This story should have been declared "AT&T Declares war on customers". For reasons unknown, AT&T just doesn't grasp the idea of upgrading their network. So they provide shoddy service and blame their users instead. They do everything except take care of their network and their customers. Why do they insist on infrastructure upgrades as a last result? How can they grow when they can't handle what they have now?
They recently ranked dead last on a major US survey of cell phone providers for every single category. In all seriousness, what are they going to do when they are no longer the exclusive Jesus phone provider? People put up with for lack of an alternative network for their Jesus phone, without that exclusive they would start hemorrhaging customers.
Your the only person who can answer one simple question about this "Will this advance a career path that I wish to go down?". If this won't help advance a career path you want, than you should look for an alternative. Perhaps they want to groom you for management, and feel this is a good lead into it? Ask your manager how they see this with regards to your career path and go from there.
I won't argue the logic you put forward for real costs (it would be interesting to see just how many watts of electricity SETI does take?). By all means, the electric load has got to be enough to not be inconsequential.
My response is more with regards to exaggerated repair costs which is something I've seen too many times. When clueless people are in IT management, they tend to do things like spend a million dollars to fix something that can be done with a batch script.
That being said, your idea of power consumption by watts is one that I think has merit of it's own right. It would be an interesting metric for software companies to start using when advertising how well their software runs. If you can show your software has real operational cost reduction vs the competition, than thats something you can use against the competition.
If they are being billed one million dollars by a consulting company to do this, that's the real crime. I'll clean their entire district, and I'll be happy to do it for a couple grand with a few scripts.
If they are spending a million dollars to find and uninstall a program that/doesn't/ hide itself than I declare them incompetent. For a fraction of that money you could set up and license Altiris, SCCM or another similar infrastructure management program, buy your servers, set up a lab, hire some packagers as well as the architects and admins to run the whole works. Even without all of that a halfway decent desktop engineer could create a login script to look for and uninstall the application on any pc that was affected.
Once upon a time there was a saying "May the best player win". I think we need to amend that saying to reflect the new corporate model "May the richest player win".
Actually, I do happen to read those particular papers and the WSJ on a routine basis because they have more than canned AP stories. If something important is happening in the news, I like to get different takes on it, even routinely reading news sites outside the US. So yes, I can go through 8 sites trying to find a second article on something. Your baseless generalization doesn't change my point though.
My point stands, most major papers anymore offer very little to differentiate themselves from other papers. My point has nothing to do with lesser papers, it applies just as easily to the large papers as well. My own local paper has laid off dozens of reporters over the last year alone, and it is one of the biggest ones in the country.
News sites just don't get it, they are a commodity. If they want to stand out, they have to have something to stand out with. Wither you stand out with original reporting and or a better experience is up to the news source. Until news sites do that, they need to realize that the public is now well aware that one news site is typically just the same as another.
Oh no, nuclear energy is being used, the world will end! Must stop this at all costs, or mother nature will be unhappy. Nuclear is evil because it has the word nuclear in it and somehow related to the military! Now that thats settled it's back to firing up some more coal power plants to meet the needs of society....
What do you mean the greens are the ones stopping the building of new nuclear power plants? The FUD power trip on nuclear is so much more important than letting people have clean power.
Newspapers and the news have become a commodity, they just don't realize it yet. When I can read 8 different newspapers with the exact same AP story, the differential between the newspapers becomes the experience. Newspapers are victims of their own business tactics. By removing local reporting resources, and getting most stories from the Reuters or AP, there is very little to differentiate one news source from another. Newspapers have two choices:
Create more original content (ie create content by hiring reporters)
Create a better experience for the reader (is your website pleasant to use)
Neither one of these has anything to do with Google, however surviving Google (or it's replacement) requires doing one and or the other. The fact that Google is the delivery mechanism for much of their traffic is moot. Changing the delivery mechanism won't change the fundamentals behind the issue. What newspapers need to do is learn how to keep the traffic they get once visitors find their site.
