You know... people don't need any help in fucking themselves over, but likely more often than you would think, they get more help with it than they need. Perhaps you've been lucky to avoid unethical, cold-hearted, racist and/or back-stabbing employers/managers/supervisors/co-workers, but just because you haven't run into them, it doesn't mean they don't exist.
Sometimes you eat the bar, sometimes the bar eats you.
And for anyone wondering what the hell we're talking about, Paranoia Agent is an anime TV series. It's a little cheesy, but has some rather interesting bits, including the episode involving a bunch that make an online suicide pact.
My second thought was to wonder if chicks who enter into such pacts would be easy... or something like that. To get rejected by someone getting ready to commit suicide would really put meaning behind someone saying "I'd rather die than have sex with you!". And the twisted thought that springs to mind is that I'd imagine it shouldn't feel too bad to be rejected by that person anyway, since they wouldn't be around long enough for anyone to find out about it.
I started programming on a Vic 20 when I was 7 years old. I delved into the spiral bound manual on programming in BASIC and was hooked. Unfortunately, some component burned out on that Vic 20 and I never got all that far, but I loved it nonetheless and from then on, whenever anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I proudly said computer programmer.
My dad bought an 8088 many years later and in high school I took Computer Science and AP Computer Science, and I fell in love with a new language: Pascal. I used to sit in front of that 8088 for hours on end making games and programming BBS doors. On weekends, I would literally get up in the morning and start programming, with short breaks to eat, continuing until I went to sleep. I had a 3.9 GPA and was 12th in my class, so I had high hopes for college... maybe I could get a scholarship? But I didn't. And, not wanting to go into debt, I opted for enlisting into the Air Force. GI Bill, right?
I tried for comm-prog as a career field, but when I went up to the MEPS in Oakland, I missed taking the EDPT, since I spent all day trying to pee in a cup (I have a bit of a mental hangup when it comes to someone watching). I ended up in avionics instead of proagramming, hoping to retrain later in my enlistment. I programmed off and on for fun in my off-duty hours, but came to do so less and less as time wore on. Eventually I wasn't much programming at all.
Still, I tried retraining at my 3 year mark. I was a bit worried about the EDPT, since I had a friend who was a decent programmer and he had failed it (and gone on to work for Microsoft). I passed alright, but it didn't matter. I didn't get to retrain anyway. And, lacking the confidence to leave the military and venture out into the real world, I reenlisted anyway right before the IT boom. Over the years, I churned out some personal projects with C, Visual Basic, Delphi, PHP and even Miva, but each time things became less fun and more tedious... like work.
And so, mixed in with nostalgia is some bitterness whenever I think of that fantastic little compy known as the Commodore Vic 20. Not that I'm blaming it for my woes;)
I'm sorry, but you don't get to decide what other people think matters! I, for one, care very much that my software is Free, and pity you for being so short-sighted as to throw your freedom away for something as trivial as slightly more stable software!
Those who would give up freedom for a little temporary safety, deserve neither Firefox nor Opera?
SOE started getting bad reputation when they took over EQ1 and started their trend of ignoring their customers (as far as SOE is concerned, the "customer" is nothing but a cash cow, stuff like customer service or game enjoyment don't exist in the SOE world but in marketroid speak), releasing half baked products or products not done at all, dumbing down the game in ways that had never been done before, basically telling the players to shut the fuck up, stop suggesting improvements and stop asking for bugfixes (because, you know, there is no way the players could know how the game should evolve even though whole communities managed to reach consensus on several issues), and trigger the "milk the suckers" mode (e.g. crank up the release frequency of $30-priced "extensions" from the original 1/year to 1/6 months to 1/3 months)
In a country full of idiots, that sounds like a lucrative way of doing business. Why go out of your way to make everyone happy when you can make most people happy for less?
But what am I saying? We all know that every single 18 year old, without exception, is an immature, boozing, sex-addict.:P
While your statement is likely tongue in cheek, I just wanted to point out that when I was 18, I was digusted with such types (my peers).
Incidentally, I haven't matured all that much since, and I'm 29 now... and I still find people in my age bracket that I find to be irresponsible idiots with poor impulse control.
a) There's the person who believes in an ideological abstraction that is the core basis of libertarianism, which is just that: an idea, that has no track record of being practical nor desireable when you look into the reality of a world where everyone is left to fend for themselves.
