1. someone can DDOS the system by just encouraging enough people to stay in there and push that button until they overflow the hard drive or the printer runs out of ink and paper. (If there's a maximum number N that you can push the button, then we're back to my first post, with the minor twist that now Don Corleone will ask for N+1 receipts.)
2. you introduced some vote subtracting _after_ the votes have been checked. Remember, if the two are identical, there's no difference between discarding bogus extra votes and discarding real votes.
3. you can still _add_ votes with impunity, since the only thing that check does is verify if a vote hasn't been discarded. But if there's one vote in the database, you can't prove that someone actually cast it. And the extra bogus votes scheme also destroys any chance to detect that there were more votes than voters.
Especially 2 and 3 can be used very creatively together.
E.g., let's say the real votes are (let's say for governor, so we have nice big round numbers) 1 million votes for Moraelin, 1.5 million for Don Corleone, and 2 million for Johnny Extra. Let's say people also used the "Coercion" button generously, and we have 10 million extra votes for each this way. So the actual count says 11 mil for Moraelin, 11.5 mil for Don Corleone and 12 mil for Johnny Extra.
Now let's say I'm a crooked guy in charge of the voting machines there, and got really big money from Don Corleone to swing the vote his way. Let's gently manipulate the record so it says it's actually 10.5 million coercion votes. So an extra 0.5 million is subtraced from each. I'll also add 1.5 million votes for Don Corleone. Now after subtracting the (hacked) number of coercion votes, the numbers become 0.5 mil for Moraelin, 2.5 mil for Don Corleone and 1.5 mil for Johnny Extra.
The total is still 4.5 million votes, exactly as much as people who went to vote, and everyone can check that each of their receipts did indeed get counted. What you can't prove, though, is that (A) some actual real votes just got subtracted as coercion votes, (B) some votes just appeared for which noone has a receipt.
Briefly, it's still much, much worse than paper ballot counting.
Some, oh, I think 6-7 years ago, I happened to be at the local computer store, to buy some stuff. (In the meantime I buy most components online, so that's not to say it hasn't happened ever since, just that I wasn't there to see it.)
So an older guy came and said he wants them to build him a system. He was pretty explicit that he really doesn't want much more than to read emails and send digital photos to his kids. You'd think entry level system, right? Well, the guy behind the counter talked him into buying a system that was vastly more powerful than my gaming rig. (And bear in mind that at the time I was upgrading so often to stay high end, that the guys at the computer hardware store were greeting me happily on the street. Sad, but true.) They sold him the absolute top end Intel CPU, IIRC some two gigabytes of RAM (which at the time was enterprise server class), the absolute top-end NVidia card (apparently you really really need that for graphical stuff, like, say, digital photos), etc.
So basically don't underestimate what lack of knowledge can do. There are a bunch of people who will be just easy prey to the nice man at the store telling them that DDR3 is 50% better than DDR2, 'cause, see 3 is a whole 50% bigger than 2.
And then there'll be a lot who'll make that inferrence on their own, or based on some ads. DDR3 is obviously newer than DDR2, so, hmm, it must be better, right?
Basically at least those teenagers you mention read benchmarks religiously, with the desperation of someone whose penis size depends (physically) on his 3DMark score and how many MHz he's overclocked. If god forbid his score fall 100 points short of the pack leader, he might as well have "IMPOTENT, PLEASE KILL ME" tattooed on the forehead. At 1000 points less, someone will come at a door with a rusty garden scissors and revoke his right to pee standing. So they'll be informed at least roughly what difference does it make, or at least if the guys with the biggest e-penis are on DDR2 or DDR3.
I worry more about moms and pops who don't know their arse from their elbow when it comes to computers. Now _normally_ those won't go for the highest end machine, but I can see them swindled of an extra 100 bucks just because something's newer and might hopefully make their new computer less quick to go obsolete.
The question just hinges on whether you get a receipt to prove that your vote was counted, or not. Which is what a lot of people are proposing. If it just stays in a pile at the voting site for the recounts, then you've just created a fancier paper ballot recount scheme. I was addressing the case where you get to keep that receipt. (Because that is the stupidity that _usually_ gets thrown around by techno-utopians whenever such a thing is proposed.)
As for your "Coercion" button, the question then is simply like this: Which of the following you propose? Because both can be abused equally well:
1. Only the right receipt shows up as counted. Then the "Coercion" button becomes a useless bell and whistle, as Don Corleone can still kneecap you for trying to smoke him with a blatantly fake receipt.
It also creates the problem that someone can collect a bunch of those fake receipts and start screaming, "electoral fraud! Look at all the votes that didn't get counted!"
2. All the extra receipts show as counted when you use them at a vote-checking terminal or site. Then you just made electoral fraud 10 times easier. I can flip the vote in the database for everyone who used that button, to any choice I wish, and they can't prove a damn thing, because the extra receipts for all candidates equally show as "counted."
Let's say the choice was between Moraelin (the guy buying votes for money), Don Corleone (the guy threatening to kneecap you), and Johnny Extra (the hopeless independent candidate.) So let's say you voted Johnny Extra, because at least he's not a blatant sleazebag. So you vote for him, and get your ticket with a crypto token that can be used to prove "counted as 1 vote for Johnny Extra." Being the cautious kind of guy, you also push the "Coercion" button, and the machine dutifully spits two extra tickets, whose serial numbers are for the other two candidates. Now the choices are like this: either
1. The two extra tickets, when used at the check-your-vote terminal or site, show "no vote was counted for this serial number". Then both Moraelin and Don Corleone will know you didn't vote for them, because those tickets will show as no vote counted.
2. All 3 of them, when used at the same terminal or site, show that, yep, one vote was counted for that candidate. In which case they're useless, because you can't prove which of them was _actually_ counted. If Don Corleone bribed some technicians (or threatened their families) to flip your vote for Don Corleone, you can't prove that. The tickets with the tokens for Don Corleone and for Johnny Extra equally show "1 vote counted", and you can't know which is real and which is the decoy.
If I was looking to derail an election, I'd _love_ variant 2. I'd make sure that all machines have a "Coercion" button and remind people to press it, just in case. Then everyone who's pressed it, essentially lost any way to check for which candidate was their vote really counted. I could freely flip the votes for each and every one of them, and noone would be any wiser.
While in case 1, the link between voter and vote is done by the fact that:
A) _YOU_ have that ticket, and
B) The ticket can be used to check for whom was the vote counted.
That's all the link that's needed. The only way to lose that link there is to lose the ticket, in which case Don Corleone will still kneecap you, your dad will still ground you, etc. And the guys who decided to vote for the guy promising $100 per vote certainly won't lose theirs, so it becomes a moot point anyway.
The only way to dis-associate it from the voter is to not give such a receipt to the voter at all, but just keep it in a pile at the voting section for a recount. But then we already know that that works without such crypto-tokens anyway. And if you're going to recount everything by hand anyway, why bother? It's faster and cheaper to just do the old fashioned counting and save yourself the whole computer madness.
Ok, let's say you receive your crypto token, and can prove at any point that your vote was counted all the way to the grand total.
Also remember that it's not enough to hold on for it for 5 minutes. You must hold on to it all the way to the recounts, at least. If you just prove before leaving that the machine still has your vote, then there's not thing to say someone can't flip the votes in the database later.
The problem is this: any proof of how you voted, can be used for electoral fraud by itself. E.g.:
- Someone else can demand that proof that you voted for their candidate, or else. Let's say Don Corleone, the respectable head of the local mafia group, is running for mayor. If you have your ticket that you can check at a terminal, then so can Don Corleone's goons for you. It makes an electoral racket as simple as a protection racket. You know, you only have one kneecap in each leg, it would be a shame if that were to change. Show your ticket proving that you voted for Don Corleone, and you have our "protection" so it doesn't.
- Outright buying votes. Let's say I've won the lottery jackpot and want to be governor. Or just mayor. It's as this: everyone who shows me a ticket proving that they've voted for me, gets 100$, no questions asked. (And I'll store the crypto token on a database of my own, of course, so several people can't come with the same ticket.) In fact, let's turn up peer pressure a notch: if you can also prove that your spouse (if applicable) and at least one parent or child of voting age also voted for me, you get an extra 100$. You know, just to have old retired moms call their sons and do the "you won't even do that for me?" sobbing act.
- Pure social pressure. E.g., if you're a student still living with your parents, whoppee, they can control who you voted for. You know, under the old principle of, "as long as you're in _my_ house, you'll do what _I_ say, young man. Now let's go to a terminal and you'll prove to me that you voted as I told you to." E.g., if you want to keep working at my office, better "voluntarily" prove that you voted for my favourite candidate.
Etc.
Yeah, I'm sure _you_ would bravely stand your ground, stick to your ideals, and never betray the sanctity of the free democratic voting. Maybe. But considering that elections have been won by a 0.1% lead before, the funny thing is: you don't need to get _everyone_ to cooperate.
Some of those aren't even easy to legislate against. E.g., how would you legislate against parents demanding to see their 21 year old son's ticket?
So, no. Please don't do that. The important thing about votes isn't just that they're counted, but also that they're secret and hard to influence. The moment all that remains is that they're counted, but someone can easily influence the voters and/or check what they voted... well, you might as well not bother pretending it's a democracy any more.
Not really. In fact, it's outright wrong. English doesn't have genders, every object is inherently an "it", so slapping a "she" is pretty arbitrary. Most other languages have inherent genders of each noun, and they're spread evenly across all genders. It's not whether you want to think of an object as "he" or "she" for psychological reasons, it's that your ancestors already decided it for you.
To it, if you want to know about Germans and noun genders, a tank, ("Panzerkampfwagen" = "Armoured Fighting Vehicle", pretty literally) gets its gender from the last bit, the noun it's based on, namely "Wagen", which is "der Wagen", i.e., masculine all the way.
Some items even change gender in the same paragraph if you use different words for it. For example a car can be "der Wagen" (masculine) and "das Auto" (neutral) in the same paragraph.
Other things, well, make me wonder what my ancestors were thinking there. A fist is "die Faust", so it's feminine. Ditto for the hand, "die Hand". Other than, umm, self-satisfaction I can't think of any objective reason for that. The sun is feminine too, so it's "die Sonne". Quite the opposite of, say, the ancient Egyptians, which worshipped the sun invariably as a male god. Etc.
On the other hand "Mädchen" (girl) or the now largely obsolete "Fräulein" (Miss, as in Miss Eva Braun) are both neutral. It seems a bit illogical, when you think of it, that a big ball of fire in the sky or a hand would be feminine, but a girl would be an "it". Actually, the rule there is that diminutives are always "it", so applying a diminutive endearing-kinda term to anything turns it into an "it". (In English you'd probably consider it anything but endearing to be called "it", but there you go.)
To get back to military stuff, a bomb isn't an "it", but a "she". "Die Bombe". A plane is "it" indeed. "Das Flugzeug", but becomes masculine if it's a bomber ("der Bomber"). A pistol or SMG is feminine. Etc.
While, again, I actually like WoW, I feel that some things aren't _that_ impossible. (Though they might still be arguably undesirable.)
A level and gear based MMO having a war? Well, I'd say it's actually possible, with a bit of thinking outside the box.
E.g., COH has a very elegant way of effectively lowering or raising someone's level to that of a team mate. Sure, you won't be a real level 49 if you're level one and someone raised you to 49 by making you their "sidekick". But it's possible to recalculate someone's base stats and some equivalent equipment suitable for their new level.
In WoW terms, if, say, you were to proclaim the large scale battles to be "everyone is level 70" battles, then a level 1 in white level gear would become (for the scope of that zone) a level 70 in white level 70 gear. A level 19 with, say, a blue level 15 weapon, would become a level 70 with a blue level 66 weapon. You just need to scale the weapon's stats accordingly. You would keep your fewer talents, though.
