Whatever their intentions at Acorn, this is illegal and must be stopped.
Actually, if they didn't turn in those registrations, that would be illegal. What Acorn was doing is perfectly compliant with the law. The reason for this law is to prevent potential discrimination of groups like this from seeing the Republican box checked and throwing it away claiming that it was invalid. Be happy it's this way.
If some smart-ass college student fills out a registration as Santa Claus, then Acorn flags (or not - their call) that registration as "probably fake" and HAS to hand it in. Similarly, if the Acorn workers on the street make up a few registrations to reach supposed quotas (there are varying reports on if they are only paid hourly or if they receive bonuses for handing in extra registrations), the people who see those HAVE to hand it in.
At the end of the process, it isn't any individual working for Acorn who decides which voter registration is valid or not - individual states handle all of that. Acorn just hands over the registrations to the states. Blaming Acorn for handing in fraudulent registrations when they are required by law to do exactly that is stupid. Drop it already.
It'll never go critical, I think, but it is possible for the pebble manipulation hardware to jam and thus cause problems.
In terms used in nuclear reactions, "critical" refers to a self-sustaining fission process. You want a nuclear reactor to go critical. Thus, "sub-critical" is a reaction that is slowing down, and "super-critical" is a reaction that is speeding up. Still, you probably don't mean to say super-critical, as this could describe the beginning stages of a reaction that will become stable and critical without causing damage to its surroundings. It's safer to just say "The reactor probably won't explode":).
I don't know that I believe the stuff that JTG is preaching. I just read something of his yesterday going into it with a fully open mind, and I left it doubting many of his conclusions.
Many of the lessons that he describes can simply be explained by "It's the most efficient form of education that works." Aside from that, there have in fact been many improvements to society under our formal education system in the recent years, so despite all he does to bitch about it, we seem to be doing pretty well.
I should have specified a little more on the pick ticket. When a sale occurs that requires someone to get the item for a customer (big TV, desktop computer, projector, certain software... anything in the back), the pick ticket is printed at the front of the store for the people to grab it from the back and give it to the customer.
3. Another (non-involved) employee sees the sale in the system and helpfully puts the TV into your car.
The reason that non-involved employee gets the right item is because the printed out slip of paper has that model number along with the name of the sales associate who made the sale. If someone actually tried this, they would be caught quickly.
When I worked at CCity (up until June 08), very few people had access to do returns. Only managers and customer service reps... and if you do a return, the sales ticket is by no means deleted - there are logs kept. Maybe the top managers can do more stuff that I am unaware of, but it clearly isn't as simple as your first step listed.
Step 2 would be impossible to do with a credit card without logs - it needs to authorize the sale before the system thinks the unit is sold, otherwise you will need to do a return (more logs). You would want to claim to the system that the person is paying with cash and just not move any cash from the register.
Aside from that, the very high end models (I'd say $4,000-$6,000 are high end) are very rarely in stock at individual stores. You more often than not will need to special order those very high end models.
On a similar note, if he was selling models that were in stock, then that means that the inventory system recognized that the store was running lower on those models and had to have more shipped to it. The same inventory system is tied to the daily reports of traffic in general... I find it hard to believe that nothing would stand out.
If the inventory system was not ordering replacements for those TV's, "Product Flow" would very quickly recognize that their stock in the back is not as expected and start to ask questions on where the big TV's went. Trust me, they check the big stuff before open, around noon, and near close. When big things turn up missing, questions are asked.
But, the biggest indicator that this is complete bunk is the fact that when the "Product Flow" team gets the pick ticket (automatically generated and printed at the time of sale, completely separate of the sales ticket) for the sale in question, the employee who made the sale shows up on the ticket along with the model number, and that ticket is used to make yet another log in the system of releasing the TV to the customer. Afterwards, the pick ticket is placed in a stack of released items.
Circuit City had problems. Employee theft like this was not a major one. I have heard stories about the delivery truck guys finding ways around the system, but I don't know any specifics...
