And right there, perfectly formatted, is the classic example of someone who, rather than face the discomfort of acknowledging that that some issues simply are black and white, decides to be slippery (changing the meaning of the questions by playing dumb about context) and and snarky (sounding like you're dishing out some sort of verbal retaliation for having been somehow offended, which is BS).
People with a vested interest in a not-firm position on anything (because holding and affirming one one would expose their own mixed premises, hypocrisy, or other cognitive or philosophical shortcomings) tend to opt rather quickly for ad hominem or just plain boorish responses to reasonably-put challenges. Thanks for illustrating that so nicely.
I'm just trying to keep up, here. As long as I park far enough away from that Tahoe down the block, though, that should keep the other end of our street from tilting up and altering the weather. Um, unless we want that to happen. It's confusing, now. I'll carry around some extra sandbags if that will help.
shoving their shoddy DOS... down your throat... abusing their monopoly
Right! Because DOS was definitely the only O/S upon which big business was doing business, say, back in the 1980's.
And then there were those enormous numbers of consumers using DOS instead of Apple II machines or Ataris or Amigas... Shoved down their throats? Come on. If you're going to rant about MS market share, at least skip over the part when it was anything but a sure thing, before all of the other platform makers wheezed and missed the opportunity to take over the business desktop market (when they already owned the back office corporate computing market!) when it was anything but settled in one popular direction.
will be taking these guys on golf outings. I mean, how creepy is that?
>>Inviting someone to a game of golf, or to a party, or a seminar, or whatever is a lot less creepy than this indirect approach
It worked with me, I love my new littoral combat ship.;)
Hey, I almost got that! But since I like faster stuff, I opted for a Joint Strike Fighter. But stupid me (early adopter!), I got the one from Boeing instead of the final one from Lockheed. It's like owning a flying Betamax. Oh well, it still has Firewire, and it runs Linux if you don't care about the display drivers or compatibility with cheaper imported air-to-air missle hardware.
If you're in radio earshot of the capital beltway, you can always tell when some congressional committee or federal procurement process is closing in on a big contract decision. The local AM radio stations (and NPR sponsorship slots) will fill up with advertisements that can only be meant to influence about half a dozen people.
What's creepy is the level of concentration of wealth, power and influence
What are you talking about? The guy with something to sell is representing products or services that are worth millions of dollars. He's not selling one single large diamond he inherited from his grandfather, The Duke. What he's selling is produced by hundreds or thousands of employees, all of whom in turn use products and services supplied by other people in the course of doing what they do. They all take home their paychecks and spend it on all sorts of other things.
Then you've got the guy he's selling to. Did you think we're talking about yachts, here, or gold-plated horse trailers? It's big-ticket IT stuff that is used to power entire business operations - upon which (at the scale we're talking about), hundreds or thousands of people will do their jobs and serve, in turn, their customers.
Just because the sales guy has a vested interest in persuading a higher-end decision maker to go one way versus another doesn't mean the decision is made in a vacuum. At that level, the decision maker is answerable to a board of directors, investors, and so on.
Like or not, large employers that do a lot of things for a lot of customers and staff use big-ticket things, like airplanes and server farms. Someone sells them, and someone decides which ones to buy. And it's rarely about just one technical dividing point or another - there's finances, support, legal issues, security reputations, and much more that figure into it. If you don't have the face time and easy relationship with someone who has to weigh all of that, you don't have a chance to convey everything you have to say.
The point of my comment is that this is the oldest story in the book, and just because some newer methods of getting a little attention and face time have evolved, the need for suppliers to woo purchasers hasn't changed one bit.
... sales execs who've actually done some homework on the dozen or so people in the entire universe likely to meaningfully purchase what they have to sell will be taking these guys on golf outings. I mean, how creepy is that? They'll probably even shake hands!
Are we to extend the boycott to them, too? Are we also to boycott Carl Zeiss because they make optics for some Sony cameras?
We're on the same page, here, and you're actually helping to make my point... which (in response to the "they're not getting any more of my money, I'll just warez their stuff" guy) was to point out that he's going to have to do some REAL walking away from Sony if he means it. And it's difficult, as you point out. His "threat" to just rip off, rather than pay for, his entertainment is pretty empty, really - and says more about his looking for an excuse to rip off the artists that Sony happens to represent than it does some real (meaningful) effort on his part to harm Sony in any way that matters.