(And I suspect that Blizzard already has a formula about how equipment stats should scale with level. Or if not, heck, they've randomly generated equipment before in Diablo, based on a formula. They already know how it's done.)
Sure, they'd still get pwned one-on-one by a real level 70 with epics. But enough of them scaling the walls of your castle would be a realistic threat anyway. Same, I guess, as in the middle ages not everyone was a knight: enough peasants with a cheap spear and shield would be a problem anyway.
I guess in the interest of not tripping suspension of disbelief, in such massive war areas, basically you could make everyone level-less. Everyone is a soldier in there, their level is hidden, and their stats and equipment are scaled as above.
E.g., COH again, has monsters which are level-less. All giant monsters are like that, and the Rikti spawned in Issue 10 events are like that too. Against them, your attacks have a base value calculated in (very low) percentages of the monster's health, and their attacks do a percentage of the base health for your level. (Which in turn is modified by class, so in practice a mage still dies faster than the tank.) Buffs and debuffs are already calculated in percentages there. (And could be auto-scaled instead on WoW.) So basically everyone has a chance at fighting them.
So again, I could see a PvE event working like that in WoW too. Go take that massive orc fortress defended by level-less orcs npcs, for example. Get a trebuchet and a couple of battering rams while you're at it.
So IMHO impossible it is not. Whether that's _desirable_, now that's a whole other question. It would essentially turn a chunk of the game into a game without levels, or at least a lot less level based. I can imagine a lot of good arguments against _that_. (But then again, also for.) So I'm not saying that Blizzard _should_ do that. Just that, well, at least theoretically it's not impossible.
Well, I certainly see your point, but the cynic in me says that we've thought this before... and we were wrong.
When Origin invented the genre, they were literally the only player in town. They were so far ahead the other MMOs, that the others were just getting started trying to copy it. Even if you consider MUDs to be essentially the same genre, the difference between UO and your average text-based MUD, if nothing else in terms of number of players, was larger than between WoW and Anarchy Online nowadays.
Other people who arguably invented a genre, or made it mainstream, are still the Gods of Gaming in that genre. E.g., Id and FPS. You'd expect Origin to share that fate, wouldn't you?
You'd think nothing could possibly dethrone UO at that point, until Origin creates UO2, right? Well, we already know how that went.
Then came Everquest, and it was so popular it became synonim with MMOs. You didn't talk, say, about people losing their job and wife to MMOs, you instinctively spoke of them losing that to Everquest. It's also the game which caused the deluge of me-too MMOs. It was such a money-printing license, everyone wanted a piece of that market.
Worse yet, along came a long period of stagnation, and most new MMOs just managed to steal some of someone else's players, only to have them stolen by someone else in 6 months. It looked like there were a total of about 1 million MMO players total... and EQ owned slightly more than half of them.
Once you factored in their other games too, Sony _owned_ the MMO market.
Surely one would have thought nothing will challenge that until their own EQ2 came out, right? Well, wrong, actually. EQ2 peaked a lot lower than what EQ still had, never mind its former peak. It _still_ has less players than the old Everquest. (Not saying it's necessarily a bad game, as that's something highly subjective, just that subscription-wise it failed to be the block-buster everyone expected.)
Instead there came this WoW noone really expected that much of. What people wanted from Blizzard was Starcraft 2 or maybe Diablo 3, not a MMO. They hadn't proved that they know their elbow from their arse in the MMO arena yet. They had the Warcraft franchise and name recognition, but an unrelated franchise name only carries you so far: see TSO which flopped in spite of the The Sims franchise which had outsold all 3 Warcraft games _combined_.
Not only it handed Sony its arse at its own game, it managed something that noone else had managed in years: it actually enlarged the western MMO market. About 10 times.
So now we think the same all over again. "Man, nothing's going to displace WoW until they launch WoW2." I dunno, we've been wrong about that at least twice before. (Or more than twice if we're talking about sequel surpassing their original. AC2 bombed so badly that it was shut down, for example. Essentially that sequel moved the AC franchise from being the second most successful MMO to being nobody.)
Before anyone accuses me of wishing that WoW fails or anything, note that I'm not against any of the games I've mentioned here. I actually liked WoW, though nowadays I'm playing COH yet again. I can see why WoW was successful. In this highly subjective taste matter, they sure managed to give the larger market segment, the casual gamers and off-line Oblivion-type gamers, more of what they wanted in a game. They "deserve" their current position. I'm just saying that noone, Blizzard included, has a certificate of ownership of the market. They all "rent" the #1 spot for a while. They can fall like everyone else, eventually.
In fact, I'm sorta surprised that WoW hasn't fallen back yet. Again, I don't wish it or anything, but it's not like they have a patent on what made WoW successful. Everyone else is free to copy the elements that made it sell well. It's just that everyone else seems to be surprisingly slow to understand it. Oh, they've tried to copy bits and pieces of WoW, but they just can't seem to understand _what_ they copy. It's... a bit like watching a clock maker try to copy random individual cogs from a competitor's clock, without understanding what they copy or the larger scheme of the mechanism in which it must fit in.
Just a thought, maybe it's because the initial demo by those companies created plenty of interference? It's easy to take a jab at the broadcasters, but I'd be worried there too. Yes, it can be designed to minimize interference, but I too would first like to see the model which indeed does that.
Then those companies said, basically, "yeah, well, you should ignore that 'cause the device was just deffective." Well, then show me the model which isn't. Also, did they test it? If they can't take a demo to the FCC seriously enough to have a fully tested prototype, it doesn't exactly inspire confidence... yet.
Also show me that you've fixed that mode of failure. If a device can just fail in a mode that jams two adjacent TV channels, I'd worry too.
To give an example from another wave band and type, imagine that a disco opens across the road from your house. Yes, it can be soundproofed to hell and back, but I'd like them to do that first, not just remain at the "it could be done" stage. If the first test could be heard from a mile, dunno about you, I'd probably be at the head of the medieval mob with torches and pitchforks trying to get them out of town.
And, honestly, the computer-related companies _do_ have a track record of pushing unsafe or untested stuff out the door. Tell anyone who's seen a Windows computer get pwned in 10 minutes flat after connecting to the internet that they should _totally_ trust MS to have their broadcasting equipment fail-safe.
Google is any better only because they stuck to the "but it's only a beta!" defense for how many years now? In any other tech company, going productive with a beta would be called irresponsible. My boss would probably have my head for lunch if I told him "it's just a beta" about a version that got deployed.
At any rate, it's again a culture that doesn't inspire confidence when it comes to other domains. If they can run their search engine as a beta and tweak it as it goes, more power to them, but it's not a model I'd want in something that broadcasts stuff. Or generally in anything that involves a physical product. If their page rank algorithm fails it's just a "teh oops" moment, and they'll tweak it some more again. If such a broadcasting device fails, it jams two adjacent TV stations. It's just not the same thing.
Heck, even in software it becomes an unworkable model if you move out of the free-services-over-the-net arena. If you shipped an OS by the "it's just a beta" philosophy, you'd probably do worse than even MS. Remember, MS at least has the policy of never shipping with known bugs. But even just the unknown ones caused the pwnage-fest when connected to the Internet. Now imagine it shipped as a beta.
Oh....my....god. Let me see if I can hit this nail on the head.
To spoil the ending for you, you missed by a wide margin. Starting with the fact that instead of worrying about whether the message is right or wrong, you try to figure out a way to pick at who wrote it. Still, in the interest of transparency:
You LOVE UML.
Can't say I have any particular fetish for that. Honestly, even if you just spend 5 minutes thinking in your head, "ok, do I need a singleton here? What am I trying to accomplish? What alternatives are there?" that's already a damn good start. That's what engineering is about. That's my main point. Whether you actually go and formalize it in any other way, we could make a whole thread out of that too. But for a start, just asking yourself why you need something, and if you really need it, is already something I'd praise.
You hate computer science majors.
Nope, not really. In fact, I'd gladly take more of those and less monkeys who don't even know what the O notation is. Mind you, I have my minor disagreements with some of them, but it's far, far, far from being even close to "hate". In my top 10 list of "what's wrong with programming today", CS doesn't even make it on the list.
You are a rocket scientist...seriously.
I wanted to be a rocket scientist, seriously. See, my first nerdy obsession as a kid was physics. But having also grown up with a computer, by the last year of high school I figured out that I like computers more. So I went and studied that instead of physics.
You love Java but seem to write most of your stuff in C#.
Actually, I don't even know C#. Which is a shame, really. I should study it soon. Knowing one more tool is never bad.
You hate Microsoft Visual Studio yet you still use it.
Wrong on both counts, actually. I only used MSVC waay back for C++. It seemed like a nice IDE actually. I still liked Borland's compilers more, but still, I had not much reason to hate MS's IDE either. Nowadays, I use Eclipse.
You talk to students like they are idiots.
Now, now... I like to think I'm above petty a-priori discrimination against any group, students included. I talk to _everyone_ like they're idiots;)
You collect cookie fortunes and comics (...boring).
Guilty as charged. Well, computer games too. Can't forget those.
You used to sing until you realized a pizza could feed a family of four while you couldn't.
Heh. Nah, you obviously never heard me sing. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't even be allowed to do it in public. It would probably count as cruel and unusual punishment under the terms of the Geneva convention;) So, nope, I never tried my luck there. I went straight to be a programmer after college, and it actually paid damn well so far.
Mind you, it was the dot com craze of the 90's. Anyone could make a damn good living if they knew anything about computers. (For example where the start menu is.) So much as I'd love to wave that as some proof of my l33tness, truth is, it doesn't say much. Probably staying in the job, and even getting a pay raise, _after_ the dot-com bubble imploded is by far a bigger achievement.
You went back to college, became an engineer, and have yet to get off of your high-horse since.
Again, wrong on both counts. That was the college I went to in the first place, so there's been not much reason to go back. As for the high horse, pfft, I was pretty much born in the saddle. I don't need college to teach me to be snotty;)
If anything, I thought I mellowed out a bit ever since. I'm at least trying to give other peo
Holy false dichotomy, Batman! While it's impossible to pin-down 100% of the requirements in advance (the so-called BDUF methodology) that doesn't mean you shouldn't be aiming at 90%, or that 0% is ideal. Let's say we were building an accounts system. It'd be good if we knew in advance whether it had to cover sales, purchases, or both.
Very much so, and I can only agree there. Note that that's not a dichotomy _I_ made. That's a reason I called that a caricature. But some places did feel a need to institutionalize just that kind of false dichotomy. Because no design is bad, they'll ask for everything to be 100% specified in detail before it even starts.
If you let the users do detailed technical design you're hosed before you start. I could tell a hundred war stories about this. They rarely if ever have the knowledge or skills - but often think they do. They should be specifying what, not how.
Well, then you've just told me that you're not the kind I was ranting against. You know why you use those, you know about code reuse, and it's just a widget library anyway.
In a perverse way, by what you wrote there, you're the kind of guy who's closer to RL engineering. Much as you seem to be against that comparison.
The kind I'm ranting about would throw that perfectly functional library away, and rebuild it based on whatever the latest buzzword is (let's call it Snake Oil Droplets (TM)), just because they want that buzzword in the app or on their resume. If they can't figure out an existing problem that Snake Oil Droplets (TM) solves, they'll pervert the rest of the design into creating a case for using that.
And I'm not talking about people who just use a library. Using existing components is good. I'm talking people who put some hard work into creating a cargo cult framework... and a maintenance problem for their successors in the process.
I know one team where you could fill a whiteboard just with the _layers_ through which a data object had to go (with factories, decorators and managers at each step) from being read from the database to being actually used. Not just happening to be so because of some third party framework's design. They actually coded each and every line of that bloat. That were some 25 man-years or so, sunk just into coding pure bloat.
