My CS 404 Thoughts

The video we watched today was very amusing to me. I don't recall seeing so many different ways to hedge and beat around the bush by so many people in such a short time. What really got my attention was that it wasn't the programmers who were the instigators of the problem, or even the owners of the businesses that went public, but the investment bankers. I have never been overly fond of the stereotypical upper level banking executives, even though I'm a firm believer in the capitalistic system. Even though I was in high school and on my mission and relatively unaffected by the dot com bust I irks me to see that a handful of investment banking executives can have that kind of impact on our society. It may not even be the magnitude of the impact, but the intent and the duration that is the main problem. I owned a business before I started school. For a short time, that business was my sole source of income, and I believed I had a pretty good foundation. However, I would never have dreamed of trying to take it public based on the short duration I had operated it for. That the investment banking executives were so hungry for IPO kickbacks as to take untested and unprepared businesses public drives home the fact that money can indeed be the "root of all evil."

After the online readings we did for class today our guest speaker wasn't quite what I was expecting, but she raised some good points and clarified my thoughts a little. I was intrigued by Carla's recognition of the fact that programming often requires "non-standard" hours, and that it is a field dominated by "nerds who just want to solve problems." The De Palma reading about why women avoid Computer Science seems to me to confirm this. I have always wondered why my wife who is smarter than I am asks me to fix her computer, or figure out how to do something and then show her. Carla's mention of the mindset of a programmer and De Palma's discussion of the "tinkering factor" are a clearer answer to this than I ever thought I'd find. While reading De Palma's article and listening to Carla acknowledge that we are here because we are "nerds" it just clicked. I really do like to tinker. If someone asks me to do something with a computer that I don't know how to do, I have no problem telling them that I'll "figure it out." On the other hand, my wife (and most other girls I've known) is not so fond of tinkering. I think that many of the obstacles faced by women in Computer Science are partially due to a lack of numbers, and I'm not sure that will change without a fairly major paradigm shift in our world of "tinkerers" and "nerds" who just want to solve problems.

I am no stranger to the idea of a missed deadline. I have seen construction projects that I've worked on go way over schedule, and I've seen numerous software products late to market. The question I have to ask is: who sets these deadlines? In the case of construction projects (houses or other buildings) it was almost universally the real estate agent or some other agent of the development. In the case of software products, I would guess it is usually middle to upper management and marketing executives. This presents the question: how are these deadlines chosen? In my experience, this has next to nothing to do with the level of complexity of the project. I worked on several three to five hundred thousand dollar custom log homes before I moved to Provo, and we were well past the "deadline" on each one. The problem was that the person who set the deadline had no clue how much effort was involved in the vaulted ceilings, multi-pitched roofs, tongue-and-groove interior siding, and the multitudes of other "custom" or "rustic" options that were sold. I would make a guess that this is the same with the frequently late software products (Windows Vista comes to mind). I would also guess that the whole economy is somewhat inured to missed or pushed back deadlines. In the case of our construction projects, if the development real estate agents would have asked us how much time it would take, invariably we could have helped them set a deadline that we could assuredly make (barring some kind of catastrophe). So I don't think that the question is so much "the case of the missed deadline" as it is "the case of the over-eager marketing and management people."

The idea of hackers breaking into computer systems has been highly romanticized since even the earliest instances, and especially so since the early to mid-nineties, when movies like "The Net" and "Mission: Impossible" were seen by millions of viewers and brought "hacking" to the mainstream consciousness. This creates a major problem. What should be done with "hackers" who get caught? In my opinion, existing punishments (when it is extremely hard to catch a "hacker" in the first place) are not an effective deterrent. The young man in the movie from Wales who stole hundreds of thousands of credit card numbers was left to his own devices while awaiting trial (with his computer still plugged into the web). If he had broken into an actual physical building and stolen the same information in some kind of tangible form you can bet he would be singing a different tune. The teenager who illegally accessed NASA and other government files was sentenced to 6 months of house arrest. With this lack of deterrence, it is no surprise that these "hackers" think that they will never be caught. It is much easier to think you won't be caught when you are not afraid of the consequences of your actions. I think that we need to make the deterrent strong enough that they are afraid of it, so instead of "They will never catch me..." these miscreants start thinking "What if they catch me?". Until we do, we will have to rely on making our individual computers harder to break into than someone else's and hoping that this makes it not worth the "hacker's" time.

