It would not be 1/100th as funny if his nym was "joe6pack" or "vlm", doing a little intentional Planned Chaos with that as his name is a hilarious metajoke.
Plus his initial statement that he's defending is true to the point of absurdity, making the whole thing even funnier.
If you're a libertarian, then that bridge is your capital investment
Your education and P.E. license is your capital investment. You still need P.E. Licensing boards even in a libertarian paradise because there is no free market in engineers, only engineers can figure out if another engineer is an idiot (well, most of the time) and the numbers are too small to be considered a commodity. Just like there is no free market in health care, or policing, or fire depts.
I think you missed my extremely subtle attempt at sarcasm. And I'm old enough to remember the insistence that electing an actor would lead to utter and total apocalypse, yet it wasn't quite that bad, hence the "not all that bad of an approach" deal.
You can turn it around from acting to engineering, my mom was horrified at my suggestion that an engineer would make a great president... she was old enough to remember Carter and associated the horrific economic conditions with the pres himself, however little direct relationship there was, but I was too young to remember Carter's election (which probably pinpoints my age to within a couple years)
I'm not a big fan of commenting code. I prefer code possessing such clarity that it is self-commenting.
Your code might be self commenting. The problem is the bug might be at a higher system level, at a higher level that your code.
You need comments for that, unless your system is so simple a noob would figure the whole system out instantly, or your system/framework is magically self commenting at the system design level (I've never seen that!).
You need to comment why your little part of the system fits in right here. Not what your obvious little part of the system does.
True, some code is truly difficult to comprehend and therefore requires comments, usually because what the code is doing is supremely complicated and difficult to comprehend itself. I'm not talking about that kind of code
Example after/before a monstrosity of a perl regex, break that dude down little bit at a time. If it takes 50 lines to explain, well then it just does. Some mistakenly demand you write 50 lines of code, but thats actually harder to debug, once you understand what its doing. Magically adding whitespace doesn't inherently make the problem simpler. If that was the case, then you could ace the SATs and ACTs by taking the "large print" versions instead of the regular versions.
one is an engineer first and foremost due to training and education.
LOL the flaw in your analysis is thats how you identify the engineers that totally suck at engineering. Simply find an engineer lacking a
underlying propensity towards tinkering and technology
and you've found an engineer who sucks at engineering, at least 99% of the time.
lets take it to a different probably less personal analogy. "A teacher may or may not like kids, but they're a teacher because they got a teaching license". Now run with all kinds of logic chopping based on the idea that teachers hate kids therefore blah blah, ignoring the fact that most don't hate kids, and the ones that hate kids are the ones that suck at their job.
Also tinkering as a pejorative is wrong, it merely equals a low rate of return on your labor. Trust an engineer who's been around the block a bit, unless you're doing something really boring, a lot of engineering involves what boils down to tinkering, once you've done the best you can with the best tools and design techniques you can get. Hackers don't have the boss hovering over them telling them not to waste money tinkering, that's all. The ratio of predictable work to unpredictable work changes a lot from engineer work to home hacker but its merely a change in quantity, not quality. At work economic forces stop me from squeezing the last dB of gain out of the companies VHF amp, at home nothing can stop me from getting the absolute most power and best IMD and SNR out of my ham radio gear. That's the only difference...
I think Dilbert's pretty funny and all, but Scott Adams is a pretentious douche. The proof is in his reddit comment history. Yeah, wow.
Can I have 2 minutes of my life back? Your comment above and your link appear tenuously connected in that they do in fact refer to SA but they otherwise appear to be almost completely orthogonal with not relationship at all.
Aside from the complete lack of connection, I'm totally not getting the hostility toward SA's reddit quote in your link. Lets try a real world example here. I'm familiar with the Ebers-Moll simplified model of bipolar transistor emitter current. You aren't? Oh no problemo, I'm sure you're entitled to your opinion about amplifier biasing design. Um, you can feel good about your opinions all you want, but thats not gonna work out real well if you try to actually make a microwave RF amp.
Yet in politics, even a hint of a politician displaying intelligence by changing his stance after new information and it's the political kiss of death.
Simple / obvious / occams razor answer: We live in a theocracy. Not a christian one, or at least not a true christian one anyway.
One of the very definitions of intelligence is the ability to take information and make conclusions. Obviously new information can lead to new conclusions.
