is sociological.
In addition, anybody want to bet on how long it will take for someone to reverse engineer this app to identify the server(s) it contacts, worm their way into those servers, and send out some joke/malicious updates?
"Romney chooses Sarah Palin as his running mate!" or "Mitt chooses you, Pikachu!" or "Click this link (to a virus-laden server with malware targeted at iOS or Android) to learn who Mitt Romney has chosen as his Vice President!"
Just because you CAN do something doesn't mean you SHOULD.
I'm sure that people who don't have this app will be kicking themselves. After all, this app is going to be the ONLY way to learn who Romney has chosen... for the six seconds it takes for CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and EVERY OTHER TV, INTERNET, RADIO, ETC. NEWS ORGANIZATION IN THE US to get someone on the air announcing it.
Slashdot Mirror
That brings to mind a quote attributed (incorrectly) to the French philosopher Voltaire: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Other quotes from Voltaire from that same page make sense to me, such as "It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one." [Innocent until proven guilty] and 'People sometimes say: "Common sense is quite rare." ' as well as "What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly — that is the first law of nature."
I would also insert a second layer of QA consisting of Project Managers and Product Managers. The primary QA guys are running regression tests and unit tests etc. You need to have someone actual sit down and drive the software too because Mercury and the like don't catch everything, especially logic and common sense things.
Automated tests are good and I prefer to write automated tests for all the software created by the developers with whom I work. But sometimes interactive tests are useful and/or necessary. Making sure that the core processing routine for your application does what it's supposed to do with known input? Automate that. Making sure that the interface (GUI, web page, etc.) passes the right stuff to the core processing routine when the user clicks on the nice shiny buttons? Harder to automate; it may be more cost-effective to create an interactive test for that.
From the article and it's referenced information, namely Secretary of State Scott Gessler's guidelines on the matter, ballots were to include limited identifying marks to ensure that the same ballot would not be counted twice when votes were tabulated, but that individuals would not have their ball it's unique identifier linked to their voter registration.
IMO a better solution to this problem is to give the person counting the ballot a stamp. When the counter counts a ballot, they stamp it in one specific corner. If a ballot already has a stamp, you don't count it again. Need to recount? Choose another corner to stamp.
They're not necessarily correlated. I created an account a while back (over a decade ago) under my college email address. I'd consider that to be when I "joined" Slashdot. After I graduated I lost access to that email address. Since I didn't remember the password for that old account, and didn't have access to the email address to which the password change email would be sent, that account is dead and so I created this new one. In hindsight, I should have changed the email on that old account to use an address to which I would retain access even after graduation, but hindsight is 20/20 and my foresight is significantly worse.
Depends on how big a blender you have. The brochure says the Cray 2 was 45 inches tall, 53 inches in diameter, and weighed 5500 pounds. [Aaaaaaand ... cue the "Yo Momma" jokes.] According to Guinness, the world's largest blender was "4.79 m (16 ft 4 in) tall, 2.43 (8 ft) wide, 3.04 m (10 ft) deep and ... [was used] to make a 1, 324 litre (291 gal / 350 US gal) smoothie." Assuming the smoothie ingredients weighed the same as water, the blender was able to handle just shy of 3000 pounds. That's well shy of the Cray 2's weight, but the Guinness article doesn't make it clear if that was the blender's maximum weight limit.
And before you try to "Whoosh" me ... it's not a Whoosh if you enjoy figuring out the answer to the rhetorical question.
If a lawyer includes a text link to a website in a court filing, are they required to obtain permission from the site author to do so or be guilty of copyright infringement?
Can a future owner of that website rescind permission?
Do either of those answers change if the court filings are digitized and made available electronically through a website owned by the Dutch court system?
I've read reports of people sniping other types of camera with paintballs; what's the effective range on a paintball gun?
Or, relatively non-destructively: put a piece of duct tape or a piece of aluminum foil over the lens. If the cameras are high enough above the ground this could be a problem, but you may be able to do it with a long broom handle.
OS X Soft Kitty
OS X Warm Kitty
OS X Happy Kitty
OS X Sleepy Kitty
But those are bug fix releases ... for a computer program, having a bug is kind of like being sick, right?
Donald Knuth has stated that after he dies, TeX's version number shall be fixed at pi and Metafont's version number shall be fixed at e. All remaining "bugs" will be reclassified as features at that time.
why do you think you can "know for sure" an actual vote count?
Where I vote, I have to give my name and address, receive a ballot, draw a line to connect an arrow for the candidate for whom I want to vote, and put the physical ballot in a ballot box. The people counting votes there have the actual physical pieces of paper; if someone claims that the vote count isn't correct they can do it again.
do you "know for sure" exactly how many people are in the US?