That's not the only way to do bad engineering, of course, but it's one example where pointing people at "best practices" can be just a ticket to have them turned in ingenious ways into "worst practices."
Well, you bring an insightful point into how that goes downhill, but that's exactly what makes me wonder.
Engineering used to be about starting from a problem and figuring out the best solution. Well, best within the limits of your knowledge and abilities.
E.g., let's say you have to get people from A to B across a river. You'd start from that problem and figure out a solution, and not from "but I wanna build a cantilever bridge, 'cause it's the latest buzzword" and find a river in the middle of nowhere. Or dig a canal if you don't have a river for your buzzword bridge.
Then you'd look at the exact data your problem is based on. How wide is that river? What kind of traffic you expect over it? Is there barge traffic on the river that you'd have to deal with?
Then you'd look at the alternatives: do you need a bridge? Maybe a ferry is enough? How about a tunnel under it? If you decided on a bridge, should it be cantilever, suspension, or what? There is no free meal. Each option has its own advantages, but, and here's the important part, also its disadvantages and limitations.
And I think that's exactly what's missing in most of "software engineering" today. People start from what's the latest buzzword, and then work backwards to try to find some problem (even imaginary) to apply it to. They'll build a bridge in the middle of nowhere, in the style of 19'th century follies, just because they want a cantilever truss bridge, everything else be damned.
(Except the 19'th century follies were actually known to be follies, and built as a fucked-up form of social security in times of crisis. The laissez faire doctrine said that it's wrong to (A) just give people unemployment benefits, since supposedly that would have turned everyone into parasites, and/or (B) to use them to build something useful, since that would have competed with private initiative. So they built roads in the middle of a field, towers in the middle of nowhere, etc, instead. Whereas today's programs don't even have that excuse.)
And while it's fun to blame monolythic programs written by monkeys, I'll go and blame the opposite too: people who do basically an overblown cargo-cult design.
(Cargo cults happened on some islands in the Pacific when some supplies were supposedly paradropped to troops fighting there, but instead landed on some local tribe. The aborigines then proceeded to worship the big birds that dropped those, and pray that they come drop some more of that stuff. And when they didn't come back, they sculpted airplanes out of wood, and kept hoping that those'll drop some food and tools.)
People who don't understand what a singleton, or a factory, or a decorator pattern, or a manager pattern are, or when they're used, go ahead and created tons of them just because they got told that that's good programming practice. Everything has to go through layers upon layers of decorators, built by a factory, which is a singleton, registered with a manager, etc. They don't understand what those are or when or why they're used, so they effectively went and sculpted their own useless wooden factory, like the tribes in the Pacific.
So maybe just telling people about some "best practices" isn't everything. Some people _will_ manage to turn any best practice into the worst nightmare. Maybe what's really needed is to remind more people what engineering used to mean.
The same goes for design before implementation. There are places which sanctified the worst caricature of the waterfall model, but again, in a form that actually is worse than no design. Places where you have to spend two years (don't laugh, I know of a team which had to do just that) getting formal specs out of every single user (who hasn't even seen a mock-up yet, and some don't even understand what the techies actually want), then have an architect design an overblown framework that does everything except what the users actually wanted, then get on with the coding, then they have 1 month allocated for tests and debugging at the end
It makes me wonder, though. Schizophrenia quite often starts mild, debatably sane, and progresses over time to padded-room calibre. Just because at some point you might look like just a bit eccentric or slightly bizarre or a bit of a bad case of cognitive dissonance, doesn't mean that 17 years later you can't be diagnosed with proper schizophrenia.
And this guy's delusions started from half-way between mildly annoying and mildly funny, and progressed to outright bizarre. I can't diagnose him anyway, but it makes me, you know, wonder. Maybe a second examination would find it a bit worse than the one almost 2 decades ago? It's a possibility.
Plus, to the best of my knowledge, a lot (most?) doctors tend to prefer to err on the conservative side, especially when it would bury someone's career. If slapping a "yup, he's schizophrenic" label on him would terminate his right to act as a lawyer, even temporarily, they'll give him a lot of benefit of the doubt. He'd pretty much have to be at the raving lunatic stage to get that. It's just a different standard. Even if you'd consider giving him neuroleptics in a private consultation, you'd have to be convinced that he's to deranged to do his job to actually slap that on his dossier.
Plus, in that kind of context, I figure it's hard to diagnose anyway. Noone will start telling you about the voices in his head, when he's sent there to determine whether he's fit to keep working and doing his crusade. Being insane carries a major stigma. So unless they're deranged past the point of hiding it, a lot of people _will_ try to hide it, if you just send them to a psychiatrist. They might admit stuff to their therapist if it was their idea to go there, and it's going to be kept secret. But not to the guy who has to determine whether they're fit to keep their job, and whose conclusion will probably be public record.
What I'm trying to say is that it's entirely possible that he just slipped through the cracks the first time. (_If_ he's indeed nuts.) There's no telling if he'd still pass after all this time.
Man, if I end up on such a wheelchair, I sure hope my larynx is fucked up too. Because otherwise it sounds like an orangutan on a wheelchair. "Uh uh uuuuh uh uh uuuuh uuuuh uuuuh!" Throw in some chest thumping and people might try to appease me with bananas.
You still don't understand it. "License" only applies if you want to copy those tracks or otherwise commercially use that IP. You know, Copyright.
Since copyright actually comes from the days of books and newspapers, get this: you never "licensed" a book, except if you wanted to republish it yourself. Otherwise, if you walk into a book store and buy one, that's it: you bought that book. (Or rather, a copy thereof.)
The "license" bullshit comes from software, and was based on the following weasel reasoning: to use a program, you have to make a copy to RAM. Since you're making a copy, you need a license from the copyright holder. You need their permission to make copies. You know, Copyright.
Re-read that paragraph, because that reasoning was the sole and only reason for software "end-user licenses". And, again, it never existed for anything else before: you don't get an end-user license on a book. And it's especially funny since, AFAIK:
A) Even in the US copyright law, that loophole has already been closed. So, regardless of what MS tries to tell you, you _bought_ a copy of their software, you have the same rights as if you had bought a book.
You _would_ need a license, if you wanted to press your own Vista CDs and sell them, or maybe make some derivative works based on it. Dunno, pack it together with your own crapware or themese and sell it. You don't need a license as Joe Average who just bought a packaged copy and installs it on his own home computer.
It's already a disturbing trend that a corporation can try to snow you over several pages that they can override your consumer rights... and people actually believe it. So then, it's no surprise that:
B) I now see them trying to expand this to stuff which didn't have even that bullshit excuse in the first place. To play a CD, you never needed to make a copy in any form or shape. A typical CD player never reads more than maybe a second or two ahead, at any given time.
And, oh, since you seem obsessed by that car sale:
C) Copyright never applied to stuff like cars, since you seem obsessed by that car sale. Consumer rights, however, did. There _have_ been manufacturers who tried stipulating that you don't have this or that right (e.g., that you're a criminal if you repair it yourself), and it's already been ruled even in the USA that they can't do that. You _are_ legally allowed to repair your own car, whether the manufacturer likes it or not.
You may still void the warranty if you take your engine apart. You may get extra conditions if you have to give that car back, i.e., it's a lease or rental. But a sale? A sale is final. It's yours now. It's your legal right to do whatever you damn please with it, as far as the manufacturer is concerned.
Even for rentals or leasing, it has already been ruled even in the USA that certain clauses don't belong there. Stipulating that you can't wreck it is OK. Most other stuff is not. Even if it's a contract, stuff that a reasonable person wouldn't expect in there, or wouldn't see a reason why it would be needed in there, is legally null and void even in the USA. E.g., if I had a rent-a-car shop and snuck in the fine print "I just adopted your firstborn", that clause would get thrown out of court if I tried to enforce it. It's not the kind of payment a reasonable person would expect in a contract to rent a car.
Also, a contract doesn't override the laws in any part of the world. E.g., I can't put in a contract that you're now my slave, because slavery has been outlawed a long time ago. Well, the same applies to copyright law (which _does_ include that fair use clause) and consumer rights laws. _Regardless_ of what a contract says, it can't take away your legal rights.
Also, the idea of a contract is, or at least used to be, something that has been explicitly agreed upon and signed in advance. It's (or used to be) also expected that if any point is even borderline controversial, then it would have been explicitly brought up and dis
Nah, not in the 1937 case. There it wasn't just to mix something, it was the whole liquid. And to the best of my knowledge it wasn't "low enough" or "some people", but simply everyone who drank that medicine died in horrible pain over then next two weeks or so.
It was simply untested. They took the first thing that disolved the actual antibiotic, and that was it. Sorta the chemistry equivalent of, "it compiles, let's ship it."
Acually, if you actually RTFA, it raises exactly the same problems you write about, so I'm curious how you could call it moronic without, you know, calling yourself a moron;)
That said, I still have to wonder about some tradeoffs. Essentially, the way I read the article:
1. A lot (if not most) of the increasing risk was in the name of cutting costs as such, or cost per capacity. E.g., the original Cobalt, which was expensive but apparently safe, got then replaced with Nickel, then with even cheaper Nickel-Manganese alloy. I'm not sure how that can be a problem, but _something_ (this or something else) along the way apparently turned a safe battery design into a potential time bomb.
2. (Or maybe 1a.) They seem to be blaming the factory in China where everyone outsourced the actual manufacturing to. Again in the name of cutting costs. Maybe it's just blame-shifting and finger pointing, but it raises a valid theoretical concern. It's not easy to know, once a battery is assembled and sealed, what really is inside. If, theoretically, they shafted you for an extra buck, how would you know? You can put all sorts of checks in place in your own factory, but once you've outsourced it, it's out of your control.
It even gives you an example of what can go wrong in that scenario. If the separating membrane doesn't soften and collapse at a given temperature, the battery essentially just lost the designed protection against catching fire. What if someone replaces that foil with something cheaper, but which doesn't work that way?
3. (Or maybe 1b.) Apparently at least one batch is suspected to have been manufactured with counterfeit materials. I have to wonder if this wasn't just because they were cheaper. I.e., cost cutting again.
4. Not cost cutting, but competitive advantage again, apparently some laptop manufacturers recharge their batteries more "aggressively" (read: exceed the rated recharge current) so they can get a minor competitive edge there. It apparently (according to TFA) causes the battery to vibrate, and might cause particles to impale the membrane and shortcircuit the battery.
So while I'm not against capitalism or anything, it makes me, you know, wonder. Maybe the drive to cut costs can be taken to dangerous extremes? Just a thought.
Yes, it should fix itself, companies would in an ideal world avoid loss of reputation due to faulty products, etc. But sometimes it's too late. E.g., it's already suspected that a plane crash was due to a laptop igniting in the hold. E.g, an even worse case was when in 1937 a pharma company offered a liquid antibiotic where the actual antibiotic wasn't solluble in water, but someone found out it was solluble in diethylene glycol, a deadly poison. It was what prompted the FDA to mandate extensive testing for medicine. (And speaking of diethylene glycol, it seems to keep reappearing recently in Chinese-manufactured toothpaste. No doubt because it's cheaper than something less toxic.) Etc.
Do I have a solution? Nope. It makes me wonder, though.
Well, I've never been involved in anything even remotely nuclear, but it seems to me that half of good security is imagining in advance what kind of shit can hit the fan. So I'd be more worried if they didn't have a name and procedure for it until it started happening often enough.
You can see it in programming too. There are people who can write good code, know all the patterns, but can't seem to think of a boundary condition or anything out of the ordinary until it actually happens. _The_ classic example are buffer overflows: the average programmer can't seem to think of what would happen when someone stores more than 4096 characters in his fixed buffer. Oh, he'll fix it when someone reports the bug, but can't seem to think of it in advance until he had to fix it 10 times before.
