I submit that it's better to make everyone more free than it is to make some people very free and other people mainly subject to them.
Yes, this is exactly my point.
In every implementation of communism to date, there have been a few heads-of-state who were very powerful and very free and countless ordinary citizens that were subject to them. That's the situation that Josephus refers to as "tyranny". That is the situation that you and I ought to be opposing.
And Open Source does oppose this. Gone are the days when programmers
had to subject themselves to IBM/AT&T/Honeywell in order to get access to the software they needed. Only the elites could afford software then. These days, anybody can download a copy of Debian, for free. Open Source is a great equalizer. Open Source does not solve every problem, but it is a force for good.
There still exist concentrations of power, which are worth opposing. But transferring all power to the state, which is what communism does, creates a new and even greater concentration of power, which ends up making the problem worse. Better is to move power downward, toward regions, communities, civic and religious organizations, families, and individuals. Distributed is better than centralized. That's why we have checks-and-balances, three branches of government that (by design) are constantly in opposition to each other, frequent elections, laws against monopoly control, unions, a bill-of-rights, and so forth. The whole point is to prevent concentrations of power, since, as you observe, concentrations of power tend toward evil.
Communism is about concentrating power in the hands of the state. Open Source is about distributing power to smaller groups and individuals. The two are in opposition to one another.
No, Bruce. Capitalism arises spontaneously whenever you give people a few basic freedoms. The only way to make communism/socialism work is to take those freedoms away. So the only way that you can argue that communism is not inherently evil is to say that it is not evil to take away such things as the right to detemine for yourself what you will do for a living and the right control the products of your own hands (which is the right to own property), the right to enter into mutually beneficial contracts, the right to buy and sell as you see fit, and basically the right to determine for yourself how to live your own life. Take away those rights and what you are left with is usually called "totalitarianism" or "tyranny" or some such. But whatever you call it, it is inherent to communism.
The other day I was reminded of a quote from Flavius Josephus, the 1st century Roman historian. Writing in about an ancient ruler in Babylonian ruler, he says:
He gradually changed their government to tyranny, finding no other way to break their fear of God than to make the people dependent on him for all of their daily needs.
The really interesting thing about this quote (I think) is Josephus's definition of "tyranny", which is basically any form of government that makes the citizens dependent upon the government. By that definition, Open Source is the antithesis of tyranny, since the whole point of Open Source is that the users are in control and are not dependent outside powers. The whole point of Open Source, at least as I see it, is that individual people are free to control their own destiny.
Bruce, I really admire all that you've done for Open Source. Can we now agree to work together to fight tyranny? Part of that is recognizing that you cannot have communism without taking from people the right to control their own destiny.
There is a very simple formula for getting and keeping a job. The formula works during all eras and in all cultures. It also works if you want to start your own business - simply substitute "customer" in place of "employer". This is the formula:
$(problems-you-solve) > $(problems-you-create)
It really is that simple. Just solve more problems than you create, and you will never have trouble getting or keeping a job. Technological innovation, government policies, cultural conventions, and the opinions of the director of workplace studies at Cornell have nothing to do with it.
There are two ways of making this formula work. You can minimize the term on the right, or you can maximize the term on the left. Let's consider both cases.
The principal problem you will create as an employee (or business owner) is that you will expect to be paid. Your employer/customer does not want to do this. It will be a problem for them. This is an unavoidable problem. There are other factors on the right-hand side that are avoidable, however. You can minimize the problems you create by being a nice person. Don't be a prima donna or a jerk. There is an entire self-help industry devoted with minimizing the right-hand side of the formula, so I'll say no more about it here.
While there are limits on how much you can minimize the right-hand side, there are no limits on how much you can increase the left-hand side. So the best approach for getting and keeping a job is to maximize the number of problems you solve. Note that the better of a problem solver you become, the more income you can command without unbalancing the formula. So if you want to achieve "employment security", probably your best approach is just to learn to be a better problem solver.
So how do you learn to solve problems? Practice solving problems!