Yeah try that next time you're at church, let us know how that turns out, how the reaction of the true believers matches your observations of politics.
The other analytical problem is you're assuming historical stance changes have been due to careful and reasoned economic analysis, but historical stance changes have actually been 99% due to corruption and back room scam deals, and everyone knows it, and there's no reason not to punish corruption, and flip floppers are almost certainly corrupt, so fry them.
The final analysis is we live in a republic but are brainwashed to think its a democracy, so a flip flopper screws up that illusion; from a democracy viewpoint its like the flipper faked the direct democracy voting results, making everyone angry. Nothing makes people angrier than forcing them to remove their illusions.
Decisions based merely on results, divorced from ethics and morality can bring disastrous results.
That never happens. Circular reasoning or bizarre redefinition of the word "results". The immoral decision was made without taking all results into account, in which case it was a very poor decision
1) If you take all conditions and results into account 2) select the best decision based on step #1 3) step #2 is wrong because you failed in step #1 to account for some pretty obvious conditions. 4) soft science says step #3 is +1 insightful, hard science says you failed miserably back in step #1 not in step #2, and once you fix step #1 you'll optimistically fix step #2 and never reach step #3, so its a zen "if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a +1 insightful post" type of non-rational thinking.
More generally it's kind of the natural outcome of a certain engineering mindset which looks for optimized supply chains, economies of scale, evidence/data-based decision making, etc. There's an alternate, more messy/decentralized engineering mindset though, perhaps better labeled "hacker mindset" than "engineering mindset", which is more about DIY, free-form experimentation, etc., and less technocratic in its orientation (though not necessarily libertarian in the American sense either; plenty are more lefty-anarchist leaning).
That seems like a very complicated answer. How bout "a hacker is an engineer with a really small budget". By occams razor my short and simple answer is much more likely to be correct. All your other postulated behaviors seem to flow from a simple lack of $ or in some cases, time.
1) La de da, I'm building a bridge. My favorite welder on his days off likes to stick tab A into slot B of a member of the same sex. I understand the meaning of an independent variable and file this as such; don't much care. I guess that makes me an engineer-libertarian.
2) La de da, I'm a building a bridge. I sweat over a keyboard for 850 hours of computer simulation to prove that bolt #374904 must be a size 10-24 NC because if some idiot installs a 8-32 NC or smaller the bridge will collapse when loaded with precisely 17 pickup trucks plus one housefly. Cheap businessman wants to install a smaller 8-32 bolt because live and let live, man, my right to tell him what to do ends at the tip of his screwdriver, or some psuedo-libertarian stuff like that. No, F you businessman, I'm going full on technocrat control freak on you and 10-24 NC bolts are getting installed there or its off to the camps with you.
Want to run a country instead of building a bridge? Sounds to me like it don't much matter if tab A gets inserted into slot B no matter what sex A or B is, or what hole they're using, as long as they're both consenting adults blah blah. That's the libertarian answer. The control freak comes out when you say no, you are not F-ing setting up a concentration camp for brown people, because unlike two dudes in a closet, that does destroy a country.
Considering this is Japan, I'm pretty sure they got the idea from Ghost in the Shell. The Major often times references performing a Back Hack, to determine the location of an attacker. Now if only I could...
... I was thinking more along the lines of what to do with those who bring virii onto my network... tentacles....
Aside from all the hype, its basically a distributed IDS. Since everything I do as a sysadmin is done in puppet, and my ids image is an ids image because of about one line, I'm half way tempted to try it at home, "everything under puppet control instantly becomes an IDS".
The biggest problem I can find is scalability of alerts. So now when one machine sees something weird I get it in the daily status report. What happens when 25 or so machines see something weird and all decide to simultaneously spam me?
LOL mobile phones in the US are the biggest scam / confuseopoly you can imagine. Imagine the opposite of the European business relationship, and you're there.
I was doing the Virgin Mobile $7/month plan like Tepples, and recently lucked into the republic wireless while it was open for beta, and I'm quite pleased with it, although it does cost about 3 times as much at $20/month.
My $120/month iphone coworker is absolutely aghast that he pays more per month than I pay in half a year. A large part of the appeal of smartphone ownership in the US is signalling to the opposite sex (or whatever) that you're rich and therefore desirable, ironically especially commonly used when the braggart is not rich at all. So my paying a sixth what he pays is the social equivalent of a drunken nascar fan in a stained wifebeater tee shirt barging into a ballet performance and puking on the stage, the nouveau riche are NOT amused...
