The utopian future, where users won't be crying "fix my random device you have never seen one of before, I need it to work" to IT?
Jesus. Don't blame the users. The CEOs are 98% at fault.
When they don't have to buy desktops or cell phones, they count that as a plus. Sure, it shifts a huge burden to IT, but don't forget who is really the driving force behind this.
I have a different take on it: if management wants to save money by "letting" me BYOD, rather than buying their own, fine. They can lease it from me during the workday, in addition to my pay. If they think they're going to get it for free, they can suck eggs.
I should add that they did not get the Title II exemption just for the purposes of carrying internet. They also wanted to be able to provide content as well as deliver it.
"you can't, because the government has decided that it would be inefficient to have more than one set of power lines, or water lines, or cable lines, or telephone lines, etc, going into a single home."
This all actually fits together. The glue that makes it all stick (or rather, fall apart) is regulation under FCC Title II. At the risk of oversimplifying, it went something like this:
In the early telephone days, the U.S. saw that multiple competing, and usually incompatible, telephone systems wasn't working well. It decided to allow one highly regulated monopoly to build our countrywide telephone infrastucture. In exchange for allowing it to operate unchallenged, it had to live with certain regulations, as a common carrier under FCC Title II.
There are certain strict regulations that apply to Title II common carriers. Among the rules are, in no particular order: (1) the carriers cannot supply content, they can only carry content (telephone conversations, internet packets) created by others. (2) A common carrier cannot intercept communications, or allow communications to be intentionally intercepted, without a warrant. There are other rules, too, but those are the two important ones for the moment.
As a result of having a single, unified infrastructure, at the time the U.S. phone system was the envy of the world. This telephone monopoly was eventually broken up (the reasons are beyond the scope of this summary), but telcos still have to live by common carrier rules.
Then along came cable TV. Back when it started to become apparent that cable could also be a good medium for internet communication, the cable companies (which were already fat from cable TV profits) lobbied Congress to specifically pass a law saying Title II (common carrier) regulation would not apply to ISPs.
The result is what we see today: ISPs can legally intercept your communications in various ways, cable companies can supply content AS WELL AS carry communications (the possible negative consequences of this should be obvious), and they have had huge mergers and developed monopolies because they are not subject to the same sane regulation as the telcos were (are).
The point being this: in countries where the common communications backbones are required to allow sharing by competitors, internet service is faster and cheaper. That is true competition. What the cable companies in the U.S. are calling "competition" really isn't.
Free-market capitalism is not always the best answer, when it comes to common public services, utilities, etc. And it is becoming increasingly obvious that it hasn't worked for cable in the U.S. [But note: lobbying Congress is not "free market capitalism", either... so it's kind of a moot point in this particular instance.]
I should clarify the latter example. There is in fact a closing bracket -- }]; -- at the end of the file. BUT...
It is all "minified" code, which has no newlines. All the code is crammed together. That's fine, usually. But it BEGINS with 2 slashes, which indicates a single-line comment.
BECAUSE there are no newlines, that means all the following code is one long "line", including the final closing bracket. Therefore, the closing bracket is actually commented out with all the rest of that code, and won't be seen by the interpreter (or JIT compiler). So there will be a syntax error at this point.
"And how hard would it be to post an example here for our edification?"
You can get the file yourself HERE. It has been improved somewhat over the last week, but it's still full of errors.
Here is an example (from line 49, if the code is properly formatted):
resources['ffe.ee.shared.error.reviewInformation'] = 'Review the information you entered. If the information you entered is correct, select the 'Continue ' button. If the information you entered isn't correct, make any necessary changes, then select the 'Continue' button.';
Note that single-quoted strings can't contain single quotes. It doesn't work. The JIT compiler will end the string at the first internal single quote, and the rest of the line will be a syntax error. The file is full of these.
Down at the bottom of the file is the start of a function:
signIn: function() { mixpanel.track("Log In"); var passwordStatus = "expired"; //for testing purposes... (this is a block of about 80k bytes of minified code, all commented out by those two slashes)...
... with no ending bracket. Another obvious and rather serious syntax error.
Those examples are by no means the only errors. And I only looked for syntax errors. I didn't try to analyze the code for runtime errors; I'm not a masochist.
"Requirement changes due to red states not implementing exchanges and their legislatures making any state assistance illegal constituted the majority of the development issues."
No, they didn't. Repeat: I *SAW* some of their code. (In was from the registration page, in fact.) And it was just plain bad. Quite literally terrible, inept programming. You would actually have to consciously try in order to do worse.
