Just because a terraformed Mars may require maintainance, doesn't mean it's not worth it. After all, it's providing a new place to fit billions more people.
Well, I got it, but I'm more interested in how Deja Thoris, Princess of Mars, is faring (she could raise the surface temperature on Mars all by herself).
To stay on topic, the problem is that companies like Diebold and Sequoia Systems are fighting every attempt to provide a paper ballot trail that could be used to check the accuracy of their machines and the validity of the voting results. They claim their machines are infallible despite the numerous problems that have been documented during recent elections. That should scare any voter.
And ID requirements? Yeah, that isn't a way to screw over poor people who might not have a drivers license or DMV ID -- last time I checked those cost money.
Clothes cost money as well, but I've never heard of nude people being allowed to vote. Non-driver ID cards typically have a very small one-time charge. There is nothing wrong with voter ID requirements. Without them you are inviting every felon and illegal alien in the country to vote. That is supposed to be a right reserved to citizens who have not proven themselves to be a menace to society. There are already provisional ballots for people who don't have their ID at the time. It's a non-problem for people who aren't trying to scam the system.
But I don't think this is an intrinsic issue for online voting companies.
Online voting (at least in national elections) isn't allowed in this country. This is an issue about companies that provide computerized black-box voting machines and resist every effort to provide ballot paper-trails and audited source code. Now why would any company not be willing, even eager, to prove their honesty and their product's accuracy when it comes to our election process? Diebold isn't the only one that has been caught lying or providing equipmnent that doesn't "work" quite right. Sequoia Systems is high on the list as well.
The other unanswered question was about funding having a relationship to the results. The position was that the results were independent of the funding, but how many organizations that produce unfavorable results continue to get funding for new "studies"? That selection process would eventually produce results favorable to the sponsoring company with the money.
Okay, and the Pinto wasn't a totally domestic product, so it might be a bad example for the point you were trying to make. I must have missed/filtered the comment you replied to - it seemed that the argument was about poor design and/or incorrect implementation - not where the product was manufactured.
The problems with the first Corvair, which really weren't great, were fixed long before Nader wrote his book. The only reason the Corvair has a bad rep is because GM tried to strongarm Nader. Back in the day, I really wanted a later model Corvair to mod - great suspension and an engine from Porsche. Sigh, I never got the chance to do it, but there are still Corvair clubs around. Bad example to cite.
Sadly, the string probably voids your warranty and places you in peril of prosecution in violation of the DMCA as a disallowed modification/hack that circumvents certain behaviors of the system as Microsoft designed it.
Bah. (Cue the Ennio Morricone music) Hang 'em. Hang 'em high!
In terms of fabulous domestic products, I've got 2 words for you;
Ford Pinto
The Ford Pinto caught fire only after being rear-ended. It didn't overheat and stop working every twenty minutes. If your Xbox 360 was run over by a car, that would be a reasonable cause to stop working properly.
The only way to fight a rabid dog is to put it down. Use a gun!
But Atticus Finch, who used the gun, was a really a lawyer. The reversed symbolism here is killing me. Can somebody please bring in an English Lit professor from the EFF to clear this up?
The last gasps of the commercial software industry will not be nice, or any fun at all.
Commercial software is in no danger. It might not be a good time to be developing commercial operating systems, but that's a small fraction of the industry (developer-wise, not revenue-wise). The software industry is healthy overall. The loss of Microsoft's multi-billion OS and office businesses would be less problematic than the end of Enron was. There were no big disruptions when Standard Oil and Ma Bell were broken up, despite all the dire forcasts.
What the FSCK is the UN worth if they're dancing to the tune of a stupid company? Apparently they have no opinions of their own.
The UN has plenty of independent opinions, it's just that they are easily changed by the presence of large amounts of money. Hmmm . . . sounds an awful lot like the US Congress now that I think about it.
I think you're having problems with reading comprehension. 20 years of UNIX/Linux experience != 20 years of Linux experience. The two operating systems are highly similar, and experience with one should generally apply to the other. If you can't understand that, then I can understand that your lack of regard for experience is due to your inexperience.
They can't get rid of customer service completely, but you know they all want to. They can, however, make it as hard as possible for you to contact them.
