"You may be able to argue that a five thousand vote error is a small price to pay for a national election but these errors are certainly inadmissible on a much smaller scale.
A software error resulting in +/- 5000 votes cast is unacceptable on any level, even if it gets drowned out on the national level in the US.
There is absolutely no reason or excuse for software to miscount votes. It isn't rocket science.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but this shit just pisses me off. It's a matter of national and local integrity that our voting systems are transparent. Please support blackboxvoting.org if you don't have the time to get involved in a deeper fashion (calling/writing your legislators, etc).
Note: I'm not affiliated with blackboxvoting.org. I just appreciate their work.
I'm not a big fan of one of the largest chipmakers venturing into embedded systems. Given Intel's track record, something tells me that things are going to get fugly for companies that sell embedded systems as a component of larger products.
I sure hope someone will be playing close attention to Intel's pricing... if they use Wind River's systems as a loss leader for their chips, that would suck for a competitive chip market.
It's a little early to talk about Sun as a part of Oracle. It's probable that the acquisition will clear regulatory approval, but until it does, Oracle can't play anything resembling a decision-making role in something like this.
That's a laugh. At the operational level, Oracle will not interfere much until the acquisition is approved.
But at the strategic level? You can bet your bottom dollar that Sun isn't blowing its nose without checking with Oracle to see if it's OK first.
2008
- British Airways Flight 38, Boeing 777
- Kalitta Air, Boeing 747F
- Sudan Airways Flight Flight 109, Airbus A310
- Fedex Flight 80, McDD MD-11
FEDEX SUPERVISOR: Well, Red, the new flight schedules for 2010 are out. Make sure your certification to fly a McDD MD-11 is current by year end... ME: Out of curiosity, which flight do you have me on? FEDEX SUPERVISOR: Flight 80. ME: I knew I shouldn't have kissed your wife at the Memorial Day barbecue. FEDEX SUPERVISOR: Mwua-ha-ha-ha.
I feel badly for all those kids who chose MIT because of its top-ten Playboy ranking, only to go and find a bunch of nerds, forever regretting not going to Clemson instead.
I don't know if you ever visited MIT in the 80s. The parties were definitely off the hook, and the girls coming in from Wellesley, BU, BC, etc were pretty amazing.
One thing I recall from the MIT guys I knew -- those guys were overachievers at everything -- academics, sports, leadership, and of course, partying. My exposure was limited to guys like that, so I don't know if it applied to the rest of the student body... but you should have seen some of the fantastic hack-engineering used to hide kegs, jello pits, etc.
The use of the word bogeyman presumably being intended to imply that there is no danger, but doing so without you having to actually make that claim and then defend it.
I'm not making that claim. You presume too much. There is danger, but you overstate the danger, whipping it up into a bogeyman that must be avoided at all costs. What you have done with "tyranny" is no better than what some of the potential tyrants have done with "terrorists".
Sheesh, look in a dictionary sometime.
I did. Long ago, when you claimed I fit the very definition of a bigot. And guess what? I don't. YOU need to look in a dictionary -- or, if your understanding of the word bigot is correct, then you need to revisit your presumptions of what I believe in relation to who I am.
I do. Constantly. But I get the feeling you don't question yourself much, if at all.
Why? Because I disagree with your paranoid conclusions? Because you do not believe it is possible for someone to question themselves and come to a different conclusion that you did? I genuflect all the time. But this isn't about me anymore -- it's about your inability to address one of the foundations of your argument. This alone tells me that you don't want to question your own beliefs.
LOL Why would I want to participate in an ad hominem attack on myself? Don't be silly.
Where is the ad hominem attack? I haven't made one. I'm trying to understand where your philosophy has come from, so I can better understand why you apparently believe that an unjust society is tolerable.
Ummm, one where I was taught some history, given analytical tools to observe what is going on around me and appraise the claims of others, etcetera... your comments indicate that didn't happen for you.