In the constitution, it says he has to swear to the best of his abilities. It's near impossible for the president of the United State to break his oath of office.
Is this really the best of his abilities? Presidents with major health issues have taken less vacation days than him...
Sarah Palin was too inexperienced having been a mayor of a small town and governor of a low-populated state (with an 80% approval rating).
Obama's executive experience in the public or private sector? The guy hasn't run a hot dog stand, let alone a major organization.
So you're suggesting that Obama's experience is equivalent or less than Palin's? This was a nice post that gets the point across. (No need for me to reinvent the wheel - Rei did a fine job)
Man, I wish that was true for me. For the past half a year or more, I decided to completely stop drinking caffeine outside of when it is clearly a good idea (either very long drives as you said or drives late at night). This past week has been complete hell for me for some reason though - I almost passed out at work on Monday a number of times, so I decided to start drinking mountain dew again until I can manage without it...
Wikipedia suggests otherwise. Redbulls start at 80mg of caffeine per serving... NOS, however, has 343mg. I guess the strongest that I've had was Jolt cola at 280mg
They do buy more extra crap, but the question is "Do they proportionally buy more extra crap compared to lower income people?" If not, then the tax burden shifts to lower income people.
Thoughtful response on the WoW discussion - Thanks:).
Depends on the context of that violence. I honestly don't see any compelling reason that kids need to be exposed to games like GTA or even Halo -- if the entire game consists of shooting things then what the hell is there to learn exactly? Hand-eye coordination? You could gain that playing basketball or flight simulators.....
That's the thing - it's hard to tell what kids will get out of these games. I grew up playing Doom (age ~7-8), Duke Nukem 3D (age 10-11), and Quake (age 11-23).
Aside from killing crap in Doom in singleplayer, I messed around with freebie level editors and had fun making my own creations. In Duke3D, I had my first experiences in online games, I messed around with the.ini files to change attributes of the games, and once again I made (more intricate) levels.
When it comes to Quake, what the hell haven't I done... I learned a LOT about programming by messing with the game source code, did more level editing... but more importantly, I learned how to critically think. I started analyzing the top players of the game to the point of being able to mimic their actions/responses, and eventually I learned how to BE one of the top players of the game. It was a hell of a trip. I've become a very well-respected member of the community, been an administrator for a significant portion of the servers in the country, learned how to fairly be an admin for the servers and deal with abusive users maturely. I've been able to apply myself to so many more things for being involved in Quake.
During summers of Highschool, my dad used to pester me to get a job flipping burgers or something. Since then, he has said on a number of occasions that he was wrong and has been very surprised by what I learned from playing games.
I'm curious then - How would you view games with social networks? For example - if your child grew an interest in World of Warcraft, would you prevent him from playing it?
What is your criteria for not allowing certain games? Online social interactions not allowable under a certain age? Violent games not allowable under a certain age?
That's my vote. I've seen kids that are absolutely mesmerized by the TV. They stare at it for hours on end. If they aren't watching Cartoon Network they are probably playing video games. And people really wonder why we have a childhood obesity problem?
It depends on the age group, but there are multiple sides to this - particularly with video games. In certain areas, sometimes the only perceived alternative to doing stuff at home is doing illegal stuff (underage drinking/drugs) with friends elsewhere.
Would you rather have a child: a) Be a nerd/gamer on the internet who potentially learns how to program, or at the worst has better hand-eye coordination. b) Potentially start to rely on drugs/alcohol for entertainment and develop serious issues in the future.
I fully realize that option b) doesn't happen every time, but the chances seem much higher. Also, I know there are many other outcomes for both paths, but I would just like to say that you shouldn't be so quick to dismiss certain things (video games, in particular) as completely destructive to a child's development.
