There are some serious differences between voting in Ireland and voting in NYC. In Ireland, the boxes in which polling slips are posted at each polling station are shipped to centralised county districts for counting. Counting them locally in each station would be completely impractical and inefficient. Polls only occur every few years, so the tellers who add up the votes are temporary staff, hired for the occasion (usually one day and maybe one night, although a close call can result in a request for a recount).
The biggest difference is that Ireland uses proportional representation by means of a single transferable vote, so you number your candidates in order of preference; there are multiple seats per constituency, and a quota based on population. All the 1st prefs are tallied, and if one candidate gets over the quota, s/he is elected. Remaining [unused] votes are then redistributed among remaining candidates according to their 2nd pref: lather, rinse, repeat until all seats are filled. There is no question of voter intent: if a paper is spoiled, incorrectly filled in, or not clearly readable, it's invalid. The Returning Officer might be called over by a counter to adjudicate on a borderline case.
Doing the whole thing by hand is well-organised, tried, and tested. It costs a lot less than the government wasted on machines that were inadequate for the purpose, running proprietary, closed-source code that could not be tested or proved. It certainly would be possible to replace the system with a computerised one, but the politicians who made the mistakes were simply too stupid to understand that a problem existed, even when told by the entire country's IT community (except the even stupider "IT advisers" who were supposed to advise the politicians). But this is a small country. The law is the same throughout, unlike the 50 separate US states, so we don't have a dozen pieces of local legislation to ride in along with every national vote. I can well see that persisting with a pencil-and-paper solution in such a disparate environment would not have the same attraction.
After all, traditional college diplomas look elegant when hung on the wall, but they contain very little detail about what the recipient learned.
I think the author has made a fundamentally false assumption here. "Traditional college diplomas" are not meant to contain the details of what the recipient learned. That's what a Transcript is for. A degree certifies that you have learned how to learn; that you know how to read and analyse, how to find information and sift it for fact and fiction, how to write what you have learned clearly and concisely, and how to support your argument by pointing at what others have done. It also certifies that you have done all this within a specific discipline, so there is an implication that you know the basics of your chosen field[s].
That may certainly provide adequate credentials for some kinds of employment. But it excludes the large number of specialist institutions whose business is to teach the basics and practicalities of a discipline, without the same level of emphasis on the other skills.
Unfortunately it also excludes a significant number of institutions who accept payment to allow a student to graduate without proper checks on whether they have or have not achieved anything of worth, based on other aspects of the individual's social background. As degrees-for-cash become more prevalent, whether state-sponsored or privately-funded, it is becoming more difficult to distinguish this class of graduate from the first.
Amazing how the population of the USA has been brainwashed into thinking that the carrier lock is in exchange for a low cost.
The low cost is in exchange for a term contract. The carrier lock is just US industry's 1950's mentality kicking in. In principle, it's very little different from the proprietary lock-in we see in software.
Hmm, so they, for once took customer feedback seriously? What the heck just happened? A galaxy must have just imploded somewhere (from our vantage point, that is).
What puzzles me more is why they ever thought this was a good idea in the first place. It must have been tried dozens of times all over the world, and has always failed — in some places it has even been made illegal to charge a fee to the customer for a specific method of payment.
We all know most marketing and corporate bizniz droids are fairly dim bulbs intellectually, but whoever dreamed this one up must surely be at the bottom of the heap.
He just doesn't get it. You should treat people, especially your customers, good no matter who they are.[...]
It isn't just that. It's that he appears to be only semi-literate and none too bright (but that may be a part of the act). But WTF were Avenger thinking, hiring someone to sell stuff on the net who admits he doesn't know much about it?
Hmm. Maybe thinking is too strong a term to apply to Avenger: doubtless it was their marketing people who hired him, and one marketing droid is much like another.
In any case, if it's "corporate" email it's probably trivial or ephemeral, concerned with administrative minutiae or the perpetual re-editing of "reports" as if they were something of great value. Out of 200Gb I would expect perhaps half a dozen emails containing something interesting, salacious, or actionable (perhaps all three:-) and that kind of hit rate is barely worth the trouble of pwning their server.