As a registered Libertarian that sometimes votes Libertarian, I strongly identify with this notion. I've always assumed that a larger part of party consists of those who have the same idea. It's not a practical party, but it has a LOT of good ideas and the basic sentiment is appealing. I sometimes wish there was a "practical libertarian" party, but alas, it is not so.
So, to all you libertarians out there: How many of you are realists (pro-libertarian because you feel it's ideals are better than Rep/Dem) and how many of you are purely idealists/extremists (swallowing anarcho-capitalism whole)?
Slightly off topic, but as a college student today I am still shocked at how many people write down literally every word the professor says. It is even worse when they use a powerpoint presentation as a way of guiding themselves (and the class) through the topic. People will be busily writing down things they have absolutely no understanding of, and you just know most of them aren't listening to the professor actually, you know, explaining it, because they're just too busy writing.
I'm sure they feel quite good that they got the lecture outline on the title page jotted down--most won't be clever enough to leave space between the points for elaboration, it's just mindless copying--but I am also sure that many of these same people are going to be absolutely shocked when they study their notes for hours and still don't know what the hell they're talking about come test time. Naturally, they will blame the professor for not explaining the material well enough. They got his slides copied down verbatim, what more could there possibly be to know?
I think some of this stems from the methods of teaching that people grow accustomed to in high school. In high school, it's a bundle of facts with little or no context. This means you can write everything down and with no interaction, you can do well enough because the curriculum is more information based, whereas college material tends more towards analysis and more conceptual thinking.
It's one way to seperate the wheat from the chaff, I guess.
On a related note, one of my favorite class activites is to ask a number of questions and completely derail things. Someone inevitably asks if this is testable material and a professor with a good sense of humor will encourage them to write down the completely irrelevant points.
I started asking them about the computers and the sales lady though I was some average user who thinks it all smoke and magic inside the box. She was saying the cpu (computer itself) had a a gforce4 proccesor 80 gig of memory a 10-100k modem and they could UPLOAD Windows Office (?WinXP?) onto it for an extra $25.
Sweet. You should have asked her how much it would be for just the 80 gigs of memory.
I can't shake the compulsion to play such games, much like when I'm asked for a "picture ID" and I slap down my military ID when I know they just want to see my driver's license (knowing full well it's often unsuitable because it lacks a signature). I guess I'm just a bastard.
I'm inclined to agree wholeheartedly with your comment, however, there might be those who are genuinely curious, but find it all too daunting. Such is the case with me and string theory. I am interested to find out *exactly* what all the buzz is about, but I don't want to go through the trouble of learning the necessary math and physics that I imagine to be required for full understanding.
@counterexample:
By the way, on getting people to understand computers more, my approach would be to touch on the basic fundamentals like basic electronics and programming. I would start off with:
1. Basic atomic theory (skip as necessary) 2. Basic electronics (with a bonus section of logic circuits) 3. How a computer basically works (using Babbages Analytical Engine, as a tangible starting point) 4. Basics on modern desktops (PSU, MB, HD, RAM, etc) 5. Basic programming (some assembly and show a few C commands that encompass several assembly commands) 6. Basic networking (teach the OSI model with *specific examples*, not the ambiguities I always see)
Once you have all the fundamentals and a computer is no longer a magical box, I would imagine the rest to fall into place much easier. Then you could go into the mundane and less universal topics like dicking with windows or some such.
93 - Saint Clement I declares that the end would be coming any moment. 100 - Saint Ignatius goes on at some length about the soon to be End Times. 156 - Montanus prophesizes end times around the corner. 195 - The "Sibylline Oracles" dates imminent apocalyose at 195. 210 - A Christian seer, Judas, determined that the Book of Daniel predeicted imminent apocalypse. 365 - Saint Hilary of Poitiers prophesized the soon to be end until being taunted out of town in 366. 375 - 400 - Saint Martin of Tours carries on doomsaying as a prodigy of Saint Hilary. 500 - Around 221, Sextus Julius Africanus placed Armageddon at roughly 500 CE. 751 - Scores believe end times are near when the last Merovingian king is deposed. Between 799 - 806 - Time of the apolcalypse according to Saint Gregory of Tours. 800 - End times according to Beatus. 848 - Thiota waltzs into Mainz in 847 to announce that the next year would be the last one. 950 - Adso of Montier, writes a letter which leads to apocalyptic panic. 968 - An eclipse causes apocalyptic panic. Friday, March 25, 970 - Lotharingian end date. 992 - Bernard of Thuringia's predicted year of end times. 1186 - In 1179, John Of Toledo squandered his money on pamphlets predicting the end year of 1186. 1260 - Joaquim of Fiore announced with great authority that 1260 would be the End. By the time his followers realized they'd been had, he'd been dead for some 58 years. 1306 - In 1147, Gerard of Poehlde predicted this year of the apocalypse. 1310 - The end according to Fra Dolcino of Novara. 1346 - The Black Death inspires the Flagellants; predicting end times, of course. 1420 - The chosen year of the Taborites. 1420 - Martinek Hausha predicted the apocalypse somewhere between February 1st and February 14th. Late 1400s - End times according to Arnold of Vilanova. 1490 - 1500 CE - Girolamo Savonarola's prediction of end times.