I was talking to one of my closest online friends yesterday, and he talked about how much it bugs him that his girlfriend obviously grew up and followed the second path. Despite the fact that she's a great woman, her past/friends are making him question things. Talking to him made me grateful that I didn't spend so much time with my group of highschool druggie^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfriends. Being a nerd helped me avoid that sort of life, and in its place, I had a head start on my education (Computer Engineering) in many ways.
50%? For Engineering, that seems high. At the University of Pittsburgh, I remember being told that every year, the number of students drops by half. 200 Freshman = 100 Sophomores = 50 Juniors = 25 Seniors. People dropped out of Engineering (and flocked to Business/History/English/Econ/Imaginary Engineering) like flies at my school, and it definitely showed as you got to the higher classes.
Clearly, there is a balance of cost and effectiveness. You can't have infinite students to one professor because very few students would get anything meaningful out of it.
What Firethorn is arguing is that one of the major benefits of having smaller classes is the individual student-professor interactions that occur such as the ones he listed. I tend to agree with him. When a professor can hear a student's (incorrect) thought process on a problem, he may have heard similar issues before and be quick to correct them. There are plenty of incorrect ways to look at problems, but it wouldn't make sense for a professor to approach a class of 300+ and say "Don't do these problems this way - this is wrong. Also, don't do them this way. This way is wrong too."
As much as I love Quakeworld, I'd have to say that it depends on where you live. If you're in the US, don't bother unless you want to play brainless Clan Arena mods. If you're in Europe, the community is much larger. There are (from my understanding) significantly large free-for-all communities as well as dueling and team deathmatch (2on2 and 4on4) communities.
The game is VERY difficult to get into, which is why I would fully recommend making use of #qwrookie if you happen to start fresh or even after a few years break. Quakeworld is about as hardcore as it comes. Trying to break into it in the US will result in incredible frustration unless you know the right people who have a ton of time to spend on helping you out.
Sweet. Now with all that work that you've done in getting python to support braces, can you make it not depend on whitespace? I'm sure it won't take that much more effort.
What's going to happen to this world when GenC# programmers replace the old guard and they don't have the least clue about what is going on inside the computer that makes the magic happen?
It depends on where the programmer is educated. At my school, I had plenty of CS majors in my classes where I learned (in much depth) about assembly, compilers, general computer architecture... Note: my degree is in Computer Engineering, not Computer Science. I don't know if the CS majors were required to take the classes that I saw a handful of them in, but they very likely were for most of the important ones.
I wish there were some type of initiative/referendum that citizens could use to challenge laws, not because they are unconstitutional or otherwise legally invalid, but because they have failed to deliver the results that were promised. If there were a way to get rid of otherwise legally valid laws that can be objectively proven to be counterproductive, not because enough voters put enough pressure on the legislators to repeal the law, but because at least one citizen can rigorously prove that it has failed, this would represent real progress.
I think this is one of those "Seems like a good idea in theory, bad idea in practice" things. Imagine the politics behind groups working to prove that the regulations placed on certain industries have been harmful in certain cases while they ignore the fact that it helps keep the environment clean.
Perhaps religious groups would try to prove without a doubt that abortion is a bad thing. Anti-gun groups would try to prove that gun ownership is a bad thing.
If one person has the power to remove a law, then groups of large people with tons of money at their disposal will have even more power to remove said laws.
If you ban the IP, they will just start using anonymous proxies. Slashdot's moderation system isn't that bad for dealing with trolls.
I recently had the thought that AC's should be prohibited from posting in a new article for an hour or so (sort of in the same way that subscribers have access to articles before regular users do) so that their troll comments are less likely to be near the top of the discussion... any thoughts on that?
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever their intentions at Acorn, this is illegal and must be stopped.
Actually, if they didn't turn in those registrations, that would be illegal. What Acorn was doing is perfectly compliant with the law. The reason for this law is to prevent potential discrimination of groups like this from seeing the Republican box checked and throwing it away claiming that it was invalid. Be happy it's this way.