Many years ago I used to be the regional IT guy for a paper company and one of my sites was a cardboard factory. Inside the factory we had paper dust everywhere in very large quantities (it was enough of an issue to require a dedicated permanent vacuum system to suck up most of it). We also had printers (the computer were in special industrial cases with filters) on the factory floor that were exposed to large quantities of paper dust.
A brand new laser printer would be coated on the inside with dust within a week at most. We routinely bought rebuild and maintenance kits and rebuilt the printers every three months due to the heavy usage and the effects of all the paper dust. A brand new $1500 HP laser printer had to be rebuilt with a full maintenance performed after three months, something normally not done for years.
Why? All that paper dust coated everything because of the environment that the printer was put into. As a company the idea of trying to get a warranty claim with HP was considered absurd. We put the printer in an environment where it was essentially abused. The innards would be coated and if not for our maintenance schedule they would overheat and slowly bake themselves.
A situation that is really do different than the apple one. Why should Apple have to pay because someone put their computer in an abusive environment where it was physically damaged? If the customer puts a computer in an environment that physically damaged the product, denial of warranty coverage is really straight forward. That environment just happens to belong to a heavy smoker.
Actually, I'd really like to know, as this has long baffled me. Their fans are loyal know matter what is done to them, time and time again. I can understand animosity to a company like Microsoft for everything they have pulled. What I don't understand is why more people don't look at Apple the same way. Thing is, when you get down to it Apple has pulled just as many stunts as any other company.
What makes Apple somehow above reproach, regardless of who they shaft, how often and for how much? Make a list of 'evil' corporate behaviors and you'd be surprised how many things Apple does on a routine basis. My questions is really what will it finally take for Apple to have crossed the line?
Why can't people see that Apple is evil? Seriously, at what level of bend over and take it does it start to hurt enough to want it to stop? What is the line that will get the fanboy's to realize that they do just as much evil stuff as microsoft or any other company in tech? Does shiny and simple really outweigh everything else? I expect to get flaimed and modded down, but I really want to know, how much is too much, what would it take for the iMasses to see the real iJob and wake up?
Give some credit, they did a code review, noticed the accusation was factual and did the right thing. As many times as microsoft has done the wrong thing, it's only right to credit them for doing the right thing this time.
The interesting question now is if they will retain this tool going forward, or replace it with another that is not GPL'd. It certainly sounds like an accident, so I am curious if good production code has any chance of trumping internal politics.
This is the same kind of logic Microsoft used with security in the 9.x kernel. Putting the impetus on third parties to behave and not take advantage of this is nuts! Are they not the least bit familiar with malware or anything else of the like? Bad Adobe, bad!
How would that break functionality on major websites? I have worked with many a technically illiterate person and showed them how to use facebook, myspace, and the like without difficulty while using Firefox / Noscript.
The only sites that I have to use IE for are work related and windows update. Other than that, I don't think there's a site I use that won't work under Firefox / noscript. Sometimes you have to tell noscript to allow certain scripts, but that can be narrowly tailored to just what's needed.
I've learned a lot of lessons from filling that role for too many years. Here they are:
Make a folder for all their base install sources so there is easy access to the source.
Teach them to download everything to a single source on the data drive to make scanning and root cause easier.
Make sure they have their cab files on their system.
When you rebuild their system seperate out their OS and Data on two seperate drives.
Once seperated you can then image their system and have a back of a known good state for that computer. Make sure they also have a backup.
Better yet, teach them how to perform their own images.
Ensure they one antivirus scanner and another malware scanner - not from the same company.
Set up automated downloads and scans.
Insist that they use firefox with noscript - show them how this makes browsing the web fun again without all the clutter.
Set up for automatic patches.
