Yes - in exactly the same way that the difference between a mugging and a murder is one of degree, and the terms shouldn't be confused for exactly the same reason "mugger" and "murderer" shouldn't be confused.
not shown any tendencies towards limiting anything other than servers running on their network
But that's the whole point. Why should your ISP GIVE A DAMN which direction the traffic is flowing? It costs them no more money to send a TCP/IP packet than to receive one (and besides, just because it's a server doesn't have to mean it sends more data than it recieves. It could be a protocol where the client sends verbose data, and gets a short reply back from the server (for example, submitting a document to a website that accepts file uploads.))
I would really hate paying gouging surcharges for a service that I know doesn't actually cost any more to provide.
Which is why newspapers and TV back Democratic candidates 10 to 1?
Define what you mean by "back" here. Most news sources bend over backwards to say nothing at all that could be construed as support for one side or the other.
I'd consider an IDE if any of them understood that keybindings should be re-mappable. I absolutely love using gvim as a text editor, because none of the more modern ones are as powerful (except maybe Emacs) at the tast of editing text. While the IDE's give me bonuses in terms of language-aware editing (tab-completing function calls, indent fixing, and so on), they take away my ability to edit text lightning fast without resorting to the mouse or even the arrow keys (which, though much more intuative to learn than hjkl, are much slower to actually use than hjkl.) About the only "lose" that vi has in the text editing department for me is that it only makes sense on a QWERTY keyboard. I don't try Dvorak only because it would move the hjkl keys and thus make vi really painful to deal with.
If someone would invent an IDE that would use vi keys in the text editor, I'd take notice.
When I'm entering code, I'm too busy thinking to waste time trying to search for the home row over and over and over because my right hand has to keep leaving it's spot on the keyboard to use the allegedly "easier" arrow keys, pgup, pgdown, ins/del, and the mouse.
for a company similar to the subject pool, this study would seem to be an accurate comparison.
True. But the dishonesty is that the company that paid for the study usually (as in this case) tries to make the claim that the study applies to the general case. They bury the admission that it only applies to a specific case very deep down in the text, where if sued for fraud, they can claim they disclosed it, but far enough buried that it won't stick in people's minds. Somewhere in the body of the text it admits "Windows is cheaper, under the circunstances of the study, which were as follows", but up in the summary at the top it will just say "this study proves Windows is cheaper." and in the headline it will just say "Windows is cheaper."
Every time someone includes a 'cost of training' or 'cost of learning' in such a study they are being dishonest, because they don't include the cost of learning Microsoft's sytsems - they just assume everyone already knows them. While that is probably true, it is still a lie to state that this means the Microsoft solution is cheaper. It just means it's been partially paid for already. Using that to claim it's cheaper would be like me claiming that go-karts are more expensive than cars, based on the fact that most people already own a car. It would be like claiming that television is a cheaper form of entertainment than a boardgame of Parchesi, based on the fact that more people already own TV's than Parchesi games.
There is a distinct difference between claiming "X is cheaper" and "X is already paid for", and it would be nice if these studies had the honesty to be more careful with their statements like that.
It's my impression that draws are a lot more uncommon in baseball, football (gridiron) and basketball.
Interesting. In the American sports, the length of the game will acutally be extended in order to resolve ties if necesary, and a tie will only be accepted if the score is still tied after the extended time, mostly as a realization of the necessity of it since the players are too exhausted to keep playing well. If it was possible to keep going beyond that, we probably would.
p.s. to keep it bang ontopic, Staff Beer used to use football as an example of Syntegrity. Put one team of 11 players on a field, and they'll just score a couple of thousand goals in the 90 minutes and go home. Dull, dull, dull. Put a second team of 11 players on the pitch pointing in the other way and you've got the most popular sport on the planet.
Most Americans who don't like soccer (myself included) say that the reason is that the scores don't change often enough. If the game consists of one hour of play, and a typical score is something like 2 to 1, that means that the score typically changes only once every 20 minutes or so during play. That's a long time to watch without any "progress" to the game occurring. It might be very interesting to PLAY, but it's less interesting to watch. (Like golf or tennis, it makes a good participation sport, but a boring spectator sport.) You will find a lot of people in the US who are very familiar with soccer, as we tend to play it as kids a lot. But that doesn't translate into big professional teams because it's just not that fun to watch. Not for us, anyway.
