There's a reason the phone companies go to unlimited calling plans.
Because people want them.
There were some studies a decade or two ago where people would prefer an unlimited telephone plan, even if you could demonstrably prove to them that they would save money over their per-usage plan. The fear of the unexpected bills that would force them to feel as though they needed to mentally meter their phone calls and potentially be rude to the people they're speaking to was enough that they were willing to pay a bit more for that extra piece of mind.
We can even draw evidence for this from your own statement: "There's a reason that phone companies go to unlimited," meaning they didn't start that way. The hardware and software necessary for that sort of monitoring are essentially sunk costs. Moving TO unlimited didn't cost them anything and likely doesn't save them much either.
We can see the same behavior from cellular companies in a much shorter time frame. First there was metered usaged, then packs of minutes both incoming and outgoing. Now several companies are offering you free incoming minutes, and almost everybody at least has an option for an unlimited plan. Commercials constantly prey on customers' fears of that unplanned bill. Free incoming minutes will be standard soon, and unlimited minutes will likely follow. Watch this exact same evolution with text messages, even faster than cell phones that were so much faster than the POTS evolutions.
Metering MAKES these companies money, because pushing an extra minute of phone call or extra packet of data is essentially free to them. If they can charge you for them, cha-ching! You're right that it will annoy customers and ultimately fail, but not the reasoning.
This may all be true on its face--though I still don't like the breaking and entering analogies for reasons I'm sure you've heard or can come up with yourself--but it doesn't change the fact that it's a staggering overreaction by the school district, police, and district attorney, nor the fact that the law needs to be clarified or outright changed.
Let's run with your analogy. The kid finds a door with a piece of tape over it that says "DO NOT REMOVE TAPE!" He removes it, enters, looks around, finds a bunch of really sensitive information and anonymously alerts the police of this utter negligence in the security of said information. He's arrested for breaking and entering. Do you really believe that this kid is going to be charged with three felony counts for what he did? Do you think it's worth sending this kid to jail, potentially for years? To screw up his chances at employment anywhere they bother to include the textbook question of "have you ever been charged with a felony" on their application forms?
Maybe there really is more to the story than what we're hearing, and maybe he ultimately deserves the charges. If so, I'm sure there are dozens of similar cases one can find where the person doesn't deserve it; where the "crime" is one of curiosity or "I wonder if I can..." rather than some malicious intent to take identities. Even in this case, I'm awfully wary of the officer's statement ("The kid committed an intentional criminal act. He deceitfully used someone else's name and password so he would not get caught and was looking to profit from his criminal act"). He seems to be implying he somehow knows that the kid knew what he would find by doing what he did, and thinking back to my own high school days I seriously doubt it. More likely he saw a folder named "District Employees" or some such.
Aaaanyway. If we want to be charging people with felonies, I think it's time we passed a law against this sort of criminally negligent "security" of peoples' private information, with a stipulation that anybody illegally accessing such information can be used as evidence against you. If your security really does suck so bad that a 15-year-old student can access thousands of social security numbers (I bet you a thousand dollars it was a spreadsheet!) and that "thousands of students, faculty and employees could have accessed the same file for up to two weeks," then you and he can share a jail cell. Frankly, if this boy really had the malicious intentions he's being accused of and charged with, I think every employee on that list should sue the school district into the dirt for their negligence and for exposing them to this identity theft (which if you didn't read the article, is one of the three felony charges).
Somehow I think if we started charging idiots for exposing that information, that only legitimately malicious criminal acts would get prosecuted instead of trying to throw children under the bus for your own security mistakes.
As far as I can tell with the information we have, you're absolutely correct. It should be exactly that easy to circumvent.
But your question as to whether or not it is useless is, I think, already answered with a pretty resounding "no" by the fact that you're asking it in this story. Whatever they're doing, it caught somebody. Maybe this method only catches stupid people. If you buy into the "go after the demand" theory in why possession of child pornography is illegal in the first place, that's perfectly acceptable. And from a more generalized standpoint, most criminals are likely to be fairly stupid anyway. If you don't believe in that theory, then the entire expedition is useless from the get-go because you'd be going after the creators, meaning you wouldn't have an md5 of their creations on hand to verify against anyway.
In lay terms, the police hashing every file on a person's hard drive won't occur if they're not searching for something. I highly doubt they do it for funsies.
However, I still agree with the grandparent post. If you have to comb through my FAT or journal or whatever to find files, then read every single bit of every single file into an algorithm, you're doing a search. The fact that you're inside my computer/hard drive at all means you're doing a search. I don't care if you ultimately decide you need the evidence by running it through your database any more than I would care if you thumbed around in my room but ultimately decided not to use what you found. What you do with the information may ultimately determine what effect it has on the case, but it doesn't change the fact that you conducted a search and that it was illegal.
I know the real-life analogies tend to suck, but compare this to a cop dropping a drug-sniffing dog in through your window. The dog searches everything, but he doesn't really know what it is he's looking at. All he knows is if he finds something he's been trained to look for. I don't think most people would have any trouble calling this a search the minute they entered your premises. They definitely wouldn't have trouble calling it a search when the dog starts sniffing around. The only difference I can see between what happened in the story and the analogy is that you can separate the "sniffing around" from the comparison in the story, whereas in the dog's head it's essentially instantaneous.
Essentially, I think you're making a worthless distinction between a computerized methodology and a human one. The fact that a computer can hypothetically stop between the sniffing through all of your data and the seeing what it found steps doesn't mean it should be treated any differently even if it does. And as I said before, it's all relatively moot since the police aren't going to go through the time and expense of the former only to stop before the latter.
No disrespect, but I'm beginning to get annoyed every time I see a question like that.
We can't do what you do in Canada and what others do elsewhere because our process is different. Your process works fantastically when a person is choosing one of a small handful of options. Big name, big circle, big X. Simple. Easy as hell to count.
The last time I voted here in the US (Cook County, Illinois, if you wish to know) I probably cast nearly 100 votes, many in different formats. President was painfully simple; three choices, if I recall correctly. Same with the national seats and even the state seats. Then there were things like county boards where I have to choose X of Y, and a list of 50 or so judges where I have to vote to retain or dismiss. Plus no fewer than two ballot proposals.
Aside from the logistical problems of trying to present 100 different votes in the way you do, think of how ridiculous this is to count. Most people aren't going to be able to keep 100 different counts going in their heads, and jotting them down into 100 different columns (many more, actually, since I made 100ish votes--meaning there were well more than 100 options) is going to be very time-consuming and error-prone. And then, after you finish going through hundreds or thousands of ballots and making tick marks in a hundred different columns, you realize that you've yet to actually count the votes.
