I've gone off and on watching TV shows streaming from the various websites of the networks, and, for the most part, it's ok. If they were in HD resolution and didn't chop the videos up into multiple streams with forced ads it'd be a decent alternative.
As it is, I mostly prefer renting the series on Netflix when it becomes available or setting it up on my DVR. I'm really pleased with the quality of Netflix' streaming, though I'm not so happy with having to open an IE window to do it.
The sad part is that if you pay MSRP you're going to pay less for the Prius than most of Toyota's other vehicles, and the same goes with the Insight vs. most of Honda's vehicles. Unless you're going for the bottom-line cars they offer, or the dealer is putting on some good deals on the other models, the real premium is when you go for one of the hybrid versions of their other models.
Of course, I drive a POS Kia that I dump money into every year to keep on the road and only drive 7 miles a day. I get about 10-15 miles per gallon but my cost for gas is roughly $15/week because I only have to fill the tank every other week.
If it weren't for the significant difference in the cost of an 8 year old Kia vs. a brand new Toyota I'd probably buy a Prius for the 5-6x improvement in city gas mileage (fill the tank once a month? every other month? buy less gas to keep it from going bad in the tank?).
Exactly, once they find the bandwidth to the new server farm in China is acceptable, the people with their hands on the box are not here. We may find that server farms start moving to wherever the electricity and disposal fees for the servers are cheapest, and more people are buying their servers preloaded (and any additional custom software load can be done over the wire).
Hell, I've only seen three of the servers I work with every day, and the only reason I have a clue where any of the rest are (in another state) is because someone let us know in a meeting that a physical move had completed successfully and we needed to check out the software and keep an eye on things for a little while to make sure everything was running right.
and even if they were in a situation to actually encounter an oddball case, the chances are that their supervisor would either do it themselves or take it upon themselves to tell them how to do it step-by-step, instead of letting them make mistakes and helping them fix it.
I worked with a group of electricians on a short job a few months ago, and none of them were particularly familiar with the type of work we were doing. Thankfully the specification had been written up, the scope of work was fairly limited, and roughly half the individuals were fairly intelligent. It took an hour or so to pick up most of the nuances involved in the work, and after the first day it became fairly quick and easy work. I couldn't imagine wiring wall sockets for 3 years and studying for a test and suddenly feeling confident in calling myself a master electrician, though.
In some states, they can't sell the house if they did any electrical work themselves until they have it inspected specifically to make sure their work is up to code (and they may have to pay a fine for not having it done by a certified electrician). Of course, if the owner doesn't tell anyone (because they don't want to pay a fine), and the inspectors that come in to evaluate the house for purposes of sale don't notice that some electrical work was done, then you won't know anyway until something blows up.
The reality, though, is that if you hire a certified electrician to do the work, you're probably going to get an apprentice doing the work with the certified electrician (hopefully on-site) looking over it before inspection.
Of course, the house I just moved out of was built to code 30 years ago, and you couldn't really plug any minor electronics into a wall socket without a surge protector (most laptops and such can handle a pretty wide range of fluctuation in the power, but a cheap fan or lamp can't). If they ever sell the house (rather than it remaining a rental property), they might have to replace all of the wiring, if someone knows to ask whether or not it's aluminum.
It should also be noted that most (if not all, and especially pre-schools, since that's what I'm currently most familiar with) schools use this concept as well. You give the school a list of people that are permitted to pick up your child, and they don't let anyone else near your child.
They also had a list (usually a very short list, like the parents) of people they could call to authorize someone to pick up your child, and even if the person coming to pick up your child was on the whitelist they would call the people that could authorize a pick-up before letting the child out of the building.
At least I always felt comfortable knowing not only that I could stop by at any time and see that my child was ok, but also that only my wife could pick up my child without someone calling me or her to confirm that it was ok.
ECMAScript is the standard version. JavaScript was the original made by Netscape (after being named LiveScript or Mocha), and v1.5+ of JavaScript is compliant with ECMA v3. JScript is the Microsoft implementation in IE, and v5.5+ is compliant with ECMA v3.
