WRONG. If you turn on the compatibility mode, then yes, it works fine with Firefox, but that is not the same interface people will be used to if they've used it before in IE. The "main" interface is absolutely rife with Active X widgets, and integrates with your Windows desktop, and gives you "You've got mail" pop-ups and crap like that.
Terminal Services Environment, whether you do it through Citrix or buy Microsoft's own product...If you have to have windows integration, that's how you have to do it. That is the only way to make it work given our current tools. WINE is not ready, and he's right, it's no more ready now than it's ever been.
Microsoft has too much to lose by ever opening up their standards; they will do everything in their power to make it hard for us to use those applications on anything but Windows. Hell, when Mac went to OS X, they pulled out Outlook support and replaced it with a very different program called Entourage, just because OS X is a little to close to Linux.
Hell, if people wanted to use windows apps they'd be better to work on emulating Macs...At least there is a family resemblance there.
Exchange is double hard; you really have to run it in a terminal environment to get the full feature set out of it. The web interface is rife with Active X...Even running it through a secure Apache proxy is a hell of a lot more complex than you would think.
My advice is always to go with Lotus, but Lotus is slow and it's a bear to customize, so even though it runs well in Linux, you've got people to soothe. Same with OpenOffice.
What it comes down to is: There is nothing wrong with Linux. We just don't have a killer office suite, or a killer server based productivity suite. End of story.
And as long as we're forced to use our biggest competitions Office and Productivity suites, we're always going to have problems.
And SMB support is HUGELY easier than having an Office/Exchange substitute.
They don't want to migrate of Microsoft...Hell, that's the root of the whole problem. They want to not have to use Windows, and Microsoft has a huge amount of money riding on people not being able to use Office or Exchange in a Linux environment.
Being a veteran of many different Linux migrations, some successful, others dismal failures, it always comes down to a few applications:
Office: StarOffice/OpenOffice is not as good.
Exchange: Goddamn managers and their shared calendars.
Unsupported Widget: Every goddamn company has an Unsupported Widget written by a savant who was killed by a bolt of lightning. The Widget is always absolutely critical to their business, and ALWAYS runs on some piece of hardware that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world, and only talks to certain versions of Windows.
Every one of these things will come up, and even if you're successful in talking them into going over to OpenOffice and Lotus, and you manage to slay or replace the widget, it's going to take longer and cost more than you would have thought.
In the end, it's always about the damn tool. Use the right tool for the job. Don't try to force Linux in where you know there are going to be problems. The jackass in the article was subcontracting for DELL, the king of the Windows shops, and he thinks he's going to be able to get by on a pure Linux environment? He's a fool.
Oh please. Yea, no support in Linux for Exchange, wow, newsflash, I am stunned. Transitioning from Office to StarOffice is a bitch, yup, been there. Linux doesn't work just like Windows, hate to break it to people, you have to be able to adapt.
If you're serious about using Linux, and you absolutely have to have Exchange and MS Office, you need to come to terms with running those applications in a terminal services environment...Or, (for Exchange) if you're a cheapskate, just use the Exchange web interface that fricking comes with Exchange! It doesn't look as good in Firefox as it does in IE, but if you're doing it on a shoestring, that's what you get, and it is feature complete.
Expecting WINE to make Linux run MS programs identically to Windows is never goign to happen. Depending on WINE to be super stable and reliable in a deployment environment is a mistake, so don't do it. Spend a little money to get the tools to do it right, or don't try and do it at all. And if you try to do it without the tools or the skills to make them work, don't whine about it. We fricking know it's difficult to intergrate Windows apps on Linux machines...If anyone could do it, there wouldn't be Windows anymore.
Eh. AMD makes great processors. If I was buying top of the line right now, I'd buy Intel, but I've had my ass saved by AMD more than once, and over the last couple of years with all the problems intel had with the Xeon line, AMD was the smart buy. I've got an AMD Barton (2800?) production machine that had a CPU fan die on it, and I popped the case open and pointed a floor fan at it, and the damn thing ran like a champ for 2 days until I got a replacement fan...You won't see that with Intel.
Likewise with motherboards. There are some really good brands out there...I've always had a lot of luck with Asus, even though I don't tend to overclock, the over-design that they put into the boards to create a stable platform for overclocking provides a solid consumer benefit.
