Several people have pointed out that management is supposed to solve the problem. Indeed, with good management you can have a team of 120 working quite effectively.
However, mediocre to bad management is far more common than good management. With mediocre or worse management the team ends up routing around management problems and reestablishing those hundreds of communication paths. Thus, your pessimistic estimates are reasonable for real world situations.
The key is good management. Finding and retaining good management is left as an exercise for the reader.
I heard good reviews about Half-Life 2. I decided to pick up a copy. Not having actually followed the news that closely, I assumed I was buying a normal retail product. I overlooked the small print "requires registration with online service" printed on the bottom. I was quite surprised when it wanted to install Steam. I was even more surprised when I had to wait. And wait. And wait. To play. Fscking weak. Worse, it's doing some sort of online checking to see if I can play, but I still have to leave the disk (The first one only, not the fifth one, as I discovered to my irritation) in my CD drive. Really fscking weak. Apparently I'm not trusted enough to buy their damn products. I'm a thief until proven otherwise. Feh.
On the up side, once the game actually started it rocked hard. Time constraints mean I haven't played too far into the game yet, but I'm quite pleased with the graphics and frame rate on my kinda-crusty (1.4Ghz, Radeon 9200) system.
VANESSA: Mr. Boy 13, my job is to acclimate you to the Nineties. You know, a lot's changed since 1967.
DANGER_BOY_13:
Well, as long as companies still are dedicated to their employees, only asking for hard work in exchange for
life-long employment,
and
secure retirement benefits, I'll be sound as a pound.
Sims is a weird one. He demonizes woman as unproductive and emotional, yet Cerebus (especially early on) is filled with powerful and rational women. The Cirinist (matriarchal) nation may be frightening, but it's powerful, growing, and holds a self-consistent (if scary) belief system. His essays in Reads and the later in Tangents depict someone completely divorced from reality, someone you cannot rationally debate. His letters responding to people asking for free comics he offered are well writte, witty, and suggest someone I'd enjoy talking with, even if we disagreed. (The offer of a free comic is real and still open.)
Sim's beliefs are certainly relevant, especially since they were printed in his comics. However, it's also important to not write off his work because of those beliefs. Much great art has been created by racists, homophobes, sexists, and all sorts of negative -ists. You can condemn the beliefs, but you still have respect the work itself. Cerebus, especially its early years, is an important milestone is comic art.
For anyone interested in checking out Sims's work, do not start with the first book, Cerebus. It's an only adequate parody of low-fantasy. My local comic shop owner pointed me to book two, High Society. That's where his political and social parody begins and the series becomes noteworthy. In fact, you can basically skip the entire "Sims gets weird" and enjoy what are arguably his best (or at least most popular) works by getting books 2 through 4 (High Society (parodying government and politics), Church & State I and II (parodying religion and politics. Book II gets a little weird...), and Jaka's Story (Really good, not really parody, and hard to describe. Themes include growing up, priviledge, women in society, and truth.)).
There's a simple rule that I like: if you (as a manager) call overtime, you will work the same hours.
Damn, that's good. Obvious, but I hadn't considered it. Perhaps it should logically chain up the entire structure; if a manager is working overtime for more than (say) a week, than his boss has to start working overtime. Chain it up the chain of command. This would catch managers who already do constantly work overtime; their boss would have incentive (and time) to investigate why this is the case and see how it could be fixed. Some managers consider 60+ hour weeks year round to be reasonable; there needs to be a check on them as well.
Obviously these can't be hard and fast rules; part of the deal with salary is that you'll sometimes put in slightly longer weeks. It's when the overtime becomes mandatory or long term that something is broken and must be fixed.
I'm particularlly fond of the claim that Indymedia is not an involved party and thus cannot file this motion. That's insane. Apparently just because it was their servers that were taken it doesn't mean that they have any standing.
I tried to absorb an english-japanese dictionary one afternoon, but it gave me nightmares. Literally. It was as if the english-reading-part of my brain was in conflict with the oddball characters and symbols presented in the japanese language. Ever since I've been haunted by perverse unreadbility of it all. I liken the experence to attempting to think in russian.
So by this I know for a fact that japanese is Not My Thing(tm).
.
Learning Perl is like learning a living human language. It's big and daunting, but you can relatively quickly learn a powerful and useful subset. As you continune to learn more and more you'll discover power and subtle shades of meaning. You'll feel better able to express yourself, to implement the solution in terms of the problem instead of the programming language. Instead of seeing a nearly infinite amount of work to learn the entire language, you'll see a nearly infinite amount of possibilities to explore as necessary. You'll take on a new problem domain and start wishing that Perl had just the right tool for the problem. Usually Perl does. It's rare that I finish a task and say to myself, "Wow, that was way easier than I thought." When I do, it's usually thanks to Perl.
Ultimately Perl is a big messy language because the world is a big messy place with big messy problems. Living human languages like english are big message languages for exactly the same reason.
Don't try to learn Perl by diving into the syntax docs, especially the reference ones. That's like trying to learn C++ by reading the STL reference.