And on, and on, and on... and then comes the 20th century, filled with hundreds of purported doomsdays.
"It's like putting lipstick on a pig," said Larry Newhart, a challenger of the turbine projects. "You can dress it up however you want but it's still a pig."
WHAT. THE. FUCK.
I think he's right. It's a bit like putting lipstick on a pig. With or without the lipstick, pigs are tasty goodness.
And if people heard a big pig farm was coming to their town, they'd probably bitch, too. But they'd complain when there's no bacon, all the same.
Also, you might want to consider other industrial disasters. When I was in college, 7 people were killed in a collapse at a local coal fired plant. That's just 5 short of Chernobyl, but nobody cites "Morgantown, WV" when slamming coal as a dangerous power source.
Well... good thing it was just an accident at a coal fired plant. Had it been a nuclear plant, Morgantown's city size would have dropped to 9, which equates to roughly 1,350,000 deaths!
Ditto to "The Fifth Element". That thing was a travesty of science fiction.
Perhaps you didn't watch it until the end? Or haven't seen it since it first came out?
I'll admit, the first time I saw it, I began by making the mistake of taking it seriously and being unimpressed by it. Once you lighten up and appreciate its style and humor, maybe you can enjoy it.
But, to each his own. I can ceratinly sympathize with vehemence for commonly loved movies.
"Windows NT 3.1 ran on Intel IA-32 x86, DEC Alpha, and MIPS R4000 processors. Windows NT 3.51 added support for PowerPC processors. Intergraph Corporation ported Windows NT to its Clipper architecture and later SPARC, but neither version was sold to the public. Windows NT 4.0 was the last major release to support Alpha, MIPS, or PowerPC, though development of Windows 2000 for Alpha continued until 1999, when Compaq stopped support for Windows NT on that architecture."
Interesting. What with their propaganda-styled approach, I just assumed The Corporation was making it up.
Note to people who make films like The Corporation, End of Suburbia or The Money Masters: When you go overboard with your conspiracy theories, you lend discredit to everything you present!
When you're writing software for an air traffic control system, military avionics software, or an authentication system for the NSA, the delivered code can't afford to have bugs
I've been in this industry for quite some time and let me be the first to say that I wish I could repeat this sentence with a straight face.
That was my first thought, particularly with military avionics. A few years ago they put out a hardware/software update for the ENS system (Enhanced Navigation System) which led to frequent crashing... and it took over a year for them to come out with a message saying that it was a bug and not to waste countless man hours trying to repair it.
It's sort of a new concept, though, as I'd never really seen such problems with traditional avionics systems (non glass-cockpit stuff). I've always attributed it to people being used to the behavior of MS Windows. And I'm not saying that to start a flamewar. I'm serious. Unreliable avionics systems should be unacceptable, but these days, that doesn't seem to be the case.
We could have a slashcode government! You go to a site with news, comment threads and the usual, and laws could be started like articles, being debated online and eventually voted on... with only the really high karma folks (virtual politicians) being able to vote:)
Well, it certainly addresses what I see as one of the biggest flaws in modern government: stupid, uneducated voters. In a way...
Slashdot Mirror
You know... people don't need any help in fucking themselves over, but likely more often than you would think, they get more help with it than they need. Perhaps you've been lucky to avoid unethical, cold-hearted, racist and/or back-stabbing employers/managers/supervisors/co-workers, but just because you haven't run into them, it doesn't mean they don't exist.
Sometimes you eat the bar, sometimes the bar eats you.
Yeah, that was my first thought, too.
And for anyone wondering what the hell we're talking about, Paranoia Agent is an anime TV series. It's a little cheesy, but has some rather interesting bits, including the episode involving a bunch that make an online suicide pact.