...engineering and IT are becoming far more intertwined and co-dependent on each other. Splitting them apart would, I think, be counterproductive - you'd end up with IT wanting to do their own thing and engineering being unable to make it work with their side of the house.
But even if they are a single unit, you will still get the IT being neglected because the engineers want X instead of Y, and engineering being neglected because IT wants Y instead of X. There is always a risk that engineers will break IT systems because they are engineers, not IT people, and that IT people will break engineering applications because they are IT people, not engineers.
No such thing as bad PR in these people's eyes. What surprises me is that anyone is surprised at this guy's behaviour. PR is thickly populated with semi-literates whose business isn't actually Public Relations at all. It is clear from the exchange that this guy is basically in import-export clerical operations (dealing with customs, handling queries, arranging booths, attending shows, etc). Unfortunately, line management in the PR business is virtually non-existent, so no-one is monitoring his behaviour or how he handles a customer, and he is very clearly incapable of understanding why his behaviour would even merit comment. I'd say call off the dogs and leave him: he's too far down the food chain to be worth bothering about. I'm sorry for the customer, but he has to learn that this is what will happen if you buy goods from a PR company, or from a supplier who won't talk to you but employs a PR company to do the job instead.
This has absolutely nothing whatever to do with "government".
Companies are every bit as stupid as this, installing "new technology" because some dickhead at the top insisted on it, and omitted to make any provision for its continued operation. Everyone in IT knows this (see./ articles passim).
And let's not have any blather about "responsibility" either: companies are just as able to cover up the stupidities of their senior execs as government offices are.
And while we're at it, let's skip the rubbish about "other people's money". Companies spend and mis-spend other people's money with impunity* every day — how the fuck do you think we got into the current recession? It sure as hell wasn't governments doing all those shady hedge fund deals with borrowed money; it was banks: those wonderful much-vaunted joint stock limited-liability business-can-do-no-wrong corporations, run by greed-raddled execs and owned by greedy or ignorant stockholders who actively or passively encouraged their activities.
* Yes, impunity. The people responsible have been rewarded for their misdeeds, just like the cretins responsible for the government mismanagement which enabled it.
This whole "let's just blame the government" nonsense is simply a blind cooked up by corporate shills trying to cover up their own ineptitude. The governments are equally to blame with the corporates for their foolishness and stupidity. Blaming just one of them alone isn't simply incorrect, it's dangerous.
They certainly are. Hiring older people (assuming you pick the right ones) is a treble whammy: greater depth of experience, much lower training requirements, and no desire to be heading out the door in a few months (unless you dump on them). Downside: you have to pay them more. Upside: they'll probably be 100x more productive from day 1. Plus they know shit that the younger ones (and the CIO) simply have no clue about, which can save the company from making silly mistakes out of ignorance, if they're smart enough to take advice.
Most CIOs, however, don't think like this. They lose. Game over. New game?
And it always beat me why anyone would even consider doing business with a company called "GoDaddy". Of all the puerile names I have ever seen for companies, this must probably be the silliest.
The link to the PDF no longer works ("The system cannot find the file specified.") so either they pulled it for corrections or they didn't mean to release it in the first place.
I would guess that this is nothing to do with spellcheckers (which are useful for catching typos, but fairly useless for catching mis-spellings). As this was observed over time, might it not be possible that the decreasing level of literacy may be being exposed by a decrease in the average age of the contributors?
I particularly liked the shot of the inside of Bag End with the dehumidifier (or perhaps an A/C unit or even a vacuum cleaner;-)
Perhaps this is the droid we've been looking for...
Slashdot Mirror
The real core of the problem seems to be that the police force is composed of morons.
Sometimes if you want experience you're better off paying up for the older engineer.
No, but it seems to be a Windows-only Eclipse plugin, which is kinda weird when designers all use Macs...