Or I've had to fix someone's... let's call it a custom file transfer program, without getting into many details, which had 6 different ways why it couldn't continue an interrupted download. And 4 for the upload, btw. I don't even mean that he'd just restart the transfer from start instead of resuming... I mean it couldn't even do that. The program was otherwise well designed, but the implementation ran flawlessly, and was thoroughly tested, on exactly one case: the fortunate case where nothing goes wrong, nothing is out of the range he assumed, etc. I'm sure he would have fixed it retroactively, when it goes productive and shit hits the fan, though. Had he not been moved to another team, that is.
The most valuable people are those who can think in advance what could go wrong, and write the code to handle it from the start. You know, the guys who, when they write a malloc, they already think "buffer overflow", and write the ifs or assertions to guard against it.
So based on that (admittedly flawed) analogy, I'd say the same applies to the military. Anyone can sit around until a nuke is stolen, and only then get in a panic and try to figure out what to do. But it makes me sleep easier at night that someone thought up a name and procedure for it long before anything remotely similar happened.
I'll agree too. Some of the worst videogame implementations of the Monomyth (since it's mentioned in the summary) went and made me do boring, mundane tasks for hours on end, apparently for no other reason that the Monomyth said they must start with the hero as an everyman Joe. So, same as an action movie starts with showing you the hero for 10 minutes being an ordinary father and good cop (or good soldier, or guy on a trip, or whatever), some games seemed to feel a need to stretch this proportional to the game's length, and made me go through hours on end of doing mundane, uninteresting, un-heroic things.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is: kudos. Maybe a review site can get that idea out of more potential victims' heads.
I've been there only 7:30 hours today, out of which 30 minutes was that break. Leaves plenty of time for driving, especially since I live close to work, doesn't it? I never saw much point in commuting half-way across the country, like some of my co-workers do. My time is more valuable than that. (I could post on Slashdot in that time, for example;)
Downside, I'll have to work longer on some other day(s) to get the monthly total right. It's called flex-time. (And admittedly my version of it is pretty chaotic and at times arguably bizarre. But my boss hasn't complained yet.)
That said, if you're actually required to work 12 hours a day, ouch. You have my sympathy. You sure earned your right to complain all you want, if anyone asks me.
but it doesn't surprise me, you don't exactly sound like a 'thinker'
And you must be, because you can't make your point without an ad-hominem, right? Everyone who doesn't see things your way, is obviously not a thinker, right? Heh.
That said, while, no, _I_ don't telecommute:
A) I do work with people who do, and
B) I have to work more loosely with people who are in offices in the other end of the town, or in another town completely. You know, large companies aren't all concentrated in one office. So in all respects I'm much like telecommuting to them, and viceversa.
I actually _have_ thought of it, much as it might surprise you, based on that actual data I just don't remember any situation where their robot would have made it any better. Whenever someone wanted something from me, or I wanted from them, a phone call or email seem to work pretty well.
And before we go any further down that line of thought, let's get one premise clear: have you _seen_ their robot in TFA? It's just a cardboard box on wheels with a TFT monitor and, presumably, a camera. It's not that much of a physical presence, it's a moving video-conference contraption. It _is_ a webcam and a monitor.
And by video-conference, I didn't necessarily mean scheduling a big meeting, weeks in advance. If you feel that much more productive ad-hoc, one-on-one, via such a monitor-and-camera contraption, there's nothing to keep you from doing ad-hoc calls with a web-cam and your own monitor. Just get everyone in the company a web cam and suitable IM software on their PC, and there you go. You can make ad-hoc, one-on-one calls between any two persons. Seeing each other's faces too.
If you feel that video conferencing on your own monitor works that badly, why, pray tell, would you feel it works much better if the monitor and camera are mounted on a cardboard box with a pole? No, really, you're the self-proclaimed "thinker" there. You enlighten me.
That said, hmm, what would I say? "Go back to work," most likely.
See, just for the sake of ruining a good joke, the first couple of messages for today were written at home, the one you answer to was written during the break (I have to take at least 30 minutes break daily, and there's not much more to do in that area), and this one is written at home again.
(Now, mind you, you could make a good point as to why the heck am I here first thing after entering my home. But, hey, allow an old nerd to have his vices;)
But I'm guessing you were only making fun of the stereotype, right? Same as "you're on Slashdot so you never got laid" and the rest, right?;)
Dude, read again what you're trying to tell me there: that you'd take some time to stroll around -- in person or with that robot -- for no other reason and benefit than that there might be someone along the way to talk to. And that doesn't sound to you like a deliberate waste of your employer's time?
Now I can understand that when it just happens naturally and unplanned. Say you just needed a cup of coffee, Joe was at the coffee machine, a conversation just started while waiting your turn. Fine. I can't ask you to sit at your desk and dehydrate, if you need a coffee, can I?
But here you're telling me no less than that you'd take that robot for a stroll for the _sole_ reason that there might be a Joe along the way in a mood to talk. I.e., planned, deliberate, doing anything else than working in that time.
Yes, team bonding, social experience, team members getting used to each other, bla, bla, bla. I've heard all that before. Repeatedly. I'll even tell you from whom: the most unproductive parasites on every team. There's always someone who has a good reason as to why he's somewhere else than at his workstation, chatting about his vacation. Again. For half the freaking day. The problem is that these people rarely contribute much to the team anyway. By their theory they should be the damn glue and life of the team, but in practice they're the guy who just doesn't have the personality type to sit and program. And it's the rest of us who get to pick the slack and do his work too. Worse yet, most of them don't just waste their own time, they go waste someone else's time too.
Now I'm not accusing you of being that kind of type, because I don't even know you. I can't make an informed judgment. So I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Maybe you're just excited about the nerdy part of building a robot, and are willing to rationalize it to extremes. Or whatever else. I'll give you that benefit of the doubt. But if I were to take at face value that you actually do take strolls through the company just because someone might be along the way who's willing to chat, well, then see the above paragraph.
You'd be surprised how little socializing on the employer's time is actually required for that team to work. No, I'm not saying you shouldn't talk to your co-workers at all, far from it. I'm saying that if you have to take a trip for the sole reason that you might meet someone to talk to, that's already too much. You already have meetings with those co-workers, you already talk to them about work-related stuff, etc, and there's nothing stopping you from doing more socializing after work on your own free time. (I've been to pizza or to a pub after work with my co-worker several times this summer alone.) You know those guys already. Taking an extra socializing break will add at most a little delta to that.
If your team was dysfunctional without those long strolls to find someone to talk to, then it will be just as dysfunctional (if not more) with everyone taking strolls around and talking about their vacation.
And, oh, if stuff that's _important_ or needs your _help_ actually depends on the chance of you meeting Joe randomly at the water cooler, I'd say your company has a bigger problem already. In any sane place, if Joe needs your help, he'd have a better way to contact you. If projects or continued business actually depend on that kind of random chances, I'd start worrying and post my resume on Monster in advance. Because at some point some shit is gonna hit the fan just because Joe went to the coffee machine half an hour too late.
It almost sounds to me like the reason you see no use for this robot, is because you see no use for talking to your co-workers without an issue to discuss. You aren't the manager by chance are you?
I'm not a manager, but I don't take that as a insult either. Especially in this context. If any manager wanted to protest against someone's deliberately going for a time wasting trip instead of working, dunno, I might even like that manager.
So basically instead of calling someone to tell him a joke, you'd spend a few minutes steering a robot to hang around the lunch room with other people's robots.
Not to mention why would you have an excuse to be steering your robot around the lunch room or water cooler anyway? It's not like the robot can actually drink that water to quench your thirst across the country. So basically you'd take your normal RL breaks to eat or get a coffee in your home, then _also_ spend some time steering the robot around the coffee machine or lunch room in the office too. Does that sound like a productive use of time to you?
And if I'm trying to work on something, I'll soo appreciate someone driving a robot into my room to tell me a joke. Instead of, I dunno, just forwarding as an email I can read at my leisure. No really. Seeing a metal contraption trying to chat me up is so going to say "social interaction" and "the guy was probably just on his way to the coffee machine and dropped by." Dunno, it would tell me that the guy just spent some time driving the robot around just to chat to someone instead of working. It's not like the robot needed a coffee.
And in the lunch room? Man, I'll totally appreciate having to dodge robots in there too, as opposed to just the people there to have lunch. Oh, wait...
Visual contact? Whatever happened to a web cam? Then I can see you and you can see me. Whereas if we steer our robots around the office, I see your robot and you see mine. Yeah, so they haul a screen too, but now nstead of just seeing you as seen by your camera, I get to have the extra layer of having my camera capture your robot's screen. Yeah, that'll be sooo much more social. Not.
Here's an idea: the technology for visual contact has existed for a long time already. It's called video conferencing. What he's doing there is nothing more than adding a robot to move the camera and screen around. It's solving a problem we had already solved, and adding an unecessary layer to it.
Why? I already have my PC's screen, I can jolly well open a window to see his mug. Exactly why do I need a robot hauling his screen around? If it's important for him to see me, then why can't management just buy a cheap web cam for every PC?
Which would also let him see notes on whiteboards. Just hook one up in the conference room and point it at the whiteboard. There you go.
Exactly what does the robot add there? Just the fact that instead of calling me instantly and focusing on the conversation, he gets to also steer it around and fiddle with the controls while talking?
Well, I wouldn't say _most_ of them. There is a lot of honest research, it just doesn't make headlines.
E.g., since you mention all the "OMFG! It's teh cure for cancer!" articles, in at least 90% of cases that's not what the researcher said. The researcher usually said something closer to "hmm, well, it might possibly help against some types of cancers, but we don't know that yet, more research is needed. And, oh, it only worked on mice not humans so far, so hold your horses." It was the media that blew it out of proportion.
This isn't to say that such flawed studies, or prejudice-motivated studies don't exist. They do. God knows the idea of trying to pack a prejudice or political agenda as only science is centuries-old, and PR dressed as pseudo-science is even more common. It's just that they get disproportionately more media attention than the honest research.
Remember, journalism _needs_ big headlines. It also needs "controversy". In fact, a lot of the fucked-up idea of journalistic impartiality is based on showing at least two conflicting points of view, as equals, and without telling the readers that one is a recognized scientist and one is a quack with a faked diploma... and not even in the right field. If they told you that, then it would be taking sides, thus no longer "impartial".
Another kind of research which the media loves is: PR disguised as research. I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of "blue vs pink" research was that.
It goes sorta like this: let's say I had a company, Moraelin's Snake Oil Co. It does the normal advertising too, of course, but let's say I feel there's a need for an extra push to tell people to buy more snake oil. So I go to a PR agency. These guys are _good_ at faking journalism or faking research. So they write a bogus piece of pseudo-research that says "anti-cancer enzyme found in snake oil!" or "the formula for the perfect day to apply snake oil calculated!" (neatly timed to coincide with my product launch).
Now so far it would look almost comical, if it was my company that released it. So they'll find someone with a Prof or Dr title to sign it. Most will say "take a hike", but eventually they find someone, let's call him Prof Weasel, who essentially has nothing to lose. It's not like he had a respected name in the scientific community anyway. Sure, he'll take their thirty silvers and sign their paper.
And from there the PR agency carpet-bombs all newspapers and news agencies with it.
So Joe Average buys the newspaper and or sees it discussed on whatever site, and thinks it's genuine. Now my purposes there are served regardless of whether he actually believes every word there, or goes, "ha ha, these 'scientists' are all such arse clowns. Why's my tax money paying for this crap?" Even in the latter case, now he's also less likely to listen to the real scientists telling him that my snake oil is just that: snake oil. At the very least, the seed of doubt has been planted into his brain: maybe we don't understand snake oil after all, maybe if you asked 5 scientists you got 6 different answers, and maybe there's really no difference between the quack telling him to buy snake oil and the doctor telling him to buy clindamycin.
