Apparently, you missed the point. Typical for Slashdotters but... really.
Engineers will generally (if they're halfway competent) do the best job they can with the resources at their disposal. Fact is, the engineers themselves are a resource, a tool. In any technical organization, somebody in management is responsible for selecting the engineering staff and providing them with project goals, adequate resources, and the requisite guidance... in other words, the tools to do the job.
Voting machines are big business. BIG business. These are not shoestring operations, which means there's plenty of money to go around to attract the best and the brightest. It doesn't matter whether management hired second and third string engineers, or hired high-level people and simply mismanaged them. Maybe they did get good people and received a good design, but failed to commit the QA resources to make sure it actually worked right. Whatever. The responsibility for bad design and bad implementation lies at the top. You know that as well as I do. That is why the people at the top make so much more money that the people doing the actual engineering. Well... that's one reason.
Corporate management often says it wants the best possible product. Unfortunately, they rarely back up those words with the resources to achieve it. Then, when customers complain about the defective products the company has been manufacturing, the finger is immediately pointed at the engineers who designed them. And that's wrong: it's their manager who should be shot on the spot for being an incompetent, because only an incompetent would hire an incompetent, much less give him a position of responsibility.
Well, if someone hires an incompetent, what does that make him? The real culprits aren't the software guys but the suits that either a. hired incompetent engineers or b. hired good ones but didn't give them the resources to develop and test sound software.
Well, when I said "our" I mean the United States. It's interesting to hear that Russian schools place such emphasis on language skills. I hadn't known that, but it explains a lot.
It's a bit depressing to find out some people will throw away perfectly fine (and often new) PCs just because the windows installed on it got spyware..
Well, when I have people over for dinner and somebody says something like "No thanks, I don't like mashed potatoes" I just say, "Goody.. more for me."
I generally don't dump entire computers anyway. I agree with you: you don't need a 2 Ghz machine to read mail and browse and write letters. I tend to upgrade my machines piecemeal over time, consequently I put relatively little old hardware into the local landfill. People that toss an entire system in the dumpster because they feel the need for a new one are most of the problem.
I think there's a certain degree of (not entirely unjustified) paranoia on the part of corporations that are afraid of confidential information that might leave on old systems. They figure it's just better to have the stuff destroyed rather than risk some ghetto kid getting hold of next year's financial projections.
I can't wait 'til all the people who are too goddamned stupid to use a computer get their asses handed to them on a platter. Frankly, I wouldn't mind it if they simply left the Internet entirely, since there would be nobody worth sending spam to anymore and maybe my ISP could charge me less money.
Actually, this ass-handing happens every day, only it's called by various terms such as "fraud" and "identity theft" and so forth, and frankly I wish the cops would spend more time worrying about that than about someone leeching a little bandwidth. In monetary terms, we're talking peanuts here. Sure, if the lad had accessed his neighbors data and done something criminal with it (such as stealing the guy's credit-card numbers) I'd feel differently. But the charge against this kid seems to be merely theft of bandwidth, which frankly isn't that heinous. I had someone trying to crack my WAP at one point: I ping-flooded the bastard and he got the message, but I never felt the need to call in the cops. "Nice try, buddy" was my attitude. Securing my network is my responsibility, not the government's, and no matter how tough the law becomes, the relative anonymity of wireless access assures that people will continue to try and use it (and abuse it.) It's best to just accept that fact right up front, and take the appropriate steps to keep unwanted users off your network, if that is your wish. If you don't know how to take those steps, either find/pay someone who does or don't plug in that WAP.
Regardless, if your misplaced faith in humanity leads you to open an access point with no security then you are too stupid to use a computer, and you shouldn't be surprised (nor should you have any right whatsoever to complain) when somebody rips you off, to whatever degree. If I write my PIN on the back of my ATM card, and I happen to lose it, should I have a right to expect that my accounts won't be immediately flatlined? Do I have a right to expect that anyone that happens to pick up that card will be an honest, ethical person that will return it to my bank? Of course not: I'd be a fool if I did. Moreover, responsibility for any funds lost would be mine, because I was stupid. That's actually in my bank's TOS, although it is couched in much more polite and scary-sounding legal language. Likewise, that neighbor who left his access point wide open is simply an idiot who really got less than he deserved for his ignorance. He's lucky it was just a college kid looking for a freebie that found him, rather than someone with real criminal intent. I hope he's happy he just trashed somebody's life over a non-issue.