The problem with ATI/nVidia, is that you can still buy a card with a good chipset from a company that will be going into the toilet (ATI and nVidia don't usually make their own cards)...I had a 300 dollar card self-destruct on me less than a week after the quite-reputable (in my understanding) company I'd bought it from went tits up...Wish I could remember the company name, I'm sure there are other people who will remember it.
Otherwise I agree. Motherboards are very often flawed in mass market desktops, because they throw a high end processor in it and then put in a crappy motherboard, knowing that the customer is only looking at the clock speed, and doesn't understand the problems that he'll get from a shoddy system bus.
Sure, it would be nice to live in that world, but what do you say to your bosses after some accounting weenie loses a laptop with an entire period's accounting data including customer banking account data, because he wanted to work in the coffee shop and didn't take the laptop with him when he went to take a piss.
For every piece of perfect planning, there will be an idiot who opens a hole in your security that you could never have forseen in your preplanning. It's better to have a system that is simple and redundant.
As far as planning for natural disasters, it all boils down to 1) Have backups of your data, 2) Have a suitable alternate base of operations.
Informative? Informative would be explaining how he came up with accurate numbers for [Total Cost of Intrusion] and [Percentage Chance of Intrusion].
That's where the problem is in this whole issue. How much will it cost if we get owned, and how likely is it that we will get owned? If you can calculate those two data points accurately, then yes, it's easy as pie to figure out your ROI, but the problem is that figuring out the former, requires the services of a mind reader, and the latter requires the knowledge of all the weaknesses in your security and all the skills and motivations of those who want to break your security.
Sure, it's fine and dandy to pull some numbers out of your ass and plug them into an equation, but when you get taken and the cost is higher or lower than your predicted cost, then you had better hope no one holds you accountable.
Shrug. I came to the conclusion years ago that, if you were able to build your own computer, you would be crazy not to. I've used nothing but custom builds for the last 8 years or so, and I wouldn't switch back for anything.
You end up taking the shaft even from working with a high end desktop from an industry leader. I got so tired of buying high end Dell's for 4,000 a pop, and then having them be a big non-upgradable paperweight 3 years later...All the internal mounts on their cases are proprietary, power supply, motherboard...hell, you can switch pci cards and that's about it. Pathetic.
On the other hand, a nice 150 dollar Antec case is good for years, and you can put any damn motherboard/power supply in it, no trouble at all, and when all the components are standards compliant, you can switch out whatever part you want and it's no big deal. New motherboard/processor without upgrading a single other piece of the machine? No problem.
You're right. I replaced a hard drive, motherboard, ram, sound, and graphics card on one system, and all I had to do was call them and say, "No, my copy of XP is not installed on any other system" and they game me a reactivation code.
My copy of XP isn't OEM though, which may be an issue...Still, that's about as big an upgrade as you can get and they didn't even blink.
I keep thinking about this as well. Really, sitting down a trying to write code that runs optimally on multiple processors is a huge headache, and, frankly, judging by the code I've seen in my life, most coders aren't up to it...It would be far better to put a VM or a specialty compiler between the code and the system, one that is capable of taking regular code and making it more multi-core friendly.
Sure it'll add overhead, but the number of cores we're going to be working with at a time is going to continue to change, and the only way to not write immediately obsolete code is to have an intermediate control layer that is smart enough to translate.
If you don't know why you need Oracle, you don't need Oracle.
Oracle makes it's money primarily by selling support and service, not by selling licenses, so while they may try to sell you a license, they're not going to go out of their way to snag an itty-bitty fish that's not going to be able to afford support.
And frankly, if you're big enough to afford support, you probably DO need Oracle...mySQL is a good tool, but I'd be really hesitant about setting up a big accounting system on mySQL.
I find it hard to believe that a company with the amount of overhead that Oracle has will be able to provide mySQL support for the same rates that mySQL can; the primary benefit for Oracle is that they'll be able to offer bundled support with people who already have Oracle support and want the convenience of dealing with one company for all their support needs.
Definitely a win-win situation for mySQL, because they get press and legitimacy without losing too much business. The "unbreakable linux" deal probably hurt RedHat a hell of a lot more than this will hurt mySQL.
Just as easy to say, "Any game that has cheat codes is fundamentally flawed," but it's not any more true there...It doesn't matter how good the game is, there will always be someone who wants to skip to the end.
I don't use cheat codes, and I don't buy stuff off of goldfarming sites, and I don't do it because it ruins the game for me...Kills all the sense of satisfaction from accomplishing things.