There may have been other contributing factors, but the plain truth is that they did a very poor job on the website.
The caliber of the asshole is just getting larger.
"Claiming someone "doesn't understand" your point after they've pointed out very specific and damning flaws with it"
All you pointed out was the degree to which you misinterpreted what I was saying. I have no apologies to make to you, and any necessary explanations have already been made. Repeating them won't help you understand any better.
"Were you shocked at the vastly out-dated code used? You might be shocked at how many other web applications that in use by the Feds are based on old code/software."
No, that wasn't it at all. It was newly-written code; it changed almost every day. And it was riddled with elementary errors.
"I would have expected careful selection of contractors, and contractors placed on notice that Hell Hath No Fury like the customer if they fuck this one up."
It turns out that the Senior VP of CGI is an old acquaintance of Michelle Obama. An ex- college classmate in fact.
"The thing that's interesting about the 'blame the developers' position is that, in the run-up to the election, it was generally demonstrated that Obama's tech (management) chops were head-and-shoulders above his opponent's."
Read my comment further up the page. The developers demonstrated themselves to be incompetent, beyond reasonable doubt. I *SAW* their work, and yes, it was incompetent.
"If you search you will find that Obama and his people delayed the rules for Obamacare so they would not come out before the 2012 elections. That delayed the writing of the code for the website and they continued to issue changes right before the site was about to be released. "
That's a good excuse... and might even be part of the reason. But it's sure not the whole reason.
I downloaded some of the JavaScript code directly from the site, and it was truly awful. I'm talking chock-full of first-day-in-javascript-class level errors. I simply have a hard time believing that anybody got paid for doing that. And let's be clear: I'm not talking about "Oh, no, I'm on a tight deadline so I goofed" kind of errors. I am literally saying somebody-who-doesn't-know-shit-about-javascript errors.
Of course, the Senior VP of CGI used to be a classmate of Michelle Obama. I suppose that just maybe that could have had something to do with it.
It is interesting that you see a description of your own argument as a "salad". If you think that is meaningful, perhaps you ought to contemplate what it actually means.
Ah, hell. Tonight is my night for mis-reading what other people wrote.
What you stated above is not unreasonable, except for the part about the faulty premise. It is not faulty at all. if we don't understand one, we will never understand the other. It's that simple.
A politician who first tried to get the broad study shut down entirely managed to instead add a qualifier where there was none before (i.e. not "this vs. that" but "all vs. some"), hamstringing the project by basing it on a faulty premise (that "cyclical" change merits such a large impact study) and a loaded question (presupposing that there is no other significant source of climate change impacting the state).
You are demonstrating your bias by arguing that one part of the science merits study but another part does not.
Do you realize that the "cyclical" (as one person mentioned, the proper word is probably "periodic") factors in climate science are so strong, and the AGW factors so weak, that it is still a matter of debate whether the latter even exists?
BOTH are valid subjects of study, and by studying one, you are going to shed light on the other. Your choice of which to support is entirely political, not scientific. Because if you understood the science, you would be supporting further study of the periodic factors that influence climate.
Sorry, man, but like others here you're trying to have it both ways. You can't understand the one without the other, and by fighting the study of the one, you are trying to lessen our understanding of the other. It simply won't wash.
There is not a single piece of evidence that could falsity that hypothesis.
You know what? I concede this argument, because I went back to refer to your original comments, and I had mis-read what you wrote (quoted above). I had it in my head that you had written "There is not a single piece of evidence to that effect."
Mea culpa. Misunderstanding. You are correct that there is nothing that can disprove the hypothesis of a "young earth". I had simply not read your comment correctly, and thought you were claiming something you did not, in fact, claim.:(
You are fundamentally confused about the topic at hand.
Laughable. "There is no evidence" is a very clear statement. If there was a misunderstanding, it sure as hell wasn't on my end.
I said there is no evidence that could falsify the hypothesis, which is true.
And I explained that your standard of evidence is complete horseshit, which is also true.
There is plenty of evidence that, taken together makes the hypothesis incredibly unlikely, but that's not good enough and that's not the point.
Yes, it is the point. You want PROOF. There is none. Get fucking used to it. Case in point:
Standards of proof are irrelevant to anything I'm saying.
Hahahaha! This is the most hilarious thing you've written yet. In ALL of science, there is a level of evidence that a reasonable person would accept as indicating truth, even though it is not "proof".