My second thought was to wonder if chicks who enter into such pacts would be easy... or something like that. To get rejected by someone getting ready to commit suicide would really put meaning behind someone saying "I'd rather die than have sex with you!". And the twisted thought that springs to mind is that I'd imagine it shouldn't feel too bad to be rejected by that person anyway, since they wouldn't be around long enough for anyone to find out about it.
Me too.
;)
I started programming on a Vic 20 when I was 7 years old. I delved into the spiral bound manual on programming in BASIC and was hooked. Unfortunately, some component burned out on that Vic 20 and I never got all that far, but I loved it nonetheless and from then on, whenever anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I proudly said computer programmer.
My dad bought an 8088 many years later and in high school I took Computer Science and AP Computer Science, and I fell in love with a new language: Pascal. I used to sit in front of that 8088 for hours on end making games and programming BBS doors. On weekends, I would literally get up in the morning and start programming, with short breaks to eat, continuing until I went to sleep. I had a 3.9 GPA and was 12th in my class, so I had high hopes for college... maybe I could get a scholarship? But I didn't. And, not wanting to go into debt, I opted for enlisting into the Air Force. GI Bill, right?
I tried for comm-prog as a career field, but when I went up to the MEPS in Oakland, I missed taking the EDPT, since I spent all day trying to pee in a cup (I have a bit of a mental hangup when it comes to someone watching). I ended up in avionics instead of proagramming, hoping to retrain later in my enlistment. I programmed off and on for fun in my off-duty hours, but came to do so less and less as time wore on. Eventually I wasn't much programming at all.
Still, I tried retraining at my 3 year mark. I was a bit worried about the EDPT, since I had a friend who was a decent programmer and he had failed it (and gone on to work for Microsoft). I passed alright, but it didn't matter. I didn't get to retrain anyway. And, lacking the confidence to leave the military and venture out into the real world, I reenlisted anyway right before the IT boom. Over the years, I churned out some personal projects with C, Visual Basic, Delphi, PHP and even Miva, but each time things became less fun and more tedious... like work.
And so, mixed in with nostalgia is some bitterness whenever I think of that fantastic little compy known as the Commodore Vic 20. Not that I'm blaming it for my woes
I'm sorry, but you don't get to decide what other people think matters! I, for one, care very much that my software is Free, and pity you for being so short-sighted as to throw your freedom away for something as trivial as slightly more stable software!
Those who would give up freedom for a little temporary safety, deserve neither Firefox nor Opera?
SOE started getting bad reputation when they took over EQ1 and started their trend of ignoring their customers (as far as SOE is concerned, the "customer" is nothing but a cash cow, stuff like customer service or game enjoyment don't exist in the SOE world but in marketroid speak), releasing half baked products or products not done at all, dumbing down the game in ways that had never been done before, basically telling the players to shut the fuck up, stop suggesting improvements and stop asking for bugfixes (because, you know, there is no way the players could know how the game should evolve even though whole communities managed to reach consensus on several issues), and trigger the "milk the suckers" mode (e.g. crank up the release frequency of $30-priced "extensions" from the original 1/year to 1/6 months to 1/3 months)
In a country full of idiots, that sounds like a lucrative way of doing business. Why go out of your way to make everyone happy when you can make most people happy for less?
But what am I saying? We all know that every single 18 year old, without exception, is an immature, boozing, sex-addict. :P
While your statement is likely tongue in cheek, I just wanted to point out that when I was 18, I was digusted with such types (my peers).
Incidentally, I haven't matured all that much since, and I'm 29 now... and I still find people in my age bracket that I find to be irresponsible idiots with poor impulse control.
I've been saying something similar for years, only instead of a literacy test, make it a test on ethics and/or political science.
Most of the progress in emissions technology in the last 15 years has involved getting cats to warm up progressively more quickly.
That's easy. Just use a microwave oven.
So, yes, a 20 foot rise WOULD sumerge a large part of Florida.
And this is bad?
a) There's the person who believes in an ideological abstraction that is the core basis of libertarianism, which is just that: an idea, that has no track record of being practical nor desireable when you look into the reality of a world where everyone is left to fend for themselves.
As a registered Libertarian that sometimes votes Libertarian, I strongly identify with this notion. I've always assumed that a larger part of party consists of those who have the same idea. It's not a practical party, but it has a LOT of good ideas and the basic sentiment is appealing. I sometimes wish there was a "practical libertarian" party, but alas, it is not so.
