See my other comment for details. True, they both voted for the bill (McCain the first time around, Obama the second), but Obama voted for threeanti-immunityamendments, and McCain didn't vote for any.
See my links below, but basically, both voted for it - McCain the first time around, Obama the second time around.
Looking at the amendments, however, is interesting:
On the amendment to entirely strike Title II (the part about immunity), however, Obama voted yay, and McCain didn't vote. It failed 32-66, by the way.
Same for the amendment to limit immunity, which failed 37-61.
And the one to suspend retroactive immunity cases for 90 days, which failed 42-56.
So the answer is C), but Obama voted against immunity a heck of a lot more than McCain did.
BTW, my wife's condition is ultra-rare, there are only 3 or 4 specialists in our entire state, and we've never had to wait more than a week.
I'm just saying...3-4 specialists in a state doesn't qualify for me as "ultra-rare." Rare, yes. Ultra-rare sounds like one of those things where there are like 3-4 specialists in the country.
But that doesn't really matter. As mentioned in a sibling post, ultra-rare (or rare) means less demand. That's kind of the issue with the waiting thing, is overloading. If there's no one with the condition, there's no one in line in front of you.
Perhaps we can get Canonical to complain about Awesomebar...the devs just don't care no matter how many users complain.
That's because plenty of users like it. I love the thing, personally. Users who don't like it (usually a small but vocal minority of changephobes) complain, but eventually get used to it. That's how every major change in every software I've seen works. People react because it's not what they're used to, with very few concrete reasons for their opposition. The reasons they do come up with are usually either unwillingness to consider the reasons behind the change, or pointless and/or insignificant nitpicking. After a while, they get used to it, adjust, and move on. Then when things change again, it's back to complaining about how the old design (the same thing that was new and terrible last time) is way better, and the new one is crap.
It's happened before. Look at Pidgin's name and interface change, Facebook a few times, and, yes, Firefox. Heck, look at XP. "Everyone" decried it as bubbly and stupid, but it's turned out to be a decent system.* And Office 2k7 - everyone (yes, me included) decried the ribbon, it was terrible, the worst idea anyone ever had. But most people who actually took the time to use it (again, myself included) found that it was a far more productive interface. But it took some relearning and some (gasp!) change. For another random example, Blender is often cited for its unintuitive user interface (it does have a very steep learning curve), but it's designed in such a way that once you learn it, it's much more productive and easier to work with.
Changephobia in software is largely detrimental, and rarely results in any good.
The devs don't listen to your whining about the Awesomebar because they've seen this cycle time and time again, and know that you'll get used to it and learn to love it. They had a lot of reason behind creating the Awesomebar, and for the vast majority of users, it's a boon for usability and a great idea. In the case that you're part of the vast minority that will cling to their extensions and old versions, you're just that - a vast minority who is willing to sacrifice effort (downloading an extension) for keeping things like they were. It's not worth the dev's effort to try to satisfy a minority that can easily be satisfied through other means.
Also, random aside: your sig doesn't make sense. The idea is true enough, but you can't mod someone with a combination of Troll and Flamebait. Look up the definition of boolean logic.
Besides, we all know that "-1:StronglyDisagreeAndWishToCensor" is what "Overrated" is for;)
*For a Windows OS, anyway. I'm writing this on Linux because using Windows for any extended period of time just annoys me anymore, so I'm not making any claims of absolute decency, just relative to the rest of the Windows line. (Yeah, yeah, Win2k excepted)
Sibling could have at least provide a link. You would find (with a casual search for "R" and "D" which seems pretty effective) that the Republicans got 1.53 million, and the Democrats got 1.27 million. Hardly a glaring difference.
You might want to reconsider that. There is a proven significant link between facial hair and the success of programming languages. I would assume there is a similar correlation in any software project.
I predict the GPP's license is doomed to preside over failures, due to the intrinsic lack of facial hair.
You think that's bad, I passed a Carl's Jr. truck (Hardees to you east of the Mississippi) that said "It's Rude To Stare" next to a picture of their burger, and they had apparently trademarked the phrase, as it had a "TM" after it. And it was to the left of the burger, so it's not like they were trademarking the burger itself.