So, still more ad hominem attacks from you. Do you have any other tools in your shed? Such as reasoned debate? Or are you still tossing the ad hominems to avoid answering questions fundamental to your analysis of the situation?
Since I not only never said that but never even implied it you are once again demonstrating your willingness to promote your uninformed opinions to the status of facts and publicly present them as such. Again you are giving a clear indication of how much credence should be given to your various claims. And "wanton"? You might do better if you dialed back the hyperbole a smidgen.
You did indeed imply that. Numerous times. By avoiding answering the questions that would have cleared up your views on that specific issue. By discounting systematic redress of injustice as a valid policy to counteract it. By refusing to address the issue when I had raised it more than once before.
So, before you go back onto your "ends justify the means" rant, will you please address the two questions laid out in a prior post? Or will you continue to stand on a logical point that has no foundation?
Canada has twice the bandwidth at half the price we suckers in the USA pay for.
Some of that has to do with the fact that we adopted the tech a generation earlier than Canada... and then we forgot^H^H^H^H^H^H ran away with the cash we were supposed to use to upgrade with.
Didn't predict what was going to happen? That was very short-sighted of you.
It was blindingly obvious, after all.
Yes, yes, I'm an insensitive clod. I understand this, and apologize in advance to my sight-challenged friends who are listening to this via text reader or reading it via braille.
They know just enough to turn the thing on and push exactly the indicated buttons in exactly the indicated order to. Anything outside those parameters means driving off the edge of the map and into a terrifying, unknown world.
Just wanted to note that maybe a critical health-care setting is one of those places where "this is diverging from my script -- let's see what happens if I do $THIS" could be a bad bad move. Caution when using any unfamiliar systems seems like a positive characteristic for nurses and doctors -- and we all know that the most dangerous user is the one with the knowledge to truly screw up but without the wisdom not to.
The other thing about computers in medical settings... it increases dependence on computers for basic actions. When I went to college, this was a big issue in the school of pharmacy. Pharmacists learn to depend on the computer to check for drug interactions, contraindications, etc. Full computerization of records actually *increased* medication incidents industry-wide -- the conclusion at the time was the reduced vigilance was the problem. This was likely exacerbated by the increased workload of pharmacists during the late 80s and 90s as well, so it's hard to sort out the primary causes, and I don't know if the industry found a good solution... but I think it's a pretty natural tendency for people to get intellectually lazy when they have a system built to do some of their 'thinking' for them.
So, you're suggesting that slashdot is simply taking the hard line on standards compatibility, and builds to the standards regardless of the experience of their users?
Kind of admirable, if true, but in my opinion, maybe not in their best interests... that's a lot of eyeballs they are choosing to alienate.
My experience is, from stints at four employers (two of those very long stints) in the tech industry, is that the HR drones are, in fact, clueless. HR clerkdom is where you put employees you don't want to fire, but can't cut the mustard in other areas. Maybe this is a function of my previous employers... but I've seen it too many times to think it's not a normal situation.
Yes, the problem is systemic. But clueless HR drones do, indeed, hinder resolution by not escalating when required, by not knowing how to handle exceptions.
Interestingly, my one non-tech-industry employer did not have this problem. HR clerkdom was where they screened raw graduates for promotion to other departments, mostly as admins. If they weren't up and running well in 60 days, they got canned. That HR department was a pleasure to work with... all the fresh hires new to escalate immediately on process exceptions.
I don't write code anymore. At all. It's not my source of income, and I value other hobbies higher.
Yet I refused to sign an all-your-code-belongs-to-us agreement at my current employer, and almost didn't get the job because of it. The HR red-tape machine couldn't deal with a process exception, so the CFO of the company had to step in to resolve the issue on their end with their legal team.
The reason I'm sharing it is this: the clueless HR drones are the ones enforcing the sign-it-or-go-away policy. If you're worth your salt, and the company management is good, they'll make exceptions. And from a principles point of view, you probably shouldn't work from a company that wants to enslave you.