If I absolutely positively must have any of its media(games movies cds etc) or electronics products i'll either warez it or buy it second hand.
Come on, now. If you're actually taking this position on principle, how can you even talk about absolutely positively "must having" a game?
It's one thing to grumble if, say, your employer requires you to use a Sony product (batteries?). But you never, ever, "need" entertainment. By pretending that you're going to somehow teach them some lesson by ripping off their media products, you're just not admitting that your desire for their entertainer's handiwork is still stronger than your loathing of them as a business. Well, which is it? Ripping them off still increases the demand for their products. It maintains buzz, visibility, and the notion that even people who can't afford to buy their own entertainment are willing to break the law to have Sony products. If you really don't like them, just walk away. Completely. Only that will teach them a lesson.
... and it's all Googly. That is to say, the implementation is quick, but a little too Googly, in terms of weaving the results into your own web site. Of course you can limit the search scope to your own site, and the results are right there (and of course very fast)... but interestingly, though I regularly see Google crawling my dynamicly rendered content, very obvious searches that should bring that stuff back aren't showing up in the results. It's the same problem content people always have in getting search engines to like everything on their sites.
In other words, it's very easy to graft this tool onto your web site, but you may have a lot of more advanced websmithery ahead of you to actually get Google to successfully index everything on your site. And, of course, it's not going to help people find some document you just put up this morning... Google's indexes can be off by days at least, and often weeks.
A well-crafted built-in search tool, and good keywording habits by the people producing the content are more likely to get your own visitors finding material on your own web site. But if you open up the Google engine's scope to include other web sites, they'll get a lot more info to pick from... if you don't mind those eyeballs wandering off, never to be seen again.
Isn't this a bit redundant? Don't all high-traffic sites already have their own search, or already have Google's search in them? And a good many sites already use AdSense, so this seems a little odd that Google is searching the deep dark depths of the internet to get their search and ads. But OTOH, this seems perfect for non-high traffic sites that don't have AdSense, but get enough clicks so that a little revenue wouldn't hurt.
Even if a small-ish site does have some native search capability, the odds are pretty good that they don't have the ability to index PDFs and other stuff that Google already handles so well. I think I'll give this a try on some of my smaller project sites and see how it behaves - it might spare me from re-inventing the wheel or having to deal with manual keywording database links to binary files. The AdSense revenue is just frosting on the cake if you're already signed on anyway.
A national culture that encourages a rational atmosphere does not make irrational behaviour impossible, just less probable.
Which is why I referred to the culture, not the government. And large, violent, absurdly irrational behavior (over cartoons!) by a rapidly expanding segment of a country's population is a cultural issue. And to the extent that a culture elects a government that encourages that shift in the demographic (through wide-open immigration policies, boundless social benefits for anything that breathes, etc), then that culture (the one that's shocked - shocked! - by the sudden intolerance of their culture by the new culture that's moving in) can either use civil institutions, like the press, to cast shame on such behavior, or use the government. Civil pressure is far more effective, but shaming a segment of the culture into seeing the irrationality of their own behavior makes some people feel uncomfortable (we wouldn't want to hurt anyone's feelings!), and so it gets left alone... and then all the sudden you've got exactly what happened in Denmark.
If a government imposes their own vision of rational thought, then there is no freedom!
A government can't impose thought processes, obviously. But it is worth mentioning that there are no "versions" of rational thought. Reason simply is. A good politician should be able to speak rationally, and thereby illustrate the contrast between his/her world view and those that are shaped by crazy, backwards religious hooey. It's less about government imposition, and more about leading by example. Which isn't to say, of course, that non-religious types aren't just as irrational on some of their own pet issues... but that's usually on stuff that's easier to actually debate, and doesn't involve invoking magic invisible friends and whatnot.
Hell, if anything, Denmark deserves credit for giving the journalists police protection when they were threatened.