Firstly, the USA is an extremely large country, and only has one neighbour of any relative population size. This helps make the USA far more of a self-contained world than just about any other country out there. It also means that ~97% of television content is locally produced, furthering this.
All this is true. (It's also why people in the USA are rarely bilingual. There's no practical use for a second language for many Americans. Anyone who learns a second langauge is just doing it for the sake of rounding their education, not becuase they actually expect to need to use it. I think this has a lot to do with it the attitude as well, since learning to "think" in another language helps make someone less insular in their views. I learned a little French in school but never needed to use it for anything, so I don't rememeber enough of it to use. I have to travel over 1,000 miles to get to the nearest place where English is not the primary language, and that's just Quebec, which has English as a secondary bilingual language so that doesn't count as somewhere where another language would be helpful. And even if you think of Central and South America (the next nearest places) those only have two languages over such a vast area - Spanish, and Portugese. Over here in the Western Hemisphere, we don't have a lot of variety of languages.)
America is extremely nationalistic and has a national myth of grandious pridefulness 2nd to very few. Most Americans don't want to tolerate anything that gets in the way of that nationalism. It skews the mind into thinking that Americans are superior and that foreigners are inferior, no matter what the ears hear and the eyes see.
This paragraph, on the other hand, is total bunk. We are very distrustful of our own government. Although we are very prideful of our history, this pride does not extend to whomever is currently in power in the government. Foreigners often fail to understand this and make the mistake of assuming American pride equals slavish loyalty to the current leader. It doesn't work that way. Most of those opposed to Bush still believe in that prideful view of our history just as much as those that support him do.
And as far as the "Americans are superior" attitdue - it is held by a vocal minority. They have every right to say what they want and we don't go out of our way to suppress them, but they do make for an embarassing misconception of what Americans are like to the outside observer.
If we are guilty of anything, it's complacency, not egotism. It is very common to hear people who never bother voting complaining about how they have no power and don't like the current leader.
In short, I'm not denying that many people in the USA fit your image of them. I'm denying that those people constitute the majority.
You know how this would work. Those port numbers often used on Windows would be allowed. Anything not on that whitelist would be cut off. So suddenly everyone using Linux under the ISP who wants their services to work correctly gets labelled as an uncouth 'hacker' (in the media meaning of the word, not the original meaning) for wanting to punch through the firewall.
And then the morons who make the majority of public opinion see the extra hoops Linux users would have to jump through to get their systems to work and think, Oh, my Windows box just works, so I guess it's better. (For example, if Windows sharing port numbers are allowed but NFS port numbers are not, then the general effect is that Windows filesharing works and Unix's does not. No amount of explaining will sway the public opinion on this. It's not based on reasoned thinking.)
And although I couched this in terms of Windows Vs Linux, the more general case is the real problem - it makes the decision of which technologies will live and which will die be entirely in the hands of the ISPs. It's the equivilent of your phone company saying "You can discuss your pets, your wife, and your kids over our phone lines, but you aren't allowed to talk about radios, televisions, or cable modems over our phone lines. And we'll be listening in and if you try to raise one of those subjects we'll cut your call off."
I think you missed my attempt at distinguishing harware failure (which is what you seem to be describing)
Wrong. I *am* describing glitches. Try this thought experiment: Take any program's binary executable file. Write a program that will randomly pick one of the bytes in that file and re-write it with a different value (say, with one or two bits flipped). The, try to run that program file. This simulates one kind of memory glitch. Now, which is more likely to be the kind of bug that occurs:
1 - The program runs to completion without crashing, but something "weird" happens, like a wrong answer in a math formula.
2 - The program crashes entirely at some point.
I say #2 will happen more often than #1, and that was what I was talking about. When I talked about software crashing you mistook that for hardware crashing. I was talking about "minor" glitches in hardware causing major crashes in the software that runs on it. Software is very intolerant of the computer it runs on suddenly doing something out-of-spec.