But I understand why someone who's played a game up to level 60, and decides he wants to try a second character class would think, "Hmmmm, 10 days of my life, or 500 bucks out of my bank account?" Or likewise, why someone who really enjoys the game but has, you know, a life, would like to be able to compete with the 20-hour-a-day crowd...Can't play the same amount they play, but you've got a job, so what the hell?
Far as I'm concerned, if cheating makes it more enjoyable for them to play the game, more power to 'em. Not like I care because my combination of ethics and life means I can't compete with either the people who cheat, or the people who have no life, and both groups are pretty much equally annoying.
It's just eBay being stupid. IGE and all the other sites that cater specifically to gold/equipment/character farmers are just going to get more business because eBay is "worried about the legal complexities" of selling virtual property.
Honestly, I'd thought better of them than this...eBay sells so many things of purely subjective value, you'd think that some policy maker on the inside would have cottoned to the fact that value is a fairy tale, and that their business is to make money off people's experiments with value, not to "decide" that there are some things that don't have a place in their auctions.
Moron's who try to fight Supply and Demand by messing with supply get no pity from me. Where there is enough demand, and supply is not flat impossible, there will be supply. The only way to prevent the sale of in-game artifacts is to make them non-transferable, and that's never going to happen.
I will reply to this post to make the meta-post chain complete (a reply to a post about a post that was a reply to a post of mine).
I myself have had a lot of issues with GoDaddy, and I can't help but be surprised at the people who are acting so shocked. It's cheap webhosting. They don't give a damn about individual customers, and they don't have a great reputation.
Getting a good webhost is hard. You have to be willing to move around a lot, and to pay more than 8 bucks a month.
There was a list compiled by a bunch of phishers that made it into the open a few months ago...Lot of security guys were using it to do things like check for the average complexity of passwords among users and suchlike. The first link I found was on Google was the Tech Reads blog, dated 9/16/6 (mdy), so this is nothing new.
Ordering a takedown in pointless...I can't believe that those users weren't informed that they should change their passwords, and if they were, what's the problem?
Why would they bother when they know GoDaddy will cave in a second? Send an email to a guy who runs a security site, and he'll tell you where to shove it...Not like he didn't know that MySpace would object to that information being public!
Unless your web hosting company is willing to go to bat for you, you'll never, ever, hear from a company like MySpace before your site is taken off line.
You get what you pay for with GoDaddy. I certainly wouldn't expect them to take my side in a dispute with MySpace, News Corp, or, frankly, anyone with a significant number of lawyers on their side.
Providers, by and large, will cave to any request from a big company...Hell there was an article about it here a few days ago, that linked the BoF Experiment where they posted a public domain work on 10 different places, and then sent DMCA takedown notices to all 10 places, and had 7 remove it immediately even though it was clearly marked as public domain.
Face it; a hosting site that will stick up for it's customers against a significant threat from a big company is hard as hell to find, and sure as hell GoDaddy isn't going to do it for 10 bucks a month.
I agree with you about needing more data to make an accurate claim, but it's my intuition that there are a great many more patents that would be invalidated if someone bothered to make a challenge.
And since we know that, of the patents that get challenged, 70% are invalidated/amended, we either have to assume that this sample is somehow aberrant (e.g only really inaccurate patents are ever challenged), or we can assume that the patents are a fair sample set, and that the percentages are representative.
Without more data, it's impossible to know which case is more accurate, but judging by past examples of ridiculous patents, and over-broad patents, and patents on things that should never even have patent law applied to them, I can't find myself willing to believe that the vast majority of patents are perfectly legitimate, and it's only the bad patents that are challeneged and invalidated.
Anyone else find it infuriating that 70% of re-examinations result in them revising their initial findings?
What kind of crappy department accepts an error rate of around 70%? And you know it's worse than that, because these are just the cases that people give a crap about. You know that the total library of existing approved patents are at least 90% pure crap, if 70% are changed whenever challenged.
Why don't they just issue us all personal stamps, and let us stamp our patent on anything we happen to walk past? Probably less error prone.
It's because the exit polling was a much closer match to the actual results, rather than having substantial irregularities or, as in the case of the 2004 election, actual instances of election fraud.
Having both sides being extremely skeptical of the computer returned election counts is the only thing keeping anyone honest.
Slashdot Mirror
WRONG. If you turn on the compatibility mode, then yes, it works fine with Firefox, but that is not the same interface people will be used to if they've used it before in IE. The "main" interface is absolutely rife with Active X widgets, and integrates with your Windows desktop, and gives you "You've got mail" pop-ups and crap like that.