That's true enough. They are also making it as hard as possible to communicate if you do manage to get through to a real person. I recently went through a phone menu maze only to wind up at a dead-end and started pounding "0". Then I was connected to "Harry" who had a passing acquaintance with English. It took me several minutes to make him understand that I did not use Microsoft Windows at home, so I could not access their "solution". Once you get them off their scripts, they're lost. For many companies, customer service is dead (consumers don't need it).
Good advice. I would also add the "sweet spot". That is 2 to 5 years of experience.
You are the problem, not the solution. Would you prefer a surgeon who had 2-5 years experience over the one who had 20 years experience? Clue: I chose the one with 20 years experience, and it worked well for me. This applies to IT as well as any other field.
Agreed, and it's getting worse. What's really the question here? There aren't enough jobs for the CS/IT graduates we are producing, but Congress is determined to worsen the situation by increasing the number of IT workers brought in on work visas (H-1B/L) in the latest budget legislation. I've been working my congress-critters for years, but if people in our profession (and others by extension) aren't willing to slam our legislators, perhaps we deserve to go out with a whimper rather than a bang.
It would be a sad ending to see the productive workforce sold out to cheap foreign labor by a very expensive, unproductive legislature that can't be replaced by a cheap foreign legislature.
The format? Which one? Word 97, Word 2000, and Word 2003 document formats all have incompatibilities going both forward and backward. Apparently, every version has its own format. What about the next version of Word?
Those gold tablets wouldn't mean much to Bill. Do they come with an EULA guaranteeing that MS won't break the standard next year with a new version? Anyone who has used MS Word for a few years with anything more complex than plain text is aware that compatibility between versions is not Microsoft's strong suit. Playing catch-up to a rapidly changing so-called "open standard" won't benefit anyone except MS. Obviously, the various governments are interested in a stable document format.
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You mean, Total Recall was right????
:-)
And you all laughed!!! HA!!
I couldn't help it. Schwarzenegger's ballooning face and the visible gas spewing out over the planet were funny. I didn't know it was real science. :)
Just because a terraformed Mars may require maintainance, doesn't mean it's not worth it. After all, it's providing a new place to fit billions more people.
Well, there goes the neighborhood.
This may sound cold, but I don't want to know anything about ice holes near Uranus.
Well, I got it, but I'm more interested in how Deja Thoris, Princess of Mars, is faring (she could raise the surface temperature on Mars all by herself).
To stay on topic, the problem is that companies like Diebold and Sequoia Systems are fighting every attempt to provide a paper ballot trail that could be used to check the accuracy of their machines and the validity of the voting results. They claim their machines are infallible despite the numerous problems that have been documented during recent elections. That should scare any voter.
And ID requirements? Yeah, that isn't a way to screw over poor people who might not have a drivers license or DMV ID -- last time I checked those cost money.
Clothes cost money as well, but I've never heard of nude people being allowed to vote. Non-driver ID cards typically have a very small one-time charge. There is nothing wrong with voter ID requirements. Without them you are inviting every felon and illegal alien in the country to vote. That is supposed to be a right reserved to citizens who have not proven themselves to be a menace to society. There are already provisional ballots for people who don't have their ID at the time. It's a non-problem for people who aren't trying to scam the system.
But I don't think this is an intrinsic issue for online voting companies.
Online voting (at least in national elections) isn't allowed in this country. This is an issue about companies that provide computerized black-box voting machines and resist every effort to provide ballot paper-trails and audited source code. Now why would any company not be willing, even eager, to prove their honesty and their product's accuracy when it comes to our election process? Diebold isn't the only one that has been caught lying or providing equipmnent that doesn't "work" quite right. Sequoia Systems is high on the list as well.
http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/1 1/28/1245256&tid=109&tid=11&tid=106
The other unanswered question was about funding having a relationship to the results. The position was that the results were independent of the funding, but how many organizations that produce unfavorable results continue to get funding for new "studies"? That selection process would eventually produce results favorable to the sponsoring company with the money.
Okay, and the Pinto wasn't a totally domestic product, so it might be a bad example for the point you were trying to make. I must have missed/filtered the comment you replied to - it seemed that the argument was about poor design and/or incorrect implementation - not where the product was manufactured.