This hearkens back to the mid-seventies when my father testified before our State Legislature regarding a computer-crime bill they were intent on passing. It wasn't until my Dad pointed out to these cretins that they were proposing to felonize virtually every computer science and engineering student in the State that they backed off on their "no-nonsense" approach. The law they finally passed still sucked, but at least it didn't put most of our technical talent behind bars. At the time, I was one of those students.
Excessively harsh laws ultimately serve little purpose.
They were published in a book of such letters. There were a lot of them, but yes it's possible they weren't representative, so perhaps I could have chosen a better example. In any event, I still maintain that written language skills are vital to any society, and that our schools are not, by and large, doing as good a job as they once did.
On the other hand, I think bad grammar and spelling should be ignored on a math or a chemistry exam, so long the answer is understandable.
A common misconception: as Locutus of Borg put it, "A narrow vision." The belief that only those fields which predominantly deal with written language should be required to exercise it properly is in error. Seriously in error, and the widespread adoption of this mistake is costing us dearly.
The reality for people of all walks of life, whether they be physicist, mathematician, songwriter, janitor, engineer, lawyer, sales clerk... virtually any career path but that of beach bum, is that they will be required to communicate with other individuals and groups. More to the point, they will be required to do it on paper (or some reasonable facsimile of same.) It may simply be knowing how to pen a solid business letter, a proposal, a poem, a love letter, tech manual, or any of the thousands of other pieces of written communication that human beings generate by the trillions on a daily basis. We all need to write, and how well we write has a definite, quantifiable effect upon our well-being, upon our ability to achieve our personal goals, and helps to define how we are perceived by our peers (and our superiors.)
You cannot be a true professional in most areas of human endeavor if you cannot communicate, and everyone, no matter how low or how high, benefits from knowing how to write. It is a comfortable falsehood that only professions such as writer or journalist need to have a good command of langauge. I've known many engineers with poor verbal skills: some became engineers because of a mistaken belief that they wouldn't need such abilities in a purely technical field. You can imagine the shock and disillusionment (if not panic) when they were first asked to write a fifty-page proposal. Again, reality must intrude upon fantasy... those who cannot communicate well are limited in what they will be allowed to achieve. Any school which graduates students that cannot write has done them a lifelong disservice.
I've seen the results of such educational policies before. I have an ex-girlfriend who was (maybe still is, I don't know, it's been about fifteen years) a college English instructor. A good one, I might add, in spite of her other failings. In any event, at the time she taught first-year English at a local community college, and would often bring papers home to grade. I was positively astounded at the number of incoming students that literally could not write in full sentences, not if their very lives depended upon it. Fully half of the kids she tested had somehow made it through grade school and high school without achieving basic literacy, and regardless of their native intelligence were simply not ready for college-level coursework.
As an example of how far we have fallen in the past century or two, I found it illuminating to read the letters that American infantrymen sent home to their families during the old Indian campaigns. These were boys, often only in their teens, mere footsoldiers, and yet the quality of their writing was substantially greater than what most college graduates are capable of in our time. Some of those letters were pure prose, and the emotional impact was significant. That's because they were taught well, and held to a standard, a standard that has been flagging for the past century or more.
I admit, writing extremely well requires talent in addition to training. The likes of a Shakespeare are rare indeed in any century. But mere competence in one's native language is a skill that can be acquired by virtually everyone, and it is one that is best acquired early. Yes, it is complicated and there are many who, for many reasons, may find it tough going. But it is no less worthwhile for being difficult.
Oh, and before someone brings up the number of successful corporate executives that are functional illiterates and require an intelligent secretary to handle their correspondence, let me point out that these people are not members of the same species as the rest of us, and are judged by different standards.
was hoping Google could help identify a cure, or at least a treatment. So I entered "megalomania" and "politician". Informative, to be sure, but the only effective treatment seems to involve shooting them until they are dead.
since all of these technologies are relatively young and constantly changing, and any conclusions they may draw will likely be obsolete by the time they're published.
The web is the great leveller, it can bring people and business together who wouldn't normally be able - why lose 200,000 potential customers in the U.S. alone?
Leveller? I'd say it's the exact opposite. It's more like the great enabler, and when you enable millions of people all will benefit but some will rise above the rest. Society has become anything but level since the advent of the public Internet.
Anyway, let's say my company manufactures laser-leveling equipment for surveyors. Or maybe telescopic sights. Or any of a gazillion other items that are of little interest to a blind person (and not very interesting to the vast majority of sighted individuals for that matter.) Should I be required to be accessible? What if, for reasons of my own that are not your business or the government's business or anyone else's business... I am simply not interested in marketing to those people? Should I be forced to spend substantial sums to become compliant with the law, when it will provide no benefit either to me or any blind person? Accessibility is fine so far as it goes, but if a poorly-written law gets rammed down everyone's throats and simply drives smaller companies off the Web, I don't see the benefit for anyone, blind or otherwise. Unfortunately, our government has shown a dangerous willingness to put unreasonable and irrational burdens on the private sector. I suspect this will be no exception. Whatever happens, it's going to be expensive and I suspect that blind people will see very little benefit to it.