But wouldn't they get more credit if, as a national culture, they established a more rational atmosphere that made it absolutely beyond the pale to have a big ol' Islamic rant-a-thon in the first place (over cartoons!)? If a culture doesn't insist on enough assimilation by immigrants to avoid that sort of absurd friction in the first place, then perhaps that's the thing that contributes to the atmosphere that makes the press feel so timid that they need police protection for drawing or publishing cartoons?
Yes, because Finland hosting the EU Presidency makes it the least involved in world affairs..
Alas, but you don't see newly nuclear Stalinist cleptocracies stamping their feet and threatening to test missiles over the heads of the people of Japan if Finland doesn't agree to one-on-one negotiating over getting more free resources in exchange for not lashing out. The EU may have some role in talking to regimes like Iran (though it has been essentially ineffective so far, in having any impact whatsoever on that front), but in which European city certain EU officials are stationed, or from which state they originate this week/month/year probably doesn't have any bearing Finland, per se, as a focus of militant press-threatening. Um, unless you're saying that the press in Finland suddenly is altering their behavior because of threats that have arisen from fringe militants angered by Finland's current EU government role? Just a little perplexed, that's all.
the anti-establishment teens are going to see them as corporate shills and take their eyeballs elsewhere
I'm always amused by this bit of silliness. The "establishment" that these noble rebels are rebeling against are... the people producing the very creative material they seem to want. They aren't anti-establishment, they're anti-paying-what-the-people-who-produce-it-ask. Or, anti-the-artists-they-like-to-have-entertain-them. But not so anti that they have the intellectual honesty to simply walk away from the material produced by the people they're "against."
Corporate shills? I wonder if, after sitting down with Matt Groening, they'd still consider the people that Groening has continued to employ to deal with his business arrangements, financing, legal crap, etc - that he has chosen - to be "corporate shills." Poor Matt Groening! He, and all of his animators, voice talent, writers, production staff, the accountants that get them paychecks and handle health insurance... they're all just creative people who want their voice to be heard, and The Man is shackling them, and distracting us with their Shills!
*sigh*
Instead of worrying the specifics of how YouTube is or isn't obeying the law, why isn't all of this noise focused on helping "the anti-establishment teens" actually get a clue about what it takes to keep The Simpsons in production for decades straight?
Sorry, you're wrong about the Florida election being applicable. The whole "hanging chad" mess doesn't happen when you limit the ballots as the GP suggested: Ink pen, paper, locked metal box.
Can't fill in a block without bleeding over? You just trashed your ballot. Watch it get shredded, then re-do your vote./That's/ how you guarantee both anonymity and clean ballots.
Except that's exactly why the Florida election is germaine. Though the Florida laws called for a double-voted ballot to be considered invalid, the people doing the recounts ended up arguing, ballot-by-ballot, about which ones were in that condition. "See, there is a mark on this other one, but it looks like it wasn't really meant to be a vote, since this other one is marked better..." It's not so much that Florida is an example of why paper can't work, it's just an example of what happens when, despite clear rules, people willing to drag in the lawyers will still try to interpret semi-ambiguous hand-actions by voters in whatever way suits them.
If it were as simple as "any mark outside the box invalidates your vote," then this wouldn't be an issue. But the losing candidate in a close election is going to challenge each hand-marked ballot in exactly that way. That's what mechanical and electronic voting mechanisms are supposed to completely prevent. As we saw in Florida, mechanical marks on paper don't do the job. I think pen-on-paper would be even worse.
One would think that the state would require the sourcecode for due diligence...
Not necessarily. The state also does things like approve commercial use of things like scales and compertized gasoline pumps. The look at the results (yes, it actually pumped 100 gallons of gas, and that's what the meter is showing), but probably do not have the chops to review the source code in the pumps, the register systems, and so on. And yet, we all assume that the machines, and people using them, are not lying. Getting into the source code of accounting systems, life-and-death machinery... it's not something most state governments could possibly do without themselves making mistakes.
Piece of paper, ink pen, padlocked metal box. That's how sane people run elections.
Do you have any recollection of the Florida mess in 2000? The Gore campaign didn't like the results, and demanded recounts in certain districts though to be favorable to their candidate. There was no arguing about most of the poll documents, but because they were literally trying to differentiate between a few hundred votes, it came down to groups of people sitting around a table debating what they imagined a voter's thoughts really were when they left a partial impression next to ONE candidate's name, but then a slightly more dramatic impression next to another, etc.