For a long time I used Best Buy for commodity electronics and video games. I now only use them as a last resort. Several incidents stick out:
First, heading in with a friend to busy Game Cubes. How hard could it be? Go it, get box, pay, leave. However, the Game Cubes weren't kept on the floor. So the floorweasel has to get it for us. But not before she tries to pressure sell us the extended warrantee. The only down side of her plan is that we knew what she was talking about better than she did. "You guys looks like serious gamers." Well, duh. "And you know how frequently they break down." Umm, yes. Practically never. "So clearly you'll want an extended warrantee." No, not really. I've got four consoles and piles of other consumer electronics at home, all of it happily humming along. Statistically the warrantee is idiotic. I've even had an expensive stereo receiver fail, but including that in my figures I saved money replacing it myself instead of having an warrantee on all of my electronics. Please, just go get my Game Cube.
Second, and much worse. A friend's cellphone was flaking out. She had purchased it at Best Buy and paid for the extended warrantee. Well, time to head in to get it replaced. The only problem: they couldn't replace the phone. They didn't have an equivalent phone in stock any more. She could get another phone, but they would only extend her partial credit to her. I've gotten the "buy the extended warrantee" routine dozens of times over years. "If anything goes wrong at all, just bring it in and we'll replace it with the same model or a newer on" is standard. My friend had specifically gotten the extended warrantee so that she could avoid worrying about it. When I confirmed that the salesweasel couldn't offer her anything better, I asked for a manager. The manager had the audacity to suggest that it was inappropriate for us to expect them to be able to replace my friend's phone. After all, she'd only paid for the extended warrantee, how could Best Buy know that they might need to replace it? She then threatened to use to escape clause in the warrantee; they'd refund the cost of the warrantee (after enjoying the money for the last 18 months) and refuse to support it. We finally got the phone replaced after playing stupid games ("Well, if you cancel your service, then sign up for new service and fill out this form and wait 2 months you'll get a $50 rebate.")
Best Buy lost my respect that day. I've never returned anything. I lack the time to hunt down loss-leaders. Their aggresive policies lost a stable customer.
How do you know that the current prices are not "fair?" If they are able to produce increased profits year-over-year, instead of just continually breaking-even, does that mean they're "ripping you off?" Should a company be content with simply breaking-even, or holding steady at 5% profit every year?
If a company increases profits every year there is something wrong and the price isn't fair. The company isn't necessarily ripping you off; they're charging what the market will be bear. If a company continues to make larger and larger profits each year while providing essentially the same service or product than the market has failed. Given such an obviously safe opportunity a competitor should have arisen to keep prices down.
That said, I suggest you reread the grandparent post. He doesn't suggest that he's being ripped off. He doesn't mention shareholders. You're looking to pick a fight and picked the wrong target. Believe it or not, it's possible to critize our capitalist system while simultaneously being pro-capitalism. Hell, his point wasn't even that there should be no profit, his point was that offering a rebate you actively plan to avoid paying on is dishonest and unfair.
I'm not expecting to change anyone's mind, but just in case, here's my case for
Why I'm Voting for Kerry. In the interests of keeping it brief and easy to skim it's mostly a bullet list of points.
With the new release of the Osama-Bin-Laden tape supporting John Kerry, I can 100% saying I am going for Bush.
If I might point out, perhaps a man who masterminds a terrorist network responsible for thousands of deaths just may be lying to further his own ends? In essence you're saying that you're letting bin Laden's desires influence your actions? Isn't that the whole point of terrorism? If bin Laden wanted Bush in office perhaps it would make sense to lie and claim that he wanted Kerry?
Me, I plan on voting for the candidate I believe will serve American best. I plan on ignoring and endorsements by terrorists. Shouldn't you?
Though the world would have been a better place had it been so limited. My pet peeve was the weirdly brain dead default string implementation. Strings weren't null terminated, instead the length of the string was stored. That's a good idea. A bad idea is using the first byte of the string to hold the length. 8 bits to store the string length means a maximum string length of 255 characters. I worked on a large project that had originally been written in Pascal. We used p2c to convert it and maintained it in C. An early task was removing the 255 character long string brain damage and replace it with intelligent strings (in our case C++'s generally good and absolutely superior to Pascal's std::string). Still, I got to read and occasionally maintain the Pascal master for a variety of reasons. The code dealing with strings was always irritating. Sometimes it just ignored the problem (creating potential buffer overruns), sometimes it just crudely limited the string length (meaning, for example, that you couldn't have a URL longer than 255 characters), and sometimes it used some weird chained string extension that I never quite understood. Mac programmers I know told me that the 255 limit was pervasive throughout MacOS as late as MacOS 9. Most unfortunate.
(To be fair, it did seem like a pretty good language, and I really dug the "with" idiom. A healthy revision (that may have happened, I don't stay up to date on Pascal) could have turned it into something more mainstream and successful. Hell, let's be honest, I just wanted to bitch about the stupid strings...)
Does he think that cheaper hardware will make copying software harder to do?
Of course not. He's very reasonably suggesting that by saving money on hardware, consumers will have more money to spend on software. It's only reason to ask a highly competitive market with relatively low margins that doesn't impose any sort of EULAs on their customers to cut margins further to support the software industries copyright protected markets with much larger margins and restrictive EULAs.
Tomorrow I'll be explaining how we can improve customer satisfaction by eliminating competition.
The problem is that the US Commission on Civil Rights failed to find a single person who would testify that they were incorrectly denied the right to vote.