They're pocketing the money. That's not going to change.
It'll change when somebody offers something better. Fiber service is helping in some areas... competition is a wonderful thing. If only people didn't use their video content provider as their ISP, I think competition would be even better. Nothing like the cable cos (and the telcos who offer fiber) limiting internet volume to keep people from downloading their video content.
There are a lot of IFs, such as:
...IF regulatory hurdles to video content delivery are manageable ...IF distribution is separated from content production (this, IMO, is the biggest hurdle -- the networks are canceling shows that they don't produce, in favor of less-popular but self-produced shows that are more profitable). ...IF a retailer of video programming is able to negotiate deals with enough of the content producers to have a decent selection.
I see video content as being where music was 10 years ago, except that more of the producers have limited online official distribution.
The reason for this is because slashdot doesn't have a proper webdev writing their site. The may have a webdev, but obviously the person they have is not capable of meeting their needs.
Since the corporate overlords are cutting back on expenses, there is no room in the budget to hire a proper webdev. So the slashdot team has decided to purposely bork the site, keeping it just-good-enough-for-content-to-be-available, in the hope that some skilled webdev will offer their services for free to fix the site.
Or, possibly, the slashdot editors are playing passive-aggressive with the corporate overlord's demands that slashdot become more like a social networking site, and less like a news aggregator with comments. I think this has been hinted at by Rob & Jamie in the past.
Finally, the third possibility -- it's summer, which is kind of like the Septembers of yore on usenet. Maybe they're hoping to preserve the community by driving off the shambling hordes of idiots who belong on Fark or 4chan instead of here, while the slashdot core sticks around, knowing that things will simmer down in October. But that's probably wishful thinking.
Well, the ITMS did it for music... why shouldn't Hulu do it for video?
I mean, this is way off the ads-vs.-subscription debate from earlier in the thread...
But why can't a la carte video work in the mainstream? Is it because people listen to the same music over and over, but they don't for videos, so the utility people assign to single videos is much lower than for music (and therefore, they won't pay a lot for it)?
And surely there's merit in bundled videos, along those lines... Say, $1 per episode of some show, $10 for the whole 12-episode season. Or $1/football game, $15 for the whole season (including pre- & post-season where applicable)?
As for the compelling reason... the ITMS had three compelling reasons to choose it over BT: the tie-in to the iPod; ease-of-use; and legitimacy (for a lot of people, a compelling reason in itself).
Obviously, people already have video-watching appliances, so the tie-in to a pop hardware is out. But the other two items are definitely attainable. The big question is whether any video retailer will be able to get the content-producers to sign on (since all the content-producers want to see ALL the profits, so they are on competing services).
Anyway, I'm rambling here, and my thoughts aren't 100% organized... but let me just say that if Hulu goes the traditional-TV-channel model, then eventually someone will wise up and offer a video retail store similar to ITMS... I just wonder if the a la carte price needed to cover production expenses would be too high for the typical consumer.
Fine, but it's either subscription or ads. You don't get to do both.
Why not? Why shouldn't ads subsidize some of the content so that subscription fees are manageable?
It doesn't have to be an either/or situation.
Why not offer ad-free content to "gold" subscribers, limited ads to "silver" subscribers, and normal ad levels to "brown" (free) subscribers.
Then everybody wins, since it's the choice of the subscriber.
I know that the magazine-subscription model is very different, largely due to the cost of producing and distributing a magazine, and the difficulty of publishing different versions... but at a broader scale, this is what we have. Ad-heavy magazines with low subscription prices, ad-light magazines with high subscription prices. And, of course, the expensive mags with lots of advertising, where the advertising is considered part of the content (fashion mags especially).
Out of fear of some tyrannical bogeyman, you are willing to let millions of people wallow in discrimination. You still haven't addressed whether you think this is just, and whether it is necessary to provide for equal opportunity in order to be a just society. Are you avoiding that question because the answer would show your true bigotry?