Pens and paper are too ambiguous when you have campaign workers doing psychic readings after the fact and trying to produce the results they're looking for. Electronic voting mechanisms unambiguously record the voter's actions (or lack of them). A paper trail produced at the same time, reviewed by the voter, is the ideal method.
I can just see Bush declaring an emergency on polling day which has the side-effect of banning exit polls... oh so convenient... get rid of those pesky exit polls... then no-one knows how the voting is going except those controlling the magic software...
Utter nonsense. Any "emergency" so dire that someone can't stand on a sidewalk and ask someone else on the sidewalk a question would be an emergency so serious that it would prevent voting in the first place. You're dreaming up mustache-twirling fanstasy villainy just because you don't like someone. It's a little embarassing, really.
Next thing you're going to tell me is that the previous administration had FBI dossiers on political opponents delivered to White House staff for review by campaign workers! Oh, wait, that did happen. If you can "just see Bush" doing something, why not actually explain how that would, in practical terms, work? That would at least show that you're thinking about it, and would more stylishly showcase your tin-foil hat by accenting it with some propertly conspiratorial crazy-flair.
What red herring? The gaming division is the sum of all its parts. An argument that Microsoft itself is still running in the black would have made more sense (and cents).
I think the point is that saying some movie makers are skittish about Halo because of MS is a nonsensical comment. Especially to the degree that their hardware pricing (and its impact on MS's profitability in the larger bottom line of their entertainment-related ledger-sheet) has anything to do with it - which is to say, not at all.
I think you're the one dividing things. Parent was talking about the "GAMING DIVISION".
Which is a red herring, which is why I called him on it. As has been talked to death, here, it's the hardware sales piece of that division that's always in the red. They do great on the titles. Hell, Flight Simulator alone is a cash cow.
Slashdot Mirror
Suck it.
And right there, perfectly formatted, is the classic example of someone who, rather than face the discomfort of acknowledging that that some issues simply are black and white, decides to be slippery (changing the meaning of the questions by playing dumb about context) and and snarky (sounding like you're dishing out some sort of verbal retaliation for having been somehow offended, which is BS).
People with a vested interest in a not-firm position on anything (because holding and affirming one one would expose their own mixed premises, hypocrisy, or other cognitive or philosophical shortcomings) tend to opt rather quickly for ad hominem or just plain boorish responses to reasonably-put challenges. Thanks for illustrating that so nicely.
I'm just trying to keep up, here. As long as I park far enough away from that Tahoe down the block, though, that should keep the other end of our street from tilting up and altering the weather. Um, unless we want that to happen. It's confusing, now. I'll carry around some extra sandbags if that will help.
shoving their shoddy DOS ... down your throat ... abusing their monopoly
Right! Because DOS was definitely the only O/S upon which big business was doing business, say, back in the 1980's.
And then there were those enormous numbers of consumers using DOS instead of Apple II machines or Ataris or Amigas... Shoved down their throats? Come on. If you're going to rant about MS market share, at least skip over the part when it was anything but a sure thing, before all of the other platform makers wheezed and missed the opportunity to take over the business desktop market (when they already owned the back office corporate computing market!) when it was anything but settled in one popular direction.
will be taking these guys on golf outings. I mean, how creepy is that?
... *tap tap tap*
>>Inviting someone to a game of golf, or to a party, or a seminar, or whatever is a lot less creepy than this indirect approach
*checks sarcasm meter*
Is this thing on?
It worked with me, I love my new littoral combat ship. ;)
Hey, I almost got that! But since I like faster stuff, I opted for a Joint Strike Fighter. But stupid me (early adopter!), I got the one from Boeing instead of the final one from Lockheed. It's like owning a flying Betamax. Oh well, it still has Firewire, and it runs Linux if you don't care about the display drivers or compatibility with cheaper imported air-to-air missle hardware.
If you're in radio earshot of the capital beltway, you can always tell when some congressional committee or federal procurement process is closing in on a big contract decision. The local AM radio stations (and NPR sponsorship slots) will fill up with advertisements that can only be meant to influence about half a dozen people.