Supported by approximately 30 hours of sworn testimony from some 100 witnesses, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights determined that the Florida presidential elections appear to have been marred by voter disenfranchisement.
Undeterred by these delays, Ms. Jackson returned to her precinct after work to try to vote again, but the poll workers were never able to verify her registration status and refused to allow her to vote.
...
When Ms. DeSouza asked if there was an absentee ballot that would allow her to cast her vote, the poll worker explained that there was nothing he could do.
The page is full of stories from individuals and poll workers, all named.
The Miami Herald, on the other hand, estimates that 5,600 convicted felons voted in the Florida 2000 election because counties completely scrapped the felon list.
This is, admittedly, completely off topic, but I find it odd that any state would deny the vote to felons who had served their time. Why not just let them vote? It's one thing to remove directly life-threatening things from a felon (guns), but another to remove their voting rights. In essence every single felony sentence adds "... and you may never vote in this state again." That seems a little harsh while completely useless as a deterrant. (Gee, I was going to steal this car, but I might lose by voting rights!) Are we attempting to protect society from those dangerous felons? I somehow doubt that we're going to see politicians pandering to the felon vote. We give released felons arguably much more dangerous freedoms (notably freedom of speech), letting them vote seems relatively harmless. Those states where released felons can vote manage to avoid having that sort of problem. As an added bonus, our states don't need to spend millions of dollars trying to keep those released felons from voting. I suppose it's Florida's right to decide this, but it just seems weird to me.
That doesn't make a very convincing argument, then, in favor of an OSS voting system that many Slashdotters advocate.
If the argument is, "Local elections boards can download the software and hardware plans from SourceForge and hire a 16 year old kit to put it all together," yes, that's a stupid argument.
If the plan is, "Local elections boards will hire IBM to provide a voting system, support for that system, and make guarantees about uptimes and accuracy. IBM will take software and hardware plans from SourceForge, hire staff to review them, possibly modify them, and assemble best practices," that's a pretty good argument.
By way of example, if you want an open source web server, think Apache looks good, but you want IBM to stand behind it, go get the rather uncreatively named IBM HTTP Server.
Many Slashdotters tend to hold OSS to a much lower quality standard than commercial software (as you apparently do) while insisting that OSS is fundamentally superior. I'm simply taking yet another opportunity to point that little inconsistency out.
Expecting a lower quality of customer support doesn't necessarily mean I expect a lower level of quality for the software itself. Furthermore, my experience has been that customer support for commercial software is pretty uniformly crap. You can get good support, but you're generally paying through the nose for it, typically on top of the cost you paid for the software itself. You can do that open source software as well.
The "technology" in question was a wide sheet of paper and some bubbles running down the middle that you were supposed to mark.
The interface in question is a punchcard inserted into a carefully aligned slot. Above the punchcard were rigid sheets spaced apart wide enough to see a single column of punchcard potential-holes. The user went page by page, each time locating a desired candidate and punching the hole next to their name. As they moved through this "book", they effectively moved column by column across the punchcard.
It was designed by a Dem....
Why, oh, why do you keep bringing this up? It's completely irrelevant. I don't care if Al Gore himself designed the ballot; it was a seriously flawed design. Breaking News: Democrats are just as capable of making bad decisions as the average person! User interface design often has surprising problems!
...it was given a full time for review and comment per the regulations of the county.
That was the time to complain.
Indeed, that was the time. Someone with real user interface design experience should have looked at it and raised some warnings. But it didn't. Unfortunately it wasn't taken seriously until it was suddenly a crisis. Unfortunate though it is, this is frequently when broken systems are finally fixed. Indeed, the 2000 election cast much scruntiny on that bad design
In comparision, the right time to diagnose and repair communication problems in in our law enforcement agencies was before 9/11. 9/11 didn't change the world, it just pointed out that our existing security solution had serious flaws.
I'm not at all suggesting an IQ test. I am however pointing out that voting is a priveledge that should be taken seriously.
So are you suggesting that voters happened to be wandering by the polling place, decided, "hey, that might be fun!" and picked who to vote for based on which names sounded coolest? I suspect that the voters did take it seriously. They looked at the options, located the candidate they had decided upon based on their observations and reflections, then based on their flawed understanding of how the technology works, proceeded to try and mark their decision but made a mistake. There will always be mistakes, but the evidence suggested an unusually large number of mistakes. If a significant number of users make the same mistake, typically the user interface is to blame, not the user.
Somehow I suspect Second Amendment was talking about pistols, not mortars. Something you can use to repell bandits who show up at your house, but not to interfere with general public's "pursuit of happiness".
Somehow I suspect that the Second Amendment was talking about rifles and cannons overtly intended to kill government representatives. Something you use to repel your country's lawful army to prevent them from enforcing the law. Something to stage a rebellion with. Having just rebelled from England and fought a bloody revolutionary war, I suspect that this was fresh in their minds. The second amendment is a defense against one's own government. The militia's in question would be those that grouped up to defeat tyranny.