1) GPL for open source redistribution, you pay up quite a bit if you want to sell without releasing source. Obviously not an issue for internal-only apps, or open source apps (duh). If you thought you'd develop and sell a closed source app under a BSD license using witty, its not that simple, gotta pay to license witty first. AFAIK its GPL not LGPL unless they recently changed it.
2) Packaged for Debian "apt-cache show witty" "apt-get install witty" etc. So installation and long term upgrading is not an issue, rolls out as easy as rails.
3) You'll find that less than 1 in 10K web devs understand C++ so... I think scorp1us and I might be the only/.ers to have ever used witty? I don't currently use witty (long irrelevant story) so I can provide no advice other than it worked and it was pretty cool when I tried it some years ago. Nice to see its still going. I wish there was a cross platform library that spoke both AJAX etc like witty AND rendered natively to kde, wx, something like that, so I could write an app and compile it for either web or native. As far as I know this does not exist other than crazy hacks (like running a webserver on the loopback interface, accessing via browser, and pretending that's "native"). Maybe thats been added to witty in recent years, I can't be bothered to read all the docs to find out.
Let me help with the standard/. car analogy of why people are pissed off with that answer.
Question:
I need to buy a nice set of metric socket sets to work on my car (my car was built in TN by a domestic company last century, yet is almost totally metric), and I'm not buying Chinese chrome plated plastic from walmart, can/. advise me on a nice place to get socket sets or general advice on procurement (note, I'm in market for 6-sides not those "bolt rounder" 12-sides and also I wanna get high grade impact sockets)?
Answer:
Well Saturn of Chattanooga never steered me wrong when I needed the plastic thermostat replaced with the brass one back in '98 due to the recall and I'm sure nothing has changed in the last 14 years so I'd go there.
I wonder how much Christmas played into those little bumps. It's almost like people head off buying expensive new phones during that period, possibly in hopes in getting them for gifts.
Sounds like "gifting" someone a puppy or a kitten. Hey, here's a phone as a gift. Whoops it comes with a $120/year two year contract, so sorry your "gift" actually cost you about three grand over the next two years, hope you don't mind.
The only people I see using the apps are people that have already decided who they are voting for and the mobile app might as well be a "donate now" button.
Oh I've got an idea I'm publishing right now on/. so its public knowledge (although being incredibly obvious, its probably a patented business method already)
My idea is make yet another mindless yet addictive mobile app game, and the in-app purchase store not only lets you skip a level or change your characters clothes, but includes a mandatory $1 (or matching funds or 50:50 of profit or whatever) donation to the crook... err... politician... of your choice.
So you play mobile device strip poker and to cheat you gotta in app purchase $2, $1 goes to me and $1 goes to crook. Advertised on app store as the "the official strip poker app of (crooks name here) campaign 2012"
Anyone wanna take odds that they fail on the "convert" vs " preach to the faithful" problem with their attempt at technological relevancy?
If there's one thing the R.P. guys (such as myself) are good at, its convincing other R.P. fans that it would be a great idea to vote for him, you know, like we were planning to do all along anyway. Surrounded by a bunch of "He sucks because he's only about a 6 on a scale of 1 to 10" ignoring the other candidates are more like a 2 or 3 on a scale of 1 to 10.
Now a REAL online internet social presence election would involve someone online getting elected, like Moot from 4chan or perhaps uncle leo from twit or cmdrtaco, not just using a new technology as yet another spam spewing source.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes thats the part that makes it hilarious.
It would not be 1/100th as funny if his nym was "joe6pack" or "vlm", doing a little intentional Planned Chaos with that as his name is a hilarious metajoke.
Plus his initial statement that he's defending is true to the point of absurdity, making the whole thing even funnier.
If you're a libertarian, then that bridge is your capital investment
Your education and P.E. license is your capital investment. You still need P.E. Licensing boards even in a libertarian paradise because there is no free market in engineers, only engineers can figure out if another engineer is an idiot (well, most of the time) and the numbers are too small to be considered a commodity. Just like there is no free market in health care, or policing, or fire depts.