When a hypothesis is formed, it must be formed in such a way there some circumstance could theoretically come to pass that would demonstrate it as false.
No shit, Sherlock. And it only takes one counter-example to disprove a hypothesis. However, you are begging the question... you will only accept absolutes as "proof". Therefore you are insisting on a level of "proof" that does not exist in science.
What you are doing here is a particular kind of logical fallacy known as "shifting the goalposts". You originally wrote "there is no evidence", but now you're demanding "proof". I have already explained why this is nonsense but you're blathering on, as though you hadn't made that mistake.
Hilarious. The fact that my comment above was modded "troll" is simply more evidence that the people on one "side" of this argument are being political rather than scientific.
If the bill said "Here's more money for you to keep doing the science that you're doing," I'd be perfectly happy with that. Any presumption of the conclusion, or restriction on the funding based on their faulty understanding of the field, is idiotic and political.
Do you see what you did there? You presumed the conclusion that the bill presumed a conclusion. But we have exactly zero evidence that is the case. Methinks thou dost protest too much.
The bill to require the study was already written. Therefore, if simply adding the word "cyclical" presumes a conclusion, then the bill already presumed a conclusion. You can't have that both ways. One word was added, which changed it from the study of one aspect of climate science to the study of another aspect of climate science. But they are both aspects of climate science, and if a conclusion was "presumed" then it was already presumed.
I think your argument is pretty amusing, actually, because in order for it to be true, then "your side" must have presumed a conclusion.
Right. And it also didn't NOT say that white is black, or that pink smells itchy. You can attempt to justify any argument whatsoever with a statement like that. Sheesh.
This is inherently a political issue. One faction wanted to study one aspect of "climate change". Another faction changed it to require study of another aspect of climate change. But either way, it's still study of climate change. You don't seem to like the politics of it. Too bad. That's the way Congresses work.
Slashdot Mirror
The utopian future, where users won't be crying "fix my random device you have never seen one of before, I need it to work" to IT?
Jesus. Don't blame the users. The CEOs are 98% at fault.
When they don't have to buy desktops or cell phones, they count that as a plus. Sure, it shifts a huge burden to IT, but don't forget who is really the driving force behind this.
I have a different take on it: if management wants to save money by "letting" me BYOD, rather than buying their own, fine. They can lease it from me during the workday, in addition to my pay. If they think they're going to get it for free, they can suck eggs.
"Because, to paraphrase Groucho Marx, I wouldn't join any club that would have you as a member."
Hahahaha. You managed to take a historic line that was both interesting and funny, and completely demolish any meaning or humor in it.
Kind of like what you did to the rest of this conversation. If it can be called that at all.
You just increased diameter from a 12-gauge asshole to 10-gauge.
This is actually kind of fun. It might be interesting to see at what point you fall through the orifice and hang youself.
I should add that they did not get the Title II exemption just for the purposes of carrying internet. They also wanted to be able to provide content as well as deliver it.
"you can't, because the government has decided that it would be inefficient to have more than one set of power lines, or water lines, or cable lines, or telephone lines, etc, going into a single home."
This all actually fits together. The glue that makes it all stick (or rather, fall apart) is regulation under FCC Title II. At the risk of oversimplifying, it went something like this:
In the early telephone days, the U.S. saw that multiple competing, and usually incompatible, telephone systems wasn't working well. It decided to allow one highly regulated monopoly to build our countrywide telephone infrastucture. In exchange for allowing it to operate unchallenged, it had to live with certain regulations, as a common carrier under FCC Title II.
There are certain strict regulations that apply to Title II common carriers. Among the rules are, in no particular order: (1) the carriers cannot supply content, they can only carry content (telephone conversations, internet packets) created by others. (2) A common carrier cannot intercept communications, or allow communications to be intentionally intercepted, without a warrant. There are other rules, too, but those are the two important ones for the moment.
As a result of having a single, unified infrastructure, at the time the U.S. phone system was the envy of the world. This telephone monopoly was eventually broken up (the reasons are beyond the scope of this summary), but telcos still have to live by common carrier rules.
Then along came cable TV. Back when it started to become apparent that cable could also be a good medium for internet communication, the cable companies (which were already fat from cable TV profits) lobbied Congress to specifically pass a law saying Title II (common carrier) regulation would not apply to ISPs.
The result is what we see today: ISPs can legally intercept your communications in various ways, cable companies can supply content AS WELL AS carry communications (the possible negative consequences of this should be obvious), and they have had huge mergers and developed monopolies because they are not subject to the same sane regulation as the telcos were (are).