If you start to get into the idea of machine counting the ballots, you're basically into most of the same sets of issues you're in when talking about computerized voting. At which point, why not simply use the computer to spit out a ballot that could be machine-counted if it's any way a simpler problem to solve?
Some US ballots are undoubtedly confusing and they could be improved. But it's nowhere near as simple as people with the "use a fucking pencil, n00bs!" approach make it out to be.
What does that have to do with software development? If I'm deciding where to develop software, I couldn't care less how many versions of the gphone there are; I care that they all are based on android. If the competition is as fierce as you seem to suggest, that just means there are that many more potential customers out there to reach. What do I care how much T-Mobile or G-Mobile or Random-Mobile makes on the phone as long as they're selling them?
There are a lot of times I don't branch, but it's usually out of laziness and I end up regretting it at some point in the project.
Easily, the most common reason for branching is a stable-versus-development split. I've run into it in virtually every project I've been on that involved any other people (even just as employer), and even a number of my personal projects. Stable branches almost always need an occasional bugfix or super-quick feature that I can be reasonably sure to get in in a one or two commits, and typically these things need to go out ASAP. I've run into that a million times with copy changes. In programming world, copy changes are usually the lowest possible priority thing, but with clients they're often some of the highest priority.
Point being, if I'm ever working on adding some major feature--really anything that will take more than a couple days, and sometimes even when it won't--I'm likely going to be better served doing it in a branch. If it happens that I get through it without needing to make any changes to the stable code, sweet! The merge is going to be super quick and easy. If not I'm going to be very glad I took the time to branch or regret not having done so. "I can't make your change right now because I have a ton of half-finished in-development code" is not an excuse people are interested in hearing.
The power brick of the macbook (any mac laptop i guess) alone is worth the price difference already.
See, this comment illustrates my problem with this article specifically and Mac fanbois in general. (And I'm not talking about you, just using your comment to leap-frog.)
I'm all about choice. If you want to buy a Mac because you love OS X, or think it's sturdier, or prettier, or more stable, or WHATEVER--great. In this case you've judged that the power brick is reason enough--great. These are all essentially open to differing personal opinions, but at least they're actual reasoning.
But even you say it: These things do cost more. When there's an article obviously written by a fanboi who made up his mind and wrote an "article" to justify his assumptions; who cherry-picks more expensive hardware to make the price comparisons work out better for him and still ignores when there are several hundred and even as much as $400 (see grandparent) price differences; who is happy to re-configure other machines but miraculously won't add the $500 stick of 1GB RAM to his Mac... well, he's a complete asshat. I wish I could say he was the exception in mac fanboi land, but it doesn't seem that way. The only thing that bothers me more than stupid people are smart people who act stupid.
Your point about not only comparing specs for a price is well taken, but if somebody sets out to do that I wish they could do so objectively. I don't think that's asking too much, and I bet all the fanbois here don't either--as long as the topic isn't Apple.
You'd think after the whole Bill Clinton impeachment fiasco they'd be dying for some payback. But they didn't go for it. Why?
Because it backfired. Not only did it not succeed in removing him from office, the majority of Americans found it to be petty. Increasingly so as time wore on. Many Republicans these days will even admit it was a mistake. (Not the talking heads on the radio, to be sure; their job is to rile people up.)
The article you linked verifies my point (if you actually followed the conclusion). Kucinich introduced articles of impeachment. The Republicans all voted FOR them; they desperately wanted them to come to a vote so that they could paint the Democrats as vindictive morons more concerned with taking their revenge on a president they don't like than governing the nation. Who cast them into oblivion? Democrats. Because they knew it. When the party that SHOULD support something opposes it and the one that should do everything they can to kill it wants it to proceed, you know there's some nasty politics going on. From the Democrats' perspective, it is much more important to get a democratic president elected now than it was to try to impeach Bush then.
Personally I wish he had been removed from office, because I think Bush has clearly done illegal things that warrant it. I also realize that he would never have been removed; that it would have been an entirely symbolic gesture that would have ground the congress to a halt, further politicized the nation and even introduced renewed uncertainty into the outcome of this presidential election. Symbols can be important, but I tend to prefer results.
Dick Cheney can shoot someone in the face, and what happens? The victim goes on TV and makes a public apology. For being shot in the face.
Sorry, but that is one of the stupidest things I have ever read on Slashdot.
If I went hunting with somebody I had been friends with for years and got shot in the face, I damn sure wouldn't assume it was malice on my friend's part. And if some asshats tried to make political hay out of it as if it was somehow anything more than an accident, I too would defend my friend. It has nothing to do with being terrified of him or his "boss," it has to do with not being a shitty friend.
He SHOULD feel bad that the accident that he obviously thinks nothing of turned into some sort of controversy and maligned his friend, and if he felt that calling a press conference to tell people to shut up about it would help in the least he's right to do it. I would. If you wouldn't, well, I certainly wouldn't want to be your friend.
There are plenty of problems with Bush, Cheney, Republicans and even government in general. Let's focus on them instead of trying to invent more on stupid bases.
You shouldn't ABSTAIN from version numbers because they DO have meaning, but I don't see any reason it needs to be emphasized--especially for a first version.
If the point of "let's not call it 1.0!" is to avoid a stigma associated with that version number, simply release "WizzoProg." Stick the exact version number in a Help->About box someplace. If they need to call support, the version number is there--but by that time they've already purchased the product. At the very least they're almost certain to give it a real shot and make up their minds based on the actual quality of the program since they've already laid down their money.
After that point, you can release "Wizzprog 2" to show progress if you're inclined to do so.
Well, you're correct that if somebody is attracted to children they will likely always be attracted to children.
At the same time, recidivism rates for sex offenders is relatively low compared to many other types of crime, particularly violent crime. They may always be attracted to children, but that doesn't mean they can't be helped to control their urges or find alternate, more accepted mediums to dispense with them. There is quite a bit of porn out there, for example, claiming that the girls are children (usually 16). They very often look it, but I suspect that's not true most of the time. Obviously I have no idea if that helps, in the long run. I know doing nothing doesn't help either though.
My main problem with all this sex offender stuff is like somebody said earlier: If they're so dangerous and can't be rehabilitated, just execute them or lock them up forever and be done with it. The idea that somebody can do their time and even not have any period of probation yet be subject for the rest of their lives to tracking (registries, etc) and humiliation/ostrasization/threats/physical harm/etc (being required to tell their neighbors if they move in, "no sex offender" housing zones) is not only repugnant to me, it seems to all but guarantee we turn them into criminals again in one way or another. These laws also seem to be all about that. Nobody who knows anything expects that this bill will ACTUALLY protect children from all but the stupidest of predators, but it's another thing for cops to be able to put a big-bad-predator back in jail. Regardless of whether or not he really did anything.
