This wasn't in a secure area, otherwise I would agree with you 100%. Professionals would have gone to my boss and explained the situation, and let him deal with it, rather than acting like some kind of jackboot squad. If they had asked nicely, it would have been a lot more reasonable.
That really wasn't the reason. They were just assholes. I had no access to any classified info from that machine.
Apparently, they were very loose about their rules until some idiot caused a virus to propogate around the whole company, so they grossly overreacted. Everyone hated the new policy, and I got a lot of sympathy and an apology from my boss (who was out of town when the incident happened). It wouldn't have been so bad, except IT were such pricks about it. I think it had something to do with the fact that none of them knew what they were doing.
Exactly, you can waste hundreds of dollars worth of your time to go through channels, and wait for weeks, or just go get the stuff.
I don't condone piracy... often I've simply gone out and bought what I needed.
In fact the last place I worked at had a policy that you couldn't even install anything on your machine. So, I e-mailed IT to ask politely what the exact procedure was. They basically attacked me (for what reason I cannot say, nor could any manager explain), so I just installed the stuff myself.
A couple days later they showed up in person to demand, with absolutely no diplomacy (like asking politely), that I remove my own personal keyboard (one of them old clunky IBMs because modern keyboards suck) because it was against company policy to modify hardware. I proceeded that ask them why plugging a keyboard in was verboten but almost everyone on the floor had headphones plugged in and no one cared. They responded by getting really belligerent.
I got laid off after 5 months, which was just as well, because it was the worst job I ever had. All I did was piss people off by pointing out how stupid and inefficient they were (indirectly, like "You've planned to do X. Has anyone actually tried it to see if it will work? Past experience indicates there's a good chance won't. Does anyone have benchmarks?", and received no response, or "You know, if worked a little smarter by developing a simple GUI library, we could eliminate half the team, and make the development process much less prone to errors." They refused to consider it even though they admitted I was right, but you can't charge as much when you are paid by the hour and work efficiently. Actually it was worse than that, they actually told me to come up with a prototype even though they never planned to use it (they admitted this about 4 months later). It seems they realized I had more experience than half the department put together (and they hired me for what was essentially an entry-level job without being up front about that either), and didn't want to discourage me in my first week. Of course, I'd been out of work for over a year, so I really needed the job and pay was decent. But I learned once again the worst torture at work is to be bored and powerless.
Can you guess who it was? That's right, a defense contractor for the U.S. Government.
I've heard it described that photographers will go through great contortions to get the boob in the frame with Ashcroft. Not that he didn't have that coming.
It can be fixed. We do trillions of dollars of transactions in this country with a rate of error that is miniscule... because if you screw up, it costs you.
If those kinds of standards (and incentive) could be applied to vote counting, these problems would never show up.
Of course, that ignores the fraud factor, but at least we know the system would be much more correct.
Yeah, like Ohio being "too close to call" and yet Pennsylvania (and others) had a smaller delta v (v = votes), with roughly (+/- 10%) the same population for PA.
I liked 2004. It's the year the MSM (particularly CBS, NYT and CNN) stopped even pretending they were impartial. Good old "Red" Dan Rather with his "The story is true even if the evidence is fake." You could almost see the flecks of spit flying out of his mouth. Courage, indeed.
We've all been in on the joke for 20+ years, it's nice of them to stop being so hush-hush about it.
And the best news of all would be for goofy old Dan Rather to end his career as a laughingstock brought down by his blinding partisanship.
Show of hands. Who knows what an op-scan ballot is?/me raises hand.
We use these in Loudoun County, Virginia and I can't imagine a reason for not doing it this way. There's nothing mechanical like all these goofy punch card systems... state-of-the-art 1890's technology, with their byzantine layouts. The ballots are incredibly simple and clear, so there's confusion down in the old folks' home where someone mixed up the medications.
And unless you have some kind of seizure while wielding the pen, there's no chance of ambiguity. But it doesn't reap millions of dollars to a company for forcing expensive, buggy, hopelessly complex solutions, where simple tried and true technology serves effectively, so I guess it's just not a feasible solution.
In addition to being prone to ridiculous errors, there is also the possibility of fraud, although I don't believe most of these can be attributed to some widespread conspiracy to cheat. As I've always said "Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by incompetence." and to that I would add, "The government will never choose a simple, cheap and effective solution when it is in competition with a complex, expensive and flawed solution."
not everything centers around Bush stealing an election.
No it doesn't, but I'll bet you a month's pay we'll be hearing exactly that on/. and elsewhere. The parent merely preemptively averted these arguments, and you know people will make them.
So if there had been WMD's, you wouldn't feel any different, right?