I certainly loathe televisions on in restaurants. They're becoming pervasive in mid-level restaurants; apparently as a society we're too stupid to have a peaceful dinner chatting without companions. I say this as a Tivo loving TV addict. I like TV, but can do without the constant bombardment (especially since the televisions in restaurants are usually showing crap I have no interest in). It's one thing for a sports bar to have televisions, another for a 10 table restaurant charging $15 a plate for dinner with only a token bar area to have 8 televisions.
Thus, I'll admit a certain appeal to such a device.
But I have to be honest, it's the wrong solution. The restaurant in question wants the television to be there. The real solution is to let the restaurant know that you like the restaurant, you like the food, but you don't like the televisions. Ask to have the ones in your line of sight turned off (especially if the screens in question are obviously unused. Do you really need 5 TVs on when there are only two tables of guests?). Suggest that you'd like the number of televisions reduced. Suggest having seating out of the line of sight of the screens.
Regrettably much like smoking this is a situation where restaurants have incentive to cater to a sub-market. The larger market is willing to suffer something they dislike but the smaller market demands it. You can legislate smoking (especially given the health impacts on employees), but you'd be hard pressed to do so for televisions. Do what you can to encourage your local restaurants to reduce or remove the screens and patronise those that try to serve you.
So even if it becomes available I resist buying such a device. Much like my dreamed of car-audio-disabler to turn off steroes in cars that go BOOM-BOOM-BOOM down my residential neighborhood at 3AM, vigilante justice is the wrong answer.
Honestly, do you think that if a person cannot navigate a ballot of this design that they have the ability to rationally choose a President?
In essence you're suggesting an IQ test? If that's what you want, be honest about it. Instead of making the ballot itself a test which will cause people to mis-vote, instead put the test up front and deny them the vote in the first place. Of course, the reason you can't really support an IQ test is most people would be horrified at the thought. While you're busy being ignored, console yourself that many brilliant people and ideas have had a hard time gaining popular acceptance. Meanwhile the rest of us will understand that our grandparents may make mistakes working with technology that seems trivial to us, yet still be mentally sound and politically aware.
The irony is that the "infamous" ballot was actually published in the newspaper before the election (as required by law) and had a number of weeks time for review and comment. No one raised any complaints until the counting got close.
Newsflash: bad user design isn't always obvious. The entire point is that many voters looked at the system, believed they understood what was going on, then proceeded to make a mistake (fulling believing they had not). If the had been confused I would have expected election officials to report a steady stream of voters asking for clairification on the day of the election. If a voter actually casting their vote thinks they understand the situation (but don't really), what hope does somene seeing it in the paper have?
Only after the fact did it become clear that that there was a problem. There is no irony here unless you're really dense.
(To be fair, apparently this technique had been used before, apparently with similar problems. That it wasn't noticed or acted upon previously is terrible; someone dropped the ball and deserved punishment.)
The infamous "butterfly ballot" was designed by a Democrat.
Off topic and irrelevant. Did the poster suggest that the butterfly ballot was a conspiracy? Did he even mention it? No. The butterfly ballot was just bad user interface design, it doesn't take a conspiracy theory to say that it was a bad thing.
It is estimated that there were still many thousands of illegal votes placed by felons in the 2000 election in Florida.
We appear to have a disagreement here. I'm willing to accept that some illegal votes will be cast in exchange for minimizing the number of legit voters denied the vote. You appear to be willing to accept that some legit voters will be denied the vote in exchange for minimizing the number of illegal votes.
There is a similar problem with criminal law: the easier it is to convict someone the more likely you are to put criminals behind bars. Unfortunately it also become easier to put an innocent man behind bars. Our country decided that convicting innocent men was so abhorrent that we set the standard for convictions very high ("beyond a reasonable doubt"). As a result more criminals get away with their crimes, but I still approve of the choice. I for one am unwilling to tell someone "Sorry you didn't get to vote, but you're an acceptable loss."
Sounds like your run-of-the-mill OSS tech support, if you ask me. Why is it OK to blame "idiot users" when they have problems with complicated OSS, but unacceptable to blame them for not knowing how to use a TOUCH SCREEN?
Questionable assumption 1: The poster you are replying is condescending and insulting when supporting users in other contexts. The poster may actually agree with you.
Questionable assumption 2: These are similar situations. When I approach one or more people who provide me with software for no cost and ask for free help with it my expectations are lowered. In the case of voting machines we spent a great deal of money on these products, I for one expect more.
Questionable assumption 3: There are similar audiences. My grandfather has not expressed a willingness to understand computers (oddly enough, his wife is quite happy to). That's fine; no one is requiring him to use a computer. He doesn't need to use a computer to function as a member of society. However, he does need to to be able to vote to function as a member of society. If a new voting system is confusing to a mentally sound man who has been voting for 50 years using a variety of other systems, the system has faults.
Question assumption 4: There are similar stakes. To take a common historic complaint: the mplayer people are mean to people asking for help. Well, what's the real impact of failing to be supported by the mplayer people? You don't get to watch videos. Life's tough. What's the impact of failing to be supported by election companies? You don't get to vote. I certainly think that's more important. (There is, of course, software that is Very Important. In those situations I certainly hope you're paying someone to take responsibility for it and provide good support.)
So I'll add my own conclusion (based on my own questionable assumption): You're trying to be clever by pointing out hypocrisy on Slashdot under the false assumption that Slashdot is some sort of gestalt. If that's the case, sorry, you lose.