Yes, but the solution to the problem isn't "Fix Linux" it's "Write an Office/Productivity Suite".
I think I said that. Terminal Services. That's the answer. But running them natively in Linux? don't even bother trying.
Did you read it?
Terminal Services Environment, whether you do it through Citrix or buy Microsoft's own product...If you have to have windows integration, that's how you have to do it. That is the only way to make it work given our current tools. WINE is not ready, and he's right, it's no more ready now than it's ever been.
Microsoft has too much to lose by ever opening up their standards; they will do everything in their power to make it hard for us to use those applications on anything but Windows. Hell, when Mac went to OS X, they pulled out Outlook support and replaced it with a very different program called Entourage, just because OS X is a little to close to Linux.
Hell, if people wanted to use windows apps they'd be better to work on emulating Macs...At least there is a family resemblance there.
Exchange is double hard; you really have to run it in a terminal environment to get the full feature set out of it. The web interface is rife with Active X...Even running it through a secure Apache proxy is a hell of a lot more complex than you would think.
My advice is always to go with Lotus, but Lotus is slow and it's a bear to customize, so even though it runs well in Linux, you've got people to soothe. Same with OpenOffice.
What it comes down to is: There is nothing wrong with Linux. We just don't have a killer office suite, or a killer server based productivity suite. End of story.
And as long as we're forced to use our biggest competitions Office and Productivity suites, we're always going to have problems.
And SMB support is HUGELY easier than having an Office/Exchange substitute.
They don't want to migrate of Microsoft...Hell, that's the root of the whole problem. They want to not have to use Windows, and Microsoft has a huge amount of money riding on people not being able to use Office or Exchange in a Linux environment.
Being a veteran of many different Linux migrations, some successful, others dismal failures, it always comes down to a few applications:
Office: StarOffice/OpenOffice is not as good.
Exchange: Goddamn managers and their shared calendars.
Unsupported Widget: Every goddamn company has an Unsupported Widget written by a savant who was killed by a bolt of lightning. The Widget is always absolutely critical to their business, and ALWAYS runs on some piece of hardware that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world, and only talks to certain versions of Windows.
Every one of these things will come up, and even if you're successful in talking them into going over to OpenOffice and Lotus, and you manage to slay or replace the widget, it's going to take longer and cost more than you would have thought.
In the end, it's always about the damn tool. Use the right tool for the job. Don't try to force Linux in where you know there are going to be problems. The jackass in the article was subcontracting for DELL, the king of the Windows shops, and he thinks he's going to be able to get by on a pure Linux environment? He's a fool.
Oh please. Yea, no support in Linux for Exchange, wow, newsflash, I am stunned. Transitioning from Office to StarOffice is a bitch, yup, been there. Linux doesn't work just like Windows, hate to break it to people, you have to be able to adapt.
If you're serious about using Linux, and you absolutely have to have Exchange and MS Office, you need to come to terms with running those applications in a terminal services environment...Or, (for Exchange) if you're a cheapskate, just use the Exchange web interface that fricking comes with Exchange! It doesn't look as good in Firefox as it does in IE, but if you're doing it on a shoestring, that's what you get, and it is feature complete.
Expecting WINE to make Linux run MS programs identically to Windows is never goign to happen. Depending on WINE to be super stable and reliable in a deployment environment is a mistake, so don't do it. Spend a little money to get the tools to do it right, or don't try and do it at all. And if you try to do it without the tools or the skills to make them work, don't whine about it. We fricking know it's difficult to intergrate Windows apps on Linux machines...If anyone could do it, there wouldn't be Windows anymore.
Eh. AMD makes great processors. If I was buying top of the line right now, I'd buy Intel, but I've had my ass saved by AMD more than once, and over the last couple of years with all the problems intel had with the Xeon line, AMD was the smart buy. I've got an AMD Barton (2800?) production machine that had a CPU fan die on it, and I popped the case open and pointed a floor fan at it, and the damn thing ran like a champ for 2 days until I got a replacement fan...You won't see that with Intel.
Likewise with motherboards. There are some really good brands out there...I've always had a lot of luck with Asus, even though I don't tend to overclock, the over-design that they put into the boards to create a stable platform for overclocking provides a solid consumer benefit.