To the best of my knowledge, Opera is the only browser that calls its scripting dialect ECMAScript. ECMA v3 is turning 9 years old in December.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13"
Let's see, "Safari" && !"Chrome" would probably do the trick. As a bonus you can separate them out and get the Chrome stats. Or you can pull out the Chrome results before the Safari results.
Of course, I don't know the exact method or code you're using to check browser agents now, so telling you the exact modifications you need to make is impossible.
Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
·
· Score: 1
If someone reports crashing on your site, and you find out they're using some ancient web browser, you code a work-around and get on with life. Or you get obnoxious and code in a nag screen that tells them to upgrade their browser. 90% of the time the first option is really the only option.
At least most of us have grown beyond the entry page with separate links for Netscape and IE users.
It should be noted, though, that it's significantly easier in most states for a woman to change her name upon marriage than it is for a man to change his name under any circumstances (at least in the US). For the most part, this is because it is such a common practice for women to change their names when they marry. People seemingly bend over backwards to work around any problems in their system to make sure women can still have access to their bank accounts, credit cards, billing, etc. when they change their names. My wife is more or less still able to operate completely under her maiden name or married name.
When men decide to change their name (for instance when a couple decides to hyphenate their last name when they marry), they often find they have a much harder time than their wife getting even the simplest things done, such as changing their name on a bill (hell, I can't even get people to spell my first name right on bills, and they can still find my credit record to give me a bad credit score if I don't pay it).
Even companies with licenses to get their computers repaired still do in-house IT work that can be helped with an A+ certification, and the A+ certifications have changed for the better in recent years.
Of course, it is going to depend on your particular job market. For example, a friend of mine went through the hoops to get a number of certifications, including A+ and Cisco certs (and MS certs), and the best job he could get initially was phone support. As he went through 2 of these jobs (which in one case was outsourced after he left, and in another case centralized from east- and west- coast locations to a single central time zone location), he eventually gained job experience that got him a better job doing actual IT work with room for upward movement.
The strange thing was that someone in the review board for the job actually said he got the job because one of his previous employers was the company from which they bought a number of their computers. So even though his job description was basically to read a script (and he got in trouble if someone noticed that he was solving problems off-script), just having worked for (major computer OEM) was enough for a better job position to open up.
Of course, in order to continue to move up he had to complete his college degree, but with the benefits he received from his employer that was a much easier proposition than it had been previously (and he recently received his bachelor's).
>Just look at all the professors who are brilliant >theorists and scholars but terrible instructors.
Another item to look at is how many text books are simply resold after the course is complete, even in computer programming courses, where you would think the student would have reason to maintain a decent library of solid books on at least some concepts. Many text books are written by professors, and they're often terrible. Most teachers use textbooks for homework problems and some examples, but the actual in-class teaching comes from material prepared by the teacher over many years of developing the course (as well as some material required by the school, in some cases).
Of the college textbooks I've had over the years, I've kept 3 that were actually used in my classes: 1) a Calculus workbook that contained a review of Algebra, Geometry, and Trigonometry. 2) a Logic textbook (which I loaned to someone and never got back) 3) K&R C
It might be interesting to have K&R teaching a class on C, and they might have been better instructors than the one that used their book (and it was a supplemental book, not the main book for the course), but they're probably better off writing code than teaching undergrads to not forget their semicolons and ampersands.
Whether or not parallel code is superior to a single-threaded solution depends on the application and the actual implementation. In some cases there's no way to actually make a multi-threaded version of the same application any faster, the best you can hope for is the same level of performance. In other cases the assumptions made when deciding what parts of the application should be in separate threads turn out to be incorrect.
Multi-core is working because most people now run multiple applications at a time, not because more applications take advantage of multi-threading properly (not to mention that the OS itself is using CPU time in addition to any applications you are using). Going from 2 to 4 cores has proven less beneficial for most users simply because people so rarely use the CPU resources they have, and the problems of getting more benefit in a single application from 4 cores are even more complicated than 2, except in specific applications.