Everybody is all about STEM education these days, as they observe that people with STEM degrees tend to be better employed. My theory is this has not so much to do with the subject matter of STEM as it does with the way STEM is taught. In your STEM classes, the homework and the tests and most of what you do is solve problems. You get lots and lots of practice solving problems. And that ends up making the students better problem solvers. Courses in which you write long papers tracing the development of gender stereotypes in 17th century New England farming communities do not provide nearly as much practice at problem solving, which results in graduates who are not as good at solving problems, and who therefore have more difficulty making the aforementioned formula work.
The problems you solve need not be technical problems. Problem solving tends to be an easily transferable skill. You might develop problem solving skills in math class, or playing chess, or working puzzles, but then end up applying your problem-solving prowess to management or administrative or marketing problems.
The key is to practice solving problems. Practice constantly. Make it your lifestyle to solve problems. Make problem solving part of who you are. Do you see some litter on the ground? Pick it up and you have solved a problem. Are there dirty dishes in the sink? Wash them and put them away - another problem solved. Do you see a shopping cart that some prior patron has left in the middle of the parking lot at the grocery store? Push that cart to the cart corral, or back into the store. (Do not be tempted to say "that is somebody else's problem". Your goal should be to solve problems, not assign blame for them.)
If you dare: end each day be reviewing what you have done and detailing the problems you have created and the problems you have solved, and resolve to do better the next day. If you are very brave, you can ask your spouse/significant-other to help you with that task, as they will often be able to point out countless problems that you created or problem-solving opportunities that you omitted because
Maybe Intel is an evil company that likes to cast off older workers, just to make them suffer.
Or, maybe Intel was merely closing down some older and no-longer-profitable business units from the 1980s that happen to have been staffed with workers that hired on in the 80s.
Or, maybe Intel was merely flattening their management structure, laying off managers and keeping the engineers, thus disproportionally impacting manager who also happen to be older, on average.
Or, maybe there was some combination of the above.
The fact is, we don't have any information on the issue. That the EEOC does not like Intel tells us nothing, unfortunately. In a better world, the EEOC would be an unbiased and objective adjudicator of these matters and a source of reliable information, but any rational observer knows that it not the case, at least not lately.
How about if I change my post to say "educated citizens"?
Everything is computerized now. An informed electorate needs to have some idea, however fuzzy, of what their lives literally come to depend upon.
Perhaps by "CS" they mean something other than programming. Topics might include:
The history of computing
Binary arithmetic, and why numbers like 1024 come up so often in connection with computers.
Representing text as numbers using ASCII or Unicode
What is an IP address?
What is a TCP port?
What is the difference between "the internet" and "the world-wide web"?
What is HTTP? Homework involves viewing HTTP traffic, or perhaps even fetching a webpage using nothing more than telnet.
What is HTML? Homework is to create an HTML file using a basic (no syntax highlighting) text editor.
DNS: What is it and why is it important?
Computability. Some problems are unsolvable by computers. Other problems are provably hard (NP-complete).
Cryptography. What is a one-time pad? A substitution cypher? What is the difference between symmetric and public-key crypto?
What is a "filesystem"?
What is a "process" and a "thread"?
How to operate a computer using a command-line shell, and without a GUI.
What is "network neutrality"?
There is a lot more of the above. This is stuff./-ers take for granted, but most people have no clue about any of it.
And yet it is important for citizens in a modern society to know. Hence, it needs to be taught in school.
Newer laptops have been updated (MacPro, Lenovo Win10) but I still need to recompile for my primary desktop (Ubuntu 16.04). Works fine for me. Firefox has been and continues to been my favorite browser.
Extended family members converged from around the southeast to the parking lot of the First Baptist Church of Cross Hill, SC, which is about 100 yards from the center line of totality. We brought a picnic lunch including eclipse-themed items such as Sunkist cola and Moon-Pies. We choose Cross Hill since it is not near any major cities or highways, thereby avoiding crowds and gridlock.
I brought a telescope and a white sheet to spread on the ground in order to see the shadow bands. The weather was partly cloudy, but the sun was clear of clouds for totality.
I had previously been at the center line of the annular eclipse of 1984 as it traversed the campus of Georgia Tech. A total eclipse is much better. To be able to look up and see what appears to be a hole in the sky is something you do not want to miss. If you have never witnessed a total solar eclipse before, I encourage you to add this to your "bucket list".