And either way, he's been reminded that snake oil exists, and at least one newspaper told him it even works, so essentially it was some disguised marketing.
And the newspapers sold some extra copies with that headline, so they're happy too. They're not going to wring the neck of the goose that lays golden eggs, by debunking it instead of running the headline.
*sigh* Perhaps the biggest damage that 20'th-21'st journalism has done is creating the false impression that all research is like that, and all researchers are a bunch of arse-clowns.
Slashdot Mirror
Right... so now,
1. someone can DDOS the system by just encouraging enough people to stay in there and push that button until they overflow the hard drive or the printer runs out of ink and paper. (If there's a maximum number N that you can push the button, then we're back to my first post, with the minor twist that now Don Corleone will ask for N+1 receipts.)
2. you introduced some vote subtracting _after_ the votes have been checked. Remember, if the two are identical, there's no difference between discarding bogus extra votes and discarding real votes.
3. you can still _add_ votes with impunity, since the only thing that check does is verify if a vote hasn't been discarded. But if there's one vote in the database, you can't prove that someone actually cast it. And the extra bogus votes scheme also destroys any chance to detect that there were more votes than voters.
Especially 2 and 3 can be used very creatively together.
E.g., let's say the real votes are (let's say for governor, so we have nice big round numbers) 1 million votes for Moraelin, 1.5 million for Don Corleone, and 2 million for Johnny Extra. Let's say people also used the "Coercion" button generously, and we have 10 million extra votes for each this way. So the actual count says 11 mil for Moraelin, 11.5 mil for Don Corleone and 12 mil for Johnny Extra.
Now let's say I'm a crooked guy in charge of the voting machines there, and got really big money from Don Corleone to swing the vote his way. Let's gently manipulate the record so it says it's actually 10.5 million coercion votes. So an extra 0.5 million is subtraced from each. I'll also add 1.5 million votes for Don Corleone. Now after subtracting the (hacked) number of coercion votes, the numbers become 0.5 mil for Moraelin, 2.5 mil for Don Corleone and 1.5 mil for Johnny Extra.
The total is still 4.5 million votes, exactly as much as people who went to vote, and everyone can check that each of their receipts did indeed get counted. What you can't prove, though, is that (A) some actual real votes just got subtracted as coercion votes, (B) some votes just appeared for which noone has a receipt.
Briefly, it's still much, much worse than paper ballot counting.
Some, oh, I think 6-7 years ago, I happened to be at the local computer store, to buy some stuff. (In the meantime I buy most components online, so that's not to say it hasn't happened ever since, just that I wasn't there to see it.)
So an older guy came and said he wants them to build him a system. He was pretty explicit that he really doesn't want much more than to read emails and send digital photos to his kids. You'd think entry level system, right? Well, the guy behind the counter talked him into buying a system that was vastly more powerful than my gaming rig. (And bear in mind that at the time I was upgrading so often to stay high end, that the guys at the computer hardware store were greeting me happily on the street. Sad, but true.) They sold him the absolute top end Intel CPU, IIRC some two gigabytes of RAM (which at the time was enterprise server class), the absolute top-end NVidia card (apparently you really really need that for graphical stuff, like, say, digital photos), etc.
So basically don't underestimate what lack of knowledge can do. There are a bunch of people who will be just easy prey to the nice man at the store telling them that DDR3 is 50% better than DDR2, 'cause, see 3 is a whole 50% bigger than 2.
And then there'll be a lot who'll make that inferrence on their own, or based on some ads. DDR3 is obviously newer than DDR2, so, hmm, it must be better, right?
Basically at least those teenagers you mention read benchmarks religiously, with the desperation of someone whose penis size depends (physically) on his 3DMark score and how many MHz he's overclocked. If god forbid his score fall 100 points short of the pack leader, he might as well have "IMPOTENT, PLEASE KILL ME" tattooed on the forehead. At 1000 points less, someone will come at a door with a rusty garden scissors and revoke his right to pee standing. So they'll be informed at least roughly what difference does it make, or at least if the guys with the biggest e-penis are on DDR2 or DDR3.
I worry more about moms and pops who don't know their arse from their elbow when it comes to computers. Now _normally_ those won't go for the highest end machine, but I can see them swindled of an extra 100 bucks just because something's newer and might hopefully make their new computer less quick to go obsolete.
The question just hinges on whether you get a receipt to prove that your vote was counted, or not. Which is what a lot of people are proposing. If it just stays in a pile at the voting site for the recounts, then you've just created a fancier paper ballot recount scheme. I was addressing the case where you get to keep that receipt. (Because that is the stupidity that _usually_ gets thrown around by techno-utopians whenever such a thing is proposed.)
As for your "Coercion" button, the question then is simply like this: Which of the following you propose? Because both can be abused equally well:
1. Only the right receipt shows up as counted. Then the "Coercion" button becomes a useless bell and whistle, as Don Corleone can still kneecap you for trying to smoke him with a blatantly fake receipt.
It also creates the problem that someone can collect a bunch of those fake receipts and start screaming, "electoral fraud! Look at all the votes that didn't get counted!"
2. All the extra receipts show as counted when you use them at a vote-checking terminal or site. Then you just made electoral fraud 10 times easier. I can flip the vote in the database for everyone who used that button, to any choice I wish, and they can't prove a damn thing, because the extra receipts for all candidates equally show as "counted."
Let's say the choice was between Moraelin (the guy buying votes for money), Don Corleone (the guy threatening to kneecap you), and Johnny Extra (the hopeless independent candidate.) So let's say you voted Johnny Extra, because at least he's not a blatant sleazebag. So you vote for him, and get your ticket with a crypto token that can be used to prove "counted as 1 vote for Johnny Extra." Being the cautious kind of guy, you also push the "Coercion" button, and the machine dutifully spits two extra tickets, whose serial numbers are for the other two candidates. Now the choices are like this: either
1. The two extra tickets, when used at the check-your-vote terminal or site, show "no vote was counted for this serial number". Then both Moraelin and Don Corleone will know you didn't vote for them, because those tickets will show as no vote counted.
2. All 3 of them, when used at the same terminal or site, show that, yep, one vote was counted for that candidate. In which case they're useless, because you can't prove which of them was _actually_ counted. If Don Corleone bribed some technicians (or threatened their families) to flip your vote for Don Corleone, you can't prove that. The tickets with the tokens for Don Corleone and for Johnny Extra equally show "1 vote counted", and you can't know which is real and which is the decoy.
If I was looking to derail an election, I'd _love_ variant 2. I'd make sure that all machines have a "Coercion" button and remind people to press it, just in case. Then everyone who's pressed it, essentially lost any way to check for which candidate was their vote really counted. I could freely flip the votes for each and every one of them, and noone would be any wiser.
While in case 1, the link between voter and vote is done by the fact that:
A) _YOU_ have that ticket, and
B) The ticket can be used to check for whom was the vote counted.
That's all the link that's needed. The only way to lose that link there is to lose the ticket, in which case Don Corleone will still kneecap you, your dad will still ground you, etc. And the guys who decided to vote for the guy promising $100 per vote certainly won't lose theirs, so it becomes a moot point anyway.
The only way to dis-associate it from the voter is to not give such a receipt to the voter at all, but just keep it in a pile at the voting section for a recount. But then we already know that that works without such crypto-tokens anyway. And if you're going to recount everything by hand anyway, why bother? It's faster and cheaper to just do the old fashioned counting and save yourself the whole computer madness.
Ok, let's say you receive your crypto token, and can prove at any point that your vote was counted all the way to the grand total.
Also remember that it's not enough to hold on for it for 5 minutes. You must hold on to it all the way to the recounts, at least. If you just prove before leaving that the machine still has your vote, then there's not thing to say someone can't flip the votes in the database later.
The problem is this: any proof of how you voted, can be used for electoral fraud by itself. E.g.:
- Someone else can demand that proof that you voted for their candidate, or else. Let's say Don Corleone, the respectable head of the local mafia group, is running for mayor. If you have your ticket that you can check at a terminal, then so can Don Corleone's goons for you. It makes an electoral racket as simple as a protection racket. You know, you only have one kneecap in each leg, it would be a shame if that were to change. Show your ticket proving that you voted for Don Corleone, and you have our "protection" so it doesn't.
- Outright buying votes. Let's say I've won the lottery jackpot and want to be governor. Or just mayor. It's as this: everyone who shows me a ticket proving that they've voted for me, gets 100$, no questions asked. (And I'll store the crypto token on a database of my own, of course, so several people can't come with the same ticket.) In fact, let's turn up peer pressure a notch: if you can also prove that your spouse (if applicable) and at least one parent or child of voting age also voted for me, you get an extra 100$. You know, just to have old retired moms call their sons and do the "you won't even do that for me?" sobbing act.
- Pure social pressure. E.g., if you're a student still living with your parents, whoppee, they can control who you voted for. You know, under the old principle of, "as long as you're in _my_ house, you'll do what _I_ say, young man. Now let's go to a terminal and you'll prove to me that you voted as I told you to." E.g., if you want to keep working at my office, better "voluntarily" prove that you voted for my favourite candidate.
Etc.
Yeah, I'm sure _you_ would bravely stand your ground, stick to your ideals, and never betray the sanctity of the free democratic voting. Maybe. But considering that elections have been won by a 0.1% lead before, the funny thing is: you don't need to get _everyone_ to cooperate.
Some of those aren't even easy to legislate against. E.g., how would you legislate against parents demanding to see their 21 year old son's ticket?
So, no. Please don't do that. The important thing about votes isn't just that they're counted, but also that they're secret and hard to influence. The moment all that remains is that they're counted, but someone can easily influence the voters and/or check what they voted... well, you might as well not bother pretending it's a democracy any more.
Not really. In fact, it's outright wrong. English doesn't have genders, every object is inherently an "it", so slapping a "she" is pretty arbitrary. Most other languages have inherent genders of each noun, and they're spread evenly across all genders. It's not whether you want to think of an object as "he" or "she" for psychological reasons, it's that your ancestors already decided it for you.
To it, if you want to know about Germans and noun genders, a tank, ("Panzerkampfwagen" = "Armoured Fighting Vehicle", pretty literally) gets its gender from the last bit, the noun it's based on, namely "Wagen", which is "der Wagen", i.e., masculine all the way.
Some items even change gender in the same paragraph if you use different words for it. For example a car can be "der Wagen" (masculine) and "das Auto" (neutral) in the same paragraph.
Other things, well, make me wonder what my ancestors were thinking there. A fist is "die Faust", so it's feminine. Ditto for the hand, "die Hand". Other than, umm, self-satisfaction I can't think of any objective reason for that. The sun is feminine too, so it's "die Sonne". Quite the opposite of, say, the ancient Egyptians, which worshipped the sun invariably as a male god. Etc.
On the other hand "Mädchen" (girl) or the now largely obsolete "Fräulein" (Miss, as in Miss Eva Braun) are both neutral. It seems a bit illogical, when you think of it, that a big ball of fire in the sky or a hand would be feminine, but a girl would be an "it". Actually, the rule there is that diminutives are always "it", so applying a diminutive endearing-kinda term to anything turns it into an "it". (In English you'd probably consider it anything but endearing to be called "it", but there you go.)
To get back to military stuff, a bomb isn't an "it", but a "she". "Die Bombe". A plane is "it" indeed. "Das Flugzeug", but becomes masculine if it's a bomber ("der Bomber"). A pistol or SMG is feminine. Etc.
It's really spread across all genders, really.
While, again, I actually like WoW, I feel that some things aren't _that_ impossible. (Though they might still be arguably undesirable.)