Also, I think you usually have more data than executable code in memory, so it seems that a random bitflip in your RAM (assuming no ECC) would affect data, not program, and therefore (probably) not be fatal.
Flipping data bits *does* cause crashes just as much as flipping code bits does. (Lots of those bytes of data are pointers that the program trusts and plans to use. Lots of those bytes of data are keeping track of the heap of allocated data. Lots of those bytes are keeping track of complex data structures like graphs, trees, and so on. Lots of those bytes represent indeces into arrays. Alter any of those and *boom* - crash.)
You don't need to read *every* article to keep up with the news. When I scan the newspapers and news websites, I don't bother looking into the articles that are about pointless hype, like movie stars running for governor in a State I don't live in. (It's not pointless hype for those living in California. But I don't live there, and where they cover it with such detail in the NATIONAL news, there it's just hype.) I also don't bother reading "human interest" news stories about some stupid cat stuck in a tree, or other trivial crap. And some guy starting a campaign for an election that's still more than a year away qualifies as trivial crap, so I don't bother **YET** - as time goes on, then I'll start paying attention to it more. It will become important. Right now it's not.
Your assumption that all the news the media chooses to publish must be slavishly consumed in order to be informed is incorrect. They spend a lot of time on pointlessness. (Which is what makes half-hour news shows on TV so intolerable. They choose to waste their limited time on news I don't need to know. The news I actually care about only gets a brief sound bite.) I prefer print and web media for news, because then I'm not forced to experience it sequentially at an agonizingly slow pace with commercials. I can jump to the details I care about.
In the real world where the rest of us live, we know that fansites on the web are going to be the most likely hit for that kind of search, regardless of whether they are the most common use of the phrase. So the fact that you get the simpson's reference with that phrase doesn't mean jack squat.
I know hardware glitches occur. But they are not very frequent. And if they occur they are typically of the form, "this program doesn't work at all", not of the form "This program works but under some circumstances, with just the right conditions, it finishes successfully but with the wrong result." If a hardware glitch flips a bit from 1 to 0, for example, the chances that the program will still run anyway but with just the wrong total is very small. Alter a random bit in the program and it's highly likely to cause it to die altogether. The kind of bugs we are worried about here (where the voter doesn't know anything went wrong, but the program counted the vote badly) are orders of magnitude more likely to be software problems. Hardware problems are likely to just make the whole thing die, in a manner that people can easily tell it's not working.
Most of those "luck" issues you mentioned hang on the voter.
Or the voter who's card is adjacent to yours in the stack so his hanging chad gets hung up on your card, or the guy who dropped the box too hard, or the machine that got your card hung up in the works and tore out an extra hole. I have no idea what the cards in your area are like, and we aren't dumb enough to use them around here (we use computerized visual scanners that read the felt-tip pen line you drew on the thick paper ballot. - It's the best marriage of fast counting with unalterable manual records. If the ballot has a write-in blank marked, then the ballot gets sorted into a different box to be manually counted, otherwise it counts your vote immediately in front of you and the paper drops in a box. Here in Wisconsin, we had vote just as close as the Florida vote, but since our system doesn't have the same large margin of error theirs did, we didn't bother with a recount. Everyone knew the result would be the same. The real stupidity of the bad vote systems in Florida was that they introduce a large enough margin of error that NOBODY will ever know who actually won the election there. The margin of error of the system is larger than the margin of the vote was.) BUT, I do remember the news video footage of people pouring over those Florida cards, and they were quite flimsy. You could see them flexing in people's hands. They weren't any sturdier than an index card. I would agree, however, that over time, it becomes less and less viable to use the cards for the purpose of 'record-keeping'. Then again, I don't think they were ever meant for or designed to be used for that.
Then the bug was introduced at design time, because they SHOULD be designed to be able to keep the record as long as possible.
A deep, unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Your sig is funny given that your position is based on the "deep, unwavering belief" that everyone who doesn't know who the candidates are for an election 13 months ahead of time must be people who will never learn later either and thus cannot be informed voters.
You should be aware of the current political situation the entire year.
I agree, but I don't think a presidential election 13 months in the future qualifies under the term "current".
Re:Shoehorn
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· Score: 4, Insightful
And if for some reason we want a different platform (which we don't and won't), we'll have to recompile. Oh, the horror.