Why is that relevant? I don't know the family history of the turkey that my family has for Thanksgiving, but that doesn't prevent me from eating it.
of course not. but through statistical samples you can calculate a number that you have good faith in. fact: spend a billion dollars to hand-count every vote in the US, and here a big wooshing sound as thousand of tea-pottiers drop their "FRAUDZ!" and rail against wasteful gov't spending.
In Presidential elections from 1940 to 2008, there were a total of around 1,472,558,000 votes. Let's assume that it costs $1 to count each vote. [That's a gross overestimate I believe, but let's go with it.] That means that counting votes _for the past 68 years_ would have cost about a billion and a half dollars. For 2008, it would have cost about 130 million dollars. For comparison, looking at the summary page for the 2008 federal budget, that's approximately a third to a half of the discretionary spending requested for the Executive Office of the President. The Department of Defense probably wastes $130 million annually on the cost of paper and ink or toner printing out the covers for their TPS reports.
I never understood that whole "corporations are not people" nonsense.
Composition or aggregation, not inheritance. It is false that a corporation isa person. It is true that a corporation hasa person or multiple people.
I distinctly remember that when I started my current job over a decade ago, part of our introductory training dealt with prohibited countries where we were not allowed to do business. There were 8-10 countries on that list, and I remember three of them being Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. I don't remember the rest of the list. These restrictions are nothing new; my guess is that Blizzard recently stepped up enforcement from "Where did you say you were from? India? Sure, we trust you." to "Let's automatically try to detect where you're from. Iran? Sorry, we can't do business with you."
If your SO has read Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings or something similar, ask them if they've ever imagined themselves as part of the story. Do they envision themselves as Harry, Hermione, Ginny, or Gandalf? Do they ever think about fighting orcs like Aragorn, Eowyn, or Legolas? Role-playing is like that, just a bit more formalized. The DM is the author of the story, controlling the minor characters, but the players representing the stars contribute by describing what their characters do. But instead of just being able to say "I slide down the stairs on a shield, shooting and killing an orc each time." you need to roll dice and the better you roll, the more successful you are at the action you described your character taking.
If they haven't read HP or LOTR, use the metaphor of a game as an improv movie or TV show. The DM is the director, and controls most of what's going on in the game, but the players control the main characters and describe what those main characters do. In a live-action role playing game (or LARP) the players actually act as their characters; in a non-LARP RPG they instead just describe what their characters do.
So are Eric and Dylan, Timothy, Ted, Jeff, and John. Should we bar everyone with those first names from flying?
Of course not. Nobody has ever guaranteed such a thing, except for shady dealing liars with the worst security of all. Anybody who works in security knows that any system which protects something sufficiently valuable, or is sufficiently widely deployed will eventually come up against some lock pick or safe cracker who has enough intelligence, free time, and interest. it's just a question of how long it takes to happen, and how inconvenient it is when he shows up. Adding such a guarantee would just be a giant banner attracting more interest from such people.
Besides, there's always the social engineering approach to lockpicking, namely holding the person with the key at gunpoint/knifepoint until they open the door. I'm not going to link to the obvious XKCD.
Besides, this isn't software. If the guarantee is disproven, and you have to push out patches, you can't just put them on an FTP server. you have to build physical hardware, ship it out, etc. It would be unreasonable to expect any company to do all of that for free. In some cases a company will do a free, voluntary recall out of pocket for the sake of good PR. But, it's hardly something you can demand.
I imagine there's probably going to be at least one lawsuit out of this, and if it reaches discovery and there's evidence that the lock manufacturer was aware of the flaw and didn't fix it (because it would be too expensive, for instance) then they may wish they'd replaced the circuit board component for free.
I think NASA is as much of a drain on the nation's resources as Kentucky. Sure, they're stupid in Kentucky, but I didn't appreciate seeing all those tax-payer bought incredibly over priced apple laptops in mission control. Only the government would pay gobs of cash for a locked down version of BSD.
So what you're saying is basically "WTF has NASA done for me?" ... right after you've eaten an entire Thanksgiving dinner.
I'm curious what your impression is of the 2012 United States budget overall, where if you total the enacted discretionary and mandatory budgets NASA ranks 15th among agencies out of 22. The Department of Agriculture's budget was almost eight times that of NASA and the Department of Defense budget was almost THIRTY-eight times that of NASA's.To put it another way, NASA's budget is just over 2.5% of the DOD's and about one half of one percent of the overall budget.
IMO the United States does need to tighten its financial belt, but worrying about NASA's budget is like worrying about whether your rice cake is four inches in diameter or five
Some or all of the FBI, CIA, or Seal Team 6 pay the hacker a little "visit" to have a "chat" with them. With extreme prejudice.
And when the IDs are free and don't require any time to get them, then you can require photo IDs. At the moment there's no evidence that voter fraud, as in people pretending to be other people, is common enough to justify disenfranchising other voters. The GOP trots that out whenever they lose a close race, but the fact is that they have yet to show that there's any greater likelihood for one candidate or another to win based upon voter fraud or for it to of substantial volume.