A level and gear based MMO having a war? Well, I'd say it's actually possible, with a bit of thinking outside the box.
E.g., COH has a very elegant way of effectively lowering or raising someone's level to that of a team mate. Sure, you won't be a real level 49 if you're level one and someone raised you to 49 by making you their "sidekick". But it's possible to recalculate someone's base stats and some equivalent equipment suitable for their new level.
In WoW terms, if, say, you were to proclaim the large scale battles to be "everyone is level 70" battles, then a level 1 in white level gear would become (for the scope of that zone) a level 70 in white level 70 gear. A level 19 with, say, a blue level 15 weapon, would become a level 70 with a blue level 66 weapon. You just need to scale the weapon's stats accordingly. You would keep your fewer talents, though.
(And I suspect that Blizzard already has a formula about how equipment stats should scale with level. Or if not, heck, they've randomly generated equipment before in Diablo, based on a formula. They already know how it's done.)
Sure, they'd still get pwned one-on-one by a real level 70 with epics. But enough of them scaling the walls of your castle would be a realistic threat anyway. Same, I guess, as in the middle ages not everyone was a knight: enough peasants with a cheap spear and shield would be a problem anyway.
I guess in the interest of not tripping suspension of disbelief, in such massive war areas, basically you could make everyone level-less. Everyone is a soldier in there, their level is hidden, and their stats and equipment are scaled as above.
E.g., COH again, has monsters which are level-less. All giant monsters are like that, and the Rikti spawned in Issue 10 events are like that too. Against them, your attacks have a base value calculated in (very low) percentages of the monster's health, and their attacks do a percentage of the base health for your level. (Which in turn is modified by class, so in practice a mage still dies faster than the tank.) Buffs and debuffs are already calculated in percentages there. (And could be auto-scaled instead on WoW.) So basically everyone has a chance at fighting them.
So again, I could see a PvE event working like that in WoW too. Go take that massive orc fortress defended by level-less orcs npcs, for example. Get a trebuchet and a couple of battering rams while you're at it.
So IMHO impossible it is not. Whether that's _desirable_, now that's a whole other question. It would essentially turn a chunk of the game into a game without levels, or at least a lot less level based. I can imagine a lot of good arguments against _that_. (But then again, also for.) So I'm not saying that Blizzard _should_ do that. Just that, well, at least theoretically it's not impossible.
Well, I certainly see your point, but the cynic in me says that we've thought this before... and we were wrong.
When Origin invented the genre, they were literally the only player in town. They were so far ahead the other MMOs, that the others were just getting started trying to copy it. Even if you consider MUDs to be essentially the same genre, the difference between UO and your average text-based MUD, if nothing else in terms of number of players, was larger than between WoW and Anarchy Online nowadays.
Other people who arguably invented a genre, or made it mainstream, are still the Gods of Gaming in that genre. E.g., Id and FPS. You'd expect Origin to share that fate, wouldn't you?
You'd think nothing could possibly dethrone UO at that point, until Origin creates UO2, right? Well, we already know how that went.
Then came Everquest, and it was so popular it became synonim with MMOs. You didn't talk, say, about people losing their job and wife to MMOs, you instinctively spoke of them losing that to Everquest. It's also the game which caused the deluge of me-too MMOs. It was such a money-printing license, everyone wanted a piece of that market.
Worse yet, along came a long period of stagnation, and most new MMOs just managed to steal some of someone else's players, only to have them stolen by someone else in 6 months. It looked like there were a total of about 1 million MMO players total... and EQ owned slightly more than half of them.
Once you factored in their other games too, Sony _owned_ the MMO market.
Surely one would have thought nothing will challenge that until their own EQ2 came out, right? Well, wrong, actually. EQ2 peaked a lot lower than what EQ still had, never mind its former peak. It _still_ has less players than the old Everquest. (Not saying it's necessarily a bad game, as that's something highly subjective, just that subscription-wise it failed to be the block-buster everyone expected.)
Instead there came this WoW noone really expected that much of. What people wanted from Blizzard was Starcraft 2 or maybe Diablo 3, not a MMO. They hadn't proved that they know their elbow from their arse in the MMO arena yet. They had the Warcraft franchise and name recognition, but an unrelated franchise name only carries you so far: see TSO which flopped in spite of the The Sims franchise which had outsold all 3 Warcraft games _combined_.
Not only it handed Sony its arse at its own game, it managed something that noone else had managed in years: it actually enlarged the western MMO market. About 10 times.
So now we think the same all over again. "Man, nothing's going to displace WoW until they launch WoW2." I dunno, we've been wrong about that at least twice before. (Or more than twice if we're talking about sequel surpassing their original. AC2 bombed so badly that it was shut down, for example. Essentially that sequel moved the AC franchise from being the second most successful MMO to being nobody.)
Before anyone accuses me of wishing that WoW fails or anything, note that I'm not against any of the games I've mentioned here. I actually liked WoW, though nowadays I'm playing COH yet again. I can see why WoW was successful. In this highly subjective taste matter, they sure managed to give the larger market segment, the casual gamers and off-line Oblivion-type gamers, more of what they wanted in a game. They "deserve" their current position. I'm just saying that noone, Blizzard included, has a certificate of ownership of the market. They all "rent" the #1 spot for a while. They can fall like everyone else, eventually.
In fact, I'm sorta surprised that WoW hasn't fallen back yet. Again, I don't wish it or anything, but it's not like they have a patent on what made WoW successful. Everyone else is free to copy the elements that made it sell well. It's just that everyone else seems to be surprisingly slow to understand it. Oh, they've tried to copy bits and pieces of WoW, but they just can't seem to understand _what_ they copy. It's... a bit like watching a clock maker try to copy random individual cogs from a competitor's clock, without understanding what they copy or the larger scheme of the mechanism in which it must fit in.
But eventually it's bound to happen.
Just a thought, maybe it's because the initial demo by those companies created plenty of interference? It's easy to take a jab at the broadcasters, but I'd be worried there too. Yes, it can be designed to minimize interference, but I too would first like to see the model which indeed does that.
Then those companies said, basically, "yeah, well, you should ignore that 'cause the device was just deffective." Well, then show me the model which isn't. Also, did they test it? If they can't take a demo to the FCC seriously enough to have a fully tested prototype, it doesn't exactly inspire confidence... yet.
Also show me that you've fixed that mode of failure. If a device can just fail in a mode that jams two adjacent TV channels, I'd worry too.
To give an example from another wave band and type, imagine that a disco opens across the road from your house. Yes, it can be soundproofed to hell and back, but I'd like them to do that first, not just remain at the "it could be done" stage. If the first test could be heard from a mile, dunno about you, I'd probably be at the head of the medieval mob with torches and pitchforks trying to get them out of town.
And, honestly, the computer-related companies _do_ have a track record of pushing unsafe or untested stuff out the door. Tell anyone who's seen a Windows computer get pwned in 10 minutes flat after connecting to the internet that they should _totally_ trust MS to have their broadcasting equipment fail-safe.
Google is any better only because they stuck to the "but it's only a beta!" defense for how many years now? In any other tech company, going productive with a beta would be called irresponsible. My boss would probably have my head for lunch if I told him "it's just a beta" about a version that got deployed.
At any rate, it's again a culture that doesn't inspire confidence when it comes to other domains. If they can run their search engine as a beta and tweak it as it goes, more power to them, but it's not a model I'd want in something that broadcasts stuff. Or generally in anything that involves a physical product. If their page rank algorithm fails it's just a "teh oops" moment, and they'll tweak it some more again. If such a broadcasting device fails, it jams two adjacent TV stations. It's just not the same thing.
Heck, even in software it becomes an unworkable model if you move out of the free-services-over-the-net arena. If you shipped an OS by the "it's just a beta" philosophy, you'd probably do worse than even MS. Remember, MS at least has the policy of never shipping with known bugs. But even just the unknown ones caused the pwnage-fest when connected to the Internet. Now imagine it shipped as a beta.
To spoil the ending for you, you missed by a wide margin. Starting with the fact that instead of worrying about whether the message is right or wrong, you try to figure out a way to pick at who wrote it. Still, in the interest of transparency:
Can't say I have any particular fetish for that. Honestly, even if you just spend 5 minutes thinking in your head, "ok, do I need a singleton here? What am I trying to accomplish? What alternatives are there?" that's already a damn good start. That's what engineering is about. That's my main point. Whether you actually go and formalize it in any other way, we could make a whole thread out of that too. But for a start, just asking yourself why you need something, and if you really need it, is already something I'd praise.
Nope, not really. In fact, I'd gladly take more of those and less monkeys who don't even know what the O notation is. Mind you, I have my minor disagreements with some of them, but it's far, far, far from being even close to "hate". In my top 10 list of "what's wrong with programming today", CS doesn't even make it on the list.
I wanted to be a rocket scientist, seriously. See, my first nerdy obsession as a kid was physics. But having also grown up with a computer, by the last year of high school I figured out that I like computers more. So I went and studied that instead of physics.
Actually, I don't even know C#. Which is a shame, really. I should study it soon. Knowing one more tool is never bad.
Wrong on both counts, actually. I only used MSVC waay back for C++. It seemed like a nice IDE actually. I still liked Borland's compilers more, but still, I had not much reason to hate MS's IDE either. Nowadays, I use Eclipse.
Now, now... I like to think I'm above petty a-priori discrimination against any group, students included. I talk to _everyone_ like they're idiots ;)
Guilty as charged. Well, computer games too. Can't forget those.
Heh. Nah, you obviously never heard me sing. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't even be allowed to do it in public. It would probably count as cruel and unusual punishment under the terms of the Geneva convention ;) So, nope, I never tried my luck there. I went straight to be a programmer after college, and it actually paid damn well so far.
Mind you, it was the dot com craze of the 90's. Anyone could make a damn good living if they knew anything about computers. (For example where the start menu is.) So much as I'd love to wave that as some proof of my l33tness, truth is, it doesn't say much. Probably staying in the job, and even getting a pay raise, _after_ the dot-com bubble imploded is by far a bigger achievement.
Again, wrong on both counts. That was the college I went to in the first place, so there's been not much reason to go back. As for the high horse, pfft, I was pretty much born in the saddle. I don't need college to teach me to be snotty ;)
If anything, I thought I mellowed out a bit ever since. I'm at least trying to give other peo
Very much so, and I can only agree there. Note that that's not a dichotomy _I_ made. That's a reason I called that a caricature. But some places did feel a need to institutionalize just that kind of false dichotomy. Because no design is bad, they'll ask for everything to be 100% specified in detail before it even starts.
Amen.
Well, then you've just told me that you're not the kind I was ranting against. You know why you use those, you know about code reuse, and it's just a widget library anyway.
In a perverse way, by what you wrote there, you're the kind of guy who's closer to RL engineering. Much as you seem to be against that comparison.
The kind I'm ranting about would throw that perfectly functional library away, and rebuild it based on whatever the latest buzzword is (let's call it Snake Oil Droplets (TM)), just because they want that buzzword in the app or on their resume. If they can't figure out an existing problem that Snake Oil Droplets (TM) solves, they'll pervert the rest of the design into creating a case for using that.
And I'm not talking about people who just use a library. Using existing components is good. I'm talking people who put some hard work into creating a cargo cult framework... and a maintenance problem for their successors in the process.
I know one team where you could fill a whiteboard just with the _layers_ through which a data object had to go (with factories, decorators and managers at each step) from being read from the database to being actually used. Not just happening to be so because of some third party framework's design. They actually coded each and every line of that bloat. That were some 25 man-years or so, sunk just into coding pure bloat.
That's not the only way to do bad engineering, of course, but it's one example where pointing people at "best practices" can be just a ticket to have them turned in ingenious ways into "worst practices."