And that's why we have so many.Net applications for Unix and Mac....Oh, wait. "just recompile" is a great solution IF you didn't use a development model that locks you in. I use "just recompile" all the time on C and C++ programs.
...those who are dealing with business realities and not philosophical preferences.
I'm sick of that oft-repeated lie. BOTH the alleged "realists" and the "idealists" are actually realists. The difference is how far ahead they are looking. If you only care about the next year or so, you don't mind supporting only Microsoft. If you care about 10 years down the road, you do. BOTH camps are being realists, but they don't have the same goals in mind. One just wants to finish his current project, while the other will sacrifice current comfort to help ensure that there's still more than one computer company 10 years down the road.
Re:Shoehorn
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Java vs .NET
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Can't say that it will make a difference to me since I guess I'm the only person in the world who knows what platform they are devloping for up front.
While the rest of us aren't willing to make that restriction on ourselves.
The problem with this kind of national dick-waving contest is that every invention builds on what came before, so where you chose to draw the line depends on who you want to claim the inventor was. A Brit may have invented the light bulb, for example, but an American made it last long enough to be practical. Who gets credit for the invention? Whomever you are trying to promote at the time, that's who. The Wright brothers had the first airplane that relied on the three-axis controls (pitch,roll,yaw), and thus could sustain a long flight, but the design of the basic wing shape necessary to attain lift was not theirs, nor was the engine that drove the thing.
Well, I've seen lots of the so-called "Off-Road" SUVs go head-to-head on muddy fields/hills/forests, etc., and unless you're buying a Range Rover, forget it. All the others just have the ground-clearance and appearance of off-roaders, but perform like your average family sedan.
"Just have ground, clearance" is more than just a "just". It's the be-all, end-all reason I bought a Jeep Cherokee. Ground clearance is necessary if you want to drive in the snow. You can cite statistics about crash safety in slippery conditions with small cars versus SUV's but the fact that they carry out those tests at all proves they aren't doing it under real winter conditions. The fact that the smaller cars are able to achieve those speeds in the first place proves that they are only testing for smooth ice, not snow. In snow, the car couldn't have gotten up to those speeds because it would have been stuck on top of the snow without enough of it's weight being supported by the wheels (so, no traction to get moving). When you live where you can get stuck in snow by driving ON the road, you want ground clearance. Otherwise you are at the mercy of waiting for the snowplow, which means waiting for the snow to stop, which means being stuck for the day.
why not get a nice station wagon? Similar cargo passenger/cargo space, I know there are differences between British and American use of the English language, but I didn't realize you like to use "similar" when the phrase we Americans would use is "much less".
Apparently, hundreds of thousands of Americans in Florida are so ignorant that they cannot follow simple instructions on properly completing the voting ballots. As a result, some ballots indicated a vote for multiple candidates
Observed indisputable fact: During the recount, a rather large number of ballots were discovered to be unreadable due to problems like double-votes and dangling chads that aren't all the way out of the hole.
Disputable conclusion: That must have happend because voters used the ballots incorrectly. There is no other explanation.
More reasonable conclusion: Those ballots spent a lot of time in shipping and handling after the voters touched them, and punchcards are prone to damage, and the cards were only examined manually *after* having attempted to run them through the counting machine once, a process which can further damage the cards. Therefore there are a multitude of stages in the process during which the errors could have been introduced, not just when the ballots were in the hands of the voters themselves. With no observations of what state the ballots were in between these different stages, we don't have the ability to tell who messed them up. More than likely, some bad ballots were the result of stupid voters, but not all of them, and maybe not even most of them.
A punchcard system is too physcially fragile to trush a vote to. We need a system where there is little or no chance of damaging the ballots during processing, and that preserve a good record in case of a recount. Ordinary paper ballots work well for this. Punchcards do not.
The point in Minority Report was that wood grain patterns are like fingerprints, no two alike.
No, the point in Minority Report was that someone thought it would look cool to have wooden balls roll down a tube thingy, and so they made up an excuse for why they wanted this special effect.
Slashdot Mirror
That seems like a difference in degree to me.