What's creepy is the level of concentration of wealth, power and influence
What are you talking about? The guy with something to sell is representing products or services that are worth millions of dollars. He's not selling one single large diamond he inherited from his grandfather, The Duke. What he's selling is produced by hundreds or thousands of employees, all of whom in turn use products and services supplied by other people in the course of doing what they do. They all take home their paychecks and spend it on all sorts of other things.
Then you've got the guy he's selling to. Did you think we're talking about yachts, here, or gold-plated horse trailers? It's big-ticket IT stuff that is used to power entire business operations - upon which (at the scale we're talking about), hundreds or thousands of people will do their jobs and serve, in turn, their customers.
Just because the sales guy has a vested interest in persuading a higher-end decision maker to go one way versus another doesn't mean the decision is made in a vacuum. At that level, the decision maker is answerable to a board of directors, investors, and so on.
Like or not, large employers that do a lot of things for a lot of customers and staff use big-ticket things, like airplanes and server farms. Someone sells them, and someone decides which ones to buy. And it's rarely about just one technical dividing point or another - there's finances, support, legal issues, security reputations, and much more that figure into it. If you don't have the face time and easy relationship with someone who has to weigh all of that, you don't have a chance to convey everything you have to say.
The point of my comment is that this is the oldest story in the book, and just because some newer methods of getting a little attention and face time have evolved, the need for suppliers to woo purchasers hasn't changed one bit.
... sales execs who've actually done some homework on the dozen or so people in the entire universe likely to meaningfully purchase what they have to sell will be taking these guys on golf outings. I mean, how creepy is that? They'll probably even shake hands!
Are we to extend the boycott to them, too? Are we also to boycott Carl Zeiss because they make optics for some Sony cameras?
We're on the same page, here, and you're actually helping to make my point... which (in response to the "they're not getting any more of my money, I'll just warez their stuff" guy) was to point out that he's going to have to do some REAL walking away from Sony if he means it. And it's difficult, as you point out. His "threat" to just rip off, rather than pay for, his entertainment is pretty empty, really - and says more about his looking for an excuse to rip off the artists that Sony happens to represent than it does some real (meaningful) effort on his part to harm Sony in any way that matters.
Which means that you're going to be using Sony batteries for some time to come.
Hopefully you still get my point. Laptop batteries are not the same as goof-off-time entertainment products (or TVs, for that matter).
If I absolutely positively must have any of its media(games movies cds etc) or electronics products i'll either warez it or buy it second hand.
Come on, now. If you're actually taking this position on principle, how can you even talk about absolutely positively "must having" a game?
It's one thing to grumble if, say, your employer requires you to use a Sony product (batteries?). But you never, ever, "need" entertainment. By pretending that you're going to somehow teach them some lesson by ripping off their media products, you're just not admitting that your desire for their entertainer's handiwork is still stronger than your loathing of them as a business. Well, which is it? Ripping them off still increases the demand for their products. It maintains buzz, visibility, and the notion that even people who can't afford to buy their own entertainment are willing to break the law to have Sony products. If you really don't like them, just walk away. Completely. Only that will teach them a lesson.
... and it's all Googly. That is to say, the implementation is quick, but a little too Googly, in terms of weaving the results into your own web site. Of course you can limit the search scope to your own site, and the results are right there (and of course very fast)... but interestingly, though I regularly see Google crawling my dynamicly rendered content, very obvious searches that should bring that stuff back aren't showing up in the results. It's the same problem content people always have in getting search engines to like everything on their sites.
In other words, it's very easy to graft this tool onto your web site, but you may have a lot of more advanced websmithery ahead of you to actually get Google to successfully index everything on your site. And, of course, it's not going to help people find some document you just put up this morning... Google's indexes can be off by days at least, and often weeks.
A well-crafted built-in search tool, and good keywording habits by the people producing the content are more likely to get your own visitors finding material on your own web site. But if you open up the Google engine's scope to include other web sites, they'll get a lot more info to pick from... if you don't mind those eyeballs wandering off, never to be seen again.
Isn't this a bit redundant? Don't all high-traffic sites already have their own search, or already have Google's search in them? And a good many sites already use AdSense, so this seems a little odd that Google is searching the deep dark depths of the internet to get their search and ads. But OTOH, this seems perfect for non-high traffic sites that don't have AdSense, but get enough clicks so that a little revenue wouldn't hurt.