Well, you bring an insightful point into how that goes downhill, but that's exactly what makes me wonder.
Engineering used to be about starting from a problem and figuring out the best solution. Well, best within the limits of your knowledge and abilities.
E.g., let's say you have to get people from A to B across a river. You'd start from that problem and figure out a solution, and not from "but I wanna build a cantilever bridge, 'cause it's the latest buzzword" and find a river in the middle of nowhere. Or dig a canal if you don't have a river for your buzzword bridge.
Then you'd look at the exact data your problem is based on. How wide is that river? What kind of traffic you expect over it? Is there barge traffic on the river that you'd have to deal with?
Then you'd look at the alternatives: do you need a bridge? Maybe a ferry is enough? How about a tunnel under it? If you decided on a bridge, should it be cantilever, suspension, or what? There is no free meal. Each option has its own advantages, but, and here's the important part, also its disadvantages and limitations.
And I think that's exactly what's missing in most of "software engineering" today. People start from what's the latest buzzword, and then work backwards to try to find some problem (even imaginary) to apply it to. They'll build a bridge in the middle of nowhere, in the style of 19'th century follies, just because they want a cantilever truss bridge, everything else be damned.
(Except the 19'th century follies were actually known to be follies, and built as a fucked-up form of social security in times of crisis. The laissez faire doctrine said that it's wrong to (A) just give people unemployment benefits, since supposedly that would have turned everyone into parasites, and/or (B) to use them to build something useful, since that would have competed with private initiative. So they built roads in the middle of a field, towers in the middle of nowhere, etc, instead. Whereas today's programs don't even have that excuse.)
And while it's fun to blame monolythic programs written by monkeys, I'll go and blame the opposite too: people who do basically an overblown cargo-cult design.
(Cargo cults happened on some islands in the Pacific when some supplies were supposedly paradropped to troops fighting there, but instead landed on some local tribe. The aborigines then proceeded to worship the big birds that dropped those, and pray that they come drop some more of that stuff. And when they didn't come back, they sculpted airplanes out of wood, and kept hoping that those'll drop some food and tools.)
People who don't understand what a singleton, or a factory, or a decorator pattern, or a manager pattern are, or when they're used, go ahead and created tons of them just because they got told that that's good programming practice. Everything has to go through layers upon layers of decorators, built by a factory, which is a singleton, registered with a manager, etc. They don't understand what those are or when or why they're used, so they effectively went and sculpted their own useless wooden factory, like the tribes in the Pacific.
So maybe just telling people about some "best practices" isn't everything. Some people _will_ manage to turn any best practice into the worst nightmare. Maybe what's really needed is to remind more people what engineering used to mean.
The same goes for design before implementation. There are places which sanctified the worst caricature of the waterfall model, but again, in a form that actually is worse than no design. Places where you have to spend two years (don't laugh, I know of a team which had to do just that) getting formal specs out of every single user (who hasn't even seen a mock-up yet, and some don't even understand what the techies actually want), then have an architect design an overblown framework that does everything except what the users actually wanted, then get on with the coding, then they have 1 month allocated for tests and debugging at the end
It makes me wonder, though. Schizophrenia quite often starts mild, debatably sane, and progresses over time to padded-room calibre. Just because at some point you might look like just a bit eccentric or slightly bizarre or a bit of a bad case of cognitive dissonance, doesn't mean that 17 years later you can't be diagnosed with proper schizophrenia.
And this guy's delusions started from half-way between mildly annoying and mildly funny, and progressed to outright bizarre. I can't diagnose him anyway, but it makes me, you know, wonder. Maybe a second examination would find it a bit worse than the one almost 2 decades ago? It's a possibility.
Plus, to the best of my knowledge, a lot (most?) doctors tend to prefer to err on the conservative side, especially when it would bury someone's career. If slapping a "yup, he's schizophrenic" label on him would terminate his right to act as a lawyer, even temporarily, they'll give him a lot of benefit of the doubt. He'd pretty much have to be at the raving lunatic stage to get that. It's just a different standard. Even if you'd consider giving him neuroleptics in a private consultation, you'd have to be convinced that he's to deranged to do his job to actually slap that on his dossier.
Plus, in that kind of context, I figure it's hard to diagnose anyway. Noone will start telling you about the voices in his head, when he's sent there to determine whether he's fit to keep working and doing his crusade. Being insane carries a major stigma. So unless they're deranged past the point of hiding it, a lot of people _will_ try to hide it, if you just send them to a psychiatrist. They might admit stuff to their therapist if it was their idea to go there, and it's going to be kept secret. But not to the guy who has to determine whether they're fit to keep their job, and whose conclusion will probably be public record.
What I'm trying to say is that it's entirely possible that he just slipped through the cracks the first time. (_If_ he's indeed nuts.) There's no telling if he'd still pass after all this time.
Man, if I end up on such a wheelchair, I sure hope my larynx is fucked up too. Because otherwise it sounds like an orangutan on a wheelchair. "Uh uh uuuuh uh uh uuuuh uuuuh uuuuh!" Throw in some chest thumping and people might try to appease me with bananas.
You still don't understand it. "License" only applies if you want to copy those tracks or otherwise commercially use that IP. You know, Copyright.
Since copyright actually comes from the days of books and newspapers, get this: you never "licensed" a book, except if you wanted to republish it yourself. Otherwise, if you walk into a book store and buy one, that's it: you bought that book. (Or rather, a copy thereof.)
The "license" bullshit comes from software, and was based on the following weasel reasoning: to use a program, you have to make a copy to RAM. Since you're making a copy, you need a license from the copyright holder. You need their permission to make copies. You know, Copyright.
Re-read that paragraph, because that reasoning was the sole and only reason for software "end-user licenses". And, again, it never existed for anything else before: you don't get an end-user license on a book. And it's especially funny since, AFAIK:
A) Even in the US copyright law, that loophole has already been closed. So, regardless of what MS tries to tell you, you _bought_ a copy of their software, you have the same rights as if you had bought a book.
You _would_ need a license, if you wanted to press your own Vista CDs and sell them, or maybe make some derivative works based on it. Dunno, pack it together with your own crapware or themese and sell it. You don't need a license as Joe Average who just bought a packaged copy and installs it on his own home computer.
It's already a disturbing trend that a corporation can try to snow you over several pages that they can override your consumer rights... and people actually believe it. So then, it's no surprise that:
B) I now see them trying to expand this to stuff which didn't have even that bullshit excuse in the first place. To play a CD, you never needed to make a copy in any form or shape. A typical CD player never reads more than maybe a second or two ahead, at any given time.
And, oh, since you seem obsessed by that car sale:
C) Copyright never applied to stuff like cars, since you seem obsessed by that car sale. Consumer rights, however, did. There _have_ been manufacturers who tried stipulating that you don't have this or that right (e.g., that you're a criminal if you repair it yourself), and it's already been ruled even in the USA that they can't do that. You _are_ legally allowed to repair your own car, whether the manufacturer likes it or not.
You may still void the warranty if you take your engine apart. You may get extra conditions if you have to give that car back, i.e., it's a lease or rental. But a sale? A sale is final. It's yours now. It's your legal right to do whatever you damn please with it, as far as the manufacturer is concerned.
Even for rentals or leasing, it has already been ruled even in the USA that certain clauses don't belong there. Stipulating that you can't wreck it is OK. Most other stuff is not. Even if it's a contract, stuff that a reasonable person wouldn't expect in there, or wouldn't see a reason why it would be needed in there, is legally null and void even in the USA. E.g., if I had a rent-a-car shop and snuck in the fine print "I just adopted your firstborn", that clause would get thrown out of court if I tried to enforce it. It's not the kind of payment a reasonable person would expect in a contract to rent a car.
Also, a contract doesn't override the laws in any part of the world. E.g., I can't put in a contract that you're now my slave, because slavery has been outlawed a long time ago. Well, the same applies to copyright law (which _does_ include that fair use clause) and consumer rights laws. _Regardless_ of what a contract says, it can't take away your legal rights.
Also, the idea of a contract is, or at least used to be, something that has been explicitly agreed upon and signed in advance. It's (or used to be) also expected that if any point is even borderline controversial, then it would have been explicitly brought up and dis
Nah, not in the 1937 case. There it wasn't just to mix something, it was the whole liquid. And to the best of my knowledge it wasn't "low enough" or "some people", but simply everyone who drank that medicine died in horrible pain over then next two weeks or so.
It was simply untested. They took the first thing that disolved the actual antibiotic, and that was it. Sorta the chemistry equivalent of, "it compiles, let's ship it."
Surrealistic, but true.
Acually, if you actually RTFA, it raises exactly the same problems you write about, so I'm curious how you could call it moronic without, you know, calling yourself a moron ;)
That said, I still have to wonder about some tradeoffs. Essentially, the way I read the article:
1. A lot (if not most) of the increasing risk was in the name of cutting costs as such, or cost per capacity. E.g., the original Cobalt, which was expensive but apparently safe, got then replaced with Nickel, then with even cheaper Nickel-Manganese alloy. I'm not sure how that can be a problem, but _something_ (this or something else) along the way apparently turned a safe battery design into a potential time bomb.
2. (Or maybe 1a.) They seem to be blaming the factory in China where everyone outsourced the actual manufacturing to. Again in the name of cutting costs. Maybe it's just blame-shifting and finger pointing, but it raises a valid theoretical concern. It's not easy to know, once a battery is assembled and sealed, what really is inside. If, theoretically, they shafted you for an extra buck, how would you know? You can put all sorts of checks in place in your own factory, but once you've outsourced it, it's out of your control.
It even gives you an example of what can go wrong in that scenario. If the separating membrane doesn't soften and collapse at a given temperature, the battery essentially just lost the designed protection against catching fire. What if someone replaces that foil with something cheaper, but which doesn't work that way?
3. (Or maybe 1b.) Apparently at least one batch is suspected to have been manufactured with counterfeit materials. I have to wonder if this wasn't just because they were cheaper. I.e., cost cutting again.
4. Not cost cutting, but competitive advantage again, apparently some laptop manufacturers recharge their batteries more "aggressively" (read: exceed the rated recharge current) so they can get a minor competitive edge there. It apparently (according to TFA) causes the battery to vibrate, and might cause particles to impale the membrane and shortcircuit the battery.
So while I'm not against capitalism or anything, it makes me, you know, wonder. Maybe the drive to cut costs can be taken to dangerous extremes? Just a thought.
Yes, it should fix itself, companies would in an ideal world avoid loss of reputation due to faulty products, etc. But sometimes it's too late. E.g., it's already suspected that a plane crash was due to a laptop igniting in the hold. E.g, an even worse case was when in 1937 a pharma company offered a liquid antibiotic where the actual antibiotic wasn't solluble in water, but someone found out it was solluble in diethylene glycol, a deadly poison. It was what prompted the FDA to mandate extensive testing for medicine. (And speaking of diethylene glycol, it seems to keep reappearing recently in Chinese-manufactured toothpaste. No doubt because it's cheaper than something less toxic.) Etc.
Do I have a solution? Nope. It makes me wonder, though.
Well, I've never been involved in anything even remotely nuclear, but it seems to me that half of good security is imagining in advance what kind of shit can hit the fan. So I'd be more worried if they didn't have a name and procedure for it until it started happening often enough.
You can see it in programming too. There are people who can write good code, know all the patterns, but can't seem to think of a boundary condition or anything out of the ordinary until it actually happens. _The_ classic example are buffer overflows: the average programmer can't seem to think of what would happen when someone stores more than 4096 characters in his fixed buffer. Oh, he'll fix it when someone reports the bug, but can't seem to think of it in advance until he had to fix it 10 times before.