If some smart-ass college student fills out a registration as Santa Claus, then Acorn flags (or not - their call) that registration as "probably fake" and HAS to hand it in. Similarly, if the Acorn workers on the street make up a few registrations to reach supposed quotas (there are varying reports on if they are only paid hourly or if they receive bonuses for handing in extra registrations), the people who see those HAVE to hand it in.
At the end of the process, it isn't any individual working for Acorn who decides which voter registration is valid or not - individual states handle all of that. Acorn just hands over the registrations to the states. Blaming Acorn for handing in fraudulent registrations when they are required by law to do exactly that is stupid. Drop it already.
It'll never go critical, I think, but it is possible for the pebble manipulation hardware to jam and thus cause problems.
In terms used in nuclear reactions, "critical" refers to a self-sustaining fission process. You want a nuclear reactor to go critical. Thus, "sub-critical" is a reaction that is slowing down, and "super-critical" is a reaction that is speeding up. Still, you probably don't mean to say super-critical, as this could describe the beginning stages of a reaction that will become stable and critical without causing damage to its surroundings. It's safer to just say "The reactor probably won't explode" :).
See here for more information.
Well, I'll give it some more consideration then (provided I can find the time to read it). Thanks for the non flaming post.
I don't know that I believe the stuff that JTG is preaching. I just read something of his yesterday going into it with a fully open mind, and I left it doubting many of his conclusions.
Many of the lessons that he describes can simply be explained by "It's the most efficient form of education that works." Aside from that, there have in fact been many improvements to society under our formal education system in the recent years, so despite all he does to bitch about it, we seem to be doing pretty well.
I should have specified a little more on the pick ticket. When a sale occurs that requires someone to get the item for a customer (big TV, desktop computer, projector, certain software... anything in the back), the pick ticket is printed at the front of the store for the people to grab it from the back and give it to the customer.
3. Another (non-involved) employee sees the sale in the system and helpfully puts the TV into your car.
The reason that non-involved employee gets the right item is because the printed out slip of paper has that model number along with the name of the sales associate who made the sale. If someone actually tried this, they would be caught quickly.
I doubt it was as simple as you are claiming.
When I worked at CCity (up until June 08), very few people had access to do returns. Only managers and customer service reps... and if you do a return, the sales ticket is by no means deleted - there are logs kept. Maybe the top managers can do more stuff that I am unaware of, but it clearly isn't as simple as your first step listed.
Step 2 would be impossible to do with a credit card without logs - it needs to authorize the sale before the system thinks the unit is sold, otherwise you will need to do a return (more logs). You would want to claim to the system that the person is paying with cash and just not move any cash from the register.
Aside from that, the very high end models (I'd say $4,000-$6,000 are high end) are very rarely in stock at individual stores. You more often than not will need to special order those very high end models.
On a similar note, if he was selling models that were in stock, then that means that the inventory system recognized that the store was running lower on those models and had to have more shipped to it. The same inventory system is tied to the daily reports of traffic in general... I find it hard to believe that nothing would stand out.
If the inventory system was not ordering replacements for those TV's, "Product Flow" would very quickly recognize that their stock in the back is not as expected and start to ask questions on where the big TV's went. Trust me, they check the big stuff before open, around noon, and near close. When big things turn up missing, questions are asked.
But, the biggest indicator that this is complete bunk is the fact that when the "Product Flow" team gets the pick ticket (automatically generated and printed at the time of sale, completely separate of the sales ticket) for the sale in question, the employee who made the sale shows up on the ticket along with the model number, and that ticket is used to make yet another log in the system of releasing the TV to the customer. Afterwards, the pick ticket is placed in a stack of released items.
Circuit City had problems. Employee theft like this was not a major one. I have heard stories about the delivery truck guys finding ways around the system, but I don't know any specifics...
In the constitution, it says he has to swear to the best of his abilities. It's near impossible for the president of the United State to break his oath of office.
Is this really the best of his abilities? Presidents with major health issues have taken less vacation days than him...