Their cost is a second hard drive that they pay for, typically this is well under $100. It's more work up front on this, but teaching them basic safe browsing, automating what they don't want to deal with and have an image (and the ability to freely blow away the boot drive) are all things that will save you time in spades in the long run. I've significantly reduced how often I have to perform the friends and family computer work this way, and they feel better knowing that they have regained some level of control over their computer.
So some clueless employee in a company of tens of thousands of employees made a comment on the record. If this was an employee on one of the design teams, and it was a comment in an email to their manager and said email leaked, there would be a story and a lawsuit. However it wasn't, it just happened to be conjecture by someone that pulled their comment out of their ass.
The employee should have known better to make such a comment to begin with and is likely now/very/ aware of Microsoft's press policy.
What the employee did was no different from a factory worker for Ford that spends their day driving new cars into the parking lot making a comment about the design inspiration for the F-150. To be frank, I'll be surprised if the employee doesn't get fired, they certainly have cause.
If anything we should increase the amount of energy created by using nuclear fuel in this country. Every form of 'green' power has some kind of drawback that makes it less than ideal, hyrdo affects fish, solar requires nasty chemicals, geothermal is accused of causing earthquakes, wind power kills birds and so on. Point being if we're going to have widespread energy production it needs to be done on a feasible basis that responds to economy of scale. I'd love to have solar panels for my house (and will probably have them within a couple years), but that doesn't mean where I live is a good location for building solar power plants.
The biggest obstacle keeping us from using the greenest energy source we have is the pushback from groups like greenpeace. Ever notice that greenpeace never actually does research or other work to make the world a greener place? The research they do is politically motivated and centered around preventing others from doing things they are politically intolerant of. When's the last time you read a press release from greenpeace about a new technological development they made? If groups such as greenpeace were actually serious about the environment they would be all over themselves in doing everything they could in order to increase the use of nuclear energy.
The fact that the government feels it had to keep this story below the radar in the first place shows how much damage these groups have done to nuclear power. It's time for greenpeace to stand up, do the right thing, and make amends for decades of harm to the environment they have caused. They are no better than some of the old factories that dumped chemicals into rivers.
This is about who gets to be in a position of demanding bribes to allow WOW in their country. This is about good old fashioned greed and doesn't have a damn thing to do with Orcs or Elves. Since this is seen as potentially very lucrative, people will fight to be in a position to exploit this. It's fundamentally no different than any other fight for territory.
I agree with your point, it was more of a by the way thought will I was at it. I have followed the other 'bug report' link from another user as well as looking at an ADM tool link from another poster.
I understand Firefox is open source, and that if I think something ought to be done better I have the right and license to go in and do it better myself. However I'm not a programmer, I have other skills like creating scripts and configuring RAID arrays which is a far cry from being qualified to perform programming. All I can do is try to comment to those that can make it better and have an interest in increased utilization.
I'm an infrastructure architect and my managers aren't interested in running beta anything. My job is to make enterprise environments very stable, and I can't do that with unproven tools. All that being said, I think I will follow your idea and post something over at Mozilla.com for those that are qualified.
Looking at it now, looks like development only picked up on this again September of last year and it still hasn't hit a 1.0 release. That may sound silly, but to an enterprise manager that shows the software is immature and may not be stable. That being said this looks promising and I will be taking a look at it. Understand, I use firefox at home, I want to use it at the enterprise level, but that can't happen without the right toolsets to manage it at the enterprise level.
I was spending some time with some friends of mine a few months back when the inevitable malware conversation came up. These friends happened to all be quite computer illiterate. What I did instead of giving the usual spiel about malware was show them a better experience.
I sat them down and showed them how to use firefox with noscript. I showed them their favorite sites without all the baggage and they were amazed at the improved experience. I made sure I showed them how to use noscript with sites like facebook and still get what they wanted.
All of this was done in less than 15 minutes, and they now use this combination on a daily basis, not because of the improved security, but because of the improved experience. The fact that their security is improved is entirely incidental.