I think you missed my extremely subtle attempt at sarcasm. And I'm old enough to remember the insistence that electing an actor would lead to utter and total apocalypse, yet it wasn't quite that bad, hence the "not all that bad of an approach" deal.
You can turn it around from acting to engineering, my mom was horrified at my suggestion that an engineer would make a great president... she was old enough to remember Carter and associated the horrific economic conditions with the pres himself, however little direct relationship there was, but I was too young to remember Carter's election (which probably pinpoints my age to within a couple years)
I'm not a big fan of commenting code. I prefer code possessing such clarity that it is self-commenting.
Your code might be self commenting. The problem is the bug might be at a higher system level, at a higher level that your code.
You need comments for that, unless your system is so simple a noob would figure the whole system out instantly, or your system/framework is magically self commenting at the system design level (I've never seen that!).
You need to comment why your little part of the system fits in right here. Not what your obvious little part of the system does.
True, some code is truly difficult to comprehend and therefore requires comments, usually because what the code is doing is supremely complicated and difficult to comprehend itself. I'm not talking about that kind of code
Example after/before a monstrosity of a perl regex, break that dude down little bit at a time. If it takes 50 lines to explain, well then it just does.
Some mistakenly demand you write 50 lines of code, but thats actually harder to debug, once you understand what its doing. Magically adding whitespace doesn't inherently make the problem simpler. If that was the case, then you could ace the SATs and ACTs by taking the "large print" versions instead of the regular versions.
one is an engineer first and foremost due to training and education.
LOL the flaw in your analysis is thats how you identify the engineers that totally suck at engineering. Simply find an engineer lacking a
underlying propensity towards tinkering and technology
and you've found an engineer who sucks at engineering, at least 99% of the time.
lets take it to a different probably less personal analogy. "A teacher may or may not like kids, but they're a teacher because they got a teaching license". Now run with all kinds of logic chopping based on the idea that teachers hate kids therefore blah blah, ignoring the fact that most don't hate kids, and the ones that hate kids are the ones that suck at their job.
Also tinkering as a pejorative is wrong, it merely equals a low rate of return on your labor. Trust an engineer who's been around the block a bit, unless you're doing something really boring, a lot of engineering involves what boils down to tinkering, once you've done the best you can with the best tools and design techniques you can get. Hackers don't have the boss hovering over them telling them not to waste money tinkering, that's all. The ratio of predictable work to unpredictable work changes a lot from engineer work to home hacker but its merely a change in quantity, not quality. At work economic forces stop me from squeezing the last dB of gain out of the companies VHF amp, at home nothing can stop me from getting the absolute most power and best IMD and SNR out of my ham radio gear. That's the only difference...
I think Dilbert's pretty funny and all, but Scott Adams is a pretentious douche. The proof is in his reddit comment history. Yeah, wow.
Can I have 2 minutes of my life back? Your comment above and your link appear tenuously connected in that they do in fact refer to SA but they otherwise appear to be almost completely orthogonal with not relationship at all.
Aside from the complete lack of connection, I'm totally not getting the hostility toward SA's reddit quote in your link. Lets try a real world example here. I'm familiar with the Ebers-Moll simplified model of bipolar transistor emitter current. You aren't? Oh no problemo, I'm sure you're entitled to your opinion about amplifier biasing design. Um, you can feel good about your opinions all you want, but thats not gonna work out real well if you try to actually make a microwave RF amp.
Senator Claude Pepper was once accused of "Celibacy before marriage, and being addicted to monogamy ever since"
You sure about that? It's a much funnier quote if you swap those two, the tired old trope of not getting any after marriage.
Yet in politics, even a hint of a politician displaying intelligence by changing his stance after new information and it's the political kiss of death.
Simple / obvious / occams razor answer: We live in a theocracy. Not a christian one, or at least not a true christian one anyway.
One of the very definitions of intelligence is the ability to take information and make conclusions. Obviously new information can lead to new conclusions.
Yeah try that next time you're at church, let us know how that turns out, how the reaction of the true believers matches your observations of politics.
The other analytical problem is you're assuming historical stance changes have been due to careful and reasoned economic analysis, but historical stance changes have actually been 99% due to corruption and back room scam deals, and everyone knows it, and there's no reason not to punish corruption, and flip floppers are almost certainly corrupt, so fry them.