Let's just find some internal consistency. If being a sex offender is something that makes your life forfeit, then do that. If not, let's stop passing these idiotic laws so DAs can become politicians and politicians can claim to be tough on crime and protecting your children.
Your comment about the whole basis of wealth and money is a bit off the board for me to reply to, but we can certainly look at surplus.
When presidents submit a budget, they're given an estimation of income. I assume this is what you're referring to when you talk about projections of surplus. This is largely irrelevant except to the intentions of the president. That is, if I submit a balanced budget I intended to submit a balanced budget. If after we count all the money it turns out we didn't bring in as much as projected, say because of an economic downturn, at least I can say I tried.
There are still absolute numbers, however. You can look back a year and see that we spent $X and brought in $Y. What basis these dollars exist in is largely irrelevant; it's the system we've chosen. Looking at Clinton's presidency, it looks like he ran deficits for the first five years and then surpluses the last three.
If I recall correctly, Clinton closed the deficit. That is, for some period during his presidency our debt was not going up. The debt has existed for a very long time, going back essentially to the founding of the nation.
Some good information and graphs on the debt can be found here: http://www.cedarcomm.com/~stevelm1/usdebt.htm. It also puts to bed some of the myths about who grows the debt (everybody), who shrinks it (nobody), who it grows more under (Republicans), the last time the debt has gone down at all (Kennedy), etc. A lot of the conclusions seem to fly in the face of conventional wisdom on these topics.
The site does seem to lean a little bit left, with a particular dislike of Bush, but it seems to be more focused on what he and other groups do to the deficit and debt in particular. It's certainly interesting no matter how you slice it.
Alright, then the only justifiable thing to do, if you want such services, is to persuade your friends, family, neighbors, etc, to want it as well. Show them why it's better, why they should want it, why if they all unite, their desires will be fulfilled.
You're assuming that the community in question actually has enough people in it to EVER justify fulfilling their desires. Laying fiber is not cheap, and neither is the equipment to make it work--especially as the distances from the rest of your equipment increases. Most companies probably aren't going to be very happy to hear "we'll make our investment back in 65 years." If they don't laugh their asses off and kill the project right then and there, at the very least that community is going to be the lowest possible priority project.
The government realized this way back when we were having these same problems with phone service. It's called cream skimming: companies swoop in to service high-value customers and leave low-value customers in the lurch. Take a look at your phone bill and you'll see a tax for Universal Service (or Connectivity, or something along those lines--depends on the phone company). The government realized these people weren't going to get service if they didn't force the companies to give it to them, so to make the deal a little sweeter to phone companies they permit them to pass the charge they have to pay into the Universal Service Fund onto their customers.
Personally I think that Internet access is becoming so important to this economy that even that plan would be fine with me if that's what it takes. The local government just providing service itself is certainly something I would consider a step down from that if it's feasible.
The taxpayers were screwed as soon as they handed their money over to another government, to do with as it pleases.
Well, at least your political leanings are overt. It's a perfectly valid position to have, but it's entirely too idealistic to work in the real world. To borrow a quote from West Wing: "I don't know where you get the idea that taxpayers shouldn't have to pay for anything of which they disapprove. Lots of them don't like tanks. Even more don't like Congress."
All you've succeeded at doing is removing all meaning from the word "justify", and in the process you've ditched individual rights in favor of what's convenient to yourself.
No, he certainly didn't "[ditch] individual rights." At worst he refused to consider a corporation an individual, which frankly is something we should have done long ago. As far as using tax dollars to pay for services, it's a debate that tends to split the nation in half. The bottom line is if these people don't like it, they need to vote into office politicians who are more in line with their beliefs. This is their local government; the government most easy for them to change. If there's nobody in that community who's willing to oppose projects like that, it says more about the political leanings of that community than it does about politicians or government.
Obviously this is open to differing opinions, but I thought the before picture of the first girl was just ugly. The eyes were totally freaking me out.
You're right about the before/after photos in TV spots and such most of the time; they tend to do things like smile versus not smile and in the after shot they're almost always wearing some sort of make-up and often their hairsyle has completely changed.
In the case of this application, it definitely messes with the lips but that's not all. It also definitely messes with the eyes in most of the cases and tends to lighten the images a bit (which is a bit of a "duh" moment). In a handful of cases, it also messes with the size of the nose, though not always in the same direction (smaller or larger), and I see at least four cases where it messed with the overall shape of the head or face. The first two photos in the last set of samples, for example, clearly had somewhat pudgy faces that were thinned out/elongated. Oh, and the first female example shot in both sets looks like the eyebrows were smoothed out as well; they had a noticable bow to them originally but it's much less exaggerated in the after shots.
When you total it up you have modifications to the eyes and eyebrows, nose and lips, as well as the shape and coloring of the face and/or head. That seems like a pretty complete list of things you can fudge around on a picture of somebody's face. All in all I thought it was fairly impressive.
Well, I'm not sure what the liability laws are like in Australia but if they're anything like the US, I'd say they have 70 people with the possibility of suing them and a decent chance of winning based on strict liability.
For those who don't know, strict liability basically amounts to "this is so fucking dangerous you're liable even if you did your best." I'm pretty sure penny-pinching to avoid paying for some shielded wires would certainly even fall short of "doing [one's] best" part, regardless of whether or not they asked you politely over the PA system to turn the phones off.
It was actually worse than that. His steps were actually:
1. wait for some guy to code something cool
2. In all.c and.h files do a "s/guys name/my name/g"
3. relase as closed source application
4. PROFIT!!
5. File patents for things related to your stolen code
6. Send the original author bills for the usage of your patents.
7. PROFIT!!
Luckily his seventh step ended up being "GET SUED!!" in this particular case, but jesus, does that take balls.
I say this once every few debates over the 10th Amendment, and it feels like its time again.
If we're going to be strict constructionalists, that's swell. But to be logically and legally consistent, the very first thing we need to start with is the idea that the Supreme Court can strike down laws based on their constitutionality. The Constitution gives them no such authority, only the authority to interpret laws; this was a power that John Marshall took for himself in order to fuck over Thomas Jefferson when he felt the law would have had him ruling on Jefferson's side and he didn't want to. A pretty amusing backdrop for what ends up being one of the most important things to happen in our nation's history.