Browsers, especially in a world of multi-tab browsers with higher use of flash and javascript on the web, should be able to benefit from multi-threading, but how much benefit can be gained and whether or not the initial assumptions programmers make going into the project are correct are the main questions at hand.
Of course, 171 threads makes you wonder what assumptions they were making, or even what they're doing with those threads.
The other thing is that in the US pensions are employer-run (or farmed out), not government systems. Not only do we know that Social Security will be nearly impossible for us to collect, but employer pensions are going out the door as well, in favor of a 401k or nothing at all. The message is to start investing in your 401k as soon as you have the option, and to keep rolling that money over into other retirement funds when you change jobs.
Additionally, health care only adds so much to our life spans. Average ages are getting older more because people are choosing not to have children, or have fewer children than in the post-WWII era. My father was one of eight kids, and my wife's father was one of fifteen.
Even C# isn't bad if you're just learning to program. Early books on C# (some written while.Net was still in beta/RC stage) are still relevant for most of what people are going to do with the language. Anyone with no programming experience whatsoever will pick up plenty of useful information from even 6-year-old books on the language. Once they're competent with C# and.Net 1.x, they would simply need to learn the additions for 2.x and 3.x, if they were going to use those additions at all. There aren't a lot of changes to the core 1.x functionality, and it can all still be used against the.Net 1.x runtimes.
What I've really found difficult with C# programming is the lack of really solid books on.Net itself, especially dealing with ASP.Net and ADO.Net. Basically once you're at the point of dealing with these parts of the framework (where things do tend to advance more quickly), you're left with scouring web resources for little nuggets of useful information in a sea of garbage.
Of course, I still believe in learning programming by starting with a more static language like C or C++ that spends a lot more time in the standardization bodies before being updated. The usefulness in the workforce may be less clear, as people are hiring more web developers than systems developers, but it will give the students a good foundation from which to learn.
Then again, schools seem to be moving more towards the focus of getting students into the workforce than life-long learning, even at the college level.
The paper, TV, and talk radio are all mediums. The message is going to depend on what paper(s) you read, what channels you watch on TV, and what you listen to on the radio. To the older generations it may not be about the "sexiness of the delivery channel", but it is about their comfort level with the delivery channel. Eventually people move to TV channels, radio programs, and papers that tell them what they want to hear. None of these mediums are less prone to distortion of the truth than the internet, and people that want to find the truth without the distortions at least have a chance to find it on the internet (though they have to actively look for it rather than relying on biased mediums).
It's not just young people. Older people vote based on what they read in the paper, what they're told by talk radio, and what they see on TV (or just what someone said down at the barbershop/hair stylist or the bingo hall).
Mass ignorance is the reason that the US democracy was set up to eliminate votes from the system, starting by preventing people from voting for all sorts of reasons (though race and sex were part of it, there were also issues of land ownership, literacy, and other items eliminated previously).
Since we've decided that everyone's vote must count, we have to deal with this issue by attempting to educate people, not by bemoaning their ignorance. At least some of these uses of modern tools are trying to educate people, though obviously in a self-serving manner wherever possible.
Preventing people from casting legitimate votes, regardless of their political affiliation, race, religious background, or any other criteria covered under law, is both legally and morally irresponsible.
And yes, for some reason this does include being stupid enough to fall for something like this in the first place.
Not only this, but the third party you vote for has a chance of gaining more backing in future elections if they can meet the percentage quotas for your particular state.
Beyond this, though, people should focus more on the elections that really matter, such as state and local elections as well as your senators and representatives. Even though one senator or representative doesn't have a great say in the bigger picture, a concerted effort to replace Congress with a more technologically savvy body on the whole by concentrating efforts on getting out to vote every other year and spreading the necessary information about individual voting records for your regional elections would do far more to make a real change in this country than electing anyone to the Presidency.
The whole point of the office of President is a final check and balance over the Congress to prevent unpopular bills from passing that can't get a 2/3 majority in Congress (to overturn a Presidential veto). The whole reason that Bush has been such a poor President is that he went along with Congress on so many poor bills and pushed to increase his own power (and they followed suit and gave it to him).