Ultimately, corporations which sell products over the Web will make accessibility a priority for the reason you mentioned: economic incentive, and because the technology will advance to where it will become much more straightforward to implement. Nor do I expect the people that write screen-reader software to stand still... they also have an incentive to make their products smarter, and the current assumption that reader technology is static, and that we must make all Web sites comply with some arbitrary "standard" right now is ridiculous on the face of it. If nothing else, it will simply drive even more business overseas as companies scramble to host their sites on foreign servers.
such a cloud would be virtually impossible to maintain and control over the long term, and will ultimately present a nasty navigation hazard for other spacecraft. Bad idea, I'd say.
In other words, they are just as infected with the disease of unaccountability as any other major corporation. No surprise there. But the idea of a "common carrier" was grounded in some serious common sense which, unfortunately, seems to have largely escaped the modern American Congress. My bet is that they'll eventually get those perks, network neutrality be damned. Corporatism at its best.
Well, it is and it isn't. It's a natural and expected reaction, I'll grant you that, sure. However, it is just as frequently a counterproductive response, and therein lies the problem. People that are polarized on a particular issue (take religion or politics, for example) will rarely come to a meeting of the minds as long as those minds are closed. Zealotry never helps when you are trying to communicate, nor (as has been happening in both camps) does lying, even when done with the best of intentions.
Slashdot Mirror
Good idea ... and we can start with Elvira: Mistress of the Dark and go down from there.
10. Boiling in oil.
9. Bamboo splinters under the fingernails.
8. Water-drip torture.
7. Genitals screwed into a light bulb socket.
6. Two words: trash compactor.
5. Covered in honey over a fire-ant nest.
4. Piranha.
3. Buried to the neck at low tide.
2. Cannibal Pygmies.
and the number one answer is:
1. {you guys figure it out / I need another beer.}
Apparently, you missed the point. Typical for Slashdotters but ... really.
... in other words, the tools to do the job.
... that's one reason.
Engineers will generally (if they're halfway competent) do the best job they can with the resources at their disposal. Fact is, the engineers themselves are a resource, a tool. In any technical organization, somebody in management is responsible for selecting the engineering staff and providing them with project goals, adequate resources, and the requisite guidance
Voting machines are big business. BIG business. These are not shoestring operations, which means there's plenty of money to go around to attract the best and the brightest. It doesn't matter whether management hired second and third string engineers, or hired high-level people and simply mismanaged them. Maybe they did get good people and received a good design, but failed to commit the QA resources to make sure it actually worked right. Whatever. The responsibility for bad design and bad implementation lies at the top. You know that as well as I do. That is why the people at the top make so much more money that the people doing the actual engineering. Well
Corporate management often says it wants the best possible product. Unfortunately, they rarely back up those words with the resources to achieve it. Then, when customers complain about the defective products the company has been manufacturing, the finger is immediately pointed at the engineers who designed them. And that's wrong: it's their manager who should be shot on the spot for being an incompetent, because only an incompetent would hire an incompetent, much less give him a position of responsibility.
Well, if someone hires an incompetent, what does that make him? The real culprits aren't the software guys but the suits that either a. hired incompetent engineers or b. hired good ones but didn't give them the resources to develop and test sound software.
Well, when I said "our" I mean the United States. It's interesting to hear that Russian schools place such emphasis on language skills. I hadn't known that, but it explains a lot.
It's a bit depressing to find out some people will throw away perfectly fine (and often new) PCs just because the windows installed on it got spyware..
.. more for me."
Well, when I have people over for dinner and somebody says something like "No thanks, I don't like mashed potatoes" I just say, "Goody
I generally don't dump entire computers anyway. I agree with you: you don't need a 2 Ghz machine to read mail and browse and write letters. I tend to upgrade my machines piecemeal over time, consequently I put relatively little old hardware into the local landfill. People that toss an entire system in the dumpster because they feel the need for a new one are most of the problem.
I think there's a certain degree of (not entirely unjustified) paranoia on the part of corporations that are afraid of confidential information that might leave on old systems. They figure it's just better to have the stuff destroyed rather than risk some ghetto kid getting hold of next year's financial projections.
Yes, equipment from Videc and Wang, among others. There were also a number of dedicated CAD systems of similar vintage.