Sarah Palin was too inexperienced having been a mayor of a small town and governor of a low-populated state (with an 80% approval rating).
Obama's executive experience in the public or private sector? The guy hasn't run a hot dog stand, let alone a major organization.
So you're suggesting that Obama's experience is equivalent or less than Palin's? This was a nice post that gets the point across. (No need for me to reinvent the wheel - Rei did a fine job)
The less you drink, the less you need it. Duh.
Man, I wish that was true for me. For the past half a year or more, I decided to completely stop drinking caffeine outside of when it is clearly a good idea (either very long drives as you said or drives late at night). This past week has been complete hell for me for some reason though - I almost passed out at work on Monday a number of times, so I decided to start drinking mountain dew again until I can manage without it...
Wikipedia suggests otherwise. Redbulls start at 80mg of caffeine per serving... NOS, however, has 343mg. I guess the strongest that I've had was Jolt cola at 280mg
Also, the ocean is already inhabited.
Sorry, but when has that stopped humans from going anywhere to live? Granted, there are other issues with living in the ocean...
Dead on. I wish Mr. Blumethal could see this advice.
but people with money buy alot of extra crap.
They do buy more extra crap, but the question is "Do they proportionally buy more extra crap compared to lower income people?" If not, then the tax burden shifts to lower income people.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/12/on-importance-of-middle-class-lesson-of.html is slightly related to the topic, and the chart at the top kind of makes my point - people with all that extra income invest in certain areas that wouldn't be taxed if you relied entirely on a sales tax.
Yea - a high-def version of this!
Thoughtful response on the WoW discussion - Thanks :).
Depends on the context of that violence. I honestly don't see any compelling reason that kids need to be exposed to games like GTA or even Halo -- if the entire game consists of shooting things then what the hell is there to learn exactly? Hand-eye coordination? You could gain that playing basketball or flight simulators.....
That's the thing - it's hard to tell what kids will get out of these games. I grew up playing Doom (age ~7-8), Duke Nukem 3D (age 10-11), and Quake (age 11-23).
Aside from killing crap in Doom in singleplayer, I messed around with freebie level editors and had fun making my own creations. In Duke3D, I had my first experiences in online games, I messed around with the .ini files to change attributes of the games, and once again I made (more intricate) levels.
When it comes to Quake, what the hell haven't I done... I learned a LOT about programming by messing with the game source code, did more level editing... but more importantly, I learned how to critically think. I started analyzing the top players of the game to the point of being able to mimic their actions/responses, and eventually I learned how to BE one of the top players of the game. It was a hell of a trip. I've become a very well-respected member of the community, been an administrator for a significant portion of the servers in the country, learned how to fairly be an admin for the servers and deal with abusive users maturely. I've been able to apply myself to so many more things for being involved in Quake.
During summers of Highschool, my dad used to pester me to get a job flipping burgers or something. Since then, he has said on a number of occasions that he was wrong and has been very surprised by what I learned from playing games.
I'm curious then - How would you view games with social networks? For example - if your child grew an interest in World of Warcraft, would you prevent him from playing it?
What is your criteria for not allowing certain games? Online social interactions not allowable under a certain age? Violent games not allowable under a certain age?
That's my vote. I've seen kids that are absolutely mesmerized by the TV. They stare at it for hours on end. If they aren't watching Cartoon Network they are probably playing video games. And people really wonder why we have a childhood obesity problem?
It depends on the age group, but there are multiple sides to this - particularly with video games. In certain areas, sometimes the only perceived alternative to doing stuff at home is doing illegal stuff (underage drinking/drugs) with friends elsewhere.
Would you rather have a child:
a) Be a nerd/gamer on the internet who potentially learns how to program, or at the worst has better hand-eye coordination.
b) Potentially start to rely on drugs/alcohol for entertainment and develop serious issues in the future.