I would tend to agree with your statement, except no one was disagreeing with the existence of WMD's. They said we should give inspectors more time (which I would agree with), but here's some facts:
1. The U.N. issued 17 resolutions taking Saddam to task for violating the terms of his 1991 surrender.
2. It became increasingly obvious that the U.N. didn't have any plans to back these resolutions up with anything but more finger wagging.
3. Bush used diplomacy and built a coalition to get inspectors back in and issue one more resolution (1441), that stated bery clearly that any material violation would be met with serious consequences.
4. Sanctions weren't doing any good, except to starve Iraqi citizens. "Oil for Food" may have alleviated some of that, at the expense of billions of dollars being siphoned off for Secuirty Council members France, Russia and China to obstruct any further consequences of Saddam's actions.
5. Saddam was found to be in a minor, but deliberate material violation of 1441. Plus there was an almost unanimous fear of what he had accomplished in the nearly 5 years since any inspections had taken place.
6. No one wanted to do anything about it but the U.S., so it did.
You can argue about the war, whether it should have happened and if so when, but it doesn't get around the fact that the U.N., led by France, Russia and China, had no intentions of backing up their resolutions, and in fact were working towards lifting sanctions entirely, at which time, Saddam had every intention to go back to building weapons.
In other words, the U.N. is broken. It wasn't doing anything to enforce the terms of the 1991 agreement (not to mention completely ignoring Bosnia, Rwanda and more recently the Sudan). Right or wrong, Bush was unwilling to go through the 1930's again, when everyone, including the U.S., tried to ignore, appease or otherwise negotiate with Adolf Hilter until it was too late.
I don't see it so much as eagerness to go to war, but eagerness to actually do something rather than sit around and let Iraq continue to flout the rules, at the risk of catastophic events. I also see it as part of a much larger "change the face of the Middle East" which is a radical idea of eliminating all those governments that are friendly to terrorism and extremeists in general and replacing them with more open and free governments like we see in Turkey.
Now this idea, which is grandiose, ambitious, and risky (and debatable), is a context which makes the Iraq invasion make more sense, at least to me. I think the administration's biggest mistake was not to communicate this more effectively.
I find it hard to believe that you completely neglect that Kerry's entire campaign was an effort to completely hide his record in the last 20-plus years. He spent more time talking about Vietnam than his years in the Senate by an order of magnitude.
Why do you think this is so? Why do you think Kerry, who used to be proud of being a "liberal" now shies away from the word and dismisses it as a "label", even though it has been objectively shown to be true. How else could the Democrats have expected to win the election than by attempting to hide Kerry's true record, since every time they have run a far left candidate in the last 20 years, he has lost miserably?
And as far as WMD's go, has everyone forgotten this quote?
Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime... He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation... And now he is miscalculating America's response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction... So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real..."
I could go on, but this has been beat to death, and people don't like anything that would break their illusion that this whole WMD thing was a big lie by Bush.
I can't speak for others, but I was not misinformed. Most people can't name the leaders from prominent countries and some can't even locate these countries on a map.
Maybe because post-grads are not in touch with the real world? This isn't really meant as a joke. There are lots of really intelligent people who have no idea what the average person is like or what his life is like.
There is a slight (probably not statistically significant) trend up for Bush until the very last item. I find that not surprising because at that level of education, people are more likely to have radically different views than most. While we can argue who represents the mainstream more, I would think that radical views held by very educated people would probably skew towards the Democratic side of things.
I'm dying to know what caused him to change from an emotionless sulking slug to someone who sounds like one of the most talented voice actors America ever produced.
Oh wait, because in Episode 2 he was played by a emotionless sulking slug* and in Episodes 4-6 he was played by one of the most talented voice actors America ever produced.
*To be fair, I don't know if Hayden Christiansen is an emotionless slug, because Natalie Portman can certainly act and _she_ was an emotionless sulking slug, too. Apparently the director was a talentless slug, director-wise anyway. Christiansen could be a fine actor for all I know.
Slashdot Mirror
This wasn't in a secure area, otherwise I would agree with you 100%. Professionals would have gone to my boss and explained the situation, and let him deal with it, rather than acting like some kind of jackboot squad. If they had asked nicely, it would have been a lot more reasonable.
Exactly. I realize that they can't even let you scratch your nuts in the secure area, but this was not in a secure area.
This was an overreaction to some idiot spreading a virus.
That really wasn't the reason. They were just assholes. I had no access to any classified info from that machine.