The SQLite developers were also surprised by how many bugs OSS-Fuzz (and American Fuzzy Lop) have found in SQLite.
The best explanation I have is that OSS-Fuzz and AFL are exploring extreme corner-cases of the code where human-generated tests would never think to go. Fuzzing is great for finding bugs that involve totally unreasonable inputs that never happen in actual practice and which can only appear as part of a deliberate attack. Fuzzing has not found any bugs that would impact the day-to-day use of SQLite.
In other words, fuzzing finds an entirely different class of bugs from what the mountains of other test cases for SQLite are designed to find. This is a good thing. We encourage testing diversity.
There are a few cases of NULL pointer dereferences or other crashes that come about while unwinding the stack following an Out-Of-Memory error. Those kinds of errors are real, and we are grateful to OSS-Fuzz for finding them, even if they are seldom seen in the wild. Other issues were assertion faults that probably would not have resulting in a crash if assert() has been disabled (which is the case for all default builds of SQLite). And then there are things like https://www.sqlite.org/src/tim... which is not really a bug at all - OSS-Fuzz was submitting a funky recursive VIEW query that after unwinding all the nested views resulted in a very larger prepared statement, which took too long to process and so OSS-Fuzz timed out. SQLite was getting the correct answer, it was just taking too long. Since the submitted SQL was of no practical use, we "fixed" that problem by limiting the size of prepared statements to be about 100 times larger than any real SQL statement needs to be, rather than the default limit of about a 10 million times larger.
Well written, Anonymous. On this much we agree: A college diploma is neither necessary nor sufficient to obtain useful skills. However, I think you overstate your case. College does not guarantee that you will become a problem solver, but if becoming a problem solver is your goal then college can be an effective method of achieving it.
Self-motivation and self-study are important, but not sufficient. In a functional college environment, you will be serendipitously exposed to ideas that you would not otherwise encounter, and would not know that you need to dig into. If you are motivated and want to learn, college is a great place to do that.
On the other hand, my thesis presumes a "functional" college environment. If you want to argue that many colleges these days are dysfunctional, I won't contradict you. It is entirely possible to get a college degree, even an advanced degree, and not learn anything useful. But just because it is possible to waste years and countless thousands of dollars on worthless degree programs does not mean that all college is worthless. You will get out of college in proportion to what you put in. I think even soft subjects, properly done, have value, though I agree with you that the soft subjects are not often properly done nowadays.
Society seems to have conflated the concepts of "credentials" and "capabilities" and assumes that having the first bestows the second. You cannot deny that the two are at least correlated, but the correlation is imperfect and even if it were perfect it would not imply causality. It would be good if more people, and especially policy makers, recognized this.
You want as many pixels on your screen as you can get. Dual-head is better. (Triple- or quad-head is better still). This follows from the simple observation that the more information you can see at one time, the faster you can work and the fewer mistakes you will make.
Remember that the pixel-width of your screen is more important that the physical width of your screen. The physical width should be sized so that it completely fills your field of vision when you are seated comfortably and ergonomically. Your goal should then be to put as many pixels inside that fixed physical width as you possibly can.
Avoid programming on laptops. You cannot work efficiently while looking through a soda-straw.
Wow, a person stumbled over their address, clearly they're lying!
The episode went something like this:
Poll worker: What is your current address? Voter:States address Poll worker: That is not what we have on your registation. That address is in a different district. Voter: I've moved Poll worker: You'll have to go to the other district and file a contingency ballot. Voter: Oh. In that case I haven't really moved, my address is still original address.
It was eye-rollingly obvious that the voter was lying and had moved to a different voting district but had not bothered to update her registration. So she voted in a district where she did not live. As I said, it was a minor fraud, but it is still fraud.
And they knew you had registered your move yet how...? You had just moved. How did they get your new address?
It was a local politician who knew me personally and professionally.
I keep hearing this matra of how rare vote fraud is. Yet I have personally witnessed fraud occurring twice in my life, without looking for it. If I have stumbled over vote fraud twice, which makes me think that it happens rather frequently.