The biggest difference is that Ireland uses proportional representation by means of a single transferable vote, so you number your candidates in order of preference; there are multiple seats per constituency, and a quota based on population. All the 1st prefs are tallied, and if one candidate gets over the quota, s/he is elected. Remaining [unused] votes are then redistributed among remaining candidates according to their 2nd pref: lather, rinse, repeat until all seats are filled. There is no question of voter intent: if a paper is spoiled, incorrectly filled in, or not clearly readable, it's invalid. The Returning Officer might be called over by a counter to adjudicate on a borderline case.
Doing the whole thing by hand is well-organised, tried, and tested. It costs a lot less than the government wasted on machines that were inadequate for the purpose, running proprietary, closed-source code that could not be tested or proved. It certainly would be possible to replace the system with a computerised one, but the politicians who made the mistakes were simply too stupid to understand that a problem existed, even when told by the entire country's IT community (except the even stupider "IT advisers" who were supposed to advise the politicians). But this is a small country. The law is the same throughout, unlike the 50 separate US states, so we don't have a dozen pieces of local legislation to ride in along with every national vote. I can well see that persisting with a pencil-and-paper solution in such a disparate environment would not have the same attraction.
He was using a copyrighted version dowloaded from a pwned server. Expect the goons of Hollywood to issue him a DMCA takedown notice tomorrow.
After all, traditional college diplomas look elegant when hung on the wall, but they contain very little detail about what the recipient learned.
I think the author has made a fundamentally false assumption here. "Traditional college diplomas" are not meant to contain the details of what the recipient learned. That's what a Transcript is for. A degree certifies that you have learned how to learn; that you know how to read and analyse, how to find information and sift it for fact and fiction, how to write what you have learned clearly and concisely, and how to support your argument by pointing at what others have done. It also certifies that you have done all this within a specific discipline, so there is an implication that you know the basics of your chosen field[s].
That may certainly provide adequate credentials for some kinds of employment. But it excludes the large number of specialist institutions whose business is to teach the basics and practicalities of a discipline, without the same level of emphasis on the other skills.
Unfortunately it also excludes a significant number of institutions who accept payment to allow a student to graduate without proper checks on whether they have or have not achieved anything of worth, based on other aspects of the individual's social background. As degrees-for-cash become more prevalent, whether state-sponsored or privately-funded, it is becoming more difficult to distinguish this class of graduate from the first.
The low cost is in exchange for a term contract. The carrier lock is just US industry's 1950's mentality kicking in. In principle, it's very little different from the proprietary lock-in we see in software.
Hmm, so they, for once took customer feedback seriously? What the heck just happened? A galaxy must have just imploded somewhere (from our vantage point, that is).
What puzzles me more is why they ever thought this was a good idea in the first place. It must have been tried dozens of times all over the world, and has always failed — in some places it has even been made illegal to charge a fee to the customer for a specific method of payment.
We all know most marketing and corporate bizniz droids are fairly dim bulbs intellectually, but whoever dreamed this one up must surely be at the bottom of the heap.
"If I had known..."
He just doesn't get it. You should treat people, especially your customers, good no matter who they are.[...]
It isn't just that. It's that he appears to be only semi-literate and none too bright (but that may be a part of the act). But WTF were Avenger thinking, hiring someone to sell stuff on the net who admits he doesn't know much about it?
Hmm. Maybe thinking is too strong a term to apply to Avenger: doubtless it was their marketing people who hired him, and one marketing droid is much like another.
It should never be the government's job to regulate around blatant idiocy.
Don't see why not...they did it for the banks...
GoDaddy wants a reputation as a reputable DNS register.
So why do they have a joke name that makes them sound like a third-rate cut-price porn peddler?
In any case, if it's "corporate" email it's probably trivial or ephemeral, concerned with administrative minutiae or the perpetual re-editing of "reports" as if they were something of great value. Out of 200Gb I would expect perhaps half a dozen emails containing something interesting, salacious, or actionable (perhaps all three :-) and that kind of hit rate is barely worth the trouble of pwning their server.