Apparently, they were very loose about their rules until some idiot caused a virus to propogate around the whole company, so they grossly overreacted. Everyone hated the new policy, and I got a lot of sympathy and an apology from my boss (who was out of town when the incident happened). It wouldn't have been so bad, except IT were such pricks about it. I think it had something to do with the fact that none of them knew what they were doing.
Exactly, you can waste hundreds of dollars worth of your time to go through channels, and wait for weeks, or just go get the stuff.
I don't condone piracy... often I've simply gone out and bought what I needed.
In fact the last place I worked at had a policy that you couldn't even install anything on your machine. So, I e-mailed IT to ask politely what the exact procedure was.
They basically attacked me (for what reason I cannot say, nor could any manager explain), so I just installed the stuff myself.
A couple days later they showed up in person to demand, with absolutely no diplomacy (like asking politely), that I remove my own personal keyboard (one of them old clunky IBMs because modern keyboards suck) because it was against company policy to modify hardware. I proceeded that ask them why plugging a keyboard in was verboten but almost everyone on the floor had headphones plugged in and no one cared. They responded by getting really belligerent.
I got laid off after 5 months, which was just as well, because it was the worst job I ever had. All I did was piss people off by pointing out how stupid and inefficient they were (indirectly, like "You've planned to do X. Has anyone actually tried it to see if it will work? Past experience indicates there's a good chance won't. Does anyone have benchmarks?", and received no response, or "You know, if worked a little smarter by developing a simple GUI library, we could eliminate half the team, and make the development process much less prone to errors." They refused to consider it even though they admitted I was right, but you can't charge as much when you are paid by the hour and work efficiently. Actually it was worse than that, they actually told me to come up with a prototype even though they never planned to use it (they admitted this about 4 months later). It seems they realized I had more experience than half the department put together (and they hired me for what was essentially an entry-level job without being up front about that either), and didn't want to discourage me in my first week. Of course, I'd been out of work for over a year, so I really needed the job and pay was decent. But I learned once again the worst torture at work is to be bored and powerless.
Can you guess who it was? That's right, a defense contractor for the U.S. Government.
Worst. Job. Evarrrr!
Humor! Ar ar ar ar!
</Mork>
I've heard it described that photographers will go through great contortions to get the boob in the frame with Ashcroft. Not that he didn't have that coming.
You would think it wouldn't be hard to come up with a good solution, but it sure doesn't look that way based on what people have come up with.
(p.s. Your sig: Jesus was a liberal.
Jesus also was from the Middle East, what's your point?)
Yeah, "Critical Thinking" is a rare talent it seems.
So is "Risk Assessment", for that matter.
It can be fixed. We do trillions of dollars of transactions in this country with a rate of error that is miniscule... because if you screw up, it costs you.
If those kinds of standards (and incentive) could be applied to vote counting, these problems would never show up.
Of course, that ignores the fraud factor, but at least we know the system would be much more correct.
Yeah, like Ohio being "too close to call" and yet Pennsylvania (and others) had a smaller delta v (v = votes), with roughly (+/- 10%) the same population for PA.
I liked 2004. It's the year the MSM (particularly CBS, NYT and CNN) stopped even pretending they were impartial. Good old "Red" Dan Rather with his "The story is true even if the evidence is fake." You could almost see the flecks of spit flying out of his mouth. Courage, indeed.
We've all been in on the joke for 20+ years, it's nice of them to stop being so hush-hush about it.
And the best news of all would be for goofy old Dan Rather to end his career as a laughingstock brought down by his blinding partisanship.
Of course, I meant "no confusion" down at the old folks' home.
Show of hands. Who knows what an op-scan ballot is?
We use these in Loudoun County, Virginia and I can't imagine a reason for not doing it this way. There's nothing mechanical like all these goofy punch card systems... state-of-the-art 1890's technology, with their byzantine layouts. The ballots are incredibly simple and clear, so there's confusion down in the old folks' home where someone mixed up the medications.
And unless you have some kind of seizure while wielding the pen, there's no chance of ambiguity. But it doesn't reap millions of dollars to a company for forcing expensive, buggy, hopelessly complex solutions, where simple tried and true technology serves effectively, so I guess it's just not a feasible solution.
In addition to being prone to ridiculous errors, there is also the possibility of fraud, although I don't believe most of these can be attributed to some widespread conspiracy to cheat. As I've always said "Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by incompetence." and to that I would add, "The government will never choose a simple, cheap and effective solution when it is in competition with a complex, expensive and flawed solution."
not everything centers around Bush stealing an election.
/. and elsewhere. The parent merely preemptively averted these arguments, and you know people will make them.
No it doesn't, but I'll bet you a month's pay we'll be hearing exactly that on
So if there had been WMD's, you wouldn't feel any different, right?