I'm not sure what your point is. I never suggested that that slander, perjury, or speech intending to cause panics or crime should be legal. Those are and should remain illegal. I suggested that a criminal admitting his intent to commit a crime should be legal. It provides clues for police to try and capture the criminal. It provides warning for potential victims to try and avoid the risk. All good things, no real down side. If such an admission is honest I see no problems with it.
Put another way: calling in a fake bomb threat should be illegal; you're telling a lie with the intent to cause harm to others. Calling in a real bomb threat should be legal; it gives potential victims a chance to avoid the danger and the phone call itself may provide police a clue to track down the bomber.
...a Democratic pundit claimed that Bush had no hope of winning New Jersey.... Paula Zahn did not challenge his assertion.
Polls are guesswork at best; I suspect that the pundit fully believed the statement.
The polls all point to a Kerry win.Here's a handy graph of the results. Where exactly is the bias in letting a potentially overoptimistic statement about polling slide. I sure hope there are more interesting things to cover than one pundits opinion on how a state will vote. If a Republican leaning pundit where to opine that Bush has Ohio sewn up, I'd be equally willing to let that slide as it's a reasonable interpretation given trends over the last few months, even if the results are still within the margin of error.
Slashdot Mirror
Several people have pointed out that management is supposed to solve the problem. Indeed, with good management you can have a team of 120 working quite effectively.
However, mediocre to bad management is far more common than good management. With mediocre or worse management the team ends up routing around management problems and reestablishing those hundreds of communication paths. Thus, your pessimistic estimates are reasonable for real world situations.
The key is good management. Finding and retaining good management is left as an exercise for the reader.
I heard good reviews about Half-Life 2. I decided to pick up a copy. Not having actually followed the news that closely, I assumed I was buying a normal retail product. I overlooked the small print "requires registration with online service" printed on the bottom. I was quite surprised when it wanted to install Steam. I was even more surprised when I had to wait. And wait. And wait. To play. Fscking weak. Worse, it's doing some sort of online checking to see if I can play, but I still have to leave the disk (The first one only, not the fifth one, as I discovered to my irritation) in my CD drive. Really fscking weak. Apparently I'm not trusted enough to buy their damn products. I'm a thief until proven otherwise. Feh.
On the up side, once the game actually started it rocked hard. Time constraints mean I haven't played too far into the game yet, but I'm quite pleased with the graphics and frame rate on my kinda-crusty (1.4Ghz, Radeon 9200) system.
VANESSA: Mr. Boy 13, my job is to acclimate you to the Nineties. You know, a lot's changed since 1967.
DANGER_BOY_13: Well, as long as companies still are dedicated to their employees, only asking for hard work in exchange for life-long employment, and secure retirement benefits, I'll be sound as a pound.
(Original)
Sims is a weird one. He demonizes woman as unproductive and emotional, yet Cerebus (especially early on) is filled with powerful and rational women. The Cirinist (matriarchal) nation may be frightening, but it's powerful, growing, and holds a self-consistent (if scary) belief system. His essays in Reads and the later in Tangents depict someone completely divorced from reality, someone you cannot rationally debate. His letters responding to people asking for free comics he offered are well writte, witty, and suggest someone I'd enjoy talking with, even if we disagreed. (The offer of a free comic is real and still open.)
Sim's beliefs are certainly relevant, especially since they were printed in his comics. However, it's also important to not write off his work because of those beliefs. Much great art has been created by racists, homophobes, sexists, and all sorts of negative -ists. You can condemn the beliefs, but you still have respect the work itself. Cerebus, especially its early years, is an important milestone is comic art.
For anyone interested in checking out Sims's work, do not start with the first book, Cerebus. It's an only adequate parody of low-fantasy. My local comic shop owner pointed me to book two, High Society. That's where his political and social parody begins and the series becomes noteworthy. In fact, you can basically skip the entire "Sims gets weird" and enjoy what are arguably his best (or at least most popular) works by getting books 2 through 4 (High Society (parodying government and politics), Church & State I and II (parodying religion and politics. Book II gets a little weird...), and Jaka's Story (Really good, not really parody, and hard to describe. Themes include growing up, priviledge, women in society, and truth.)).
Damn, that's good. Obvious, but I hadn't considered it. Perhaps it should logically chain up the entire structure; if a manager is working overtime for more than (say) a week, than his boss has to start working overtime. Chain it up the chain of command. This would catch managers who already do constantly work overtime; their boss would have incentive (and time) to investigate why this is the case and see how it could be fixed. Some managers consider 60+ hour weeks year round to be reasonable; there needs to be a check on them as well.
Obviously these can't be hard and fast rules; part of the deal with salary is that you'll sometimes put in slightly longer weeks. It's when the overtime becomes mandatory or long term that something is broken and must be fixed.
I'm particularlly fond of the claim that Indymedia is not an involved party and thus cannot file this motion. That's insane. Apparently just because it was their servers that were taken it doesn't mean that they have any standing.
Actually, I for one tried to learn japanese once.
I tried to absorb an english-japanese dictionary one afternoon, but it gave me nightmares. Literally. It was as if the english-reading-part of my brain was in conflict with the oddball characters and symbols presented in the japanese language. Ever since I've been haunted by perverse unreadbility of it all. I liken the experence to attempting to think in russian.