Yes - in exactly the same way that the difference between a mugging and a murder is one of degree, and the terms shouldn't be confused for exactly the same reason "mugger" and "murderer" shouldn't be confused.
not shown any tendencies towards limiting anything other than servers running on their network
But that's the whole point. Why should your ISP GIVE A DAMN which direction the traffic is flowing? It costs them no more money to send a TCP/IP packet than to receive one (and besides, just because it's a server doesn't have to mean it sends more data than it recieves. It could be a protocol where the client sends verbose data, and gets a short reply back from the server (for example, submitting a document to a website that accepts file uploads.))
I would really hate paying gouging surcharges for a service that I know doesn't actually cost any more to provide.
Which is why newspapers and TV back Democratic candidates 10 to 1?
Define what you mean by "back" here. Most news sources bend over backwards to say nothing at all that could be construed as support for one side or the other.
I'd consider an IDE if any of them understood that keybindings should be re-mappable. I absolutely love using gvim as a text editor, because none of the more modern ones are as powerful (except maybe Emacs) at the tast of editing text. While the IDE's give me bonuses in terms of language-aware editing (tab-completing function calls, indent fixing, and so on), they take away my ability to edit text lightning fast without resorting to the mouse or even the arrow keys (which, though much more intuative to learn than hjkl, are much slower to actually use than hjkl.) About the only "lose" that vi has in the text editing department for me is that it only makes sense on a QWERTY keyboard. I don't try Dvorak only because it would move the hjkl keys and thus make vi really painful to deal with.
If someone would invent an IDE that would use vi keys in the text editor, I'd take notice.
When I'm entering code, I'm too busy thinking to waste time trying to search for the home row over and over and over because my right hand has to keep leaving it's spot on the keyboard to use the allegedly "easier" arrow keys, pgup, pgdown, ins/del, and the mouse.
for a company similar to the subject pool, this study would seem to be an accurate comparison.
True. But the dishonesty is that the company that paid for the study usually (as in this case) tries to make the claim that the study applies to the general case. They bury the admission that it only applies to a specific case very deep down in the text, where if sued for fraud, they can claim they disclosed it, but far enough buried that it won't stick in people's minds. Somewhere in the body of the text it admits "Windows is cheaper, under the circunstances of the study, which were as follows", but up in the summary at the top it will just say "this study proves Windows is cheaper." and in the headline it will just say "Windows is cheaper."
Every time someone includes a 'cost of training' or 'cost of learning' in such a study they are being dishonest, because they don't include the cost of learning Microsoft's sytsems - they just assume everyone already knows them. While that is probably true, it is still a lie to state that this means the Microsoft solution is cheaper. It just means it's been partially paid for already. Using that to claim it's cheaper would be like me claiming that go-karts are more expensive than cars, based on the fact that most people already own a car. It would be like claiming that television is a cheaper form of entertainment than a boardgame of Parchesi, based on the fact that more people already own TV's than Parchesi games.
There is a distinct difference between claiming "X is cheaper" and "X is already paid for", and it would be nice if these studies had the honesty to be more careful with their statements like that.
It's my impression that draws are a lot more uncommon in baseball, football (gridiron) and basketball.
Interesting. In the American sports, the length of the game will acutally be extended in order to resolve ties if necesary, and a tie will only be accepted if the score is still tied after the extended time, mostly as a realization of the necessity of it since the players are too exhausted to keep playing well. If it was possible to keep going beyond that, we probably would.
p.s. to keep it bang ontopic, Staff Beer used to use football as an example of Syntegrity. Put one team of 11 players on a field, and they'll just score a couple of thousand goals in the 90 minutes and go home. Dull, dull, dull. Put a second team of 11 players on the pitch pointing in the other way and you've got the most popular sport on the planet.
Most Americans who don't like soccer (myself included) say that the reason is that the scores don't change often enough. If the game consists of one hour of play, and a typical score is something like 2 to 1, that means that the score typically changes only once every 20 minutes or so during play. That's a long time to watch without any "progress" to the game occurring. It might be very interesting to PLAY, but it's less interesting to watch. (Like golf or tennis, it makes a good participation sport, but a boring spectator sport.) You will find a lot of people in the US who are very familiar with soccer, as we tend to play it as kids a lot. But that doesn't translate into big professional teams because it's just not that fun to watch. Not for us, anyway.