The point being this: in countries where the common communications backbones are required to allow sharing by competitors, internet service is faster and cheaper. That is true competition. What the cable companies in the U.S. are calling "competition" really isn't.
Free-market capitalism is not always the best answer, when it comes to common public services, utilities, etc. And it is becoming increasingly obvious that it hasn't worked for cable in the U.S. [But note: lobbying Congress is not "free market capitalism", either... so it's kind of a moot point in this particular instance.]
"So it's in line with most commercial sites."
Not even. Commercial sites have to actually work.
See a couple of examples below. Or get the file and have a look yourself.
I should clarify the latter example. There is in fact a closing bracket -- }]; -- at the end of the file. BUT...
It is all "minified" code, which has no newlines. All the code is crammed together. That's fine, usually. But it BEGINS with 2 slashes, which indicates a single-line comment.
BECAUSE there are no newlines, that means all the following code is one long "line", including the final closing bracket. Therefore, the closing bracket is actually commented out with all the rest of that code, and won't be seen by the interpreter (or JIT compiler). So there will be a syntax error at this point.
These are really quite elementary-level errors.
"And how hard would it be to post an example here for our edification?"
You can get the file yourself HERE. It has been improved somewhat over the last week, but it's still full of errors.
Here is an example (from line 49, if the code is properly formatted):
Note that single-quoted strings can't contain single quotes. It doesn't work. The JIT compiler will end the string at the first internal single quote, and the rest of the line will be a syntax error. The file is full of these.
Down at the bottom of the file is the start of a function:
... with no ending bracket. Another obvious and rather serious syntax error.
Those examples are by no means the only errors. And I only looked for syntax errors. I didn't try to analyze the code for runtime errors; I'm not a masochist.
"When over half the states declared"
36 states: 72%.
"Requirement changes due to red states not implementing exchanges and their legislatures making any state assistance illegal constituted the majority of the development issues."
No, they didn't. Repeat: I *SAW* some of their code. (In was from the registration page, in fact.) And it was just plain bad. Quite literally terrible, inept programming. You would actually have to consciously try in order to do worse.
There may have been other contributing factors, but the plain truth is that they did a very poor job on the website.
"Aww, I'm sorry your feelings are hurt."
The caliber of the asshole is just getting larger.
"Claiming someone "doesn't understand" your point after they've pointed out very specific and damning flaws with it"
All you pointed out was the degree to which you misinterpreted what I was saying. I have no apologies to make to you, and any necessary explanations have already been made. Repeating them won't help you understand any better.
"Were you shocked at the vastly out-dated code used? You might be shocked at how many other web applications that in use by the Feds are based on old code/software."
No, that wasn't it at all. It was newly-written code; it changed almost every day. And it was riddled with elementary errors.
"I would have expected careful selection of contractors, and contractors placed on notice that Hell Hath No Fury like the customer if they fuck this one up."
It turns out that the Senior VP of CGI is an old acquaintance of Michelle Obama. An ex- college classmate in fact.
Coincidence? I think not.
"The thing that's interesting about the 'blame the developers' position is that, in the run-up to the election, it was generally demonstrated that Obama's tech (management) chops were head-and-shoulders above his opponent's."
Read my comment further up the page. The developers demonstrated themselves to be incompetent, beyond reasonable doubt. I *SAW* their work, and yes, it was incompetent.
"If you search you will find that Obama and his people delayed the rules for Obamacare so they would not come out before the 2012 elections. That delayed the writing of the code for the website and they continued to issue changes right before the site was about to be released. "
That's a good excuse... and might even be part of the reason. But it's sure not the whole reason.
I downloaded some of the JavaScript code directly from the site, and it was truly awful. I'm talking chock-full of first-day-in-javascript-class level errors. I simply have a hard time believing that anybody got paid for doing that. And let's be clear: I'm not talking about "Oh, no, I'm on a tight deadline so I goofed" kind of errors. I am literally saying somebody-who-doesn't-know-shit-about-javascript errors.
Of course, the Senior VP of CGI used to be a classmate of Michelle Obama. I suppose that just maybe that could have had something to do with it.
---
I've had about enough of your unjustifiably rude and insulting attitude.
You didn't understand the point, and how you're trying to cover your failure to understand by insulting other people.
Congratulations. You've won the "asshole of the week" award.
Oh goody, time to split hairs!