Note to firefox dev's, improve your enterprise management tools so that I can justify rolling out firefox to the enterprise after proving to management that it can be managed at the enterprise level. Enterprises need ways to consistently enforce policies with firefox using AD! Until this can be done firefox will never take over Internet Explorer in the Enterprise.
"Allowed to throttle content that is not legal". That loophole is big enough to pilot the Titanic through. That could easily be interpreted to block everything from p2p traffic to VOIP. This loophole would flat kill P2P in entirety and severely hurt VOIP and all with the ISP's having governments blessings. Many things are legal in one country and not in another.
This loophole needs removed in entirety for all such rules, I can guarantee you that any type of traffic you can think of is illegal, somewhere (Dutch trying to shutdown Swedish P2P, nazi artifacts illegal in France, most newspapers are illegal in certain hardline islamic countries and so on). The Internet is international by nature, it needs to be a neutral platform for the sake of international peace. If someone is breaking a local law (kiddie porn or the like), we already have plenty of laws to send them to prison as needed.
This is an appalling attempt at intimidation and coercion of those who would vote a given way. The public has a right to vote any damn way they want, and it has long been precedent that it was no one's business. I'm married, should I somehow be able to demand to know how my wife voted? Of course not, it's not my business, it's hers and hers alone. Similar stunts in the past have cost people vandalism to their home, their jobs, and their businesses. Your vote should be yours alone and not subject to public intimidation. It's your right, it shouldn't cost you to exercise it.
This is not about how your public representatives voted - public representatives who represent the public should have their votes known. This is a thinly veiled attempt at public coercion of those who don't want to vote a certain way on a certain public issue. The fact that you may happen to agree with the view of those who are pulling this stunt should be put aside. What if it was a conservative state and such a stunt was pulled? All of a sudden your in an area that doesn't approve of your vote and you get to be the one who is harassed by nutcases in the public.
A vocal minority should never be allowed to control the population, regardless of cause or locality. That's the entire point of putting something like this on a ballot, to show if a certain issue is getting coverage simply because of a vocal minority or media bias, or if that's the way the public really feels. The ballot allows the vocal minority to be exposed and for the public to speak it's will. For example look at approvals for medical marijuana in places like California.
People need to learn that a vocal minority is just that regardless of the issue and not let such people unduly intimidate the public at large. The issue the vocal minority supports shouldn't matter, it might be one you agree with this time but could just as easily be one you disagree with next time.
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When someone asks politely I will respond politely. A one word demand is not a polite response. Immature AC with a pottymouth, why do I bother?
Consumer Reports supplied the research, Google is your friend: Apple Insider
This story should have been declared "AT&T Declares war on customers". For reasons unknown, AT&T just doesn't grasp the idea of upgrading their network. So they provide shoddy service and blame their users instead. They do everything except take care of their network and their customers. Why do they insist on infrastructure upgrades as a last result? How can they grow when they can't handle what they have now?
They recently ranked dead last on a major US survey of cell phone providers for every single category. In all seriousness, what are they going to do when they are no longer the exclusive Jesus phone provider? People put up with for lack of an alternative network for their Jesus phone, without that exclusive they would start hemorrhaging customers.
Your the only person who can answer one simple question about this "Will this advance a career path that I wish to go down?". If this won't help advance a career path you want, than you should look for an alternative. Perhaps they want to groom you for management, and feel this is a good lead into it? Ask your manager how they see this with regards to your career path and go from there.
I won't argue the logic you put forward for real costs (it would be interesting to see just how many watts of electricity SETI does take?). By all means, the electric load has got to be enough to not be inconsequential.
My response is more with regards to exaggerated repair costs which is something I've seen too many times. When clueless people are in IT management, they tend to do things like spend a million dollars to fix something that can be done with a batch script.
That being said, your idea of power consumption by watts is one that I think has merit of it's own right. It would be an interesting metric for software companies to start using when advertising how well their software runs. If you can show your software has real operational cost reduction vs the competition, than thats something you can use against the competition.