The first instance of fraud I observed was in Durham, NC in the early 1990s. A woman in line to vote in front of me had moved house but voted in her former district. This was apparent because she initially gave an incorrect address, but then amended her answer to her old address when the new one didn't work. From her reactions and mannerisms, it was plainly apparent to all that she we lying about where she currently lived.
In the second instance occurred 10 years later, shortly after I myself had moved to a new city. A local politician in my former town mailed me an absentee ballot and told me to fill it out and send it back in. (I declined).
The first fraud would probably not impact national elections since it merely shifted votes from one district to another. But the second case presented the opportunity to vote twice.
I have no hard data on how often vote fraud actually occurs. But if I've personally seen it twice myself, that strongly suggests that it is happening more than 31 times in 14 years.
No. You are not getting it. View the result of the experiment not as a violation of CoM but rather as "unexplained momentum transfer". You continue to assume that CoM holds and go about figuring out mysterious way that the EM drive is imparting some of its momentum into its surroundings.
> if you understand threading, you can work just fine within it
If you understand pointers and malloc(), you can work just fine within them too. But that hasn't stopped people from disparaging them relentlessly and trying to come up with new "safe" languages that don't have pointers and memory allocation.
Added irony: With pointer and memory allocation bugs, the problems are at least reproducible. Can't say that about threading bugs.
still cannot figure out why the Java developers thought they needed to do away with pointers and (application-controlled) memory allocation, but then turned around and encouraged the use of threads. It's kind of like saying to children: "Don't play with those scissors, you might cut yourself. Use the power saw instead!"
In SQLite, you can do "PRAGMA secure_delete=ON;" and it will subsequently overwrite all deleted information with zeros. This is turned off by default because it does more disk I/O.
Alternatively, one can run "VACUUM" at any time to ensure that all deleted content has been purged from the database file.
> Please spare us the tired, "the guvamint will screw it up" argument.
I came through immigration/customs at IAD just yesterday. All around me, seasoned international travellers were talking about how this was the worst border crossing in the world. It truly was a rousing display of mismanagement and incompetence.
I tremble to think what government-managed broadband would be like.
Here in Charlotte, there are crews all over trenching in new fiber conduit - both for Google and for AT&T. I found it interesting that the AT&T crews that I've seen are putting in a single 1-inch conduit, whereas the Google crews are putting in multiple (sometimes as many as five) 2-inch conduits. Maybe Google is just trying to catch up. Or maybe they have bigger plans.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, this is exactly my point. In every implementation of communism to date, there have been a few heads-of-state who were very powerful and very free and countless ordinary citizens that were subject to them. That's the situation that Josephus refers to as "tyranny". That is the situation that you and I ought to be opposing.
And Open Source does oppose this. Gone are the days when programmers had to subject themselves to IBM/AT&T/Honeywell in order to get access to the software they needed. Only the elites could afford software then. These days, anybody can download a copy of Debian, for free. Open Source is a great equalizer. Open Source does not solve every problem, but it is a force for good.
There still exist concentrations of power, which are worth opposing. But transferring all power to the state, which is what communism does, creates a new and even greater concentration of power, which ends up making the problem worse. Better is to move power downward, toward regions, communities, civic and religious organizations, families, and individuals. Distributed is better than centralized. That's why we have checks-and-balances, three branches of government that (by design) are constantly in opposition to each other, frequent elections, laws against monopoly control, unions, a bill-of-rights, and so forth. The whole point is to prevent concentrations of power, since, as you observe, concentrations of power tend toward evil.
Communism is about concentrating power in the hands of the state. Open Source is about distributing power to smaller groups and individuals. The two are in opposition to one another.
No, Bruce. Capitalism arises spontaneously whenever you give people a few basic freedoms. The only way to make communism/socialism work is to take those freedoms away. So the only way that you can argue that communism is not inherently evil is to say that it is not evil to take away such things as the right to detemine for yourself what you will do for a living and the right control the products of your own hands (which is the right to own property), the right to enter into mutually beneficial contracts, the right to buy and sell as you see fit, and basically the right to determine for yourself how to live your own life. Take away those rights and what you are left with is usually called "totalitarianism" or "tyranny" or some such. But whatever you call it, it is inherent to communism.