You are quick to call others bigot -- you should probably examine your own beliefs.
As for my guesses being hilariously wrong, care to share? I'm curious what upbringing could have resulted in someone so afraid of tyranny that they are willing to turn a blind eye to wanton injustice.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you serious? 0.1 cents per gallon goes to the LUST Fund?
That is awesome. I had no idea that airlines were behind the explosion of porn on the internet.
A software error resulting in +/- 5000 votes cast is unacceptable on any level, even if it gets drowned out on the national level in the US.
There is absolutely no reason or excuse for software to miscount votes. It isn't rocket science.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but this shit just pisses me off. It's a matter of national and local integrity that our voting systems are transparent. Please support blackboxvoting.org if you don't have the time to get involved in a deeper fashion (calling/writing your legislators, etc).
Note: I'm not affiliated with blackboxvoting.org. I just appreciate their work.
Uh-oh...
I'm not a big fan of one of the largest chipmakers venturing into embedded systems. Given Intel's track record, something tells me that things are going to get fugly for companies that sell embedded systems as a component of larger products.
I sure hope someone will be playing close attention to Intel's pricing... if they use Wind River's systems as a loss leader for their chips, that would suck for a competitive chip market.
That's a laugh. At the operational level, Oracle will not interfere much until the acquisition is approved.
But at the strategic level? You can bet your bottom dollar that Sun isn't blowing its nose without checking with Oracle to see if it's OK first.
FEDEX SUPERVISOR: Well, Red, the new flight schedules for 2010 are out. Make sure your certification to fly a McDD MD-11 is current by year end...
ME: Out of curiosity, which flight do you have me on?
FEDEX SUPERVISOR: Flight 80.
ME: I knew I shouldn't have kissed your wife at the Memorial Day barbecue.
FEDEX SUPERVISOR: Mwua-ha-ha-ha.
I don't know if you ever visited MIT in the 80s. The parties were definitely off the hook, and the girls coming in from Wellesley, BU, BC, etc were pretty amazing.
One thing I recall from the MIT guys I knew -- those guys were overachievers at everything -- academics, sports, leadership, and of course, partying. My exposure was limited to guys like that, so I don't know if it applied to the rest of the student body... but you should have seen some of the fantastic hack-engineering used to hide kegs, jello pits, etc.
Not really. Higher rankings just means that the students they have tend to be better, which in turn feeds into higher rankings, etc.
Almost every college in the country is operating at full (or even over full) attendance capacity.
But, you're right that it's about money.
I'm not making that claim. You presume too much. There is danger, but you overstate the danger, whipping it up into a bogeyman that must be avoided at all costs. What you have done with "tyranny" is no better than what some of the potential tyrants have done with "terrorists".
I did. Long ago, when you claimed I fit the very definition of a bigot. And guess what? I don't. YOU need to look in a dictionary -- or, if your understanding of the word bigot is correct, then you need to revisit your presumptions of what I believe in relation to who I am.
Why? Because I disagree with your paranoid conclusions? Because you do not believe it is possible for someone to question themselves and come to a different conclusion that you did? I genuflect all the time. But this isn't about me anymore -- it's about your inability to address one of the foundations of your argument. This alone tells me that you don't want to question your own beliefs.
Where is the ad hominem attack? I haven't made one. I'm trying to understand where your philosophy has come from, so I can better understand why you apparently believe that an unjust society is tolerable.
So, still more ad hominem attacks from you. Do you have any other tools in your shed? Such as reasoned debate? Or are you still tossing the ad hominems to avoid answering questions fundamental to your analysis of the situation?
You did indeed imply that. Numerous times. By avoiding answering the questions that would have cleared up your views on that specific issue. By discounting systematic redress of injustice as a valid policy to counteract it. By refusing to address the issue when I had raised it more than once before.