The problem with ATI/nVidia, is that you can still buy a card with a good chipset from a company that will be going into the toilet (ATI and nVidia don't usually make their own cards)...I had a 300 dollar card self-destruct on me less than a week after the quite-reputable (in my understanding) company I'd bought it from went tits up...Wish I could remember the company name, I'm sure there are other people who will remember it.
Otherwise I agree. Motherboards are very often flawed in mass market desktops, because they throw a high end processor in it and then put in a crappy motherboard, knowing that the customer is only looking at the clock speed, and doesn't understand the problems that he'll get from a shoddy system bus.
Sure, it would be nice to live in that world, but what do you say to your bosses after some accounting weenie loses a laptop with an entire period's accounting data including customer banking account data, because he wanted to work in the coffee shop and didn't take the laptop with him when he went to take a piss.
For every piece of perfect planning, there will be an idiot who opens a hole in your security that you could never have forseen in your preplanning. It's better to have a system that is simple and redundant.
As far as planning for natural disasters, it all boils down to 1) Have backups of your data, 2) Have a suitable alternate base of operations.
Informative? Informative would be explaining how he came up with accurate numbers for [Total Cost of Intrusion] and [Percentage Chance of Intrusion].
That's where the problem is in this whole issue. How much will it cost if we get owned, and how likely is it that we will get owned? If you can calculate those two data points accurately, then yes, it's easy as pie to figure out your ROI, but the problem is that figuring out the former, requires the services of a mind reader, and the latter requires the knowledge of all the weaknesses in your security and all the skills and motivations of those who want to break your security.
Sure, it's fine and dandy to pull some numbers out of your ass and plug them into an equation, but when you get taken and the cost is higher or lower than your predicted cost, then you had better hope no one holds you accountable.
Shrug. I came to the conclusion years ago that, if you were able to build your own computer, you would be crazy not to. I've used nothing but custom builds for the last 8 years or so, and I wouldn't switch back for anything.
You end up taking the shaft even from working with a high end desktop from an industry leader. I got so tired of buying high end Dell's for 4,000 a pop, and then having them be a big non-upgradable paperweight 3 years later...All the internal mounts on their cases are proprietary, power supply, motherboard...hell, you can switch pci cards and that's about it. Pathetic.
On the other hand, a nice 150 dollar Antec case is good for years, and you can put any damn motherboard/power supply in it, no trouble at all, and when all the components are standards compliant, you can switch out whatever part you want and it's no big deal. New motherboard/processor without upgrading a single other piece of the machine? No problem.
You're right. I replaced a hard drive, motherboard, ram, sound, and graphics card on one system, and all I had to do was call them and say, "No, my copy of XP is not installed on any other system" and they game me a reactivation code.
My copy of XP isn't OEM though, which may be an issue...Still, that's about as big an upgrade as you can get and they didn't even blink.
I keep thinking about this as well. Really, sitting down a trying to write code that runs optimally on multiple processors is a huge headache, and, frankly, judging by the code I've seen in my life, most coders aren't up to it...It would be far better to put a VM or a specialty compiler between the code and the system, one that is capable of taking regular code and making it more multi-core friendly.
Sure it'll add overhead, but the number of cores we're going to be working with at a time is going to continue to change, and the only way to not write immediately obsolete code is to have an intermediate control layer that is smart enough to translate.
If you don't know why you need Oracle, you don't need Oracle.
Oracle makes it's money primarily by selling support and service, not by selling licenses, so while they may try to sell you a license, they're not going to go out of their way to snag an itty-bitty fish that's not going to be able to afford support.
And frankly, if you're big enough to afford support, you probably DO need Oracle...mySQL is a good tool, but I'd be really hesitant about setting up a big accounting system on mySQL.
I find it hard to believe that a company with the amount of overhead that Oracle has will be able to provide mySQL support for the same rates that mySQL can; the primary benefit for Oracle is that they'll be able to offer bundled support with people who already have Oracle support and want the convenience of dealing with one company for all their support needs.
Definitely a win-win situation for mySQL, because they get press and legitimacy without losing too much business. The "unbreakable linux" deal probably hurt RedHat a hell of a lot more than this will hurt mySQL.
Just as easy to say, "Any game that has cheat codes is fundamentally flawed," but it's not any more true there...It doesn't matter how good the game is, there will always be someone who wants to skip to the end.
I don't use cheat codes, and I don't buy stuff off of goldfarming sites, and I don't do it because it ruins the game for me...Kills all the sense of satisfaction from accomplishing things.