Focus on moving power back away from the President by paying more attention to what's going on in the other elections. Maybe even generate some way for people to work together on proposing new laws to address technology issues in ways that afford us the rights we value rather than reinforcing corporate values with laws sponsored by Disney and the RIAA/MPAA. Remember that the only reason the President can propose a law is because ANYONE can propose a law, the hard part is getting it into the hands of someone in Congress that understands and is willing to push it through.
Generally the point of GTA is brutalizing aggressive, threatening members of opposing street gangs and/or stealing items in their possession. Even under those circumstances you can draw the attention of the police and have some trouble getting rewarded for doing so. Brutalizing the passive, non-threatening characters is possible simply because the game tries not to restrain your actions, but it does not go out of its way rewarding you for doing so.
Personally, I've spent a lot of time playing the game for the sake of the freedom to run around in the environment and doing a great deal of damage, but while I enjoyed the challenge of fending off the highest levels of government intervention it would throw at me, I never found it interesting to play this way for long, as the reward system was not in the game itself to encourage this activity, the game actively resists users taking this action (but does not prevent them completely from doing so).
Another example: stores could reduce shoplifting to zero by physically searching every person who leaves the store Except that they actually can't do that. They can ask you to wait for the police to arrive to search you under suspicion of shoplifting, but (in the US at least), they can't search you unless you tell them they can. They can't even look into the bag you just received from the cashier unless you let them.
The only places that even come close to doing this are membership stores, and they don't bother to do more than check the contents of your cart against your receipt, if that. You're subject to the requirements of the membership in those cases.
Any other time a store employee searches your bag/cart, it's generally because an alarm went off and/or an employee requested the search, and you consented to speed things up, because waiting around for the police is pretty boring (and they're not likely in any hurry once store security has escorted you to a back room where you can't make too much of a scene). The sad part is that the alarms go off more often because the employee at the checkout didn't do their job properly rather than because someone was trying to steal something.
Slashdot Mirror
and who let the women and children in? They're supposed to be on the ark waiting for the flood, damnit
I've gone off and on watching TV shows streaming from the various websites of the networks, and, for the most part, it's ok. If they were in HD resolution and didn't chop the videos up into multiple streams with forced ads it'd be a decent alternative.
As it is, I mostly prefer renting the series on Netflix when it becomes available or setting it up on my DVR. I'm really pleased with the quality of Netflix' streaming, though I'm not so happy with having to open an IE window to do it.
The sad part is that if you pay MSRP you're going to pay less for the Prius than most of Toyota's other vehicles, and the same goes with the Insight vs. most of Honda's vehicles. Unless you're going for the bottom-line cars they offer, or the dealer is putting on some good deals on the other models, the real premium is when you go for one of the hybrid versions of their other models.
Of course, I drive a POS Kia that I dump money into every year to keep on the road and only drive 7 miles a day. I get about 10-15 miles per gallon but my cost for gas is roughly $15/week because I only have to fill the tank every other week.
If it weren't for the significant difference in the cost of an 8 year old Kia vs. a brand new Toyota I'd probably buy a Prius for the 5-6x improvement in city gas mileage (fill the tank once a month? every other month? buy less gas to keep it from going bad in the tank?).
Until they move the boxes to India.
Exactly, once they find the bandwidth to the new server farm in China is acceptable, the people with their hands on the box are not here. We may find that server farms start moving to wherever the electricity and disposal fees for the servers are cheapest, and more people are buying their servers preloaded (and any additional custom software load can be done over the wire).
Hell, I've only seen three of the servers I work with every day, and the only reason I have a clue where any of the rest are (in another state) is because someone let us know in a meeting that a physical move had completed successfully and we needed to check out the software and keep an eye on things for a little while to make sure everything was running right.
and even if they were in a situation to actually encounter an oddball case, the chances are that their supervisor would either do it themselves or take it upon themselves to tell them how to do it step-by-step, instead of letting them make mistakes and helping them fix it.