If they are being billed one million dollars by a consulting company to do this, that's the real crime. I'll clean their entire district, and I'll be happy to do it for a couple grand with a few scripts.
If they are spending a million dollars to find and uninstall a program that /doesn't/ hide itself than I declare them incompetent. For a fraction of that money you could set up and license Altiris, SCCM or another similar infrastructure management program, buy your servers, set up a lab, hire some packagers as well as the architects and admins to run the whole works. Even without all of that a halfway decent desktop engineer could create a login script to look for and uninstall the application on any pc that was affected.
Once upon a time there was a saying "May the best player win". I think we need to amend that saying to reflect the new corporate model "May the richest player win".
Actually, I do happen to read those particular papers and the WSJ on a routine basis because they have more than canned AP stories. If something important is happening in the news, I like to get different takes on it, even routinely reading news sites outside the US. So yes, I can go through 8 sites trying to find a second article on something. Your baseless generalization doesn't change my point though.
My point stands, most major papers anymore offer very little to differentiate themselves from other papers. My point has nothing to do with lesser papers, it applies just as easily to the large papers as well. My own local paper has laid off dozens of reporters over the last year alone, and it is one of the biggest ones in the country.
News sites just don't get it, they are a commodity. If they want to stand out, they have to have something to stand out with. Wither you stand out with original reporting and or a better experience is up to the news source. Until news sites do that, they need to realize that the public is now well aware that one news site is typically just the same as another.
Oh no, nuclear energy is being used, the world will end! Must stop this at all costs, or mother nature will be unhappy. Nuclear is evil because it has the word nuclear in it and somehow related to the military! Now that thats settled it's back to firing up some more coal power plants to meet the needs of society....
What do you mean the greens are the ones stopping the building of new nuclear power plants? The FUD power trip on nuclear is so much more important than letting people have clean power.
Neither one of these has anything to do with Google, however surviving Google (or it's replacement) requires doing one and or the other. The fact that Google is the delivery mechanism for much of their traffic is moot. Changing the delivery mechanism won't change the fundamentals behind the issue. What newspapers need to do is learn how to keep the traffic they get once visitors find their site.
Many years ago I used to be the regional IT guy for a paper company and one of my sites was a cardboard factory. Inside the factory we had paper dust everywhere in very large quantities (it was enough of an issue to require a dedicated permanent vacuum system to suck up most of it). We also had printers (the computer were in special industrial cases with filters) on the factory floor that were exposed to large quantities of paper dust.
A brand new laser printer would be coated on the inside with dust within a week at most. We routinely bought rebuild and maintenance kits and rebuilt the printers every three months due to the heavy usage and the effects of all the paper dust. A brand new $1500 HP laser printer had to be rebuilt with a full maintenance performed after three months, something normally not done for years.
Why? All that paper dust coated everything because of the environment that the printer was put into. As a company the idea of trying to get a warranty claim with HP was considered absurd. We put the printer in an environment where it was essentially abused. The innards would be coated and if not for our maintenance schedule they would overheat and slowly bake themselves.
A situation that is really do different than the apple one. Why should Apple have to pay because someone put their computer in an abusive environment where it was physically damaged? If the customer puts a computer in an environment that physically damaged the product, denial of warranty coverage is really straight forward. That environment just happens to belong to a heavy smoker.
Actually, I'd really like to know, as this has long baffled me. Their fans are loyal know matter what is done to them, time and time again. I can understand animosity to a company like Microsoft for everything they have pulled. What I don't understand is why more people don't look at Apple the same way. Thing is, when you get down to it Apple has pulled just as many stunts as any other company.
What makes Apple somehow above reproach, regardless of who they shaft, how often and for how much? Make a list of 'evil' corporate behaviors and you'd be surprised how many things Apple does on a routine basis. My questions is really what will it finally take for Apple to have crossed the line?