The other day I was reminded of a quote from Flavius Josephus, the 1st century Roman historian. Writing in about an ancient ruler in Babylonian ruler, he says:
The really interesting thing about this quote (I think) is Josephus's definition of "tyranny", which is basically any form of government that makes the citizens dependent upon the government. By that definition, Open Source is the antithesis of tyranny, since the whole point of Open Source is that the users are in control and are not dependent outside powers. The whole point of Open Source, at least as I see it, is that individual people are free to control their own destiny.
Bruce, I really admire all that you've done for Open Source. Can we now agree to work together to fight tyranny? Part of that is recognizing that you cannot have communism without taking from people the right to control their own destiny.
It really is that simple. Just solve more problems than you create, and you will never have trouble getting or keeping a job. Technological innovation, government policies, cultural conventions, and the opinions of the director of workplace studies at Cornell have nothing to do with it.
There are two ways of making this formula work. You can minimize the term on the right, or you can maximize the term on the left. Let's consider both cases.
The principal problem you will create as an employee (or business owner) is that you will expect to be paid. Your employer/customer does not want to do this. It will be a problem for them. This is an unavoidable problem. There are other factors on the right-hand side that are avoidable, however. You can minimize the problems you create by being a nice person. Don't be a prima donna or a jerk. There is an entire self-help industry devoted with minimizing the right-hand side of the formula, so I'll say no more about it here.
While there are limits on how much you can minimize the right-hand side, there are no limits on how much you can increase the left-hand side. So the best approach for getting and keeping a job is to maximize the number of problems you solve. Note that the better of a problem solver you become, the more income you can command without unbalancing the formula. So if you want to achieve "employment security", probably your best approach is just to learn to be a better problem solver.
So how do you learn to solve problems? Practice solving problems!
Everybody is all about STEM education these days, as they observe that people with STEM degrees tend to be better employed. My theory is this has not so much to do with the subject matter of STEM as it does with the way STEM is taught. In your STEM classes, the homework and the tests and most of what you do is solve problems. You get lots and lots of practice solving problems. And that ends up making the students better problem solvers. Courses in which you write long papers tracing the development of gender stereotypes in 17th century New England farming communities do not provide nearly as much practice at problem solving, which results in graduates who are not as good at solving problems, and who therefore have more difficulty making the aforementioned formula work.
The problems you solve need not be technical problems. Problem solving tends to be an easily transferable skill. You might develop problem solving skills in math class, or playing chess, or working puzzles, but then end up applying your problem-solving prowess to management or administrative or marketing problems.
The key is to practice solving problems. Practice constantly. Make it your lifestyle to solve problems. Make problem solving part of who you are. Do you see some litter on the ground? Pick it up and you have solved a problem. Are there dirty dishes in the sink? Wash them and put them away - another problem solved. Do you see a shopping cart that some prior patron has left in the middle of the parking lot at the grocery store? Push that cart to the cart corral, or back into the store. (Do not be tempted to say "that is somebody else's problem". Your goal should be to solve problems, not assign blame for them.)
If you dare: end each day be reviewing what you have done and detailing the problems you have created and the problems you have solved, and resolve to do better the next day. If you are very brave, you can ask your spouse/significant-other to help you with that task, as they will often be able to point out countless problems that you created or problem-solving opportunities that you omitted because
Maybe Intel is an evil company that likes to cast off older workers, just to make them suffer.
Or, maybe Intel was merely closing down some older and no-longer-profitable business units from the 1980s that happen to have been staffed with workers that hired on in the 80s.
Or, maybe Intel was merely flattening their management structure, laying off managers and keeping the engineers, thus disproportionally impacting manager who also happen to be older, on average.
Or, maybe there was some combination of the above.
The fact is, we don't have any information on the issue. That the EEOC does not like Intel tells us nothing, unfortunately. In a better world, the EEOC would be an unbiased and objective adjudicator of these matters and a source of reliable information, but any rational observer knows that it not the case, at least not lately.
You think I can defeat these new LPRs using dazzle camo? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A new youtube video from a dash cam seems to support to theory that truss #11 fractured.
How about if I change my post to say "educated citizens"? Everything is computerized now. An informed electorate needs to have some idea, however fuzzy, of what their lives literally come to depend upon.