Absent that authority, debating what is and isn't constitutional is nothing but an intellectual exercise in futility. Hell, even with that authority it only works based on the goodwill of the other branches, since the judiciary has no authority, constitutional or otherwise, to enforce its own decisions--that's what the executive is for. But I digress: Call up your governor and try to get them to secede, because that's pretty well your only course of action once we throw out judicial review. I'm sure you'll realize some people tried that once and it cost half a million soldiers' lives and didn't succeed, but maybe the second time's the charm.
Most "read the 10th amendment n00b!" arguments tend to rely on judicial review to be worth their salt and I think we've pretty well seen the folly there, so I'll leave it with one more thought pertaining more to the situation at hand: If we do accept the premise of judicial review, then there is decades and decades of precedent and case-law giving the federal government vastly more authority than you 10th amendment folks think it should have, and their opinions are the only ones that matter since that same Constitution apparently gives them the right to decide.
If you think this is unconstitutional, sue, but don't be surprised if you get legally slapped down at every turn. The Constitution is a great, important document, but our interpretations of it have also come a long way in the past 200 years.
These are civil torts and they should be handled in civil court between the two parties involved. There's no reason for the government to get involved at all, much less any more than they already are, that much more less than making it a White House/presidential priority by creating a copyright czar to operate from within the executive branch.
But more to the point, I'm tired of them pandering to big business. Assume this passes. I write a song and it's getting copied around. Do you think I'm going to be able to call up federal prosecutors and get some help? Of course not. This is for their buddies at the RIAA/MPAA member companies and nobody else. If government feels the need to get their grubby hands into this, then they should at least avoid pandering to the groups that give them money. If they want to "help," they should help the people least able to help themselves instead of billion dollar corporations with legal teams that dwarf the size of most small businesses.
Sure it might be considered paranoid, but then again you don't put locks on your door because you're constantly expecting strangers to get in, you put them in just in case.
No, you put them in to discourage the thief from even trying. Breaking most door locks isn't a particularly hard task, but it is noisy and it's fair more complicated than simply jumping in the open window next door.
That said, a door-locks-to-encryption analogy suffers. In order to tell whether or not you're using encryption, they basically have to have already compromised your system or connection in such a way that they can already see your packets. Maybe they move away at that point, but you've already got some pretty serious problems.
I don't necessarily disagree with the sentiment you expressed, but let me try to compose a counter-argument.
When you take a job, there's an understanding and a contract. Clearly, your compensation is outlined: you make $X per year, you get this many vacation days, your benefits are this. But there's no clear expectation of what's expected from you that would allow you to make an informed decision as to whether that compensation is fair for what effort you're expending.
Absent that, a typical American workweek is considered to be 40 hours. That allows you to compare your salary and your work, and to compare across jobs. As an example, let's assume that one job offers $60,000 and one job offers $70,000. The benefits are identical, just to eliminate too much complication. The second job certainly seems more fruitful. If everybody was up-front that "this is a 40 hour per week job" versus "this is a 50 hour per week job," you'd be able to deduce roughly what you make: Fifty weeks a year, your pay is $30/hr for the first job and $28/hr for the second. Suddenly that higher number in the second job is looking less attractive.
The problem is most people aren't up-front and you can't make those comparisons. As you pointed out, "well then leave your job" isn't always even a viable choice, much less a wise one. Even if you did that every time it turns out your employer was deceptive about their expectations, future employers are going to be wary of hiring somebody who consistently leaves his job after short periods of time. If you're lucky, you get a chance to explain what happened and maybe get a shot. If not, they just toss your resume off the heap and nobody even evaluates whether what you did is reasonable.
The reality is, most people aren't complaining about this over occasional overtime. Most of the people aren't going "I have to work 42 hours a week three times a year, you owe me!!" The issue is more like my example: Systematic, consistent abuse of "overtime" such that it's not really overtime, it's a longer-time job. If that's what they're offering, great. But if they don't that abundantly clear at the time they hire you, that for whatever reason you're likely to be consistently working far more than 40 hours a week, then they should pay for that.
Secondly (and yes, believe it or not, that was all one point!) it evens the power between employer and employee. The employers almost always have the power, especially in bad economic times and in anything other than extremely specialized, highly-technical fields. If they're free to abuse their employees in that way, most will. But if there's an economic consequence to it--ie, if they need to pay for it--then they're much more likely to actually fix the problems that are forcing this sort of thing.
I work as a freelancer in web development. In my experience, the vast majority of the time that overtime is truly needed it's because somebody up the (project) management chain didn't have the nuts to keep things on schedule--and I don't mean development, it's always on the creative side or the client side--or negotiate a reasonable enough project duration from the get-go. The development teams continue to pull miracles out of their ass because they haven't yet mis-managed away ALL of their development talent (just 70% or so, with more leaving soon). Rather than fixing the problems that makes that necessary week in and week out, they simply come to rely on it. Oh, there's much hand-wringing out "ZOMG CAN WE DO IT AGAIN!" and a LOT of bitching about freelancer hours lately, as if that's the problem, but they make no effort to fix the issue. Most of their employees are salaried. It seems to me if they had to pay time-and-a-half until they got their heads out of their asses, every single person at that company would be better off in six months. Or the company would fold, but I'm being redundant.
It depends on where you live. You seem to live in an important state. From your description, it is a swing state decided by only a handful of votes. Clearly, every vote there is important.
I, on the other hand, live in Illinois. Is there really any doubt it will break solidly for Obama? (Not just because he's from here; Illinois tends to go blue due to Chicago, even though most of the rest of the state tends toward Republicans.) Is there much in the way of doubt on how California or New York will break? Or on the flip side, Texas? Which states these are may or may not switch around a bit depending on who's running in a given election, but there are, at least these days, always certain states that are all but given to break a certain way before a single vote is ever cast.
It's true that if enough people stay home because their vote doesn't really matter the outcome can change, but the reality is that some peoples' votes basically are worthless due to political geography.
Honestly, I have trouble believing that this would stand up in court if somebody actually wanted to challenge it. For starters, the whole concept is ridiculously stupid on its face. Why should you be permitted to NDA every piece of correspondence you have, regardless of whether or not it really has anything to do with your products or process, just to be able to do dickhead things but not take a beating in public for it? It's a simple abuse of the legal system and a legal attempt to circumvent whatever few free market principles we have left.
Beyond that, consider what you just said in the context. We're talking about somebody whose application was rejected. Given that situation, and according to your explanation for it, you're saying that for just $99 and the signing of an NDA, that person has purchased the right to have their application rejected. It's painfully clear what Apple gets out of this process, but what does the rejected developer get? I admit my legal knowledge isn't vast (and of course nothing is as simple as it seems) but I've always believed that if there's no consideration on both sides, a contract is not valid. I hardly consider trading $99 for an NDA to be consideration to the developer.