It's quite simply a way of discouraging the poor, elderly and minorities from voting for political reasons. If there's evidence of significant levels of voter fraud then the GOP has the duty to report it so that the individuals can be prosecuted. They don't because they can't.
Uh, until you stop being ignorant why don't you just let the adults speak on this?
Right now in the USA there are close to 3 million dead people who are registered to vote and voting.
Dead, deceased, buried and/or cremated people. Voting. Close to 3 million .. that we know about.
You'll never, ever guess which party they overwhelmingly vote for. That's right... Democrats.
Now these are facts. Maybe you really hate them and can't stand they are true. They are true anyway - get over yourself. I would LOVE to have state-issued photo ID required to vote. It would be great. Photo IDs are very low cost. If you simply cannot afford $10 every 5 years or so then you have bigger problems.
And of COURSE no one who's willing to commit voter fraud would be willing to do something so shocking as obtaining a fake ID. Only teenagers that want to get into bars or buy alcohol would do that.
And even if an ID were to cost $10 (in my state it's $25) it would also require taking a trip to town/city hall or a DMV/RMV which depending on where you are and how busy it is, may require the better part of a day waiting in line. For someone that's working two jobs or more (say two full time and a part time job) that may be a real hardship.
The only people who are against this are 1) racists who think just because you're black or Hispanic that you cannot afford $10 every 5 years or so, 2) people who want to commit voter fraud, 3) Democrats who benefit from voter fraud, or 4) well-meaning liberals who sincerely and completely wrongly believe that photo ID requirements would ever disenfranchise anyone. You see, none of these are valid.
While we're at it, let's try to defray the costs of the election by requiring each voter to chip in a few bucks when they put their ballot in the box. Surely everyone can afford $1 per election, right? There's nothing wrong with that, right?
Like so many good ideas that we should already be doing, the people who oppose this have no factual reason. Just pure emotion. They don't like something so they think none of the facts are worth investigating. Sigh. Maybe a country full of people like this deserves to fail. Maybe those of us with some sense who understand basic things like the importance of honest elections should find another country to relocate to and let the emotional non-thinkers reap what they sow.
I can think of other alternatives. One such alternative would be to send everyone a ballot through the mail in a nondescript envelope (basically expanding the existing absentee ballot process to everyone) and requiring them to fill in the ballot at the polling place. This would be easier if election day was a federal holiday and/or employers were required by law to allow workers time off to vote. Now true, people who are willing to commit voter fraud may also be willing to commit mail fraud ... but if the envelopes are nondescript, the person committing the voter and mail frauds would need to intercept all the mail, and that's more likely to be noticed.
Anything that does not kill you may eventually lead to a Nobel Prize.
Some things that do kill you could lead to a Darwin Award.
Calculus is a study of continuous mathematics. C, C++, and every (?) other programming language work on principles of discrete mathematics, which is why you can read all about strange calculations with floating point variables.
Calculus is _one_ branch of mathematics. There are others, like numerical analysis, which deals in part with those "strange calculations with floating point variables." Take a look at the example in Wikipedia's article on loss of significance for an example of such an analysis.
\begin{LionelHutz}
There's the truth *frowning and shakes his head* that we tell the IRS and anyone with a contract entitling them to a share of the profits, and the truth *grinning and nodding his head* that we tell our Swiss bank accounts.
\end{LionelHutz}
Okay, Joe the janitor has filed 7,000 DMCA takedown notices this month ... whoops, 6,999 of them were wrong. Looks like Joe is going to be spending a lot of time in prison. Looks like human resources is going to need to find a new Joe. Unless we can come up with something analogous to prison for a corporation, this won't work.
Although ... what if you started fining/prosecuting the legal staff that prepared those legal declarations? But that would just replace Joe the janitor in my above description with Pamela the paralegal.
It would take 631 thousand years to crack just one of my passwords - and considering you may need to crack at least one other before you got to that one, I would say, go ahead and try - I'll wait...........
Or you could crack the password via social engineering, by doing something like setting up a website that asks people to enter their password and indicates how long it would take to crack that password .... Sometimes the weak link in the chain is technological, sometimes it is sociological.
In addition, anybody want to bet on how long it will take for someone to reverse engineer this app to identify the server(s) it contacts, worm their way into those servers, and send out some joke/malicious updates?
"Romney chooses Sarah Palin as his running mate!" or
"Mitt chooses you, Pikachu!" or
"Click this link (to a virus-laden server with malware targeted at iOS or Android) to learn who Mitt Romney has chosen as his Vice President!"
Just because you CAN do something doesn't mean you SHOULD.
I'm sure that people who don't have this app will be kicking themselves. After all, this app is going to be the ONLY way to learn who Romney has chosen ... for the six seconds it takes for CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and EVERY OTHER TV, INTERNET, RADIO, ETC. NEWS ORGANIZATION IN THE US to get someone on the air announcing it.