Perhaps by "CS" they mean something other than programming. Topics might include:
There is a lot more of the above. This is stuff ./-ers take for granted, but most people have no clue about any of it.
And yet it is important for citizens in a modern society to know. Hence, it needs to be taught in school.
DuckDuckGo? Is there some reason that I should not be using DuckDuckGo - some reason that I don't yet know about?
I will continue to go see all the canonical StarWars films on opening night - out of tradition. But the thrill is gone.
Newer laptops have been updated (MacPro, Lenovo Win10) but I still need to recompile for my primary desktop (Ubuntu 16.04). Works fine for me. Firefox has been and continues to been my favorite browser.
Extended family members converged from around the southeast to the parking lot of the First Baptist Church of Cross Hill, SC, which is about 100 yards from the center line of totality. We brought a picnic lunch including eclipse-themed items such as Sunkist cola and Moon-Pies. We choose Cross Hill since it is not near any major cities or highways, thereby avoiding crowds and gridlock.
I brought a telescope and a white sheet to spread on the ground in order to see the shadow bands. The weather was partly cloudy, but the sun was clear of clouds for totality.
Photo of totality: https://sqlite.org/tmp/total-e...
I had previously been at the center line of the annular eclipse of 1984 as it traversed the campus of Georgia Tech. A total eclipse is much better. To be able to look up and see what appears to be a hole in the sky is something you do not want to miss. If you have never witnessed a total solar eclipse before, I encourage you to add this to your "bucket list".
The SQLite developers were also surprised by how many bugs OSS-Fuzz (and American Fuzzy Lop) have found in SQLite.
The best explanation I have is that OSS-Fuzz and AFL are exploring extreme corner-cases of the code where human-generated tests would never think to go. Fuzzing is great for finding bugs that involve totally unreasonable inputs that never happen in actual practice and which can only appear as part of a deliberate attack. Fuzzing has not found any bugs that would impact the day-to-day use of SQLite.
In other words, fuzzing finds an entirely different class of bugs from what the mountains of other test cases for SQLite are designed to find. This is a good thing. We encourage testing diversity.
Here is a list of issues found in SQLite by OSS-Fuzz (and now fixed): https://www.sqlite.org/src/sea...
There are a few cases of NULL pointer dereferences or other crashes that come about while unwinding the stack following an Out-Of-Memory error. Those kinds of errors are real, and we are grateful to OSS-Fuzz for finding them, even if they are seldom seen in the wild. Other issues were assertion faults that probably would not have resulting in a crash if assert() has been disabled (which is the case for all default builds of SQLite). And then there are things like https://www.sqlite.org/src/tim... which is not really a bug at all - OSS-Fuzz was submitting a funky recursive VIEW query that after unwinding all the nested views resulted in a very larger prepared statement, which took too long to process and so OSS-Fuzz timed out. SQLite was getting the correct answer, it was just taking too long. Since the submitted SQL was of no practical use, we "fixed" that problem by limiting the size of prepared statements to be about 100 times larger than any real SQL statement needs to be, rather than the default limit of about a 10 million times larger.
Well written, Anonymous. On this much we agree: A college diploma is neither necessary nor sufficient to obtain useful skills. However, I think you overstate your case. College does not guarantee that you will become a problem solver, but if becoming a problem solver is your goal then college can be an effective method of achieving it.
Self-motivation and self-study are important, but not sufficient. In a functional college environment, you will be serendipitously exposed to ideas that you would not otherwise encounter, and would not know that you need to dig into. If you are motivated and want to learn, college is a great place to do that.
On the other hand, my thesis presumes a "functional" college environment. If you want to argue that many colleges these days are dysfunctional, I won't contradict you. It is entirely possible to get a college degree, even an advanced degree, and not learn anything useful. But just because it is possible to waste years and countless thousands of dollars on worthless degree programs does not mean that all college is worthless. You will get out of college in proportion to what you put in. I think even soft subjects, properly done, have value, though I agree with you that the soft subjects are not often properly done nowadays.