I would tend to agree with your statement, except no one was disagreeing with the existence of WMD's. They said we should give inspectors more time (which I would agree with), but here's some facts:
1. The U.N. issued 17 resolutions taking Saddam to task for violating the terms of his 1991 surrender.
2. It became increasingly obvious that the U.N. didn't have any plans to back these resolutions up with anything but more finger wagging.
3. Bush used diplomacy and built a coalition to get inspectors back in and issue one more resolution (1441), that stated bery clearly that any material violation would be met with serious consequences.
4. Sanctions weren't doing any good, except to starve Iraqi citizens. "Oil for Food" may have alleviated some of that, at the expense of billions of dollars being siphoned off for Secuirty Council members France, Russia and China to obstruct any further consequences of Saddam's actions.
5. Saddam was found to be in a minor, but deliberate material violation of 1441. Plus there was an almost unanimous fear of what he had accomplished in the nearly 5 years since any inspections had taken place.
6. No one wanted to do anything about it but the U.S., so it did.
You can argue about the war, whether it should have happened and if so when, but it doesn't get around the fact that the U.N., led by France, Russia and China, had no intentions of backing up their resolutions, and in fact were working towards lifting sanctions entirely, at which time, Saddam had every intention to go back to building weapons.
In other words, the U.N. is broken. It wasn't doing anything to enforce the terms of the 1991 agreement (not to mention completely ignoring Bosnia, Rwanda and more recently the Sudan). Right or wrong, Bush was unwilling to go through the 1930's again, when everyone, including the U.S., tried to ignore, appease or otherwise negotiate with Adolf Hilter until it was too late.
I don't see it so much as eagerness to go to war, but eagerness to actually do something rather than sit around and let Iraq continue to flout the rules, at the risk of catastophic events. I also see it as part of a much larger "change the face of the Middle East" which is a radical idea of eliminating all those governments that are friendly to terrorism and extremeists in general and replacing them with more open and free governments like we see in Turkey.
Now this idea, which is grandiose, ambitious, and risky (and debatable), is a context which makes the Iraq invasion make more sense, at least to me. I think the administration's biggest mistake was not to communicate this more effectively.
Why do you think this is so? Why do you think Kerry, who used to be proud of being a "liberal" now shies away from the word and dismisses it as a "label", even though it has been objectively shown to be true. How else could the Democrats have expected to win the election than by attempting to hide Kerry's true record, since every time they have run a far left candidate in the last 20 years, he has lost miserably?
And as far as WMD's go, has everyone forgotten this quote?
This was said by John Kerry on Jan. 23, 2003.
Or:
This was by Al Gore in September 2002.
I could go on, but this has been beat to death, and people don't like anything that would break their illusion that this whole WMD thing was a big lie by Bush.
And how is this different from the Democrats? They spend just as much time and effort courting the ignorant as anyone.
It is easy to consider yourself "informed" when you don't know much.
Well, I knew everything asked in that particular article about President Bush. That's all I was referring to.
However, I make it my business to be informed about politics and a number of other topics that I am interested in.
I can't speak for others, but I was not misinformed. Most people can't name the leaders from prominent countries and some can't even locate these countries on a map.
It's sad, but it's nothing new.
Maybe because post-grads are not in touch with the real world? This isn't really meant as a joke. There are lots of really intelligent people who have no idea what the average person is like or what his life is like.
There is a slight (probably not statistically significant) trend up for Bush until the very last item. I find that not surprising because at that level of education, people are more likely to have radically different views than most. While we can argue who represents the mainstream more, I would think that radical views held by very educated people would probably skew towards the Democratic side of things.
I'm dying to know what caused him to change from an emotionless sulking slug to someone who sounds like one of the most talented voice actors America ever produced.
Oh wait, because in Episode 2 he was played by a emotionless sulking slug* and in Episodes 4-6 he was played by one of the most talented voice actors America ever produced.
*To be fair, I don't know if Hayden Christiansen is an emotionless slug, because Natalie Portman can certainly act and _she_ was an emotionless sulking slug, too. Apparently the director was a talentless slug, director-wise anyway. Christiansen could be a fine actor for all I know.
ObSimpsons
Comic Book Guy: Oh, Jar-Jar. Everyone hates you but me. *Kiss*
A Hello Kitty MMORPG?
Role-playing little kids in a sweatshop making pink and white toys and accessories for little girls?
I heard Bill Gates said that ``security is our top priority'', but now I think he must have been misquoted.
No, the quote is correct, it's just taken out of context:
"[Our financial] security is our top priority".
http://www.zycha.com/HeyTerrorists.jpg
Heh heh... look at this: U-are-gay