Slashdot Mirror
Because people want them.
There were some studies a decade or two ago where people would prefer an unlimited telephone plan, even if you could demonstrably prove to them that they would save money over their per-usage plan. The fear of the unexpected bills that would force them to feel as though they needed to mentally meter their phone calls and potentially be rude to the people they're speaking to was enough that they were willing to pay a bit more for that extra piece of mind.
We can even draw evidence for this from your own statement: "There's a reason that phone companies go to unlimited," meaning they didn't start that way. The hardware and software necessary for that sort of monitoring are essentially sunk costs. Moving TO unlimited didn't cost them anything and likely doesn't save them much either.
We can see the same behavior from cellular companies in a much shorter time frame. First there was metered usaged, then packs of minutes both incoming and outgoing. Now several companies are offering you free incoming minutes, and almost everybody at least has an option for an unlimited plan. Commercials constantly prey on customers' fears of that unplanned bill. Free incoming minutes will be standard soon, and unlimited minutes will likely follow. Watch this exact same evolution with text messages, even faster than cell phones that were so much faster than the POTS evolutions.
Metering MAKES these companies money, because pushing an extra minute of phone call or extra packet of data is essentially free to them. If they can charge you for them, cha-ching! You're right that it will annoy customers and ultimately fail, but not the reasoning.
This may all be true on its face--though I still don't like the breaking and entering analogies for reasons I'm sure you've heard or can come up with yourself--but it doesn't change the fact that it's a staggering overreaction by the school district, police, and district attorney, nor the fact that the law needs to be clarified or outright changed.
Let's run with your analogy. The kid finds a door with a piece of tape over it that says "DO NOT REMOVE TAPE!" He removes it, enters, looks around, finds a bunch of really sensitive information and anonymously alerts the police of this utter negligence in the security of said information. He's arrested for breaking and entering. Do you really believe that this kid is going to be charged with three felony counts for what he did? Do you think it's worth sending this kid to jail, potentially for years? To screw up his chances at employment anywhere they bother to include the textbook question of "have you ever been charged with a felony" on their application forms?
Maybe there really is more to the story than what we're hearing, and maybe he ultimately deserves the charges. If so, I'm sure there are dozens of similar cases one can find where the person doesn't deserve it; where the "crime" is one of curiosity or "I wonder if I can..." rather than some malicious intent to take identities. Even in this case, I'm awfully wary of the officer's statement ("The kid committed an intentional criminal act. He deceitfully used someone else's name and password so he would not get caught and was looking to profit from his criminal act"). He seems to be implying he somehow knows that the kid knew what he would find by doing what he did, and thinking back to my own high school days I seriously doubt it. More likely he saw a folder named "District Employees" or some such.
Aaaanyway. If we want to be charging people with felonies, I think it's time we passed a law against this sort of criminally negligent "security" of peoples' private information, with a stipulation that anybody illegally accessing such information can be used as evidence against you. If your security really does suck so bad that a 15-year-old student can access thousands of social security numbers (I bet you a thousand dollars it was a spreadsheet!) and that "thousands of students, faculty and employees could have accessed the same file for up to two weeks," then you and he can share a jail cell. Frankly, if this boy really had the malicious intentions he's being accused of and charged with, I think every employee on that list should sue the school district into the dirt for their negligence and for exposing them to this identity theft (which if you didn't read the article, is one of the three felony charges).
Somehow I think if we started charging idiots for exposing that information, that only legitimately malicious criminal acts would get prosecuted instead of trying to throw children under the bus for your own security mistakes.
In short: Tough on crime my ass.
As far as I can tell with the information we have, you're absolutely correct. It should be exactly that easy to circumvent.
But your question as to whether or not it is useless is, I think, already answered with a pretty resounding "no" by the fact that you're asking it in this story. Whatever they're doing, it caught somebody. Maybe this method only catches stupid people. If you buy into the "go after the demand" theory in why possession of child pornography is illegal in the first place, that's perfectly acceptable. And from a more generalized standpoint, most criminals are likely to be fairly stupid anyway. If you don't believe in that theory, then the entire expedition is useless from the get-go because you'd be going after the creators, meaning you wouldn't have an md5 of their creations on hand to verify against anyway.
In lay terms, the police hashing every file on a person's hard drive won't occur if they're not searching for something. I highly doubt they do it for funsies.
However, I still agree with the grandparent post. If you have to comb through my FAT or journal or whatever to find files, then read every single bit of every single file into an algorithm, you're doing a search. The fact that you're inside my computer/hard drive at all means you're doing a search. I don't care if you ultimately decide you need the evidence by running it through your database any more than I would care if you thumbed around in my room but ultimately decided not to use what you found. What you do with the information may ultimately determine what effect it has on the case, but it doesn't change the fact that you conducted a search and that it was illegal.
I know the real-life analogies tend to suck, but compare this to a cop dropping a drug-sniffing dog in through your window. The dog searches everything, but he doesn't really know what it is he's looking at. All he knows is if he finds something he's been trained to look for. I don't think most people would have any trouble calling this a search the minute they entered your premises. They definitely wouldn't have trouble calling it a search when the dog starts sniffing around. The only difference I can see between what happened in the story and the analogy is that you can separate the "sniffing around" from the comparison in the story, whereas in the dog's head it's essentially instantaneous.
Essentially, I think you're making a worthless distinction between a computerized methodology and a human one. The fact that a computer can hypothetically stop between the sniffing through all of your data and the seeing what it found steps doesn't mean it should be treated any differently even if it does. And as I said before, it's all relatively moot since the police aren't going to go through the time and expense of the former only to stop before the latter.
They're federal charges, Palin has no authority to affect the sentence regardless of where he serves his time.
No disrespect, but I'm beginning to get annoyed every time I see a question like that.
We can't do what you do in Canada and what others do elsewhere because our process is different. Your process works fantastically when a person is choosing one of a small handful of options. Big name, big circle, big X. Simple. Easy as hell to count.
The last time I voted here in the US (Cook County, Illinois, if you wish to know) I probably cast nearly 100 votes, many in different formats. President was painfully simple; three choices, if I recall correctly. Same with the national seats and even the state seats. Then there were things like county boards where I have to choose X of Y, and a list of 50 or so judges where I have to vote to retain or dismiss. Plus no fewer than two ballot proposals.