So, to all you libertarians out there: How many of you are realists (pro-libertarian because you feel it's ideals are better than Rep/Dem) and how many of you are purely idealists/extremists (swallowing anarcho-capitalism whole)?
As ideological mantras go, "leave me alone, and I'll leave you alone" seems like a pretty good one to me.
Until of course you're hanging by your fingernails off the side of a cliff.
And I'm supposed to have sympathy for the dumbass who's hanging over a cliff?
Slightly off topic, but as a college student today I am still shocked at how many people write down literally every word the professor says. It is even worse when they use a powerpoint presentation as a way of guiding themselves (and the class) through the topic. People will be busily writing down things they have absolutely no understanding of, and you just know most of them aren't listening to the professor actually, you know, explaining it, because they're just too busy writing.
I'm sure they feel quite good that they got the lecture outline on the title page jotted down--most won't be clever enough to leave space between the points for elaboration, it's just mindless copying--but I am also sure that many of these same people are going to be absolutely shocked when they study their notes for hours and still don't know what the hell they're talking about come test time. Naturally, they will blame the professor for not explaining the material well enough. They got his slides copied down verbatim, what more could there possibly be to know?
I think some of this stems from the methods of teaching that people grow accustomed to in high school. In high school, it's a bundle of facts with little or no context. This means you can write everything down and with no interaction, you can do well enough because the curriculum is more information based, whereas college material tends more towards analysis and more conceptual thinking.
It's one way to seperate the wheat from the chaff, I guess.
On a related note, one of my favorite class activites is to ask a number of questions and completely derail things. Someone inevitably asks if this is testable material and a professor with a good sense of humor will encourage them to write down the completely irrelevant points.
I started asking them about the computers and the sales lady though I was some average user who thinks it all smoke and magic inside the box. She was saying the cpu (computer itself) had a a gforce4 proccesor 80 gig of memory a 10-100k modem and they could UPLOAD Windows Office (?WinXP?) onto it for an extra $25.
Sweet. You should have asked her how much it would be for just the 80 gigs of memory.
I can't shake the compulsion to play such games, much like when I'm asked for a "picture ID" and I slap down my military ID when I know they just want to see my driver's license (knowing full well it's often unsuitable because it lacks a signature). I guess I'm just a bastard.
I'm inclined to agree wholeheartedly with your comment, however, there might be those who are genuinely curious, but find it all too daunting. Such is the case with me and string theory. I am interested to find out *exactly* what all the buzz is about, but I don't want to go through the trouble of learning the necessary math and physics that I imagine to be required for full understanding.
@counterexample:
By the way, on getting people to understand computers more, my approach would be to touch on the basic fundamentals like basic electronics and programming. I would start off with:
1. Basic atomic theory (skip as necessary)
2. Basic electronics (with a bonus section of logic circuits)
3. How a computer basically works (using Babbages Analytical Engine, as a tangible starting point)
4. Basics on modern desktops (PSU, MB, HD, RAM, etc)
5. Basic programming (some assembly and show a few C commands that encompass several assembly commands)
6. Basic networking (teach the OSI model with *specific examples*, not the ambiguities I always see)
Once you have all the fundamentals and a computer is no longer a magical box, I would imagine the rest to fall into place much easier. Then you could go into the mundane and less universal topics like dicking with windows or some such.
Condensed from here:
93 - Saint Clement I declares that the end would be coming any moment.
100 - Saint Ignatius goes on at some length about the soon to be End Times.
156 - Montanus prophesizes end times around the corner.
195 - The "Sibylline Oracles" dates imminent apocalyose at 195.
210 - A Christian seer, Judas, determined that the Book of Daniel predeicted imminent apocalypse.
365 - Saint Hilary of Poitiers prophesized the soon to be end until being taunted out of town in 366.
375 - 400 - Saint Martin of Tours carries on doomsaying as a prodigy of Saint Hilary.
500 - Around 221, Sextus Julius Africanus placed Armageddon at roughly 500 CE.
751 - Scores believe end times are near when the last Merovingian king is deposed.
Between 799 - 806 - Time of the apolcalypse according to Saint Gregory of Tours.
800 - End times according to Beatus.
848 - Thiota waltzs into Mainz in 847 to announce that the next year would be the last one.
950 - Adso of Montier, writes a letter which leads to apocalyptic panic.
968 - An eclipse causes apocalyptic panic.