The final analysis is we live in a republic but are brainwashed to think its a democracy, so a flip flopper screws up that illusion; from a democracy viewpoint its like the flipper faked the direct democracy voting results, making everyone angry. Nothing makes people angrier than forcing them to remove their illusions.
...so taking what he says 100% seriously is probably a mistake. Even if Dilbert does often appear to be a thinly-veiled documentary.
Kind of like if we elect an actor, we'll probably get a guy who merely acts like a president (not saying that would be all that bad of an approach...)
Decisions based merely on results, divorced from ethics and morality can bring disastrous results.
That never happens. Circular reasoning or bizarre redefinition of the word "results". The immoral decision was made without taking all results into account, in which case it was a very poor decision
1) If you take all conditions and results into account
2) select the best decision based on step #1
3) step #2 is wrong because you failed in step #1 to account for some pretty obvious conditions.
4) soft science says step #3 is +1 insightful, hard science says you failed miserably back in step #1 not in step #2, and once you fix step #1 you'll optimistically fix step #2 and never reach step #3, so its a zen "if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a +1 insightful post" type of non-rational thinking.
More generally it's kind of the natural outcome of a certain engineering mindset which looks for optimized supply chains, economies of scale, evidence/data-based decision making, etc. There's an alternate, more messy/decentralized engineering mindset though, perhaps better labeled "hacker mindset" than "engineering mindset", which is more about DIY, free-form experimentation, etc., and less technocratic in its orientation (though not necessarily libertarian in the American sense either; plenty are more lefty-anarchist leaning).
That seems like a very complicated answer. How bout "a hacker is an engineer with a really small budget". By occams razor my short and simple answer is much more likely to be correct. All your other postulated behaviors seem to flow from a simple lack of $ or in some cases, time.
Its all in the perspective:
1) La de da, I'm building a bridge. My favorite welder on his days off likes to stick tab A into slot B of a member of the same sex. I understand the meaning of an independent variable and file this as such; don't much care. I guess that makes me an engineer-libertarian.
2) La de da, I'm a building a bridge. I sweat over a keyboard for 850 hours of computer simulation to prove that bolt #374904 must be a size 10-24 NC because if some idiot installs a 8-32 NC or smaller the bridge will collapse when loaded with precisely 17 pickup trucks plus one housefly. Cheap businessman wants to install a smaller 8-32 bolt because live and let live, man, my right to tell him what to do ends at the tip of his screwdriver, or some psuedo-libertarian stuff like that. No, F you businessman, I'm going full on technocrat control freak on you and 10-24 NC bolts are getting installed there or its off to the camps with you.
Want to run a country instead of building a bridge? Sounds to me like it don't much matter if tab A gets inserted into slot B no matter what sex A or B is, or what hole they're using, as long as they're both consenting adults blah blah. That's the libertarian answer. The control freak comes out when you say no, you are not F-ing setting up a concentration camp for brown people, because unlike two dudes in a closet, that does destroy a country.
Considering this is Japan, I'm pretty sure they got the idea from Ghost in the Shell. The Major often times references performing a Back Hack, to determine the location of an attacker. Now if only I could ...
... I was thinking more along the lines of what to do with those who bring virii onto my network ... tentacles ....
Aside from all the hype, its basically a distributed IDS. Since everything I do as a sysadmin is done in puppet, and my ids image is an ids image because of about one line, I'm half way tempted to try it at home, "everything under puppet control instantly becomes an IDS".
The biggest problem I can find is scalability of alerts. So now when one machine sees something weird I get it in the daily status report. What happens when 25 or so machines see something weird and all decide to simultaneously spam me?
LOL mobile phones in the US are the biggest scam / confuseopoly you can imagine. Imagine the opposite of the European business relationship, and you're there.
I was doing the Virgin Mobile $7/month plan like Tepples, and recently lucked into the republic wireless while it was open for beta, and I'm quite pleased with it, although it does cost about 3 times as much at $20/month.
My $120/month iphone coworker is absolutely aghast that he pays more per month than I pay in half a year. A large part of the appeal of smartphone ownership in the US is signalling to the opposite sex (or whatever) that you're rich and therefore desirable, ironically especially commonly used when the braggart is not rich at all. So my paying a sixth what he pays is the social equivalent of a drunken nascar fan in a stained wifebeater tee shirt barging into a ballet performance and puking on the stage, the nouveau riche are NOT amused...