I worked with a group of electricians on a short job a few months ago, and none of them were particularly familiar with the type of work we were doing. Thankfully the specification had been written up, the scope of work was fairly limited, and roughly half the individuals were fairly intelligent. It took an hour or so to pick up most of the nuances involved in the work, and after the first day it became fairly quick and easy work. I couldn't imagine wiring wall sockets for 3 years and studying for a test and suddenly feeling confident in calling myself a master electrician, though.
In some states, they can't sell the house if they did any electrical work themselves until they have it inspected specifically to make sure their work is up to code (and they may have to pay a fine for not having it done by a certified electrician). Of course, if the owner doesn't tell anyone (because they don't want to pay a fine), and the inspectors that come in to evaluate the house for purposes of sale don't notice that some electrical work was done, then you won't know anyway until something blows up.
The reality, though, is that if you hire a certified electrician to do the work, you're probably going to get an apprentice doing the work with the certified electrician (hopefully on-site) looking over it before inspection.
Of course, the house I just moved out of was built to code 30 years ago, and you couldn't really plug any minor electronics into a wall socket without a surge protector (most laptops and such can handle a pretty wide range of fluctuation in the power, but a cheap fan or lamp can't). If they ever sell the house (rather than it remaining a rental property), they might have to replace all of the wiring, if someone knows to ask whether or not it's aluminum.
I actually only use Picasa to sort my porn. Family photos are stored on another drive and Picasa isn't allowed to look at it.
It should also be noted that most (if not all, and especially pre-schools, since that's what I'm currently most familiar with) schools use this concept as well. You give the school a list of people that are permitted to pick up your child, and they don't let anyone else near your child.
They also had a list (usually a very short list, like the parents) of people they could call to authorize someone to pick up your child, and even if the person coming to pick up your child was on the whitelist they would call the people that could authorize a pick-up before letting the child out of the building.
At least I always felt comfortable knowing not only that I could stop by at any time and see that my child was ok, but also that only my wife could pick up my child without someone calling me or her to confirm that it was ok.
This doesn't negate using stripos(), since you could use
stripos(string,"chrome") && stripos(string,"safari")
for Chrome, while an Xor of the two would be Safari (since Chrome contains both).
ECMAScript is the standard version. JavaScript was the original made by Netscape (after being named LiveScript or Mocha), and v1.5+ of JavaScript is compliant with ECMA v3. JScript is the Microsoft implementation in IE, and v5.5+ is compliant with ECMA v3.
To the best of my knowledge, Opera is the only browser that calls its scripting dialect ECMAScript. ECMA v3 is turning 9 years old in December.
JavaScript may not be used as a class-based OO language very often, but it has many of the features of OO languages and can be used as such.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13"
Let's see, "Safari" && !"Chrome" would probably do the trick. As a bonus you can separate them out and get the Chrome stats. Or you can pull out the Chrome results before the Safari results.
Of course, I don't know the exact method or code you're using to check browser agents now, so telling you the exact modifications you need to make is impossible.
If someone reports crashing on your site, and you find out they're using some ancient web browser, you code a work-around and get on with life. Or you get obnoxious and code in a nag screen that tells them to upgrade their browser. 90% of the time the first option is really the only option.
At least most of us have grown beyond the entry page with separate links for Netscape and IE users.
It should be noted, though, that it's significantly easier in most states for a woman to change her name upon marriage than it is for a man to change his name under any circumstances (at least in the US). For the most part, this is because it is such a common practice for women to change their names when they marry. People seemingly bend over backwards to work around any problems in their system to make sure women can still have access to their bank accounts, credit cards, billing, etc. when they change their names. My wife is more or less still able to operate completely under her maiden name or married name.
When men decide to change their name (for instance when a couple decides to hyphenate their last name when they marry), they often find they have a much harder time than their wife getting even the simplest things done, such as changing their name on a bill (hell, I can't even get people to spell my first name right on bills, and they can still find my credit record to give me a bad credit score if I don't pay it).
Even companies with licenses to get their computers repaired still do in-house IT work that can be helped with an A+ certification, and the A+ certifications have changed for the better in recent years.