Why can't people see that Apple is evil? Seriously, at what level of bend over and take it does it start to hurt enough to want it to stop? What is the line that will get the fanboy's to realize that they do just as much evil stuff as microsoft or any other company in tech? Does shiny and simple really outweigh everything else? I expect to get flaimed and modded down, but I really want to know, how much is too much, what would it take for the iMasses to see the real iJob and wake up?
Give some credit, they did a code review, noticed the accusation was factual and did the right thing. As many times as microsoft has done the wrong thing, it's only right to credit them for doing the right thing this time.
The interesting question now is if they will retain this tool going forward, or replace it with another that is not GPL'd. It certainly sounds like an accident, so I am curious if good production code has any chance of trumping internal politics.
This is the same kind of logic Microsoft used with security in the 9.x kernel. Putting the impetus on third parties to behave and not take advantage of this is nuts! Are they not the least bit familiar with malware or anything else of the like? Bad Adobe, bad!
How would that break functionality on major websites? I have worked with many a technically illiterate person and showed them how to use facebook, myspace, and the like without difficulty while using Firefox / Noscript.
The only sites that I have to use IE for are work related and windows update. Other than that, I don't think there's a site I use that won't work under Firefox / noscript. Sometimes you have to tell noscript to allow certain scripts, but that can be narrowly tailored to just what's needed.
Their cost is a second hard drive that they pay for, typically this is well under $100. It's more work up front on this, but teaching them basic safe browsing, automating what they don't want to deal with and have an image (and the ability to freely blow away the boot drive) are all things that will save you time in spades in the long run. I've significantly reduced how often I have to perform the friends and family computer work this way, and they feel better knowing that they have regained some level of control over their computer.
So some clueless employee in a company of tens of thousands of employees made a comment on the record. If this was an employee on one of the design teams, and it was a comment in an email to their manager and said email leaked, there would be a story and a lawsuit. However it wasn't, it just happened to be conjecture by someone that pulled their comment out of their ass.
The employee should have known better to make such a comment to begin with and is likely now /very/ aware of Microsoft's press policy.
What the employee did was no different from a factory worker for Ford that spends their day driving new cars into the parking lot making a comment about the design inspiration for the F-150. To be frank, I'll be surprised if the employee doesn't get fired, they certainly have cause.
If anything we should increase the amount of energy created by using nuclear fuel in this country. Every form of 'green' power has some kind of drawback that makes it less than ideal, hyrdo affects fish, solar requires nasty chemicals, geothermal is accused of causing earthquakes, wind power kills birds and so on. Point being if we're going to have widespread energy production it needs to be done on a feasible basis that responds to economy of scale. I'd love to have solar panels for my house (and will probably have them within a couple years), but that doesn't mean where I live is a good location for building solar power plants.
The biggest obstacle keeping us from using the greenest energy source we have is the pushback from groups like greenpeace. Ever notice that greenpeace never actually does research or other work to make the world a greener place? The research they do is politically motivated and centered around preventing others from doing things they are politically intolerant of. When's the last time you read a press release from greenpeace about a new technological development they made? If groups such as greenpeace were actually serious about the environment they would be all over themselves in doing everything they could in order to increase the use of nuclear energy.
The fact that the government feels it had to keep this story below the radar in the first place shows how much damage these groups have done to nuclear power. It's time for greenpeace to stand up, do the right thing, and make amends for decades of harm to the environment they have caused. They are no better than some of the old factories that dumped chemicals into rivers.
This is about who gets to be in a position of demanding bribes to allow WOW in their country. This is about good old fashioned greed and doesn't have a damn thing to do with Orcs or Elves. Since this is seen as potentially very lucrative, people will fight to be in a position to exploit this. It's fundamentally no different than any other fight for territory.
I agree with your point, it was more of a by the way thought will I was at it. I have followed the other 'bug report' link from another user as well as looking at an ADM tool link from another poster.