It would be hilarious if they were funded by selling your privacy report data for marketing purposes.
Also, size: Rails, Django (and even PHP) just do not fit in an embedded environment. Wt does.
Last time I used witty, years ago, it was very thirsty for memory... has that changed?
It does embed smaller than Rails, that is for certain. But perl is/was a whole order of magnitude (or more) smaller.
Three comments about witty:
1) GPL for open source redistribution, you pay up quite a bit if you want to sell without releasing source. Obviously not an issue for internal-only apps, or open source apps (duh). If you thought you'd develop and sell a closed source app under a BSD license using witty, its not that simple, gotta pay to license witty first. AFAIK its GPL not LGPL unless they recently changed it.
2) Packaged for Debian "apt-cache show witty" "apt-get install witty" etc. So installation and long term upgrading is not an issue, rolls out as easy as rails.
3) You'll find that less than 1 in 10K web devs understand C++ so ... I think scorp1us and I might be the only /.ers to have ever used witty? I don't currently use witty (long irrelevant story) so I can provide no advice other than it worked and it was pretty cool when I tried it some years ago. Nice to see its still going. I wish there was a cross platform library that spoke both AJAX etc like witty AND rendered natively to kde, wx, something like that, so I could write an app and compile it for either web or native. As far as I know this does not exist other than crazy hacks (like running a webserver on the loopback interface, accessing via browser, and pretending that's "native"). Maybe thats been added to witty in recent years, I can't be bothered to read all the docs to find out.
Let me help with the standard /. car analogy of why people are pissed off with that answer.
Question:
I need to buy a nice set of metric socket sets to work on my car (my car was built in TN by a domestic company last century, yet is almost totally metric), and I'm not buying Chinese chrome plated plastic from walmart, can /. advise me on a nice place to get socket sets or general advice on procurement (note, I'm in market for 6-sides not those "bolt rounder" 12-sides and also I wanna get high grade impact sockets)?
Answer:
Well Saturn of Chattanooga never steered me wrong when I needed the plastic thermostat replaced with the brass one back in '98 due to the recall and I'm sure nothing has changed in the last 14 years so I'd go there.
I wonder how much Christmas played into those little bumps. It's almost like people head off buying expensive new phones during that period, possibly in hopes in getting them for gifts.
Sounds like "gifting" someone a puppy or a kitten. Hey, here's a phone as a gift. Whoops it comes with a $120/year two year contract, so sorry your "gift" actually cost you about three grand over the next two years, hope you don't mind.
The only people I see using the apps are people that have already decided who they are voting for and the mobile app might as well be a "donate now" button.
Oh I've got an idea I'm publishing right now on /. so its public knowledge (although being incredibly obvious, its probably a patented business method already)
My idea is make yet another mindless yet addictive mobile app game, and the in-app purchase store not only lets you skip a level or change your characters clothes, but includes a mandatory $1 (or matching funds or 50:50 of profit or whatever) donation to the crook ... err ... politician ... of your choice.
So you play mobile device strip poker and to cheat you gotta in app purchase $2, $1 goes to me and $1 goes to crook. Advertised on app store as the "the official strip poker app of (crooks name here) campaign 2012"
Anyone wanna take odds that they fail on the "convert" vs " preach to the faithful" problem with their attempt at technological relevancy?
If there's one thing the R.P. guys (such as myself) are good at, its convincing other R.P. fans that it would be a great idea to vote for him, you know, like we were planning to do all along anyway. Surrounded by a bunch of "He sucks because he's only about a 6 on a scale of 1 to 10" ignoring the other candidates are more like a 2 or 3 on a scale of 1 to 10.
Now a REAL online internet social presence election would involve someone online getting elected, like Moot from 4chan or perhaps uncle leo from twit or cmdrtaco, not just using a new technology as yet another spam spewing source.
Ah, you do know Palin shoots her own meat, with a rifle from a helicopter, right? I'm detecting a 5.56mm hole in your otherwise righteous plan.
I can't think of anything I'd want _less_ than a candidate for public office sending me campaign-related text messages
How bout campaign related voice phone calls? Those are pretty annoying, although at least they're cheaper than a SMS.
Unlikely, they serve the govt by compiling lists of gullible people; in other words they know who is an ideal voter / jurist / consumer.