I even found a picture of the truck (the TM isn't visible, but it's there, just to the upper-right of the "It's Rude To Stare"). Is there something I'm missing, or is the trademark world just that ridiculous?
Contrary to popular opinion, "Anybody" is a global reference, including people like your mother, those fabled female types, and people like lawyers and doctors and such, most of whom couldn't hack together a "Hello world" to save their life.*
Me, you, any self-respecting geek, yes. Anybody, not quite. That's all I was saying.
Also, I didn't want to pass up an opportunity for a well-placed Princess Bride quote;)
*Now before everyone flips out on me, I'm not saying girls can't code...just that there are a lot of them that can't, much like there are a lot of males who can't. Groupthink, however, generally recognizes the fact that males exist, while the existence of females is questionable.
I've made a bit of a hobby of finding odd/geeky plates, and have seen LOL, and have pictures of a WTF here in Washington, along with ones like SSL, URL, UTF...yeah I'm weird.
I'm guessing (hoping) that English isn't your native tongue - in that case, consider this a friendly grammar lesson:
<nazi domain="grammar">
I knew cheaters in school too. People would give them a crutch to ride on. One day everyone got fed up and didn't help, and then one day we had a lab exam (write set number of programs in an alloted time). It was stressful enough for someone like me, and I was a good programmer. These guys didn't even bother showing up for it, and were hoisted from the program.
The answers are out there for these classes: having in class testing of skills and progress. I was in a college with a small class size of 30 (there were cheaters in university too but it was only ever caught by a computer comparing code - you could still change spacing to get past it at the time). It would be harder in a university setting of 100 or more students (not so much in grad classes). There are ways to determine if these people are able to write the code, but a professor doesn't have time to implement these checks - it would have to be done by an RA, maybe a TA, but I doubt they want to go and administer lab exams and then have to go and read through 100+ students' code.
</nazi>
Sorry, but that middle paragraph (sentence, more like) just made my head hurt.
Same here. I figure the ones who think it's boring are the vast amount of grads who got into it because it was the cool thing to do, or becuase it pays well. Serves them right, and leaves room for those of us who are actually in the field because we're engineers by nature.
I'm double-majoring in CS/EE because that's how I work. I just picked up a car with a froze up engine, mostly so I could take it apart, figure out how it works, and put it together, hopefully making it work better and get a working car out of it. That's how I've always worked, that's how I always will work. I have little sympathy for those that don't have that passion, but got in the field for other reasons like money or cool factor.
Wait, what? Are you implying that he failed, and that a lot should be one word?
Or that he should spell a lot that way, to experience failure?
In the latter case, clever, but you need a little work on clarity.
In the former, I hope you learned a lot from this post, because it was anutterfailure.
Generalize from your own experience and realize we are all flaming idiots but by using tools such as logic and the scientific method we can start to approach a modicum of cleverness. Then from that point on trust only 10% of what you hear and 50% of what you see, break a bunch of stuff while learning how not to break stuff as badly, and apply your skills to future problems. Sounds remarkably like Francis Bacon's NewOrganon. The guy quite literally created the scientific revolution. He looked around him and realized that he and and everyone around him were totally useless without a method, and that he human mind was weak and prone to faulty logic and jumping to conclusions, which is why everyone was still explaining things with Aristotle.
He used an analogy of trying to build the pyramids without tools - trying to build knowledge without a method would be equally futile. He was so convinced of this, in fact, that he wrote a book about it, and the intro says something to the effect of, "I have this idea that's going to save the world, and if I die before I write it down, the world's screwed, so here you are, it's not quite done yet, but it's a start." Turns out he died six years later, oddly enough.
I'd recommend giving it a read if you haven't already - it's one of the few books I actually read from my humanities class, because it was so fascinating.
P.S. Yes, this is the Bacon that supposedly wrote Shakespeare...but that is an entirely separate issue.
I bike commute to work, and the only wreck I've had is when some midsize car looked right-left and didn't look back right before taking his free right turn. It wasn't terrible (knocked me off my bike and screwed up my back wheel), and the guy was very apologetic and helpful, but it's worse than anything I've ever gotten from an SUV.