So, before you go back onto your "ends justify the means" rant, will you please address the two questions laid out in a prior post? Or will you continue to stand on a logical point that has no foundation?
Some of that has to do with the fact that we adopted the tech a generation earlier than Canada... and then we forgot^H^H^H^H^H^H ran away with the cash we were supposed to use to upgrade with.
That's ridiculous. Where would the US get its newscasters, comedians, and singer/songwriters from if not for Canada?
Didn't predict what was going to happen? That was very short-sighted of you.
It was blindingly obvious, after all.
Yes, yes, I'm an insensitive clod. I understand this, and apologize in advance to my sight-challenged friends who are listening to this via text reader or reading it via braille.
Just wanted to note that maybe a critical health-care setting is one of those places where "this is diverging from my script -- let's see what happens if I do $THIS" could be a bad bad move. Caution when using any unfamiliar systems seems like a positive characteristic for nurses and doctors -- and we all know that the most dangerous user is the one with the knowledge to truly screw up but without the wisdom not to.
The other thing about computers in medical settings... it increases dependence on computers for basic actions. When I went to college, this was a big issue in the school of pharmacy. Pharmacists learn to depend on the computer to check for drug interactions, contraindications, etc. Full computerization of records actually *increased* medication incidents industry-wide -- the conclusion at the time was the reduced vigilance was the problem. This was likely exacerbated by the increased workload of pharmacists during the late 80s and 90s as well, so it's hard to sort out the primary causes, and I don't know if the industry found a good solution... but I think it's a pretty natural tendency for people to get intellectually lazy when they have a system built to do some of their 'thinking' for them.
Unless you're trying to avoid import/export taxes, of course. In which case, they'd want to find them anyway, so they can tax them.
Wait, so if it's an anti-piracy dog, can it go "Arrrf"?
Does it like sniffing arrrses like most dogs?
So, you're suggesting that slashdot is simply taking the hard line on standards compatibility, and builds to the standards regardless of the experience of their users?
Kind of admirable, if true, but in my opinion, maybe not in their best interests... that's a lot of eyeballs they are choosing to alienate.
My experience is, from stints at four employers (two of those very long stints) in the tech industry, is that the HR drones are, in fact, clueless. HR clerkdom is where you put employees you don't want to fire, but can't cut the mustard in other areas. Maybe this is a function of my previous employers... but I've seen it too many times to think it's not a normal situation.
Yes, the problem is systemic. But clueless HR drones do, indeed, hinder resolution by not escalating when required, by not knowing how to handle exceptions.
Interestingly, my one non-tech-industry employer did not have this problem. HR clerkdom was where they screened raw graduates for promotion to other departments, mostly as admins. If they weren't up and running well in 60 days, they got canned. That HR department was a pleasure to work with... all the fresh hires new to escalate immediately on process exceptions.
I don't write code anymore. At all. It's not my source of income, and I value other hobbies higher.
Yet I refused to sign an all-your-code-belongs-to-us agreement at my current employer, and almost didn't get the job because of it. The HR red-tape machine couldn't deal with a process exception, so the CFO of the company had to step in to resolve the issue on their end with their legal team.
The reason I'm sharing it is this: the clueless HR drones are the ones enforcing the sign-it-or-go-away policy. If you're worth your salt, and the company management is good, they'll make exceptions. And from a principles point of view, you probably shouldn't work from a company that wants to enslave you.
It'll change when somebody offers something better. Fiber service is helping in some areas... competition is a wonderful thing. If only people didn't use their video content provider as their ISP, I think competition would be even better. Nothing like the cable cos (and the telcos who offer fiber) limiting internet volume to keep people from downloading their video content.
There are a lot of IFs, such as:
...IF regulatory hurdles to video content delivery are manageable
...IF distribution is separated from content production (this, IMO, is the biggest hurdle -- the networks are canceling shows that they don't produce, in favor of less-popular but self-produced shows that are more profitable).