I can't wait 'til all the people who are too goddamned stupid to use a computer get their asses handed to them on a platter. Frankly, I wouldn't mind it if they simply left the Internet entirely, since there would be nobody worth sending spam to anymore and maybe my ISP could charge me less money.
Actually, this ass-handing happens every day, only it's called by various terms such as "fraud" and "identity theft" and so forth, and frankly I wish the cops would spend more time worrying about that than about someone leeching a little bandwidth. In monetary terms, we're talking peanuts here. Sure, if the lad had accessed his neighbors data and done something criminal with it (such as stealing the guy's credit-card numbers) I'd feel differently. But the charge against this kid seems to be merely theft of bandwidth, which frankly isn't that heinous. I had someone trying to crack my WAP at one point: I ping-flooded the bastard and he got the message, but I never felt the need to call in the cops. "Nice try, buddy" was my attitude. Securing my network is my responsibility, not the government's, and no matter how tough the law becomes, the relative anonymity of wireless access assures that people will continue to try and use it (and abuse it.) It's best to just accept that fact right up front, and take the appropriate steps to keep unwanted users off your network, if that is your wish. If you don't know how to take those steps, either find/pay someone who does or don't plug in that WAP.
Regardless, if your misplaced faith in humanity leads you to open an access point with no security then you are too stupid to use a computer, and you shouldn't be surprised (nor should you have any right whatsoever to complain) when somebody rips you off, to whatever degree. If I write my PIN on the back of my ATM card, and I happen to lose it, should I have a right to expect that my accounts won't be immediately flatlined? Do I have a right to expect that anyone that happens to pick up that card will be an honest, ethical person that will return it to my bank? Of course not: I'd be a fool if I did. Moreover, responsibility for any funds lost would be mine, because I was stupid. That's actually in my bank's TOS, although it is couched in much more polite and scary-sounding legal language. Likewise, that neighbor who left his access point wide open is simply an idiot who really got less than he deserved for his ignorance. He's lucky it was just a college kid looking for a freebie that found him, rather than someone with real criminal intent. I hope he's happy he just trashed somebody's life over a non-issue.
This hearkens back to the mid-seventies when my father testified before our State Legislature regarding a computer-crime bill they were intent on passing. It wasn't until my Dad pointed out to these cretins that they were proposing to felonize virtually every computer science and engineering student in the State that they backed off on their "no-nonsense" approach. The law they finally passed still sucked, but at least it didn't put most of our technical talent behind bars. At the time, I was one of those students.
Excessively harsh laws ultimately serve little purpose.
They were published in a book of such letters. There were a lot of them, but yes it's possible they weren't representative, so perhaps I could have chosen a better example. In any event, I still maintain that written language skills are vital to any society, and that our schools are not, by and large, doing as good a job as they once did.
What's your point?
Maybe that having standards, and sticking to them, is a good idea?
Students can concentrate on sheep herding, sheep shearing, and sheep breeding!
... somebody is gonna get screwed over this, that's for sure.
Well
On the other hand, I think bad grammar and spelling should be ignored on a math or a chemistry exam, so long the answer is understandable.
... virtually any career path but that of beach bum, is that they will be required to communicate with other individuals and groups. More to the point, they will be required to do it on paper (or some reasonable facsimile of same.) It may simply be knowing how to pen a solid business letter, a proposal, a poem, a love letter, tech manual, or any of the thousands of other pieces of written communication that human beings generate by the trillions on a daily basis. We all need to write, and how well we write has a definite, quantifiable effect upon our well-being, upon our ability to achieve our personal goals, and helps to define how we are perceived by our peers (and our superiors.)
... those who cannot communicate well are limited in what they will be allowed to achieve. Any school which graduates students that cannot write has done them a lifelong disservice.
A common misconception: as Locutus of Borg put it, "A narrow vision." The belief that only those fields which predominantly deal with written language should be required to exercise it properly is in error. Seriously in error, and the widespread adoption of this mistake is costing us dearly.
The reality for people of all walks of life, whether they be physicist, mathematician, songwriter, janitor, engineer, lawyer, sales clerk
You cannot be a true professional in most areas of human endeavor if you cannot communicate, and everyone, no matter how low or how high, benefits from knowing how to write. It is a comfortable falsehood that only professions such as writer or journalist need to have a good command of langauge. I've known many engineers with poor verbal skills: some became engineers because of a mistaken belief that they wouldn't need such abilities in a purely technical field. You can imagine the shock and disillusionment (if not panic) when they were first asked to write a fifty-page proposal. Again, reality must intrude upon fantasy
I've seen the results of such educational policies before. I have an ex-girlfriend who was (maybe still is, I don't know, it's been about fifteen years) a college English instructor. A good one, I might add, in spite of her other failings. In any event, at the time she taught first-year English at a local community college, and would often bring papers home to grade. I was positively astounded at the number of incoming students that literally could not write in full sentences, not if their very lives depended upon it. Fully half of the kids she tested had somehow made it through grade school and high school without achieving basic literacy, and regardless of their native intelligence were simply not ready for college-level coursework.