Americans also tend to think that their way of doing things is better, in all situations and culture, than any other methods currently in use.
False.
In this case the Americans decided they could run Chile better than the Chileans and couldn't.
False. "Americans" != "CIA". Most Americans had no clue this was going on.
Firstly, the USA is an extremely large country, and only has one neighbour of any relative population size. This helps make the USA far more of a self-contained world than just about any other country out there. It also means that ~97% of television content is locally produced, furthering this.
All this is true. (It's also why people in the USA are rarely bilingual. There's no practical use for a second language for many Americans. Anyone who learns a second langauge is just doing it for the sake of rounding their education, not becuase they actually expect to need to use it. I think this has a lot to do with it the attitude as well, since learning to "think" in another language helps make someone less insular in their views. I learned a little French in school but never needed to use it for anything, so I don't rememeber enough of it to use. I have to travel over 1,000 miles to get to the nearest place where English is not the primary language, and that's just Quebec, which has English as a secondary bilingual language so that doesn't count as somewhere where another language would be helpful. And even if you think of Central and South America (the next nearest places) those only have two languages over such a vast area - Spanish, and Portugese. Over here in the Western Hemisphere, we don't have a lot of variety of languages.)
America is extremely nationalistic and has a national myth of grandious pridefulness 2nd to very few. Most Americans don't want to tolerate anything that gets in the way of that nationalism. It skews the mind into thinking that Americans are superior and that foreigners are inferior, no matter what the ears hear and the eyes see.
This paragraph, on the other hand, is total bunk. We are very distrustful of our own government. Although we are very prideful of our history, this pride does not extend to whomever is currently in power in the government. Foreigners often fail to understand this and make the mistake of assuming American pride equals slavish loyalty to the current leader. It doesn't work that way. Most of those opposed to Bush still believe in that prideful view of our history just as much as those that support him do.
And as far as the "Americans are superior" attitdue - it is held by a vocal minority. They have every right to say what they want and we don't go out of our way to suppress them, but they do make for an embarassing misconception of what Americans are like to the outside observer.
If we are guilty of anything, it's complacency, not egotism. It is very common to hear people who never bother voting complaining about how they have no power and don't like the current leader.
In short, I'm not denying that many people in the USA fit your image of them. I'm denying that those people constitute the majority.
You know how this would work. Those port numbers often used on Windows would be allowed. Anything not on that whitelist would be cut off. So suddenly everyone using Linux under the ISP who wants their services to work correctly gets labelled as an uncouth 'hacker' (in the media meaning of the word, not the original meaning) for wanting to punch through the firewall.
And then the morons who make the majority of public opinion see the extra hoops Linux users would have to jump through to get their systems to work and think, Oh, my Windows box just works, so I guess it's better. (For example, if Windows sharing port numbers are allowed but NFS port numbers are not, then the general effect is that Windows filesharing works and Unix's does not. No amount of explaining will sway the public opinion on this. It's not based on reasoned thinking.)
And although I couched this in terms of Windows Vs Linux, the more general case is the real problem - it makes the decision of which technologies will live and which will die be entirely in the hands of the ISPs. It's the equivilent of your phone company saying "You can discuss your pets, your wife, and your kids over our phone lines, but you aren't allowed to talk about radios, televisions, or cable modems over our phone lines. And we'll be listening in and if you try to raise one of those subjects we'll cut your call off."
I think you missed my attempt at distinguishing harware failure (which is what you seem to be describing)
Wrong. I *am* describing glitches. Try this thought experiment: Take any program's binary executable file. Write a program that will randomly pick one of the bytes in that file and re-write it with a different value (say, with one or two bits flipped). The, try to run that program file. This simulates one kind of memory glitch. Now, which is more likely to be the kind of bug that occurs:
1 - The program runs to completion without crashing, but something "weird" happens, like a wrong answer in a math formula.
2 - The program crashes entirely at some point.