Even if a small-ish site does have some native search capability, the odds are pretty good that they don't have the ability to index PDFs and other stuff that Google already handles so well. I think I'll give this a try on some of my smaller project sites and see how it behaves - it might spare me from re-inventing the wheel or having to deal with manual keywording database links to binary files. The AdSense revenue is just frosting on the cake if you're already signed on anyway.
A national culture that encourages a rational atmosphere does not make irrational behaviour impossible, just less probable.
Which is why I referred to the culture, not the government. And large, violent, absurdly irrational behavior (over cartoons!) by a rapidly expanding segment of a country's population is a cultural issue. And to the extent that a culture elects a government that encourages that shift in the demographic (through wide-open immigration policies, boundless social benefits for anything that breathes, etc), then that culture (the one that's shocked - shocked! - by the sudden intolerance of their culture by the new culture that's moving in) can either use civil institutions, like the press, to cast shame on such behavior, or use the government. Civil pressure is far more effective, but shaming a segment of the culture into seeing the irrationality of their own behavior makes some people feel uncomfortable (we wouldn't want to hurt anyone's feelings!), and so it gets left alone... and then all the sudden you've got exactly what happened in Denmark.
If a government imposes their own vision of rational thought, then there is no freedom!
A government can't impose thought processes, obviously. But it is worth mentioning that there are no "versions" of rational thought. Reason simply is. A good politician should be able to speak rationally, and thereby illustrate the contrast between his/her world view and those that are shaped by crazy, backwards religious hooey. It's less about government imposition, and more about leading by example. Which isn't to say, of course, that non-religious types aren't just as irrational on some of their own pet issues... but that's usually on stuff that's easier to actually debate, and doesn't involve invoking magic invisible friends and whatnot.
Hell, if anything, Denmark deserves credit for giving the journalists police protection when they were threatened.
But wouldn't they get more credit if, as a national culture, they established a more rational atmosphere that made it absolutely beyond the pale to have a big ol' Islamic rant-a-thon in the first place (over cartoons!)? If a culture doesn't insist on enough assimilation by immigrants to avoid that sort of absurd friction in the first place, then perhaps that's the thing that contributes to the atmosphere that makes the press feel so timid that they need police protection for drawing or publishing cartoons?
Yes, because Finland hosting the EU Presidency makes it the least involved in world affairs..
Alas, but you don't see newly nuclear Stalinist cleptocracies stamping their feet and threatening to test missiles over the heads of the people of Japan if Finland doesn't agree to one-on-one negotiating over getting more free resources in exchange for not lashing out. The EU may have some role in talking to regimes like Iran (though it has been essentially ineffective so far, in having any impact whatsoever on that front), but in which European city certain EU officials are stationed, or from which state they originate this week/month/year probably doesn't have any bearing Finland, per se, as a focus of militant press-threatening. Um, unless you're saying that the press in Finland suddenly is altering their behavior because of threats that have arisen from fringe militants angered by Finland's current EU government role? Just a little perplexed, that's all.
Take your anti-Apple agenda somewhere else
What part of "every other publisher in the business" didn't you hear?
Dewey Defeats Truman!
Nice one. But way, way too subtle to make it through the tin-foil your intended audience is wearing, I'm afraid. Keep up the good work, though.
the anti-establishment teens are going to see them as corporate shills and take their eyeballs elsewhere
. But not so anti that they have the intellectual honesty to simply walk away from the material produced by the people they're "against."
I'm always amused by this bit of silliness. The "establishment" that these noble rebels are rebeling against are... the people producing the very creative material they seem to want. They aren't anti-establishment, they're anti-paying-what-the-people-who-produce-it-ask. Or, anti-the-artists-they-like-to-have-entertain-them
Corporate shills? I wonder if, after sitting down with Matt Groening, they'd still consider the people that Groening has continued to employ to deal with his business arrangements, financing, legal crap, etc - that he has chosen - to be "corporate shills." Poor Matt Groening! He, and all of his animators, voice talent, writers, production staff, the accountants that get them paychecks and handle health insurance... they're all just creative people who want their voice to be heard, and The Man is shackling them, and distracting us with their Shills!