Our discussion in (and after) class today is something that I have thought about somewhat frequently for the last few years. The additional security measures enacted since the attacks on 9-11-01 worry me a little bit. Terrorists do what they do to disrupt lives and strike fear into the hearts of those they target. John Locke stated that people form a society to receive, among other things, the protection of that society. Terrorist do what they do knowing full well that these societies will treat them with the same rights granted their citizens. As far as I'm concerned, in antagonizing and seeking to destroy these societies terrorists are waiving their "right" to those protections. In cases where there is confirmation of terrorist activity I believe wire-tapping and other forms of electronic eavesdropping are completely warranted. However, I don't believe that we need new legislation to allow for secret electronic eavesdropping on law-abiding citizens without a warrant as granted in the Constitution. The question of where the line is drawn between confirmed terrorist activity is something that must be considered and there must be some accountability, even if after the fact. I also believe that the way to counteract those terrorists is not to let them affect the way we live. I am firm believer in the idea that much of the damage done on 9-11-01 could have been averted if citizens of the country were better prepared to fight back like the passengers of United Flight 93. But that is another subject for another day.

The movie we watched in class today really hit home to me. It's funny to watch how ridiculous people sound when they say that 3 seconds between songs on a CD is too much blank time, or that most people hung up if the person they were calling didn't answer within three rings. It's a little less funny, however, to see some of that impatience in myself. For example, slow internet connections drive me crazy. Until very recently, my wife's parents had an AOL dial-up connection for internet at their house. It was so slow that I couldn't even stand to use it to check my email. When we stayed at their house for any period of time I just resigned myself to not use the internet for that time because I couldn't stand how slow it was. Watching the little segment on how our brains measure time the time taken to complete certain tasks helped me to make a little more sense out of why that slow internet connection bothered me so much, but it also provided pseudo-scientific evidence that whether or not we are actually wired for speed we are creatures of habit. Is this dependence on speed good for us? Does it make us more effective or productive? I don't know, but I do know that for thousands of years humans didn't count the seconds like we do today, and even ten years ago waiting a few seconds for a web page to load was no big deal. Knowing that this is a real issue and is grounded in how our brains work, I have now resolved to remember that next time I catch my foot tapping while I wait for a web page to load.

I grew up with a dichotomy of sorts in my home as far as rules and choices were concerned. My dad's idea was that he did his best to teach us right from wrong, and he left us a large measure of freedom concerning our choices. My mother, on the other hand, tried to prevent exposure from things that could harm us (mostly spiritually). The result of their different strategies showed up fairly well in our class discussion today. In my younger years, I expended considerable amounts of creative energy circumventing my mother's preventive measures almost as a matter of principle. With my dad, however, I knew what was expected of me and quickly learned that there would be unavoidable consequences when I made poor choices. As it turns out, I was stubborn and foolish enough that often it was only through the consequences that I fully learned the lesson and its accompanying principles, which leads back to our class discussion. Do we filter out even the possibility of objectionable content in our homes? Or do we teach our children (and ourselves) as best we can, and let filtering take a secondary role to protect against accidental misfortunes? I personally tend to lean toward the latter, with the addition that in my home (whenever I have children old enough that this is an issue) there will be consequences for bad choices. I greatly hope that I will be able to teach my children effectively enough that filtering or blocking measures will go largely unused, and serve mostly to protect against accidents. I also hope I will be able to teach my children effectively enough so that they don't need the consequences of a bad decision to be what they learn from. So where do I stand on the issue of censorship and freedom? Pretty much right in the middle.