They don't even have to justify anything. Banks in the UK used to charge customers a fee for replying to a letter :-)
...engineering and IT are becoming far more intertwined and co-dependent on each other. Splitting them apart would, I think, be counterproductive - you'd end up with IT wanting to do their own thing and engineering being unable to make it work with their side of the house.
But even if they are a single unit, you will still get the IT being neglected because the engineers want X instead of Y, and engineering being neglected because IT wants Y instead of X. There is always a risk that engineers will break IT systems because they are engineers, not IT people, and that IT people will break engineering applications because they are IT people, not engineers.
No such thing as bad PR in these people's eyes. What surprises me is that anyone is surprised at this guy's behaviour. PR is thickly populated with semi-literates whose business isn't actually Public Relations at all. It is clear from the exchange that this guy is basically in import-export clerical operations (dealing with customs, handling queries, arranging booths, attending shows, etc). Unfortunately, line management in the PR business is virtually non-existent, so no-one is monitoring his behaviour or how he handles a customer, and he is very clearly incapable of understanding why his behaviour would even merit comment. I'd say call off the dogs and leave him: he's too far down the food chain to be worth bothering about. I'm sorry for the customer, but he has to learn that this is what will happen if you buy goods from a PR company, or from a supplier who won't talk to you but employs a PR company to do the job instead.
Companies are every bit as stupid as this, installing "new technology" because some dickhead at the top insisted on it, and omitted to make any provision for its continued operation. Everyone in IT knows this (see ./ articles passim).
And let's not have any blather about "responsibility" either: companies are just as able to cover up the stupidities of their senior execs as government offices are.
And while we're at it, let's skip the rubbish about "other people's money". Companies spend and mis-spend other people's money with impunity* every day — how the fuck do you think we got into the current recession? It sure as hell wasn't governments doing all those shady hedge fund deals with borrowed money; it was banks: those wonderful much-vaunted joint stock limited-liability business-can-do-no-wrong corporations, run by greed-raddled execs and owned by greedy or ignorant stockholders who actively or passively encouraged their activities.
* Yes, impunity. The people responsible have been rewarded for their misdeeds, just like the cretins responsible for the government mismanagement which enabled it.
This whole "let's just blame the government" nonsense is simply a blind cooked up by corporate shills trying to cover up their own ineptitude. The governments are equally to blame with the corporates for their foolishness and stupidity. Blaming just one of them alone isn't simply incorrect, it's dangerous.
WTF is a pudding dispensing vending machine FFS?
They do exist and are more likely to stick around
They certainly are. Hiring older people (assuming you pick the right ones) is a treble whammy: greater depth of experience, much lower training requirements, and no desire to be heading out the door in a few months (unless you dump on them). Downside: you have to pay them more. Upside: they'll probably be 100x more productive from day 1. Plus they know shit that the younger ones (and the CIO) simply have no clue about, which can save the company from making silly mistakes out of ignorance, if they're smart enough to take advice.
Most CIOs, however, don't think like this. They lose. Game over. New game?
And it always beat me why anyone would even consider doing business with a company called "GoDaddy". Of all the puerile names I have ever seen for companies, this must probably be the silliest.
Anyone got another URI?
I would guess that this is nothing to do with spellcheckers (which are useful for catching typos, but fairly useless for catching mis-spellings). As this was observed over time, might it not be possible that the decreasing level of literacy may be being exposed by a decrease in the average age of the contributors?
"please bring this parcel up to the seventh floor, thanks".
Except that in some forms of English, this is perfectly correct (Hiberno-English, for example).
"datum" and "medium"
That battle was lost many decades ago, if it even got fought.
I particularly liked the shot of the inside of Bag End with the dehumidifier (or perhaps an A/C unit or even a vacuum cleaner ;-)
Perhaps this is the droid we've been looking for...
Like, it doesn't bother when a leader has people starving, and some in horrible prison camps, while he lives a life of luxury? That's not cool.
You mean like in the USA?
I drank Coke once, and hated the stuff. I am nevertheless available for a fee to act as a taster for the Coca-Cola Corporation.