Of course, it is going to depend on your particular job market. For example, a friend of mine went through the hoops to get a number of certifications, including A+ and Cisco certs (and MS certs), and the best job he could get initially was phone support. As he went through 2 of these jobs (which in one case was outsourced after he left, and in another case centralized from east- and west- coast locations to a single central time zone location), he eventually gained job experience that got him a better job doing actual IT work with room for upward movement.
The strange thing was that someone in the review board for the job actually said he got the job because one of his previous employers was the company from which they bought a number of their computers. So even though his job description was basically to read a script (and he got in trouble if someone noticed that he was solving problems off-script), just having worked for (major computer OEM) was enough for a better job position to open up.
Of course, in order to continue to move up he had to complete his college degree, but with the benefits he received from his employer that was a much easier proposition than it had been previously (and he recently received his bachelor's).
>Just look at all the professors who are brilliant
>theorists and scholars but terrible instructors.
Another item to look at is how many text books are simply resold after the course is complete, even in computer programming courses, where you would think the student would have reason to maintain a decent library of solid books on at least some concepts. Many text books are written by professors, and they're often terrible. Most teachers use textbooks for homework problems and some examples, but the actual in-class teaching comes from material prepared by the teacher over many years of developing the course (as well as some material required by the school, in some cases).
Of the college textbooks I've had over the years, I've kept 3 that were actually used in my classes:
1) a Calculus workbook that contained a review of Algebra, Geometry, and Trigonometry.
2) a Logic textbook (which I loaned to someone and never got back)
3) K&R C
It might be interesting to have K&R teaching a class on C, and they might have been better instructors than the one that used their book (and it was a supplemental book, not the main book for the course), but they're probably better off writing code than teaching undergrads to not forget their semicolons and ampersands.
Whether or not parallel code is superior to a single-threaded solution depends on the application and the actual implementation. In some cases there's no way to actually make a multi-threaded version of the same application any faster, the best you can hope for is the same level of performance. In other cases the assumptions made when deciding what parts of the application should be in separate threads turn out to be incorrect.
Multi-core is working because most people now run multiple applications at a time, not because more applications take advantage of multi-threading properly (not to mention that the OS itself is using CPU time in addition to any applications you are using). Going from 2 to 4 cores has proven less beneficial for most users simply because people so rarely use the CPU resources they have, and the problems of getting more benefit in a single application from 4 cores are even more complicated than 2, except in specific applications.
Browsers, especially in a world of multi-tab browsers with higher use of flash and javascript on the web, should be able to benefit from multi-threading, but how much benefit can be gained and whether or not the initial assumptions programmers make going into the project are correct are the main questions at hand.
Of course, 171 threads makes you wonder what assumptions they were making, or even what they're doing with those threads.
The other thing is that in the US pensions are employer-run (or farmed out), not government systems. Not only do we know that Social Security will be nearly impossible for us to collect, but employer pensions are going out the door as well, in favor of a 401k or nothing at all. The message is to start investing in your 401k as soon as you have the option, and to keep rolling that money over into other retirement funds when you change jobs.
Additionally, health care only adds so much to our life spans. Average ages are getting older more because people are choosing not to have children, or have fewer children than in the post-WWII era. My father was one of eight kids, and my wife's father was one of fifteen.
Even C# isn't bad if you're just learning to program. Early books on C# (some written while .Net was still in beta/RC stage) are still relevant for most of what people are going to do with the language. Anyone with no programming experience whatsoever will pick up plenty of useful information from even 6-year-old books on the language. Once they're competent with C# and .Net 1.x, they would simply need to learn the additions for 2.x and 3.x, if they were going to use those additions at all. There aren't a lot of changes to the core 1.x functionality, and it can all still be used against the .Net 1.x runtimes.
What I've really found difficult with C# programming is the lack of really solid books on .Net itself, especially dealing with ASP.Net and ADO.Net. Basically once you're at the point of dealing with these parts of the framework (where things do tend to advance more quickly), you're left with scouring web resources for little nuggets of useful information in a sea of garbage.