Society seems to have conflated the concepts of "credentials" and "capabilities" and assumes that having the first bestows the second. You cannot deny that the two are at least correlated, but the correlation is imperfect and even if it were perfect it would not imply causality. It would be good if more people, and especially policy makers, recognized this.
You want as many pixels on your screen as you can get. Dual-head is better. (Triple- or quad-head is better still). This follows from the simple observation that the more information you can see at one time, the faster you can work and the fewer mistakes you will make.
Remember that the pixel-width of your screen is more important that the physical width of your screen. The physical width should be sized so that it completely fills your field of vision when you are seated comfortably and ergonomically. Your goal should then be to put as many pixels inside that fixed physical width as you possibly can.
Avoid programming on laptops. You cannot work efficiently while looking through a soda-straw.
... then you don't need chocolate. Just say'in.
Wow, a person stumbled over their address, clearly they're lying!
The episode went something like this:
Poll worker: What is your current address?
Voter: States address
Poll worker: That is not what we have on your registation. That address is in a different district.
Voter: I've moved
Poll worker: You'll have to go to the other district and file a contingency ballot.
Voter: Oh. In that case I haven't really moved, my address is still original address.
It was eye-rollingly obvious that the voter was lying and had moved to a different voting district but had not bothered to update her registration. So she voted in a district where she did not live. As I said, it was a minor fraud, but it is still fraud.
And they knew you had registered your move yet how...? You had just moved. How did they get your new address?
It was a local politician who knew me personally and professionally.
I keep hearing this matra of how rare vote fraud is. Yet I have personally witnessed fraud occurring twice in my life, without looking for it. If I have stumbled over vote fraud twice, which makes me think that it happens rather frequently.
The first instance of fraud I observed was in Durham, NC in the early 1990s. A woman in line to vote in front of me had moved house but voted in her former district. This was apparent because she initially gave an incorrect address, but then amended her answer to her old address when the new one didn't work. From her reactions and mannerisms, it was plainly apparent to all that she we lying about where she currently lived.
In the second instance occurred 10 years later, shortly after I myself had moved to a new city. A local politician in my former town mailed me an absentee ballot and told me to fill it out and send it back in. (I declined).
The first fraud would probably not impact national elections since it merely shifted votes from one district to another. But the second case presented the opportunity to vote twice.
I have no hard data on how often vote fraud actually occurs. But if I've personally seen it twice myself, that strongly suggests that it is happening more than 31 times in 14 years.
No. You are not getting it. View the result of the experiment not as a violation of CoM but rather as "unexplained momentum transfer". You continue to assume that CoM holds and go about figuring out mysterious way that the EM drive is imparting some of its momentum into its surroundings.
If you understand pointers and malloc(), you can work just fine within them too. But that hasn't stopped people from disparaging them relentlessly and trying to come up with new "safe" languages that don't have pointers and memory allocation.
Added irony: With pointer and memory allocation bugs, the problems are at least reproducible. Can't say that about threading bugs.
still cannot figure out why the Java developers thought they needed to do away with pointers and (application-controlled) memory allocation, but then turned around and encouraged the use of threads. It's kind of like saying to children: "Don't play with those scissors, you might cut yourself. Use the power saw instead!"
In SQLite, you can do "PRAGMA secure_delete=ON;" and it will subsequently overwrite all deleted information with zeros. This is turned off by default because it does more disk I/O. Alternatively, one can run "VACUUM" at any time to ensure that all deleted content has been purged from the database file.
Dude, seriously. Go read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Check your greed or it will become your undoing, and possibly ours too.
> Please spare us the tired, "the guvamint will screw it up" argument.
I came through immigration/customs at IAD just yesterday. All around me, seasoned international travellers were talking about how this was the worst border crossing in the world. It truly was a rousing display of mismanagement and incompetence.
I tremble to think what government-managed broadband would be like.
https://sqlite.org/random-pass... shows example output with a link to the source code.
Here in Charlotte, there are crews all over trenching in new fiber conduit - both for Google and for AT&T. I found it interesting that the AT&T crews that I've seen are putting in a single 1-inch conduit, whereas the Google crews are putting in multiple (sometimes as many as five) 2-inch conduits. Maybe Google is just trying to catch up. Or maybe they have bigger plans.