Aside from the logistical problems of trying to present 100 different votes in the way you do, think of how ridiculous this is to count. Most people aren't going to be able to keep 100 different counts going in their heads, and jotting them down into 100 different columns (many more, actually, since I made 100ish votes--meaning there were well more than 100 options) is going to be very time-consuming and error-prone. And then, after you finish going through hundreds or thousands of ballots and making tick marks in a hundred different columns, you realize that you've yet to actually count the votes.
If you start to get into the idea of machine counting the ballots, you're basically into most of the same sets of issues you're in when talking about computerized voting. At which point, why not simply use the computer to spit out a ballot that could be machine-counted if it's any way a simpler problem to solve?
Some US ballots are undoubtedly confusing and they could be improved. But it's nowhere near as simple as people with the "use a fucking pencil, n00bs!" approach make it out to be.
What does that have to do with software development? If I'm deciding where to develop software, I couldn't care less how many versions of the gphone there are; I care that they all are based on android. If the competition is as fierce as you seem to suggest, that just means there are that many more potential customers out there to reach. What do I care how much T-Mobile or G-Mobile or Random-Mobile makes on the phone as long as they're selling them?
There are a lot of times I don't branch, but it's usually out of laziness and I end up regretting it at some point in the project.
Easily, the most common reason for branching is a stable-versus-development split. I've run into it in virtually every project I've been on that involved any other people (even just as employer), and even a number of my personal projects. Stable branches almost always need an occasional bugfix or super-quick feature that I can be reasonably sure to get in in a one or two commits, and typically these things need to go out ASAP. I've run into that a million times with copy changes. In programming world, copy changes are usually the lowest possible priority thing, but with clients they're often some of the highest priority.
Point being, if I'm ever working on adding some major feature--really anything that will take more than a couple days, and sometimes even when it won't--I'm likely going to be better served doing it in a branch. If it happens that I get through it without needing to make any changes to the stable code, sweet! The merge is going to be super quick and easy. If not I'm going to be very glad I took the time to branch or regret not having done so. "I can't make your change right now because I have a ton of half-finished in-development code" is not an excuse people are interested in hearing.
See, this comment illustrates my problem with this article specifically and Mac fanbois in general. (And I'm not talking about you, just using your comment to leap-frog.)
I'm all about choice. If you want to buy a Mac because you love OS X, or think it's sturdier, or prettier, or more stable, or WHATEVER--great. In this case you've judged that the power brick is reason enough--great. These are all essentially open to differing personal opinions, but at least they're actual reasoning.
But even you say it: These things do cost more. When there's an article obviously written by a fanboi who made up his mind and wrote an "article" to justify his assumptions; who cherry-picks more expensive hardware to make the price comparisons work out better for him and still ignores when there are several hundred and even as much as $400 (see grandparent) price differences; who is happy to re-configure other machines but miraculously won't add the $500 stick of 1GB RAM to his Mac... well, he's a complete asshat. I wish I could say he was the exception in mac fanboi land, but it doesn't seem that way. The only thing that bothers me more than stupid people are smart people who act stupid.
Your point about not only comparing specs for a price is well taken, but if somebody sets out to do that I wish they could do so objectively. I don't think that's asking too much, and I bet all the fanbois here don't either--as long as the topic isn't Apple.
Because it backfired. Not only did it not succeed in removing him from office, the majority of Americans found it to be petty. Increasingly so as time wore on. Many Republicans these days will even admit it was a mistake. (Not the talking heads on the radio, to be sure; their job is to rile people up.)
The article you linked verifies my point (if you actually followed the conclusion). Kucinich introduced articles of impeachment. The Republicans all voted FOR them; they desperately wanted them to come to a vote so that they could paint the Democrats as vindictive morons more concerned with taking their revenge on a president they don't like than governing the nation. Who cast them into oblivion? Democrats. Because they knew it. When the party that SHOULD support something opposes it and the one that should do everything they can to kill it wants it to proceed, you know there's some nasty politics going on. From the Democrats' perspective, it is much more important to get a democratic president elected now than it was to try to impeach Bush then.
Personally I wish he had been removed from office, because I think Bush has clearly done illegal things that warrant it. I also realize that he would never have been removed; that it would have been an entirely symbolic gesture that would have ground the congress to a halt, further politicized the nation and even introduced renewed uncertainty into the outcome of this presidential election. Symbols can be important, but I tend to prefer results.
Sorry, but that is one of the stupidest things I have ever read on Slashdot.
If I went hunting with somebody I had been friends with for years and got shot in the face, I damn sure wouldn't assume it was malice on my friend's part. And if some asshats tried to make political hay out of it as if it was somehow anything more than an accident, I too would defend my friend. It has nothing to do with being terrified of him or his "boss," it has to do with not being a shitty friend.
He SHOULD feel bad that the accident that he obviously thinks nothing of turned into some sort of controversy and maligned his friend, and if he felt that calling a press conference to tell people to shut up about it would help in the least he's right to do it. I would. If you wouldn't, well, I certainly wouldn't want to be your friend.
There are plenty of problems with Bush, Cheney, Republicans and even government in general. Let's focus on them instead of trying to invent more on stupid bases.
You shouldn't ABSTAIN from version numbers because they DO have meaning, but I don't see any reason it needs to be emphasized--especially for a first version.
If the point of "let's not call it 1.0!" is to avoid a stigma associated with that version number, simply release "WizzoProg." Stick the exact version number in a Help->About box someplace. If they need to call support, the version number is there--but by that time they've already purchased the product. At the very least they're almost certain to give it a real shot and make up their minds based on the actual quality of the program since they've already laid down their money.
After that point, you can release "Wizzprog 2" to show progress if you're inclined to do so.
Well, you're correct that if somebody is attracted to children they will likely always be attracted to children.
At the same time, recidivism rates for sex offenders is relatively low compared to many other types of crime, particularly violent crime. They may always be attracted to children, but that doesn't mean they can't be helped to control their urges or find alternate, more accepted mediums to dispense with them. There is quite a bit of porn out there, for example, claiming that the girls are children (usually 16). They very often look it, but I suspect that's not true most of the time. Obviously I have no idea if that helps, in the long run. I know doing nothing doesn't help either though.
My main problem with all this sex offender stuff is like somebody said earlier: If they're so dangerous and can't be rehabilitated, just execute them or lock them up forever and be done with it. The idea that somebody can do their time and even not have any period of probation yet be subject for the rest of their lives to tracking (registries, etc) and humiliation/ostrasization/threats/physical harm/etc (being required to tell their neighbors if they move in, "no sex offender" housing zones) is not only repugnant to me, it seems to all but guarantee we turn them into criminals again in one way or another. These laws also seem to be all about that. Nobody who knows anything expects that this bill will ACTUALLY protect children from all but the stupidest of predators, but it's another thing for cops to be able to put a big-bad-predator back in jail. Regardless of whether or not he really did anything.