Of course, I still believe in learning programming by starting with a more static language like C or C++ that spends a lot more time in the standardization bodies before being updated. The usefulness in the workforce may be less clear, as people are hiring more web developers than systems developers, but it will give the students a good foundation from which to learn.
Then again, schools seem to be moving more towards the focus of getting students into the workforce than life-long learning, even at the college level.
The paper, TV, and talk radio are all mediums. The message is going to depend on what paper(s) you read, what channels you watch on TV, and what you listen to on the radio. To the older generations it may not be about the "sexiness of the delivery channel", but it is about their comfort level with the delivery channel. Eventually people move to TV channels, radio programs, and papers that tell them what they want to hear. None of these mediums are less prone to distortion of the truth than the internet, and people that want to find the truth without the distortions at least have a chance to find it on the internet (though they have to actively look for it rather than relying on biased mediums).
It's not just young people. Older people vote based on what they read in the paper, what they're told by talk radio, and what they see on TV (or just what someone said down at the barbershop/hair stylist or the bingo hall).
Mass ignorance is the reason that the US democracy was set up to eliminate votes from the system, starting by preventing people from voting for all sorts of reasons (though race and sex were part of it, there were also issues of land ownership, literacy, and other items eliminated previously).
Since we've decided that everyone's vote must count, we have to deal with this issue by attempting to educate people, not by bemoaning their ignorance. At least some of these uses of modern tools are trying to educate people, though obviously in a self-serving manner wherever possible.
Preventing people from casting legitimate votes, regardless of their political affiliation, race, religious background, or any other criteria covered under law, is both legally and morally irresponsible.
And yes, for some reason this does include being stupid enough to fall for something like this in the first place.
Not only this, but the third party you vote for has a chance of gaining more backing in future elections if they can meet the percentage quotas for your particular state.
Beyond this, though, people should focus more on the elections that really matter, such as state and local elections as well as your senators and representatives. Even though one senator or representative doesn't have a great say in the bigger picture, a concerted effort to replace Congress with a more technologically savvy body on the whole by concentrating efforts on getting out to vote every other year and spreading the necessary information about individual voting records for your regional elections would do far more to make a real change in this country than electing anyone to the Presidency.
The whole point of the office of President is a final check and balance over the Congress to prevent unpopular bills from passing that can't get a 2/3 majority in Congress (to overturn a Presidential veto). The whole reason that Bush has been such a poor President is that he went along with Congress on so many poor bills and pushed to increase his own power (and they followed suit and gave it to him).
Focus on moving power back away from the President by paying more attention to what's going on in the other elections. Maybe even generate some way for people to work together on proposing new laws to address technology issues in ways that afford us the rights we value rather than reinforcing corporate values with laws sponsored by Disney and the RIAA/MPAA. Remember that the only reason the President can propose a law is because ANYONE can propose a law, the hard part is getting it into the hands of someone in Congress that understands and is willing to push it through.
Generally the point of GTA is brutalizing aggressive, threatening members of opposing street gangs and/or stealing items in their possession. Even under those circumstances you can draw the attention of the police and have some trouble getting rewarded for doing so. Brutalizing the passive, non-threatening characters is possible simply because the game tries not to restrain your actions, but it does not go out of its way rewarding you for doing so.
Personally, I've spent a lot of time playing the game for the sake of the freedom to run around in the environment and doing a great deal of damage, but while I enjoyed the challenge of fending off the highest levels of government intervention it would throw at me, I never found it interesting to play this way for long, as the reward system was not in the game itself to encourage this activity, the game actively resists users taking this action (but does not prevent them completely from doing so).
The only places that even come close to doing this are membership stores, and they don't bother to do more than check the contents of your cart against your receipt, if that. You're subject to the requirements of the membership in those cases.
Any other time a store employee searches your bag/cart, it's generally because an alarm went off and/or an employee requested the search, and you consented to speed things up, because waiting around for the police is pretty boring (and they're not likely in any hurry once store security has escorted you to a back room where you can't make too much of a scene). The sad part is that the alarms go off more often because the employee at the checkout didn't do their job properly rather than because someone was trying to steal something.