I understand Firefox is open source, and that if I think something ought to be done better I have the right and license to go in and do it better myself. However I'm not a programmer, I have other skills like creating scripts and configuring RAID arrays which is a far cry from being qualified to perform programming. All I can do is try to comment to those that can make it better and have an interest in increased utilization.
I'm an infrastructure architect and my managers aren't interested in running beta anything. My job is to make enterprise environments very stable, and I can't do that with unproven tools. All that being said, I think I will follow your idea and post something over at Mozilla.com for those that are qualified.
Looking at it now, looks like development only picked up on this again September of last year and it still hasn't hit a 1.0 release. That may sound silly, but to an enterprise manager that shows the software is immature and may not be stable. That being said this looks promising and I will be taking a look at it. Understand, I use firefox at home, I want to use it at the enterprise level, but that can't happen without the right toolsets to manage it at the enterprise level.
I was spending some time with some friends of mine a few months back when the inevitable malware conversation came up. These friends happened to all be quite computer illiterate. What I did instead of giving the usual spiel about malware was show them a better experience.
I sat them down and showed them how to use firefox with noscript. I showed them their favorite sites without all the baggage and they were amazed at the improved experience. I made sure I showed them how to use noscript with sites like facebook and still get what they wanted.
All of this was done in less than 15 minutes, and they now use this combination on a daily basis, not because of the improved security, but because of the improved experience. The fact that their security is improved is entirely incidental.
Note to firefox dev's, improve your enterprise management tools so that I can justify rolling out firefox to the enterprise after proving to management that it can be managed at the enterprise level. Enterprises need ways to consistently enforce policies with firefox using AD! Until this can be done firefox will never take over Internet Explorer in the Enterprise.
"Allowed to throttle content that is not legal". That loophole is big enough to pilot the Titanic through. That could easily be interpreted to block everything from p2p traffic to VOIP. This loophole would flat kill P2P in entirety and severely hurt VOIP and all with the ISP's having governments blessings. Many things are legal in one country and not in another.
This loophole needs removed in entirety for all such rules, I can guarantee you that any type of traffic you can think of is illegal, somewhere (Dutch trying to shutdown Swedish P2P, nazi artifacts illegal in France, most newspapers are illegal in certain hardline islamic countries and so on). The Internet is international by nature, it needs to be a neutral platform for the sake of international peace. If someone is breaking a local law (kiddie porn or the like), we already have plenty of laws to send them to prison as needed.
This is an appalling attempt at intimidation and coercion of those who would vote a given way. The public has a right to vote any damn way they want, and it has long been precedent that it was no one's business. I'm married, should I somehow be able to demand to know how my wife voted? Of course not, it's not my business, it's hers and hers alone. Similar stunts in the past have cost people vandalism to their home, their jobs, and their businesses. Your vote should be yours alone and not subject to public intimidation. It's your right, it shouldn't cost you to exercise it.
This is not about how your public representatives voted - public representatives who represent the public should have their votes known. This is a thinly veiled attempt at public coercion of those who don't want to vote a certain way on a certain public issue. The fact that you may happen to agree with the view of those who are pulling this stunt should be put aside. What if it was a conservative state and such a stunt was pulled? All of a sudden your in an area that doesn't approve of your vote and you get to be the one who is harassed by nutcases in the public.
A vocal minority should never be allowed to control the population, regardless of cause or locality. That's the entire point of putting something like this on a ballot, to show if a certain issue is getting coverage simply because of a vocal minority or media bias, or if that's the way the public really feels. The ballot allows the vocal minority to be exposed and for the public to speak it's will. For example look at approvals for medical marijuana in places like California.
People need to learn that a vocal minority is just that regardless of the issue and not let such people unduly intimidate the public at large. The issue the vocal minority supports shouldn't matter, it might be one you agree with this time but could just as easily be one you disagree with next time.