Let's just find some internal consistency. If being a sex offender is something that makes your life forfeit, then do that. If not, let's stop passing these idiotic laws so DAs can become politicians and politicians can claim to be tough on crime and protecting your children.
Your comment about the whole basis of wealth and money is a bit off the board for me to reply to, but we can certainly look at surplus.
When presidents submit a budget, they're given an estimation of income. I assume this is what you're referring to when you talk about projections of surplus. This is largely irrelevant except to the intentions of the president. That is, if I submit a balanced budget I intended to submit a balanced budget. If after we count all the money it turns out we didn't bring in as much as projected, say because of an economic downturn, at least I can say I tried.
There are still absolute numbers, however. You can look back a year and see that we spent $X and brought in $Y. What basis these dollars exist in is largely irrelevant; it's the system we've chosen. Looking at Clinton's presidency, it looks like he ran deficits for the first five years and then surpluses the last three.
If I recall correctly, Clinton closed the deficit. That is, for some period during his presidency our debt was not going up. The debt has existed for a very long time, going back essentially to the founding of the nation.
Some good information and graphs on the debt can be found here: http://www.cedarcomm.com/~stevelm1/usdebt.htm. It also puts to bed some of the myths about who grows the debt (everybody), who shrinks it (nobody), who it grows more under (Republicans), the last time the debt has gone down at all (Kennedy), etc. A lot of the conclusions seem to fly in the face of conventional wisdom on these topics.
The site does seem to lean a little bit left, with a particular dislike of Bush, but it seems to be more focused on what he and other groups do to the deficit and debt in particular. It's certainly interesting no matter how you slice it.
You're assuming that the community in question actually has enough people in it to EVER justify fulfilling their desires. Laying fiber is not cheap, and neither is the equipment to make it work--especially as the distances from the rest of your equipment increases. Most companies probably aren't going to be very happy to hear "we'll make our investment back in 65 years." If they don't laugh their asses off and kill the project right then and there, at the very least that community is going to be the lowest possible priority project.
The government realized this way back when we were having these same problems with phone service. It's called cream skimming: companies swoop in to service high-value customers and leave low-value customers in the lurch. Take a look at your phone bill and you'll see a tax for Universal Service (or Connectivity, or something along those lines--depends on the phone company). The government realized these people weren't going to get service if they didn't force the companies to give it to them, so to make the deal a little sweeter to phone companies they permit them to pass the charge they have to pay into the Universal Service Fund onto their customers.
Personally I think that Internet access is becoming so important to this economy that even that plan would be fine with me if that's what it takes. The local government just providing service itself is certainly something I would consider a step down from that if it's feasible.
Well, at least your political leanings are overt. It's a perfectly valid position to have, but it's entirely too idealistic to work in the real world. To borrow a quote from West Wing: "I don't know where you get the idea that taxpayers shouldn't have to pay for anything of which they disapprove. Lots of them don't like tanks. Even more don't like Congress."
No, he certainly didn't "[ditch] individual rights." At worst he refused to consider a corporation an individual, which frankly is something we should have done long ago. As far as using tax dollars to pay for services, it's a debate that tends to split the nation in half. The bottom line is if these people don't like it, they need to vote into office politicians who are more in line with their beliefs. This is their local government; the government most easy for them to change. If there's nobody in that community who's willing to oppose projects like that, it says more about the political leanings of that community than it does about politicians or government.
Obviously this is open to differing opinions, but I thought the before picture of the first girl was just ugly. The eyes were totally freaking me out.
You're right about the before/after photos in TV spots and such most of the time; they tend to do things like smile versus not smile and in the after shot they're almost always wearing some sort of make-up and often their hairsyle has completely changed.
In the case of this application, it definitely messes with the lips but that's not all. It also definitely messes with the eyes in most of the cases and tends to lighten the images a bit (which is a bit of a "duh" moment). In a handful of cases, it also messes with the size of the nose, though not always in the same direction (smaller or larger), and I see at least four cases where it messed with the overall shape of the head or face. The first two photos in the last set of samples, for example, clearly had somewhat pudgy faces that were thinned out/elongated. Oh, and the first female example shot in both sets looks like the eyebrows were smoothed out as well; they had a noticable bow to them originally but it's much less exaggerated in the after shots.
When you total it up you have modifications to the eyes and eyebrows, nose and lips, as well as the shape and coloring of the face and/or head. That seems like a pretty complete list of things you can fudge around on a picture of somebody's face. All in all I thought it was fairly impressive.
Well, I'm not sure what the liability laws are like in Australia but if they're anything like the US, I'd say they have 70 people with the possibility of suing them and a decent chance of winning based on strict liability.
For those who don't know, strict liability basically amounts to "this is so fucking dangerous you're liable even if you did your best." I'm pretty sure penny-pinching to avoid paying for some shielded wires would certainly even fall short of "doing [one's] best" part, regardless of whether or not they asked you politely over the PA system to turn the phones off.
My experience is with a PS3 as a Blu-Ray player, but I'll answer the questions as best I can.
No.
No.
Not to view the movie, but the BD-Live content would require you to have an active Internet connection.
You would have all of the content of the disc available, but none of the extra features (whatever those may be) that come from the BD-Live segment.
It was actually worse than that. His steps were actually:
1. wait for some guy to code something cool .c and .h files do a "s/guys name/my name/g"
2. In all
3. relase as closed source application
4. PROFIT!!
5. File patents for things related to your stolen code
6. Send the original author bills for the usage of your patents.
7. PROFIT!!
Luckily his seventh step ended up being "GET SUED!!" in this particular case, but jesus, does that take balls.
I say this once every few debates over the 10th Amendment, and it feels like its time again.
If we're going to be strict constructionalists, that's swell. But to be logically and legally consistent, the very first thing we need to start with is the idea that the Supreme Court can strike down laws based on their constitutionality. The Constitution gives them no such authority, only the authority to interpret laws; this was a power that John Marshall took for himself in order to fuck over Thomas Jefferson when he felt the law would have had him ruling on Jefferson's side and he didn't want to. A pretty amusing backdrop for what ends up being one of the most important things to happen in our nation's history.