Friday, March 25, 970 - Lotharingian end date.
992 - Bernard of Thuringia's predicted year of end times.
1186 - In 1179, John Of Toledo squandered his money on pamphlets predicting the end year of 1186.
1260 - Joaquim of Fiore announced with great authority that 1260 would be the End. By the time his followers realized they'd been had, he'd been dead for some 58 years.
1306 - In 1147, Gerard of Poehlde predicted this year of the apocalypse.
1310 - The end according to Fra Dolcino of Novara.
1346 - The Black Death inspires the Flagellants; predicting end times, of course.
1420 - The chosen year of the Taborites.
1420 - Martinek Hausha predicted the apocalypse somewhere between February 1st and February 14th.
Late 1400s - End times according to Arnold of Vilanova.
1490 - 1500 CE - Girolamo Savonarola's prediction of end times.
And on, and on, and on... and then comes the 20th century, filled with hundreds of purported doomsdays.
There's just no end to human stupidity, I guess.
"It's like putting lipstick on a pig," said Larry Newhart, a challenger of the turbine projects. "You can dress it up however you want but it's still a pig."
WHAT. THE. FUCK.
I think he's right. It's a bit like putting lipstick on a pig. With or without the lipstick, pigs are tasty goodness.
And if people heard a big pig farm was coming to their town, they'd probably bitch, too. But they'd complain when there's no bacon, all the same.
Also, you might want to consider other industrial disasters. When I was in college, 7 people were killed in a collapse at a local coal fired plant. That's just 5 short of Chernobyl, but nobody cites "Morgantown, WV" when slamming coal as a dangerous power source.
Well... good thing it was just an accident at a coal fired plant. Had it been a nuclear plant, Morgantown's city size would have dropped to 9, which equates to roughly 1,350,000 deaths!
I think almost all the pretty, young girls on the Internet are on it. There would be no more pretty girls if you vaporized all myspace users :-(.
That's not true!
True, it shows a remarkable lack of intelligence in most pretty young girls' minds, but there are always the rare exceptions.
There. Corrected that for you.
Ditto to "The Fifth Element". That thing was a travesty of science fiction.
Perhaps you didn't watch it until the end? Or haven't seen it since it first came out?
I'll admit, the first time I saw it, I began by making the mistake of taking it seriously and being unimpressed by it. Once you lighten up and appreciate its style and humor, maybe you can enjoy it.
But, to each his own. I can ceratinly sympathize with vehemence for commonly loved movies.
From wikipedia:
:|
"Windows NT 3.1 ran on Intel IA-32 x86, DEC Alpha, and MIPS R4000 processors. Windows NT 3.51 added support for PowerPC processors. Intergraph Corporation ported Windows NT to its Clipper architecture and later SPARC, but neither version was sold to the public. Windows NT 4.0 was the last major release to support Alpha, MIPS, or PowerPC, though development of Windows 2000 for Alpha continued until 1999, when Compaq stopped support for Windows NT on that architecture."
NT 4.0 ran well on my alphastation
Interesting. What with their propaganda-styled approach, I just assumed The Corporation was making it up.
Note to people who make films like The Corporation, End of Suburbia or The Money Masters: When you go overboard with your conspiracy theories, you lend discredit to everything you present!
I nominate that for post of the day! :)
Er... obviously, I meant: "Hear, hear...".
When you're writing software for an air traffic control system, military avionics software, or an authentication system for the NSA, the delivered code can't afford to have bugs
I've been in this industry for quite some time and let me be the first to say that I wish I could repeat this sentence with a straight face.
That was my first thought, particularly with military avionics. A few years ago they put out a hardware/software update for the ENS system (Enhanced Navigation System) which led to frequent crashing... and it took over a year for them to come out with a message saying that it was a bug and not to waste countless man hours trying to repair it.
It's sort of a new concept, though, as I'd never really seen such problems with traditional avionics systems (non glass-cockpit stuff). I've always attributed it to people being used to the behavior of MS Windows. And I'm not saying that to start a flamewar. I'm serious. Unreliable avionics systems should be unacceptable, but these days, that doesn't seem to be the case.
We could have a slashcode government! You go to a site with news, comment threads and the usual, and laws could be started like articles, being debated online and eventually voted on... with only the really high karma folks (virtual politicians) being able to vote :)
Well, it certainly addresses what I see as one of the biggest flaws in modern government: stupid, uneducated voters. In a way...