I say #2 will happen more often than #1, and that was what I was talking about. When I talked about software crashing you mistook that for hardware crashing. I was talking about "minor" glitches in hardware causing major crashes in the software that runs on it. Software is very intolerant of the computer it runs on suddenly doing something out-of-spec.
Also, I think you usually have more data than executable code in memory, so it seems that a random bitflip in your RAM (assuming no ECC) would affect data, not program, and therefore (probably) not be fatal.
Flipping data bits *does* cause crashes just as much as flipping code bits does. (Lots of those
bytes of data are pointers that the program trusts and plans to use. Lots of those bytes of data are keeping track of the heap of allocated data. Lots of those bytes are keeping track of complex data structures like graphs, trees, and so on. Lots of those bytes represent indeces into arrays. Alter any of those and *boom* - crash.)
You don't need to read *every* article to keep up with the news. When I scan the newspapers and news websites, I don't bother looking into the articles that are about pointless hype, like movie stars running for governor in a State I don't live in. (It's not pointless hype for those living in California. But I don't live there, and where they cover it with such detail in the NATIONAL news, there it's just hype.) I also don't bother reading "human interest" news stories about some stupid cat stuck in a tree, or other trivial crap. And some guy starting a campaign for an election that's still more than a year away qualifies as trivial crap, so I don't bother **YET** - as time goes on, then I'll start paying attention to it more. It will become important. Right now it's not.
Your assumption that all the news the media chooses to publish must be slavishly consumed in order to be informed is incorrect. They spend a lot of time on pointlessness. (Which is what makes half-hour news shows on TV so intolerable. They choose to waste their limited time on news I don't need to know. The news I actually care about only gets a brief sound bite.) I prefer print and web media for news, because then I'm
not forced to experience it sequentially at an agonizingly slow pace with commercials. I can jump to the details I care about.
In the real world where the rest of us live, we know that fansites on the web are going to be the most likely hit for that kind of search, regardless of whether they are the most common use of the phrase.
So the fact that you get the simpson's reference with that phrase doesn't mean jack squat.
I know hardware glitches occur. But they are not very frequent. And if they occur they are typically of the form, "this program doesn't work at all", not of the form "This program works but under some circumstances, with just the right conditions, it finishes successfully but with the wrong result." If a hardware glitch flips a bit from 1 to 0, for example, the chances that the program will still run anyway but with just the wrong total is very small. Alter a random bit in the program and it's highly likely to cause it to die altogether. The kind of bugs we are worried about here (where the voter doesn't know anything went wrong, but the program counted the vote badly) are orders of magnitude more likely to be software problems. Hardware problems are likely to just make the whole thing die, in a manner that people can easily tell it's not working.
Most of those "luck" issues you mentioned hang on the voter.
Or the voter who's card is adjacent to yours in the stack so his hanging chad gets hung up on your card, or the guy who dropped the box too hard, or the machine that got your card hung up in the works and tore out an extra hole. I have no idea what the cards in your area are like, and we aren't dumb enough to use them around here (we use computerized visual scanners that read the felt-tip pen line you drew on the thick paper ballot. - It's the best marriage of fast counting with unalterable manual records. If the ballot has a write-in blank marked, then the ballot gets sorted into a different box to be manually counted, otherwise it counts your vote immediately in front of you and the paper drops in a box. Here in Wisconsin, we had vote just as close as the Florida vote, but since our system doesn't have the same large margin of error theirs did, we didn't bother with a recount. Everyone knew the result would be the same. The real stupidity of the bad vote systems in Florida was that they introduce a large enough margin of error that NOBODY will ever know who actually won the election there. The margin of error of the system is larger than the margin of the vote was.) BUT, I do remember the news video footage of people pouring over those Florida cards, and they were quite flimsy. You could see them flexing in people's hands. They weren't any sturdier than an index card.
I would agree, however, that over time, it becomes less and less viable to use the cards for the purpose of 'record-keeping'. Then again, I don't think they were ever meant for or designed to be used for that.
Then the bug was introduced at design time, because they SHOULD be designed to be able to keep the record as long as possible.
A deep, unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Your sig is funny given that your position is based on the "deep, unwavering belief" that everyone who doesn't know who the candidates are for an election 13 months ahead of time must be people who will never learn later either and thus cannot be informed voters.