The problems with the first Corvair, which really weren't great, were fixed long before Nader wrote his book. The only reason the Corvair has a bad rep is because GM tried to strongarm Nader. Back in the day, I really wanted a later model Corvair to mod - great suspension and an engine from Porsche. Sigh, I never got the chance to do it, but there are still Corvair clubs around. Bad example to cite.
Sadly, the string probably voids your warranty and places you in peril of prosecution in violation of the DMCA as a disallowed modification/hack that circumvents certain behaviors of the system as Microsoft designed it.
Bah. (Cue the Ennio Morricone music) Hang 'em. Hang 'em high!
In terms of fabulous domestic products, I've got 2 words for you;
Ford Pinto
The Ford Pinto caught fire only after being rear-ended. It didn't overheat and stop working every twenty minutes. If your Xbox 360 was run over by a car, that would be a reasonable cause to stop working properly.
The only way to fight a rabid dog is to put it down. Use a gun!
But Atticus Finch, who used the gun, was a really a lawyer. The reversed symbolism here is killing me. Can somebody please bring in an English Lit professor from the EFF to clear this up?
The last gasps of the commercial software industry will not be nice, or any fun at all.
Commercial software is in no danger. It might not be a good time to be developing commercial operating systems, but that's a small fraction of the industry (developer-wise, not revenue-wise). The software industry is healthy overall. The loss of Microsoft's multi-billion OS and office businesses would be less problematic than the end of Enron was. There were no big disruptions when Standard Oil and Ma Bell were broken up, despite all the dire forcasts.
What the FSCK is the UN worth if they're dancing to the tune of a stupid company? Apparently they have no opinions of their own.
The UN has plenty of independent opinions, it's just that they are easily changed by the presence of large amounts of money. Hmmm . . . sounds an awful lot like the US Congress now that I think about it.
You made a very good, but very subtle, point with your last statement, and I doubt you even realized it.
I rarely make points I'm not aware of, especially alliterative, balanced counterpoints, but thanks for dissing me (and thanks for getting it). :)
I think you're having problems with reading comprehension. 20 years of UNIX/Linux experience != 20 years of Linux experience. The two operating systems are highly similar, and experience with one should generally apply to the other. If you can't understand that, then I can understand that your lack of regard for experience is due to your inexperience.
They can't get rid of customer service completely, but you know they all want to. They can, however, make it as hard as possible for you to contact them.
That's true enough. They are also making it as hard as possible to communicate if you do manage to get through to a real person. I recently went through a phone menu maze only to wind up at a dead-end and started pounding "0". Then I was connected to "Harry" who had a passing acquaintance with English. It took me several minutes to make him understand that I did not use Microsoft Windows at home, so I could not access their "solution". Once you get them off their scripts, they're lost. For many companies, customer service is dead (consumers don't need it).
Which would you rather have, an admin with 2 years of Linux experience or one with 20 years of UNIX/Linux experience? I'll take the latter.
Good advice. I would also add the "sweet spot". That is 2 to 5 years of experience.
You are the problem, not the solution. Would you prefer a surgeon who had 2-5 years experience over the one who had 20 years experience? Clue: I chose the one with 20 years experience, and it worked well for me. This applies to IT as well as any other field.
Agreed, and it's getting worse. What's really the question here? There aren't enough jobs for the CS/IT graduates we are producing, but Congress is determined to worsen the situation by increasing the number of IT workers brought in on work visas (H-1B/L) in the latest budget legislation. I've been working my congress-critters for years, but if people in our profession (and others by extension) aren't willing to slam our legislators, perhaps we deserve to go out with a whimper rather than a bang.
It would be a sad ending to see the productive workforce sold out to cheap foreign labor by a very expensive, unproductive legislature that can't be replaced by a cheap foreign legislature.
I hope they really open up the format.
The format? Which one? Word 97, Word 2000, and Word 2003 document formats all have incompatibilities going both forward and backward. Apparently, every version has its own format. What about the next version of Word?
Those gold tablets wouldn't mean much to Bill. Do they come with an EULA guaranteeing that MS won't break the standard next year with a new version? Anyone who has used MS Word for a few years with anything more complex than plain text is aware that compatibility between versions is not Microsoft's strong suit. Playing catch-up to a rapidly changing so-called "open standard" won't benefit anyone except MS. Obviously, the various governments are interested in a stable document format.
Dunno, but he must be pretty important. He doesn't answer email while Taco does.