Absent that authority, debating what is and isn't constitutional is nothing but an intellectual exercise in futility. Hell, even with that authority it only works based on the goodwill of the other branches, since the judiciary has no authority, constitutional or otherwise, to enforce its own decisions--that's what the executive is for. But I digress: Call up your governor and try to get them to secede, because that's pretty well your only course of action once we throw out judicial review. I'm sure you'll realize some people tried that once and it cost half a million soldiers' lives and didn't succeed, but maybe the second time's the charm.
Most "read the 10th amendment n00b!" arguments tend to rely on judicial review to be worth their salt and I think we've pretty well seen the folly there, so I'll leave it with one more thought pertaining more to the situation at hand: If we do accept the premise of judicial review, then there is decades and decades of precedent and case-law giving the federal government vastly more authority than you 10th amendment folks think it should have, and their opinions are the only ones that matter since that same Constitution apparently gives them the right to decide.
If you think this is unconstitutional, sue, but don't be surprised if you get legally slapped down at every turn. The Constitution is a great, important document, but our interpretations of it have also come a long way in the past 200 years.
These are civil torts and they should be handled in civil court between the two parties involved. There's no reason for the government to get involved at all, much less any more than they already are, that much more less than making it a White House/presidential priority by creating a copyright czar to operate from within the executive branch.
But more to the point, I'm tired of them pandering to big business. Assume this passes. I write a song and it's getting copied around. Do you think I'm going to be able to call up federal prosecutors and get some help? Of course not. This is for their buddies at the RIAA/MPAA member companies and nobody else. If government feels the need to get their grubby hands into this, then they should at least avoid pandering to the groups that give them money. If they want to "help," they should help the people least able to help themselves instead of billion dollar corporations with legal teams that dwarf the size of most small businesses.
No, you put them in to discourage the thief from even trying. Breaking most door locks isn't a particularly hard task, but it is noisy and it's fair more complicated than simply jumping in the open window next door.
That said, a door-locks-to-encryption analogy suffers. In order to tell whether or not you're using encryption, they basically have to have already compromised your system or connection in such a way that they can already see your packets. Maybe they move away at that point, but you've already got some pretty serious problems.
I don't necessarily disagree with the sentiment you expressed, but let me try to compose a counter-argument.
When you take a job, there's an understanding and a contract. Clearly, your compensation is outlined: you make $X per year, you get this many vacation days, your benefits are this. But there's no clear expectation of what's expected from you that would allow you to make an informed decision as to whether that compensation is fair for what effort you're expending.
Absent that, a typical American workweek is considered to be 40 hours. That allows you to compare your salary and your work, and to compare across jobs. As an example, let's assume that one job offers $60,000 and one job offers $70,000. The benefits are identical, just to eliminate too much complication. The second job certainly seems more fruitful. If everybody was up-front that "this is a 40 hour per week job" versus "this is a 50 hour per week job," you'd be able to deduce roughly what you make: Fifty weeks a year, your pay is $30/hr for the first job and $28/hr for the second. Suddenly that higher number in the second job is looking less attractive.
The problem is most people aren't up-front and you can't make those comparisons. As you pointed out, "well then leave your job" isn't always even a viable choice, much less a wise one. Even if you did that every time it turns out your employer was deceptive about their expectations, future employers are going to be wary of hiring somebody who consistently leaves his job after short periods of time. If you're lucky, you get a chance to explain what happened and maybe get a shot. If not, they just toss your resume off the heap and nobody even evaluates whether what you did is reasonable.
The reality is, most people aren't complaining about this over occasional overtime. Most of the people aren't going "I have to work 42 hours a week three times a year, you owe me!!" The issue is more like my example: Systematic, consistent abuse of "overtime" such that it's not really overtime, it's a longer-time job. If that's what they're offering, great. But if they don't that abundantly clear at the time they hire you, that for whatever reason you're likely to be consistently working far more than 40 hours a week, then they should pay for that.
Secondly (and yes, believe it or not, that was all one point!) it evens the power between employer and employee. The employers almost always have the power, especially in bad economic times and in anything other than extremely specialized, highly-technical fields. If they're free to abuse their employees in that way, most will. But if there's an economic consequence to it--ie, if they need to pay for it--then they're much more likely to actually fix the problems that are forcing this sort of thing.
I work as a freelancer in web development. In my experience, the vast majority of the time that overtime is truly needed it's because somebody up the (project) management chain didn't have the nuts to keep things on schedule--and I don't mean development, it's always on the creative side or the client side--or negotiate a reasonable enough project duration from the get-go. The development teams continue to pull miracles out of their ass because they haven't yet mis-managed away ALL of their development talent (just 70% or so, with more leaving soon). Rather than fixing the problems that makes that necessary week in and week out, they simply come to rely on it. Oh, there's much hand-wringing out "ZOMG CAN WE DO IT AGAIN!" and a LOT of bitching about freelancer hours lately, as if that's the problem, but they make no effort to fix the issue. Most of their employees are salaried. It seems to me if they had to pay time-and-a-half until they got their heads out of their asses, every single person at that company would be better off in six months. Or the company would fold, but I'm being redundant.
It depends on where you live. You seem to live in an important state. From your description, it is a swing state decided by only a handful of votes. Clearly, every vote there is important.
I, on the other hand, live in Illinois. Is there really any doubt it will break solidly for Obama? (Not just because he's from here; Illinois tends to go blue due to Chicago, even though most of the rest of the state tends toward Republicans.) Is there much in the way of doubt on how California or New York will break? Or on the flip side, Texas? Which states these are may or may not switch around a bit depending on who's running in a given election, but there are, at least these days, always certain states that are all but given to break a certain way before a single vote is ever cast.
It's true that if enough people stay home because their vote doesn't really matter the outcome can change, but the reality is that some peoples' votes basically are worthless due to political geography.
Honestly, I have trouble believing that this would stand up in court if somebody actually wanted to challenge it. For starters, the whole concept is ridiculously stupid on its face. Why should you be permitted to NDA every piece of correspondence you have, regardless of whether or not it really has anything to do with your products or process, just to be able to do dickhead things but not take a beating in public for it? It's a simple abuse of the legal system and a legal attempt to circumvent whatever few free market principles we have left.
Beyond that, consider what you just said in the context. We're talking about somebody whose application was rejected. Given that situation, and according to your explanation for it, you're saying that for just $99 and the signing of an NDA, that person has purchased the right to have their application rejected. It's painfully clear what Apple gets out of this process, but what does the rejected developer get? I admit my legal knowledge isn't vast (and of course nothing is as simple as it seems) but I've always believed that if there's no consideration on both sides, a contract is not valid. I hardly consider trading $99 for an NDA to be consideration to the developer.