So by this I know for a fact that japanese is Not My Thing(tm).
.
Learning Perl is like learning a living human language. It's big and daunting, but you can relatively quickly learn a powerful and useful subset. As you continune to learn more and more you'll discover power and subtle shades of meaning. You'll feel better able to express yourself, to implement the solution in terms of the problem instead of the programming language. Instead of seeing a nearly infinite amount of work to learn the entire language, you'll see a nearly infinite amount of possibilities to explore as necessary. You'll take on a new problem domain and start wishing that Perl had just the right tool for the problem. Usually Perl does. It's rare that I finish a task and say to myself, "Wow, that was way easier than I thought." When I do, it's usually thanks to Perl.
Ultimately Perl is a big messy language because the world is a big messy place with big messy problems. Living human languages like english are big message languages for exactly the same reason.
Don't try to learn Perl by diving into the syntax docs, especially the reference ones. That's like trying to learn C++ by reading the STL reference.
For a long time I used Best Buy for commodity electronics and video games. I now only use them as a last resort. Several incidents stick out:
First, heading in with a friend to busy Game Cubes. How hard could it be? Go it, get box, pay, leave. However, the Game Cubes weren't kept on the floor. So the floorweasel has to get it for us. But not before she tries to pressure sell us the extended warrantee. The only down side of her plan is that we knew what she was talking about better than she did. "You guys looks like serious gamers." Well, duh. "And you know how frequently they break down." Umm, yes. Practically never. "So clearly you'll want an extended warrantee." No, not really. I've got four consoles and piles of other consumer electronics at home, all of it happily humming along. Statistically the warrantee is idiotic. I've even had an expensive stereo receiver fail, but including that in my figures I saved money replacing it myself instead of having an warrantee on all of my electronics. Please, just go get my Game Cube.
Second, and much worse. A friend's cellphone was flaking out. She had purchased it at Best Buy and paid for the extended warrantee. Well, time to head in to get it replaced. The only problem: they couldn't replace the phone. They didn't have an equivalent phone in stock any more. She could get another phone, but they would only extend her partial credit to her. I've gotten the "buy the extended warrantee" routine dozens of times over years. "If anything goes wrong at all, just bring it in and we'll replace it with the same model or a newer on" is standard. My friend had specifically gotten the extended warrantee so that she could avoid worrying about it. When I confirmed that the salesweasel couldn't offer her anything better, I asked for a manager. The manager had the audacity to suggest that it was inappropriate for us to expect them to be able to replace my friend's phone. After all, she'd only paid for the extended warrantee, how could Best Buy know that they might need to replace it? She then threatened to use to escape clause in the warrantee; they'd refund the cost of the warrantee (after enjoying the money for the last 18 months) and refuse to support it. We finally got the phone replaced after playing stupid games ("Well, if you cancel your service, then sign up for new service and fill out this form and wait 2 months you'll get a $50 rebate.")
Best Buy lost my respect that day. I've never returned anything. I lack the time to hunt down loss-leaders. Their aggresive policies lost a stable customer.
If a company increases profits every year there is something wrong and the price isn't fair. The company isn't necessarily ripping you off; they're charging what the market will be bear. If a company continues to make larger and larger profits each year while providing essentially the same service or product than the market has failed. Given such an obviously safe opportunity a competitor should have arisen to keep prices down.
That said, I suggest you reread the grandparent post. He doesn't suggest that he's being ripped off. He doesn't mention shareholders. You're looking to pick a fight and picked the wrong target. Believe it or not, it's possible to critize our capitalist system while simultaneously being pro-capitalism. Hell, his point wasn't even that there should be no profit, his point was that offering a rebate you actively plan to avoid paying on is dishonest and unfair.
I'm not expecting to change anyone's mind, but just in case, here's my case for Why I'm Voting for Kerry. In the interests of keeping it brief and easy to skim it's mostly a bullet list of points.
If you want something longer, I think "100 Facts and 1 Opinion: The Non-Arguable Case Against the Bush Administration" by Judd Legum at The Nation is quite a good summary. Again, it's an easy to skim list.
If I might point out, perhaps a man who masterminds a terrorist network responsible for thousands of deaths just may be lying to further his own ends? In essence you're saying that you're letting bin Laden's desires influence your actions? Isn't that the whole point of terrorism? If bin Laden wanted Bush in office perhaps it would make sense to lie and claim that he wanted Kerry?
Me, I plan on voting for the candidate I believe will serve American best. I plan on ignoring and endorsements by terrorists. Shouldn't you?
Though the world would have been a better place had it been so limited. My pet peeve was the weirdly brain dead default string implementation. Strings weren't null terminated, instead the length of the string was stored. That's a good idea. A bad idea is using the first byte of the string to hold the length. 8 bits to store the string length means a maximum string length of 255 characters. I worked on a large project that had originally been written in Pascal. We used p2c to convert it and maintained it in C. An early task was removing the 255 character long string brain damage and replace it with intelligent strings (in our case C++'s generally good and absolutely superior to Pascal's std::string). Still, I got to read and occasionally maintain the Pascal master for a variety of reasons. The code dealing with strings was always irritating. Sometimes it just ignored the problem (creating potential buffer overruns), sometimes it just crudely limited the string length (meaning, for example, that you couldn't have a URL longer than 255 characters), and sometimes it used some weird chained string extension that I never quite understood. Mac programmers I know told me that the 255 limit was pervasive throughout MacOS as late as MacOS 9. Most unfortunate.