Or I've had to fix someone's... let's call it a custom file transfer program, without getting into many details, which had 6 different ways why it couldn't continue an interrupted download. And 4 for the upload, btw. I don't even mean that he'd just restart the transfer from start instead of resuming... I mean it couldn't even do that. The program was otherwise well designed, but the implementation ran flawlessly, and was thoroughly tested, on exactly one case: the fortunate case where nothing goes wrong, nothing is out of the range he assumed, etc. I'm sure he would have fixed it retroactively, when it goes productive and shit hits the fan, though. Had he not been moved to another team, that is.
The most valuable people are those who can think in advance what could go wrong, and write the code to handle it from the start. You know, the guys who, when they write a malloc, they already think "buffer overflow", and write the ifs or assertions to guard against it.
So based on that (admittedly flawed) analogy, I'd say the same applies to the military. Anyone can sit around until a nuke is stolen, and only then get in a panic and try to figure out what to do. But it makes me sleep easier at night that someone thought up a name and procedure for it long before anything remotely similar happened.
I'll agree too. Some of the worst videogame implementations of the Monomyth (since it's mentioned in the summary) went and made me do boring, mundane tasks for hours on end, apparently for no other reason that the Monomyth said they must start with the hero as an everyman Joe. So, same as an action movie starts with showing you the hero for 10 minutes being an ordinary father and good cop (or good soldier, or guy on a trip, or whatever), some games seemed to feel a need to stretch this proportional to the game's length, and made me go through hours on end of doing mundane, uninteresting, un-heroic things.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is: kudos. Maybe a review site can get that idea out of more potential victims' heads.
I've been there only 7:30 hours today, out of which 30 minutes was that break. Leaves plenty of time for driving, especially since I live close to work, doesn't it? I never saw much point in commuting half-way across the country, like some of my co-workers do. My time is more valuable than that. (I could post on Slashdot in that time, for example;)
Downside, I'll have to work longer on some other day(s) to get the monthly total right. It's called flex-time. (And admittedly my version of it is pretty chaotic and at times arguably bizarre. But my boss hasn't complained yet.)
That said, if you're actually required to work 12 hours a day, ouch. You have my sympathy. You sure earned your right to complain all you want, if anyone asks me.
And you must be, because you can't make your point without an ad-hominem, right? Everyone who doesn't see things your way, is obviously not a thinker, right? Heh.
That said, while, no, _I_ don't telecommute:
A) I do work with people who do, and
B) I have to work more loosely with people who are in offices in the other end of the town, or in another town completely. You know, large companies aren't all concentrated in one office. So in all respects I'm much like telecommuting to them, and viceversa.
I actually _have_ thought of it, much as it might surprise you, based on that actual data I just don't remember any situation where their robot would have made it any better. Whenever someone wanted something from me, or I wanted from them, a phone call or email seem to work pretty well.
And before we go any further down that line of thought, let's get one premise clear: have you _seen_ their robot in TFA? It's just a cardboard box on wheels with a TFT monitor and, presumably, a camera. It's not that much of a physical presence, it's a moving video-conference contraption. It _is_ a webcam and a monitor.
And by video-conference, I didn't necessarily mean scheduling a big meeting, weeks in advance. If you feel that much more productive ad-hoc, one-on-one, via such a monitor-and-camera contraption, there's nothing to keep you from doing ad-hoc calls with a web-cam and your own monitor. Just get everyone in the company a web cam and suitable IM software on their PC, and there you go. You can make ad-hoc, one-on-one calls between any two persons. Seeing each other's faces too.
If you feel that video conferencing on your own monitor works that badly, why, pray tell, would you feel it works much better if the monitor and camera are mounted on a cardboard box with a pole? No, really, you're the self-proclaimed "thinker" there. You enlighten me.
Heh. Funny take on the stereotype, I must say.
;)
That said, hmm, what would I say? "Go back to work," most likely.
See, just for the sake of ruining a good joke, the first couple of messages for today were written at home, the one you answer to was written during the break (I have to take at least 30 minutes break daily, and there's not much more to do in that area), and this one is written at home again.
(Now, mind you, you could make a good point as to why the heck am I here first thing after entering my home. But, hey, allow an old nerd to have his vices;)
But I'm guessing you were only making fun of the stereotype, right? Same as "you're on Slashdot so you never got laid" and the rest, right?
Now I can understand that when it just happens naturally and unplanned. Say you just needed a cup of coffee, Joe was at the coffee machine, a conversation just started while waiting your turn. Fine. I can't ask you to sit at your desk and dehydrate, if you need a coffee, can I?
But here you're telling me no less than that you'd take that robot for a stroll for the _sole_ reason that there might be a Joe along the way in a mood to talk. I.e., planned, deliberate, doing anything else than working in that time.
Yes, team bonding, social experience, team members getting used to each other, bla, bla, bla. I've heard all that before. Repeatedly. I'll even tell you from whom: the most unproductive parasites on every team. There's always someone who has a good reason as to why he's somewhere else than at his workstation, chatting about his vacation. Again. For half the freaking day. The problem is that these people rarely contribute much to the team anyway. By their theory they should be the damn glue and life of the team, but in practice they're the guy who just doesn't have the personality type to sit and program. And it's the rest of us who get to pick the slack and do his work too. Worse yet, most of them don't just waste their own time, they go waste someone else's time too.
Now I'm not accusing you of being that kind of type, because I don't even know you. I can't make an informed judgment. So I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Maybe you're just excited about the nerdy part of building a robot, and are willing to rationalize it to extremes. Or whatever else. I'll give you that benefit of the doubt. But if I were to take at face value that you actually do take strolls through the company just because someone might be along the way who's willing to chat, well, then see the above paragraph.
You'd be surprised how little socializing on the employer's time is actually required for that team to work. No, I'm not saying you shouldn't talk to your co-workers at all, far from it. I'm saying that if you have to take a trip for the sole reason that you might meet someone to talk to, that's already too much. You already have meetings with those co-workers, you already talk to them about work-related stuff, etc, and there's nothing stopping you from doing more socializing after work on your own free time. (I've been to pizza or to a pub after work with my co-worker several times this summer alone.) You know those guys already. Taking an extra socializing break will add at most a little delta to that.
If your team was dysfunctional without those long strolls to find someone to talk to, then it will be just as dysfunctional (if not more) with everyone taking strolls around and talking about their vacation.
And, oh, if stuff that's _important_ or needs your _help_ actually depends on the chance of you meeting Joe randomly at the water cooler, I'd say your company has a bigger problem already. In any sane place, if Joe needs your help, he'd have a better way to contact you. If projects or continued business actually depend on that kind of random chances, I'd start worrying and post my resume on Monster in advance. Because at some point some shit is gonna hit the fan just because Joe went to the coffee machine half an hour too late.
I'm not a manager, but I don't take that as a insult either. Especially in this context. If any manager wanted to protest against someone's deliberately going for a time wasting trip instead of working, dunno, I might even like that manager.
So basically instead of calling someone to tell him a joke, you'd spend a few minutes steering a robot to hang around the lunch room with other people's robots.
Not to mention why would you have an excuse to be steering your robot around the lunch room or water cooler anyway? It's not like the robot can actually drink that water to quench your thirst across the country. So basically you'd take your normal RL breaks to eat or get a coffee in your home, then _also_ spend some time steering the robot around the coffee machine or lunch room in the office too. Does that sound like a productive use of time to you?
And if I'm trying to work on something, I'll soo appreciate someone driving a robot into my room to tell me a joke. Instead of, I dunno, just forwarding as an email I can read at my leisure. No really. Seeing a metal contraption trying to chat me up is so going to say "social interaction" and "the guy was probably just on his way to the coffee machine and dropped by." Dunno, it would tell me that the guy just spent some time driving the robot around just to chat to someone instead of working. It's not like the robot needed a coffee.
And in the lunch room? Man, I'll totally appreciate having to dodge robots in there too, as opposed to just the people there to have lunch. Oh, wait...
Visual contact? Whatever happened to a web cam? Then I can see you and you can see me. Whereas if we steer our robots around the office, I see your robot and you see mine. Yeah, so they haul a screen too, but now nstead of just seeing you as seen by your camera, I get to have the extra layer of having my camera capture your robot's screen. Yeah, that'll be sooo much more social. Not.
Here's an idea: the technology for visual contact has existed for a long time already. It's called video conferencing. What he's doing there is nothing more than adding a robot to move the camera and screen around. It's solving a problem we had already solved, and adding an unecessary layer to it.
Why? I already have my PC's screen, I can jolly well open a window to see his mug. Exactly why do I need a robot hauling his screen around? If it's important for him to see me, then why can't management just buy a cheap web cam for every PC?
Which would also let him see notes on whiteboards. Just hook one up in the conference room and point it at the whiteboard. There you go.
Exactly what does the robot add there? Just the fact that instead of calling me instantly and focusing on the conversation, he gets to also steer it around and fiddle with the controls while talking?
Well, I wouldn't say _most_ of them. There is a lot of honest research, it just doesn't make headlines.
E.g., since you mention all the "OMFG! It's teh cure for cancer!" articles, in at least 90% of cases that's not what the researcher said. The researcher usually said something closer to "hmm, well, it might possibly help against some types of cancers, but we don't know that yet, more research is needed. And, oh, it only worked on mice not humans so far, so hold your horses." It was the media that blew it out of proportion.
This isn't to say that such flawed studies, or prejudice-motivated studies don't exist. They do. God knows the idea of trying to pack a prejudice or political agenda as only science is centuries-old, and PR dressed as pseudo-science is even more common. It's just that they get disproportionately more media attention than the honest research.
Remember, journalism _needs_ big headlines. It also needs "controversy". In fact, a lot of the fucked-up idea of journalistic impartiality is based on showing at least two conflicting points of view, as equals, and without telling the readers that one is a recognized scientist and one is a quack with a faked diploma... and not even in the right field. If they told you that, then it would be taking sides, thus no longer "impartial".
Another kind of research which the media loves is: PR disguised as research. I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of "blue vs pink" research was that.
It goes sorta like this: let's say I had a company, Moraelin's Snake Oil Co. It does the normal advertising too, of course, but let's say I feel there's a need for an extra push to tell people to buy more snake oil. So I go to a PR agency. These guys are _good_ at faking journalism or faking research. So they write a bogus piece of pseudo-research that says "anti-cancer enzyme found in snake oil!" or "the formula for the perfect day to apply snake oil calculated!" (neatly timed to coincide with my product launch).
Now so far it would look almost comical, if it was my company that released it. So they'll find someone with a Prof or Dr title to sign it. Most will say "take a hike", but eventually they find someone, let's call him Prof Weasel, who essentially has nothing to lose. It's not like he had a respected name in the scientific community anyway. Sure, he'll take their thirty silvers and sign their paper.
And from there the PR agency carpet-bombs all newspapers and news agencies with it.
So Joe Average buys the newspaper and or sees it discussed on whatever site, and thinks it's genuine. Now my purposes there are served regardless of whether he actually believes every word there, or goes, "ha ha, these 'scientists' are all such arse clowns. Why's my tax money paying for this crap?" Even in the latter case, now he's also less likely to listen to the real scientists telling him that my snake oil is just that: snake oil. At the very least, the seed of doubt has been planted into his brain: maybe we don't understand snake oil after all, maybe if you asked 5 scientists you got 6 different answers, and maybe there's really no difference between the quack telling him to buy snake oil and the doctor telling him to buy clindamycin.
And either way, he's been reminded that snake oil exists, and at least one newspaper told him it even works, so essentially it was some disguised marketing.
And the newspapers sold some extra copies with that headline, so they're happy too. They're not going to wring the neck of the goose that lays golden eggs, by debunking it instead of running the headline.
*sigh* Perhaps the biggest damage that 20'th-21'st journalism has done is creating the false impression that all research is like that, and all researchers are a bunch of arse-clowns.