I fully realize that option b) doesn't happen every time, but the chances seem much higher. Also, I know there are many other outcomes for both paths, but I would just like to say that you shouldn't be so quick to dismiss certain things (video games, in particular) as completely destructive to a child's development.
I was talking to one of my closest online friends yesterday, and he talked about how much it bugs him that his girlfriend obviously grew up and followed the second path. Despite the fact that she's a great woman, her past/friends are making him question things. Talking to him made me grateful that I didn't spend so much time with my group of highschool druggie^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfriends. Being a nerd helped me avoid that sort of life, and in its place, I had a head start on my education (Computer Engineering) in many ways.
We do scream bloody murder. Politicians suck.
50%? For Engineering, that seems high. At the University of Pittsburgh, I remember being told that every year, the number of students drops by half. 200 Freshman = 100 Sophomores = 50 Juniors = 25 Seniors. People dropped out of Engineering (and flocked to Business/History/English/Econ/Imaginary Engineering) like flies at my school, and it definitely showed as you got to the higher classes.
Clearly, there is a balance of cost and effectiveness. You can't have infinite students to one professor because very few students would get anything meaningful out of it.
What Firethorn is arguing is that one of the major benefits of having smaller classes is the individual student-professor interactions that occur such as the ones he listed. I tend to agree with him. When a professor can hear a student's (incorrect) thought process on a problem, he may have heard similar issues before and be quick to correct them. There are plenty of incorrect ways to look at problems, but it wouldn't make sense for a professor to approach a class of 300+ and say "Don't do these problems this way - this is wrong. Also, don't do them this way. This way is wrong too."
As much as I love Quakeworld, I'd have to say that it depends on where you live. If you're in the US, don't bother unless you want to play brainless Clan Arena mods. If you're in Europe, the community is much larger. There are (from my understanding) significantly large free-for-all communities as well as dueling and team deathmatch (2on2 and 4on4) communities.
The game is VERY difficult to get into, which is why I would fully recommend making use of #qwrookie if you happen to start fresh or even after a few years break. Quakeworld is about as hardcore as it comes. Trying to break into it in the US will result in incredible frustration unless you know the right people who have a ton of time to spend on helping you out.
Sweet. Now with all that work that you've done in getting python to support braces, can you make it not depend on whitespace? I'm sure it won't take that much more effort.
What's going to happen to this world when GenC# programmers replace the old guard and they don't have the least clue about what is going on inside the computer that makes the magic happen?
It depends on where the programmer is educated. At my school, I had plenty of CS majors in my classes where I learned (in much depth) about assembly, compilers, general computer architecture... Note: my degree is in Computer Engineering, not Computer Science. I don't know if the CS majors were required to take the classes that I saw a handful of them in, but they very likely were for most of the important ones.
I wish there were some type of initiative/referendum that citizens could use to challenge laws, not because they are unconstitutional or otherwise legally invalid, but because they have failed to deliver the results that were promised. If there were a way to get rid of otherwise legally valid laws that can be objectively proven to be counterproductive, not because enough voters put enough pressure on the legislators to repeal the law, but because at least one citizen can rigorously prove that it has failed, this would represent real progress.
I think this is one of those "Seems like a good idea in theory, bad idea in practice" things. Imagine the politics behind groups working to prove that the regulations placed on certain industries have been harmful in certain cases while they ignore the fact that it helps keep the environment clean.
Perhaps religious groups would try to prove without a doubt that abortion is a bad thing. Anti-gun groups would try to prove that gun ownership is a bad thing.
If one person has the power to remove a law, then groups of large people with tons of money at their disposal will have even more power to remove said laws.
If you ban the IP, they will just start using anonymous proxies. Slashdot's moderation system isn't that bad for dealing with trolls.
I recently had the thought that AC's should be prohibited from posting in a new article for an hour or so (sort of in the same way that subscribers have access to articles before regular users do) so that their troll comments are less likely to be near the top of the discussion... any thoughts on that?