...IF a retailer of video programming is able to negotiate deals with enough of the content producers to have a decent selection.
I see video content as being where music was 10 years ago, except that more of the producers have limited online official distribution.
Read between the lines.
Slashdot doesn't render properly on ANY browser.
The reason for this is because slashdot doesn't have a proper webdev writing their site. The may have a webdev, but obviously the person they have is not capable of meeting their needs.
Since the corporate overlords are cutting back on expenses, there is no room in the budget to hire a proper webdev. So the slashdot team has decided to purposely bork the site, keeping it just-good-enough-for-content-to-be-available, in the hope that some skilled webdev will offer their services for free to fix the site.
Or, possibly, the slashdot editors are playing passive-aggressive with the corporate overlord's demands that slashdot become more like a social networking site, and less like a news aggregator with comments. I think this has been hinted at by Rob & Jamie in the past.
Finally, the third possibility -- it's summer, which is kind of like the Septembers of yore on usenet. Maybe they're hoping to preserve the community by driving off the shambling hordes of idiots who belong on Fark or 4chan instead of here, while the slashdot core sticks around, knowing that things will simmer down in October. But that's probably wishful thinking.
Well, the ITMS did it for music... why shouldn't Hulu do it for video?
I mean, this is way off the ads-vs.-subscription debate from earlier in the thread...
But why can't a la carte video work in the mainstream? Is it because people listen to the same music over and over, but they don't for videos, so the utility people assign to single videos is much lower than for music (and therefore, they won't pay a lot for it)?
And surely there's merit in bundled videos, along those lines... Say, $1 per episode of some show, $10 for the whole 12-episode season. Or $1/football game, $15 for the whole season (including pre- & post-season where applicable)?
As for the compelling reason... the ITMS had three compelling reasons to choose it over BT: the tie-in to the iPod; ease-of-use; and legitimacy (for a lot of people, a compelling reason in itself).
Obviously, people already have video-watching appliances, so the tie-in to a pop hardware is out. But the other two items are definitely attainable. The big question is whether any video retailer will be able to get the content-producers to sign on (since all the content-producers want to see ALL the profits, so they are on competing services).
Anyway, I'm rambling here, and my thoughts aren't 100% organized... but let me just say that if Hulu goes the traditional-TV-channel model, then eventually someone will wise up and offer a video retail store similar to ITMS... I just wonder if the a la carte price needed to cover production expenses would be too high for the typical consumer.
Why not? Why shouldn't ads subsidize some of the content so that subscription fees are manageable?
It doesn't have to be an either/or situation.
Why not offer ad-free content to "gold" subscribers, limited ads to "silver" subscribers, and normal ad levels to "brown" (free) subscribers.
Then everybody wins, since it's the choice of the subscriber.
I know that the magazine-subscription model is very different, largely due to the cost of producing and distributing a magazine, and the difficulty of publishing different versions... but at a broader scale, this is what we have. Ad-heavy magazines with low subscription prices, ad-light magazines with high subscription prices. And, of course, the expensive mags with lots of advertising, where the advertising is considered part of the content (fashion mags especially).
Out of fear of some tyrannical bogeyman, you are willing to let millions of people wallow in discrimination. You still haven't addressed whether you think this is just, and whether it is necessary to provide for equal opportunity in order to be a just society. Are you avoiding that question because the answer would show your true bigotry?
You are quick to call others bigot -- you should probably examine your own beliefs.
As for my guesses being hilariously wrong, care to share? I'm curious what upbringing could have resulted in someone so afraid of tyranny that they are willing to turn a blind eye to wanton injustice.
Particularly the parenthetical bit at the end... sounds dirty to me.
I think we may be confused over what he meant by 'great'.
I think he meant great as in 'awesome', not great as in 'fucking huge'.
But I could be wrong.
No, that would be getouttamyspace.com.
Props to Billosaur, who I got that from.
Judging by some of the flamewars, slashdot is more like a sociopath network than anything else.