But I understand why someone who's played a game up to level 60, and decides he wants to try a second character class would think, "Hmmmm, 10 days of my life, or 500 bucks out of my bank account?" Or likewise, why someone who really enjoys the game but has, you know, a life, would like to be able to compete with the 20-hour-a-day crowd...Can't play the same amount they play, but you've got a job, so what the hell?
Far as I'm concerned, if cheating makes it more enjoyable for them to play the game, more power to 'em. Not like I care because my combination of ethics and life means I can't compete with either the people who cheat, or the people who have no life, and both groups are pretty much equally annoying.
It's just eBay being stupid. IGE and all the other sites that cater specifically to gold/equipment/character farmers are just going to get more business because eBay is "worried about the legal complexities" of selling virtual property.
Honestly, I'd thought better of them than this...eBay sells so many things of purely subjective value, you'd think that some policy maker on the inside would have cottoned to the fact that value is a fairy tale, and that their business is to make money off people's experiments with value, not to "decide" that there are some things that don't have a place in their auctions.
Moron's who try to fight Supply and Demand by messing with supply get no pity from me. Where there is enough demand, and supply is not flat impossible, there will be supply. The only way to prevent the sale of in-game artifacts is to make them non-transferable, and that's never going to happen.
I will reply to this post to make the meta-post chain complete (a reply to a post about a post that was a reply to a post of mine).
I myself have had a lot of issues with GoDaddy, and I can't help but be surprised at the people who are acting so shocked. It's cheap webhosting. They don't give a damn about individual customers, and they don't have a great reputation.
Getting a good webhost is hard. You have to be willing to move around a lot, and to pay more than 8 bucks a month.
There was a list compiled by a bunch of phishers that made it into the open a few months ago...Lot of security guys were using it to do things like check for the average complexity of passwords among users and suchlike. The first link I found was on Google was the Tech Reads blog, dated 9/16/6 (mdy), so this is nothing new.
Ordering a takedown in pointless...I can't believe that those users weren't informed that they should change their passwords, and if they were, what's the problem?
Why would they bother when they know GoDaddy will cave in a second? Send an email to a guy who runs a security site, and he'll tell you where to shove it...Not like he didn't know that MySpace would object to that information being public!
Unless your web hosting company is willing to go to bat for you, you'll never, ever, hear from a company like MySpace before your site is taken off line.
You get what you pay for with GoDaddy. I certainly wouldn't expect them to take my side in a dispute with MySpace, News Corp, or, frankly, anyone with a significant number of lawyers on their side.
Providers, by and large, will cave to any request from a big company...Hell there was an article about it here a few days ago, that linked the BoF Experiment where they posted a public domain work on 10 different places, and then sent DMCA takedown notices to all 10 places, and had 7 remove it immediately even though it was clearly marked as public domain.
Face it; a hosting site that will stick up for it's customers against a significant threat from a big company is hard as hell to find, and sure as hell GoDaddy isn't going to do it for 10 bucks a month.
I agree with you about needing more data to make an accurate claim, but it's my intuition that there are a great many more patents that would be invalidated if someone bothered to make a challenge.
And since we know that, of the patents that get challenged, 70% are invalidated/amended, we either have to assume that this sample is somehow aberrant (e.g only really inaccurate patents are ever challenged), or we can assume that the patents are a fair sample set, and that the percentages are representative.
Without more data, it's impossible to know which case is more accurate, but judging by past examples of ridiculous patents, and over-broad patents, and patents on things that should never even have patent law applied to them, I can't find myself willing to believe that the vast majority of patents are perfectly legitimate, and it's only the bad patents that are challeneged and invalidated.
Anyone else find it infuriating that 70% of re-examinations result in them revising their initial findings?
What kind of crappy department accepts an error rate of around 70%? And you know it's worse than that, because these are just the cases that people give a crap about. You know that the total library of existing approved patents are at least 90% pure crap, if 70% are changed whenever challenged.
Why don't they just issue us all personal stamps, and let us stamp our patent on anything we happen to walk past? Probably less error prone.
When you've only got seconds to doctor the votes, you can't be fumbling around with a big keychain.
;)
Jeez. I'd have thought that was obvious...
It's because the exit polling was a much closer match to the actual results, rather than having substantial irregularities or, as in the case of the 2004 election, actual instances of election fraud.
Having both sides being extremely skeptical of the computer returned election counts is the only thing keeping anyone honest.