And GP wasn't splitting hairs? I was merely pointing out that he wasn't splitting them correctly.
The stray atoms and molecules wandering around are not space.
Space contains these things. You aren't splitting hairs, you're simply distorting my clear meaning.
It is interesting that you see a description of your own argument as a "salad". If you think that is meaningful, perhaps you ought to contemplate what it actually means.
Ah, hell. Tonight is my night for mis-reading what other people wrote.
What you stated above is not unreasonable, except for the part about the faulty premise. It is not faulty at all. if we don't understand one, we will never understand the other. It's that simple.
A politician who first tried to get the broad study shut down entirely managed to instead add a qualifier where there was none before (i.e. not "this vs. that" but "all vs. some"), hamstringing the project by basing it on a faulty premise (that "cyclical" change merits such a large impact study) and a loaded question (presupposing that there is no other significant source of climate change impacting the state).
You are demonstrating your bias by arguing that one part of the science merits study but another part does not.
Do you realize that the "cyclical" (as one person mentioned, the proper word is probably "periodic") factors in climate science are so strong, and the AGW factors so weak, that it is still a matter of debate whether the latter even exists?
BOTH are valid subjects of study, and by studying one, you are going to shed light on the other. Your choice of which to support is entirely political, not scientific. Because if you understood the science, you would be supporting further study of the periodic factors that influence climate.
Sorry, man, but like others here you're trying to have it both ways. You can't understand the one without the other, and by fighting the study of the one, you are trying to lessen our understanding of the other. It simply won't wash.
There is not a single piece of evidence that could falsity that hypothesis.
You know what? I concede this argument, because I went back to refer to your original comments, and I had mis-read what you wrote (quoted above). I had it in my head that you had written "There is not a single piece of evidence to that effect."
:(
Mea culpa. Misunderstanding. You are correct that there is nothing that can disprove the hypothesis of a "young earth". I had simply not read your comment correctly, and thought you were claiming something you did not, in fact, claim.
You are fundamentally confused about the topic at hand.
Laughable. "There is no evidence" is a very clear statement. If there was a misunderstanding, it sure as hell wasn't on my end.
I said there is no evidence that could falsify the hypothesis, which is true.
And I explained that your standard of evidence is complete horseshit, which is also true.
There is plenty of evidence that, taken together makes the hypothesis incredibly unlikely, but that's not good enough and that's not the point.
Yes, it is the point. You want PROOF. There is none. Get fucking used to it. Case in point:
Standards of proof are irrelevant to anything I'm saying.
Hahahaha! This is the most hilarious thing you've written yet. In ALL of science, there is a level of evidence that a reasonable person would accept as indicating truth, even though it is not "proof".
When a hypothesis is formed, it must be formed in such a way there some circumstance could theoretically come to pass that would demonstrate it as false.
No shit, Sherlock. And it only takes one counter-example to disprove a hypothesis. However, you are begging the question... you will only accept absolutes as "proof". Therefore you are insisting on a level of "proof" that does not exist in science.
What you are doing here is a particular kind of logical fallacy known as "shifting the goalposts". You originally wrote "there is no evidence", but now you're demanding "proof". I have already explained why this is nonsense but you're blathering on, as though you hadn't made that mistake.
Hilarious. The fact that my comment above was modded "troll" is simply more evidence that the people on one "side" of this argument are being political rather than scientific.
If the bill said "Here's more money for you to keep doing the science that you're doing," I'd be perfectly happy with that. Any presumption of the conclusion, or restriction on the funding based on their faulty understanding of the field, is idiotic and political.
Do you see what you did there? You presumed the conclusion that the bill presumed a conclusion. But we have exactly zero evidence that is the case. Methinks thou dost protest too much.
The bill to require the study was already written. Therefore, if simply adding the word "cyclical" presumes a conclusion, then the bill already presumed a conclusion. You can't have that both ways. One word was added, which changed it from the study of one aspect of climate science to the study of another aspect of climate science. But they are both aspects of climate science, and if a conclusion was "presumed" then it was already presumed.
I think your argument is pretty amusing, actually, because in order for it to be true, then "your side" must have presumed a conclusion.
Right. And it also didn't NOT say that white is black, or that pink smells itchy. You can attempt to justify any argument whatsoever with a statement like that. Sheesh.
This is inherently a political issue. One faction wanted to study one aspect of "climate change". Another faction changed it to require study of another aspect of climate change. But either way, it's still study of climate change. You don't seem to like the politics of it. Too bad. That's the way Congresses work.