(To be fair, it did seem like a pretty good language, and I really dug the "with" idiom. A healthy revision (that may have happened, I don't stay up to date on Pascal) could have turned it into something more mainstream and successful. Hell, let's be honest, I just wanted to bitch about the stupid strings...)
Have you listened to what most people download? The crappiness is so powerful that it actually turns other files into crappy mp3s.
Thanks, I'll be here all week.
Of course not. He's very reasonably suggesting that by saving money on hardware, consumers will have more money to spend on software. It's only reason to ask a highly competitive market with relatively low margins that doesn't impose any sort of EULAs on their customers to cut margins further to support the software industries copyright protected markets with much larger margins and restrictive EULAs.
Tomorrow I'll be explaining how we can improve customer satisfaction by eliminating competition.
Interesting, given the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights came to a different conclusion based on their evidence:
The have a chapter in their report entitled "First-Hand Accounts of Voter Disenfranchisement" in which they document people denied the vote:
The page is full of stories from individuals and poll workers, all named.
This is, admittedly, completely off topic, but I find it odd that any state would deny the vote to felons who had served their time. Why not just let them vote? It's one thing to remove directly life-threatening things from a felon (guns), but another to remove their voting rights. In essence every single felony sentence adds "... and you may never vote in this state again." That seems a little harsh while completely useless as a deterrant. (Gee, I was going to steal this car, but I might lose by voting rights!) Are we attempting to protect society from those dangerous felons? I somehow doubt that we're going to see politicians pandering to the felon vote. We give released felons arguably much more dangerous freedoms (notably freedom of speech), letting them vote seems relatively harmless. Those states where released felons can vote manage to avoid having that sort of problem. As an added bonus, our states don't need to spend millions of dollars trying to keep those released felons from voting. I suppose it's Florida's right to decide this, but it just seems weird to me.
If the argument is, "Local elections boards can download the software and hardware plans from SourceForge and hire a 16 year old kit to put it all together," yes, that's a stupid argument.
If the plan is, "Local elections boards will hire IBM to provide a voting system, support for that system, and make guarantees about uptimes and accuracy. IBM will take software and hardware plans from SourceForge, hire staff to review them, possibly modify them, and assemble best practices," that's a pretty good argument.
By way of example, if you want an open source web server, think Apache looks good, but you want IBM to stand behind it, go get the rather uncreatively named IBM HTTP Server.
Expecting a lower quality of customer support doesn't necessarily mean I expect a lower level of quality for the software itself. Furthermore, my experience has been that customer support for commercial software is pretty uniformly crap. You can get good support, but you're generally paying through the nose for it, typically on top of the cost you paid for the software itself. You can do that open source software as well.
The interface in question is a punchcard inserted into a carefully aligned slot. Above the punchcard were rigid sheets spaced apart wide enough to see a single column of punchcard potential-holes. The user went page by page, each time locating a desired candidate and punching the hole next to their name. As they moved through this "book", they effectively moved column by column across the punchcard.
Why, oh, why do you keep bringing this up? It's completely irrelevant. I don't care if Al Gore himself designed the ballot; it was a seriously flawed design. Breaking News: Democrats are just as capable of making bad decisions as the average person! User interface design often has surprising problems!
Indeed, that was the time. Someone with real user interface design experience should have looked at it and raised some warnings. But it didn't. Unfortunately it wasn't taken seriously until it was suddenly a crisis. Unfortunate though it is, this is frequently when broken systems are finally fixed. Indeed, the 2000 election cast much scruntiny on that bad design
In comparision, the right time to diagnose and repair communication problems in in our law enforcement agencies was before 9/11. 9/11 didn't change the world, it just pointed out that our existing security solution had serious flaws.
So are you suggesting that voters happened to be wandering by the polling place, decided, "hey, that might be fun!" and picked who to vote for based on which names sounded coolest? I suspect that the voters did take it seriously. They looked at the options, located the candidate they had decided upon based on their observations and reflections, then based on their flawed understanding of how the technology works, proceeded to try and mark their decision but made a mistake. There will always be mistakes, but the evidence suggested an unusually large number of mistakes. If a significant number of users make the same mistake, typically the user interface is to blame, not the user.
Somehow I suspect that the Second Amendment was talking about rifles and cannons overtly intended to kill government representatives. Something you use to repel your country's lawful army to prevent them from enforcing the law. Something to stage a rebellion with. Having just rebelled from England and fought a bloody revolutionary war, I suspect that this was fresh in their minds. The second amendment is a defense against one's own government. The militia's in question would be those that grouped up to defeat tyranny.
Thus, I'll admit a certain appeal to such a device.
But I have to be honest, it's the wrong solution. The restaurant in question wants the television to be there. The real solution is to let the restaurant know that you like the restaurant, you like the food, but you don't like the televisions. Ask to have the ones in your line of sight turned off (especially if the screens in question are obviously unused. Do you really need 5 TVs on when there are only two tables of guests?). Suggest that you'd like the number of televisions reduced. Suggest having seating out of the line of sight of the screens.