Just adding to the point of the parent that anecdotal evidence isn't terribly helpful or convincing, contrary to what the GP thinks. Accidents happen, whether you're in a gas-guzzling SUV or a slightly less gas-guzzling midsize.
I'm tired of people being so skeptical of voting machines. At least where I live, King County, WA, we have a system similar to the GP. I have a detailed summary in an earlier comment, but as to address the cancelling:
The voter checks their paper ballot. If it's correct, they hit "okay" and the machine sucks it up. If it's not, they ask for assistance, we come over and cancel the ballot. The printer prints an additional "cancel" code that also scrolls by the window, and then they re-do the vote from the top.
The takeup wheel is rather noisy, so the voter would notice if the extra cancel code happened. Not only that, but the cancel code scrolls by the window. Once the vote is printed, there's no way to retract it or cancel it without printing an additional code. The only crack I can see is if the barcode says something different than the text - which could be fixed by making the text machine-readable (OCR-style), so the computer reads the same thing the human does. And even if the barcode is different, a manual manual recount (humans going through and counting the tape) would still show the discrepancy.
The other problem with complaining about such things is that I don't see any more danger in the digital machines than in the good old paper ballots. They're not online, I don't believe they're ever connected to the internet, so it would require manual tampering. At that point, you could just as well switch out some paper ballots - who's to say the ballot I put in the machine is actually what's being counted? And so on. The machines we have today are working well - let them be.
I know! It's exciting to see what will happen when we build large vertical structures that affect the wind and weather patterns by interfering with the wind and such. We've never tried that before, so it's really scary and obviously going to lead to world collapse.
Oh wait...we've built cities and skyscrapers and thousands upon thousands of towers for power, cell phones, radio, television, and all kinds of things that screw with the weather patterns? And we haven't died?
Okay, given. Stealing my magic electric bike may still be wrong, and for the purpose of establishing black and white wrong or right, your analogy works just fine.
Equating stealing wifi to stealing a bike, however, makes it sound much worse than it is, because no one wants their bike stolen - it's just too much of an inconvenience. There are shades of grey in the world, and stealing wifi, while it might still be grey, is a much lighter (aka less evil) grey than stealing a bike.
Stealing wifi is similar to stealing music, except that we're screwing the ISPs, who need to be screwed, instead of the artists.:P
If you think that's a heinous crime, by all means, get a cellular modem, or try your luck with a Hotspot subscription. For the rest of us, leeching wifi here and there isn't a big issue. Stealing bikes is.
Slashdot Mirror
See my other comment for details. True, they both voted for the bill (McCain the first time around, Obama the second), but Obama voted for three anti-immunity amendments, and McCain didn't vote for any.
See my links below, but basically, both voted for it - McCain the first time around, Obama the second time around.
Looking at the amendments, however, is interesting:
On the amendment to entirely strike Title II (the part about immunity), however, Obama voted yay, and McCain didn't vote. It failed 32-66, by the way.
Same for the amendment to limit immunity, which failed 37-61.
And the one to suspend retroactive immunity cases for 90 days, which failed 42-56.
So the answer is C), but Obama voted against immunity a heck of a lot more than McCain did.
This is a tricky one.
It appears there are two bills. On the one that became law (the second time around), Obama voted yes, and McCain didn't vote.
On the one that came through the senate the first time, McCain voted yes, and Obama didn't vote.
Go figure.
I'm just saying...3-4 specialists in a state doesn't qualify for me as "ultra-rare." Rare, yes. Ultra-rare sounds like one of those things where there are like 3-4 specialists in the country.
But that doesn't really matter. As mentioned in a sibling post, ultra-rare (or rare) means less demand. That's kind of the issue with the waiting thing, is overloading. If there's no one with the condition, there's no one in line in front of you.
Not if he can't spell mechanical.
That's because plenty of users like it. I love the thing, personally. Users who don't like it (usually a small but vocal minority of changephobes) complain, but eventually get used to it. That's how every major change in every software I've seen works. People react because it's not what they're used to, with very few concrete reasons for their opposition. The reasons they do come up with are usually either unwillingness to consider the reasons behind the change, or pointless and/or insignificant nitpicking. After a while, they get used to it, adjust, and move on. Then when things change again, it's back to complaining about how the old design (the same thing that was new and terrible last time) is way better, and the new one is crap.