As an example of how far we have fallen in the past century or two, I found it illuminating to read the letters that American infantrymen sent home to their families during the old Indian campaigns. These were boys, often only in their teens, mere footsoldiers, and yet the quality of their writing was substantially greater than what most college graduates are capable of in our time. Some of those letters were pure prose, and the emotional impact was significant. That's because they were taught well, and held to a standard, a standard that has been flagging for the past century or more.
I admit, writing extremely well requires talent in addition to training. The likes of a Shakespeare are rare indeed in any century. But mere competence in one's native language is a skill that can be acquired by virtually everyone, and it is one that is best acquired early. Yes, it is complicated and there are many who, for many reasons, may find it tough going. But it is no less worthwhile for being difficult.
Oh, and before someone brings up the number of successful corporate executives that are functional illiterates and require an intelligent secretary to handle their correspondence, let me point out that these people are not members of the same species as the rest of us, and are judged by different standards.
was hoping Google could help identify a cure, or at least a treatment. So I entered "megalomania" and "politician". Informative, to be sure, but the only effective treatment seems to involve shooting them until they are dead.
it looks like the Rise of the Machines will take place in the kitchen.
More likely, the use of kids on the Internet will have changed by then.
since all of these technologies are relatively young and constantly changing, and any conclusions they may draw will likely be obsolete by the time they're published.
True, and in fact most of us accept that progress has a downside. The real issue is that the definition of "progress" is by no means universal.
Plays for Ruse, since there are a lot of people that are feeling tricked at the moment.
The web is the great leveller, it can bring people and business together who wouldn't normally be able - why lose 200,000 potential customers in the U.S. alone?
... I am simply not interested in marketing to those people? Should I be forced to spend substantial sums to become compliant with the law, when it will provide no benefit either to me or any blind person? Accessibility is fine so far as it goes, but if a poorly-written law gets rammed down everyone's throats and simply drives smaller companies off the Web, I don't see the benefit for anyone, blind or otherwise. Unfortunately, our government has shown a dangerous willingness to put unreasonable and irrational burdens on the private sector. I suspect this will be no exception. Whatever happens, it's going to be expensive and I suspect that blind people will see very little benefit to it.
... they also have an incentive to make their products smarter, and the current assumption that reader technology is static, and that we must make all Web sites comply with some arbitrary "standard" right now is ridiculous on the face of it. If nothing else, it will simply drive even more business overseas as companies scramble to host their sites on foreign servers.
Leveller? I'd say it's the exact opposite. It's more like the great enabler, and when you enable millions of people all will benefit but some will rise above the rest. Society has become anything but level since the advent of the public Internet.
Anyway, let's say my company manufactures laser-leveling equipment for surveyors. Or maybe telescopic sights. Or any of a gazillion other items that are of little interest to a blind person (and not very interesting to the vast majority of sighted individuals for that matter.) Should I be required to be accessible? What if, for reasons of my own that are not your business or the government's business or anyone else's business
Ultimately, corporations which sell products over the Web will make accessibility a priority for the reason you mentioned: economic incentive, and because the technology will advance to where it will become much more straightforward to implement. Nor do I expect the people that write screen-reader software to stand still
does Verizon currently have common carrier status? And if so, to which divisions does it apply: ISP, cellular or POTS?
such a cloud would be virtually impossible to maintain and control over the long term, and will ultimately present a nasty navigation hazard for other spacecraft. Bad idea, I'd say.
In other words, they are just as infected with the disease of unaccountability as any other major corporation. No surprise there. But the idea of a "common carrier" was grounded in some serious common sense which, unfortunately, seems to have largely escaped the modern American Congress. My bet is that they'll eventually get those perks, network neutrality be damned. Corporatism at its best.
This is a rational reaction, not a religious one.
Well, it is and it isn't. It's a natural and expected reaction, I'll grant you that, sure. However, it is just as frequently a counterproductive response, and therein lies the problem. People that are polarized on a particular issue (take religion or politics, for example) will rarely come to a meeting of the minds as long as those minds are closed. Zealotry never helps when you are trying to communicate, nor (as has been happening in both camps) does lying, even when done with the best of intentions.