*sigh*
Instead of worrying the specifics of how YouTube is or isn't obeying the law, why isn't all of this noise focused on helping "the anti-establishment teens" actually get a clue about what it takes to keep The Simpsons in production for decades straight?
Sorry, you're wrong about the Florida election being applicable. The whole "hanging chad" mess doesn't happen when you limit the ballots as the GP suggested: Ink pen, paper, locked metal box.
/That's/ how you guarantee both anonymity and clean ballots.
Can't fill in a block without bleeding over? You just trashed your ballot. Watch it get shredded, then re-do your vote.
Except that's exactly why the Florida election is germaine. Though the Florida laws called for a double-voted ballot to be considered invalid, the people doing the recounts ended up arguing, ballot-by-ballot, about which ones were in that condition. "See, there is a mark on this other one, but it looks like it wasn't really meant to be a vote, since this other one is marked better..." It's not so much that Florida is an example of why paper can't work, it's just an example of what happens when, despite clear rules, people willing to drag in the lawyers will still try to interpret semi-ambiguous hand-actions by voters in whatever way suits them.
If it were as simple as "any mark outside the box invalidates your vote," then this wouldn't be an issue. But the losing candidate in a close election is going to challenge each hand-marked ballot in exactly that way. That's what mechanical and electronic voting mechanisms are supposed to completely prevent. As we saw in Florida, mechanical marks on paper don't do the job. I think pen-on-paper would be even worse.
One would think that the state would require the sourcecode for due diligence...
Not necessarily. The state also does things like approve commercial use of things like scales and compertized gasoline pumps. The look at the results (yes, it actually pumped 100 gallons of gas, and that's what the meter is showing), but probably do not have the chops to review the source code in the pumps, the register systems, and so on. And yet, we all assume that the machines, and people using them, are not lying. Getting into the source code of accounting systems, life-and-death machinery... it's not something most state governments could possibly do without themselves making mistakes.
Piece of paper, ink pen, padlocked metal box. That's how sane people run elections.
Do you have any recollection of the Florida mess in 2000? The Gore campaign didn't like the results, and demanded recounts in certain districts though to be favorable to their candidate. There was no arguing about most of the poll documents, but because they were literally trying to differentiate between a few hundred votes, it came down to groups of people sitting around a table debating what they imagined a voter's thoughts really were when they left a partial impression next to ONE candidate's name, but then a slightly more dramatic impression next to another, etc.
Pens and paper are too ambiguous when you have campaign workers doing psychic readings after the fact and trying to produce the results they're looking for. Electronic voting mechanisms unambiguously record the voter's actions (or lack of them). A paper trail produced at the same time, reviewed by the voter, is the ideal method.
I can just see Bush declaring an emergency on polling day which has the side-effect of banning exit polls... oh so convenient... get rid of those pesky exit polls... then no-one knows how the voting is going except those controlling the magic software...
Utter nonsense. Any "emergency" so dire that someone can't stand on a sidewalk and ask someone else on the sidewalk a question would be an emergency so serious that it would prevent voting in the first place. You're dreaming up mustache-twirling fanstasy villainy just because you don't like someone. It's a little embarassing, really.
Next thing you're going to tell me is that the previous administration had FBI dossiers on political opponents delivered to White House staff for review by campaign workers! Oh, wait, that did happen. If you can "just see Bush" doing something, why not actually explain how that would, in practical terms, work? That would at least show that you're thinking about it, and would more stylishly showcase your tin-foil hat by accenting it with some propertly conspiratorial crazy-flair.
What red herring? The gaming division is the sum of all its parts. An argument that Microsoft itself is still running in the black would have made more sense (and cents).
I think the point is that saying some movie makers are skittish about Halo because of MS is a nonsensical comment. Especially to the degree that their hardware pricing (and its impact on MS's profitability in the larger bottom line of their entertainment-related ledger-sheet) has anything to do with it - which is to say, not at all.
I think you're the one dividing things. Parent was talking about the "GAMING DIVISION".
Which is a red herring, which is why I called him on it. As has been talked to death, here, it's the hardware sales piece of that division that's always in the red. They do great on the titles. Hell, Flight Simulator alone is a cash cow.