;)
*For a Windows OS, anyway. I'm writing this on Linux because using Windows for any extended period of time just annoys me anymore, so I'm not making any claims of absolute decency, just relative to the rest of the Windows line. (Yeah, yeah, Win2k excepted)
It's happened before. Look at Pidgin's name and interface change, Facebook a few times, and, yes, Firefox. Heck, look at XP. "Everyone" decried it as bubbly and stupid, but it's turned out to be a decent system.* And Office 2k7 - everyone (yes, me included) decried the ribbon, it was terrible, the worst idea anyone ever had. But most people who actually took the time to use it (again, myself included) found that it was a far more productive interface. But it took some relearning and some (gasp!) change. For another random example, Blender is often cited for its unintuitive user interface (it does have a very steep learning curve), but it's designed in such a way that once you learn it, it's much more productive and easier to work with.
Changephobia in software is largely detrimental, and rarely results in any good.
The devs don't listen to your whining about the Awesomebar because they've seen this cycle time and time again, and know that you'll get used to it and learn to love it. They had a lot of reason behind creating the Awesomebar, and for the vast majority of users, it's a boon for usability and a great idea. In the case that you're part of the vast minority that will cling to their extensions and old versions, you're just that - a vast minority who is willing to sacrifice effort (downloading an extension) for keeping things like they were. It's not worth the dev's effort to try to satisfy a minority that can easily be satisfied through other means.
Also, random aside: your sig doesn't make sense. The idea is true enough, but you can't mod someone with a combination of Troll and Flamebait. Look up the definition of boolean logic.
Besides, we all know that "-1:StronglyDisagreeAndWishToCensor" is what "Overrated" is for
Ehh, it would seem the captchas are screwing things up. Regardless, check "All Cycles", enter the captcha, and you'll be good.
Sibling could have at least provide a link. You would find (with a casual search for "R" and "D" which seems pretty effective) that the Republicans got 1.53 million, and the Democrats got 1.27 million. Hardly a glaring difference.
As opposed to those pesky one-sided win-wins. Gotta watch out for those.
.............changed the world?
(Must have died while he was writing it...)
Does anyone else find it humorous that said picture was hosted on funnyjunksite.com, given the subject at hand?
Nobody?
Okay, sorry to have wasted your time.
You might want to reconsider that. There is a proven significant link between facial hair and the success of programming languages. I would assume there is a similar correlation in any software project.
I predict the GPP's license is doomed to preside over failures, due to the intrinsic lack of facial hair.
You think that's bad, I passed a Carl's Jr. truck (Hardees to you east of the Mississippi) that said "It's Rude To Stare" next to a picture of their burger, and they had apparently trademarked the phrase, as it had a "TM" after it. And it was to the left of the burger, so it's not like they were trademarking the burger itself.
I even found a picture of the truck (the TM isn't visible, but it's there, just to the upper-right of the "It's Rude To Stare"). Is there something I'm missing, or is the trademark world just that ridiculous?
Contrary to popular opinion, "Anybody" is a global reference, including people like your mother, those fabled female types, and people like lawyers and doctors and such, most of whom couldn't hack together a "Hello world" to save their life.*
;)
Me, you, any self-respecting geek, yes. Anybody, not quite. That's all I was saying.
Also, I didn't want to pass up an opportunity for a well-placed Princess Bride quote
*Now before everyone flips out on me, I'm not saying girls can't code...just that there are a lot of them that can't, much like there are a lot of males who can't. Groupthink, however, generally recognizes the fact that males exist, while the existence of females is questionable.
Anybody...you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Of course, I had mod points yesterday...
I've made a bit of a hobby of finding odd/geeky plates, and have seen LOL, and have pictures of a WTF here in Washington, along with ones like SSL, URL, UTF...yeah I'm weird.
<nazi domain="grammar">
</nazi>
Sorry, but that middle paragraph (sentence, more like) just made my head hurt.