Regrettably much like smoking this is a situation where restaurants have incentive to cater to a sub-market. The larger market is willing to suffer something they dislike but the smaller market demands it. You can legislate smoking (especially given the health impacts on employees), but you'd be hard pressed to do so for televisions. Do what you can to encourage your local restaurants to reduce or remove the screens and patronise those that try to serve you.
So even if it becomes available I resist buying such a device. Much like my dreamed of car-audio-disabler to turn off steroes in cars that go BOOM-BOOM-BOOM down my residential neighborhood at 3AM, vigilante justice is the wrong answer.
In essence you're suggesting an IQ test? If that's what you want, be honest about it. Instead of making the ballot itself a test which will cause people to mis-vote, instead put the test up front and deny them the vote in the first place. Of course, the reason you can't really support an IQ test is most people would be horrified at the thought. While you're busy being ignored, console yourself that many brilliant people and ideas have had a hard time gaining popular acceptance. Meanwhile the rest of us will understand that our grandparents may make mistakes working with technology that seems trivial to us, yet still be mentally sound and politically aware.
Newsflash: bad user design isn't always obvious. The entire point is that many voters looked at the system, believed they understood what was going on, then proceeded to make a mistake (fulling believing they had not). If the had been confused I would have expected election officials to report a steady stream of voters asking for clairification on the day of the election. If a voter actually casting their vote thinks they understand the situation (but don't really), what hope does somene seeing it in the paper have?
Only after the fact did it become clear that that there was a problem. There is no irony here unless you're really dense.
(To be fair, apparently this technique had been used before, apparently with similar problems. That it wasn't noticed or acted upon previously is terrible; someone dropped the ball and deserved punishment.)
OWJones does a great job of refuting your silly claims, so I'll just address two points that OWJones didn't:
Off topic and irrelevant. Did the poster suggest that the butterfly ballot was a conspiracy? Did he even mention it? No. The butterfly ballot was just bad user interface design, it doesn't take a conspiracy theory to say that it was a bad thing.
We appear to have a disagreement here. I'm willing to accept that some illegal votes will be cast in exchange for minimizing the number of legit voters denied the vote. You appear to be willing to accept that some legit voters will be denied the vote in exchange for minimizing the number of illegal votes.
There is a similar problem with criminal law: the easier it is to convict someone the more likely you are to put criminals behind bars. Unfortunately it also become easier to put an innocent man behind bars. Our country decided that convicting innocent men was so abhorrent that we set the standard for convictions very high ("beyond a reasonable doubt"). As a result more criminals get away with their crimes, but I still approve of the choice. I for one am unwilling to tell someone "Sorry you didn't get to vote, but you're an acceptable loss."
Questionable assumption 1: The poster you are replying is condescending and insulting when supporting users in other contexts. The poster may actually agree with you.
Questionable assumption 2: These are similar situations. When I approach one or more people who provide me with software for no cost and ask for free help with it my expectations are lowered. In the case of voting machines we spent a great deal of money on these products, I for one expect more.
Questionable assumption 3: There are similar audiences. My grandfather has not expressed a willingness to understand computers (oddly enough, his wife is quite happy to). That's fine; no one is requiring him to use a computer. He doesn't need to use a computer to function as a member of society. However, he does need to to be able to vote to function as a member of society. If a new voting system is confusing to a mentally sound man who has been voting for 50 years using a variety of other systems, the system has faults.
Question assumption 4: There are similar stakes. To take a common historic complaint: the mplayer people are mean to people asking for help. Well, what's the real impact of failing to be supported by the mplayer people? You don't get to watch videos. Life's tough. What's the impact of failing to be supported by election companies? You don't get to vote. I certainly think that's more important. (There is, of course, software that is Very Important. In those situations I certainly hope you're paying someone to take responsibility for it and provide good support.)
So I'll add my own conclusion (based on my own questionable assumption): You're trying to be clever by pointing out hypocrisy on Slashdot under the false assumption that Slashdot is some sort of gestalt. If that's the case, sorry, you lose.
I'm not sure what your point is. I never suggested that that slander, perjury, or speech intending to cause panics or crime should be legal. Those are and should remain illegal. I suggested that a criminal admitting his intent to commit a crime should be legal. It provides clues for police to try and capture the criminal. It provides warning for potential victims to try and avoid the risk. All good things, no real down side. If such an admission is honest I see no problems with it.
Put another way: calling in a fake bomb threat should be illegal; you're telling a lie with the intent to cause harm to others. Calling in a real bomb threat should be legal; it gives potential victims a chance to avoid the danger and the phone call itself may provide police a clue to track down the bomber.
Polls are guesswork at best; I suspect that the pundit fully believed the statement. The polls all point to a Kerry win. Here's a handy graph of the results. Where exactly is the bias in letting a potentially overoptimistic statement about polling slide. I sure hope there are more interesting things to cover than one pundits opinion on how a state will vote. If a Republican leaning pundit where to opine that Bush has Ohio sewn up, I'd be equally willing to let that slide as it's a reasonable interpretation given trends over the last few months, even if the results are still within the margin of error.