You should be aware of the current political situation the entire year.
I agree, but I don't think a presidential election 13 months in the future qualifies under the term "current".
And if for some reason we want a different platform (which we don't and won't), we'll have to recompile. Oh, the horror.
And that's why we have so many
"just recompile" is a great solution IF you didn't use a development model that locks you in. I use "just recompile" all the time on C and C++ programs.
...those who are dealing with business realities and not philosophical preferences.
I'm sick of that oft-repeated lie. BOTH the alleged "realists" and the "idealists" are actually realists. The difference is how far ahead they are looking. If you only care about the next year or so, you don't mind supporting only Microsoft. If you care about 10 years down the road, you do. BOTH camps are being realists, but they don't have the same goals in mind. One just wants to finish his current project, while the other will sacrifice current comfort to help ensure that there's still more than one computer company 10 years down the road.
Can't say that it will make a difference to me since I guess I'm the only person in the world who knows what platform they are devloping for up front.
While the rest of us aren't willing to make that restriction on ourselves.
The problem with this kind of national dick-waving contest is that every invention builds on what came before, so where you chose to draw the line depends on who you want to claim the inventor was. A Brit may have invented the light bulb, for example, but an American made it last long enough to be practical. Who gets credit for the invention? Whomever you are trying to promote at the time, that's who. The Wright brothers had the first airplane that relied on the three-axis controls (pitch,roll,yaw), and thus could sustain a long flight, but the design of the basic wing shape necessary to attain lift was not theirs, nor was the engine that drove the thing.
Well, I've seen lots of the so-called "Off-Road" SUVs go head-to-head on muddy fields/hills/forests, etc., and unless you're buying a Range Rover, forget it. All the others just have the ground-clearance and appearance of off-roaders, but perform like your average family sedan.
"Just have ground, clearance" is more than just a "just". It's the be-all, end-all reason I bought a Jeep Cherokee. Ground clearance is necessary if you want to drive in the snow. You can cite statistics about crash safety in slippery conditions with small cars versus SUV's but the fact that they carry out those tests at all proves they aren't doing it under real winter conditions. The fact that the smaller cars are able to achieve those speeds in the first place proves that they are only testing for smooth ice, not snow. In snow, the car couldn't have gotten up to those speeds because it would have been stuck on top of the snow without enough of it's weight being supported by the wheels (so, no traction to get moving). When you live where you can get stuck in snow by driving ON the road, you want ground clearance. Otherwise you are at the mercy of waiting for the snowplow, which means waiting for the snow to stop, which means being stuck for the day.
why not get a nice station wagon? Similar cargo passenger/cargo space,
I know there are differences between British and American use of the English language, but I didn't realize you like to use "similar" when the phrase we Americans would use is "much less".
Apparently, hundreds of thousands of Americans in Florida are so ignorant that they cannot follow simple instructions on properly completing the voting ballots. As a result, some ballots indicated a vote for multiple candidates
Observed indisputable fact: During the recount, a rather large number of ballots were discovered to be unreadable due to problems like double-votes and dangling chads that aren't all the way out of the hole.
Disputable conclusion: That must have happend because voters used the ballots incorrectly. There is no other explanation.
More reasonable conclusion: Those ballots spent a lot of time in shipping and handling after the voters touched them, and punchcards are prone to damage, and the cards were only examined manually *after* having attempted to run them through the counting machine once, a process which can further damage the cards. Therefore there are a multitude of stages in the process during which the errors could have been introduced, not just when the ballots were in the hands of the voters themselves. With no observations of what state the ballots were in between these different stages, we don't have the ability to tell who messed them up. More than likely, some bad ballots were the result of stupid voters, but not all of them, and maybe not even most of them.
A punchcard system is too physcially fragile to trush a vote to. We need a system where there is little or no chance of damaging the ballots during processing, and that preserve a good record in case of a recount. Ordinary paper ballots work well for this. Punchcards do not.
The point in Minority Report was that wood grain patterns are like fingerprints, no two alike.
No, the point in Minority Report was that someone thought it would look cool to have wooden balls roll down a tube thingy, and so they made up an excuse for why they wanted this special effect.