Same here. I figure the ones who think it's boring are the vast amount of grads who got into it because it was the cool thing to do, or becuase it pays well. Serves them right, and leaves room for those of us who are actually in the field because we're engineers by nature.
I'm double-majoring in CS/EE because that's how I work. I just picked up a car with a froze up engine, mostly so I could take it apart, figure out how it works, and put it together, hopefully making it work better and get a working car out of it. That's how I've always worked, that's how I always will work. I have little sympathy for those that don't have that passion, but got in the field for other reasons like money or cool factor.
Oh, and also...get out of my back yard!
Wait, what? Are you implying that he failed, and that a lot should be one word?
Or that he should spell a lot that way, to experience failure?
In the latter case, clever, but you need a little work on clarity.
In the former, I hope you learned a lot from this post, because it was an utter failure.
</grammar nazi>
He used an analogy of trying to build the pyramids without tools - trying to build knowledge without a method would be equally futile. He was so convinced of this, in fact, that he wrote a book about it, and the intro says something to the effect of, "I have this idea that's going to save the world, and if I die before I write it down, the world's screwed, so here you are, it's not quite done yet, but it's a start." Turns out he died six years later, oddly enough.
I'd recommend giving it a read if you haven't already - it's one of the few books I actually read from my humanities class, because it was so fascinating.
P.S. Yes, this is the Bacon that supposedly wrote Shakespeare...but that is an entirely separate issue.
I bike commute to work, and the only wreck I've had is when some midsize car looked right-left and didn't look back right before taking his free right turn. It wasn't terrible (knocked me off my bike and screwed up my back wheel), and the guy was very apologetic and helpful, but it's worse than anything I've ever gotten from an SUV.
Just adding to the point of the parent that anecdotal evidence isn't terribly helpful or convincing, contrary to what the GP thinks. Accidents happen, whether you're in a gas-guzzling SUV or a slightly less gas-guzzling midsize.
I'm tired of people being so skeptical of voting machines. At least where I live, King County, WA, we have a system similar to the GP. I have a detailed summary in an earlier comment, but as to address the cancelling:
The voter checks their paper ballot. If it's correct, they hit "okay" and the machine sucks it up. If it's not, they ask for assistance, we come over and cancel the ballot. The printer prints an additional "cancel" code that also scrolls by the window, and then they re-do the vote from the top.
The takeup wheel is rather noisy, so the voter would notice if the extra cancel code happened. Not only that, but the cancel code scrolls by the window. Once the vote is printed, there's no way to retract it or cancel it without printing an additional code. The only crack I can see is if the barcode says something different than the text - which could be fixed by making the text machine-readable (OCR-style), so the computer reads the same thing the human does. And even if the barcode is different, a manual manual recount (humans going through and counting the tape) would still show the discrepancy.
The other problem with complaining about such things is that I don't see any more danger in the digital machines than in the good old paper ballots. They're not online, I don't believe they're ever connected to the internet, so it would require manual tampering. At that point, you could just as well switch out some paper ballots - who's to say the ballot I put in the machine is actually what's being counted? And so on. The machines we have today are working well - let them be.
I know! It's exciting to see what will happen when we build large vertical structures that affect the wind and weather patterns by interfering with the wind and such. We've never tried that before, so it's really scary and obviously going to lead to world collapse.
Oh wait...we've built cities and skyscrapers and thousands upon thousands of towers for power, cell phones, radio, television, and all kinds of things that screw with the weather patterns? And we haven't died?
Never mind then.
Sorry to take your time.
Okay, given. Stealing my magic electric bike may still be wrong, and for the purpose of establishing black and white wrong or right, your analogy works just fine.
:P
Equating stealing wifi to stealing a bike, however, makes it sound much worse than it is, because no one wants their bike stolen - it's just too much of an inconvenience. There are shades of grey in the world, and stealing wifi, while it might still be grey, is a much lighter (aka less evil) grey than stealing a bike.
Stealing wifi is similar to stealing music, except that we're screwing the ISPs, who need to be screwed, instead of the artists.
If you think that's a heinous crime, by all means, get a cellular modem, or try your luck with a Hotspot subscription. For the rest of us, leeching wifi here and there isn't a big issue. Stealing bikes is.