No, the problem is that the public sector does not operate anything at all like the private sector all the while trying to emulate it under the overhead and red tape that comes along with requiring the public's input.

In addition to the issues seen with how the public sector operates, we have the requirement of outsourcing to the private sector to do the bulk of work through private/public partnerships which the public sector cannot and will not effectively manage,

The competing interests of these partnerships leans heavily on the private sector to make loads of money while the public sector expects them to operate within the bounds of the red tape the private sector is not accustomed or willing to accept as part of their business model.

If the government took this upon themselves to do anything in its entirety, it would likely be done slowly but correctly. Unfortunately, we end up with the result we did: a quickly cobbled together, expensive, and poorly implemented product which would never have seen the light of day in the private sector.

This happens ALL THE TIME with public/private partnerships. Take a look at the website redesign for the City of Apple Valley, Minnesota which was originally budgeted at $76,000 but later reduced to a much more reasonable, although still incredibly expensive $30,000. The resulting site is basically unusable, slow, horrendous to update, and slightly more useless than its predecessor (lipstick on a pig).

I am shocked! Nothing like this has ever happened on the Google Play store before.

I am shocked! Nothing like this has ever happened on the Internet before.

FTFY.

I'd love to see the Tesla sales numbers from Austin vs the rest of the state. Austin residents have long been at odds w/the rest of the state and their politics and as such I have a feeling we'd see a pretty high correlation with Austin vs Tesla ownership when compared w/the rest of the state.

I once had a non-technical manager and she told me what I did was simply "magic" to her and others and while she knew the results provided weren't as simple as it seemed to them, others in the organization felt it was.

It's a very difficult concept for non-technical people to understand and part of the life of any developer to deal with. It's the same thing many developers feel about management and administration and we all need to share in the responsibility of not assuming it's easy and/or "magic".

They needed something to release with the iPhone6.

Sounds more like Jobs than Trump to me.

I have repeatedly requested camera views from publicly owned but privately operated buses in the southern suburbs of the Minneapolis/St Paul metro area.

These cameras exist both inside and outside of the buses but whenever an issue arises which negatively impact the bus drivers or the system itself, the camera feeds are unavailable, usually due to some sort of unknown malfunction: http://www.lazylightning.org/bus-2-0-directs-mvta-driver-onto-dirt-shoulder

However, when they are not at fault, the videos are available to me right away and without question: http://www.lazylightning.org/mvta-rider-alleges-racism-over-bus-incident

This.

1. I went to a state school in Ohio which offered me a scholarship for athletics during undergrad. We paid very little.

2. I delayed grad school until I found a company that would pay for my education. I left that company with about 5 classes remaining but only had to end up paying $5200 total for a $28,000+ education.

3. This is being compared to the home loan situation. People were doing things that were stupid then too such as buying homes beyond their means, not educating themselves about the types of loans they were obtaining, etc. This is no different.

Do not go to a school you cannot afford and most definitely don't go into a major which will not provide you with a working wage afterward.

What sorts of public campaigns have you witnessed for school boards where these sorts of asinine discussions are raised? This would be injected into the meeting agenda as a minor item lumped with a bunch of others which would have all been approved with a single quick vote so they could move on to much more important topics such as wasting money on some frivolous sporting event or booster club meeting.

These sorts of discussions only come up during campaigns AFTER they've been put into place and one person in the community stands up to say WTF and is ignored at meeting after meeting by the administration who put it into place with the consent of the morons on the school board and then runs solely on the platform of removing this one item.

After they spend $1500 running, get on the board and abolish the decision, something else comes up which is possibly worse and they are powerless and clueless to stop it.

This is the problem with all local level government bodies (city, county, etc). People run on a single stupid platform, are elected, and stay there forever or are booted out because someone else has another single stupid platform of the day.

Most everyone else just shrugs, says ok, and their kids get scanned.

(As an aside, my kid is NEVER, EVER, EVER, EVER getting their fucking eyes or fingerprints or any other biometric data scanned for school -- fuck that noise).

Yesterday I got a scam call for a free resort stay if I was over the age of 28 and would provide them my credit card number.

While this particular scam is nothing particularly new, what was surprising is that the call appeared to originate from my area code. When I called the number back it went to a woman's voicemail. I'm guessing the entire thing was spoofed and she's an unknowing accomplice to this scam. Hell, they could be choosing numbers entirely at random.

I have the legal right to ask for the video from a video camera that is owned and operated by the public sector, I have no legal right to do so from someone with Google glass.

This.

I use it on my LinkedIn profile so that recruiters don't learn my real number but can still get in touch with me easily.

I have Verizon (I have had T-mobile and various rebranded AT&Ts over the years as well) and have found the Big Red to be the best overall for a few reasons:

- Coverage
- Data sharing
- Cost

I think my wife and I pay about $150 for our two lines which include unlimited voice and text with 4GB of data shared between us and our chosen devices.

AT&T was less money (about $130/month) however we had 450 anytime minutes/1000 night/weekend with rollover and no SMS plan. Being that my wife is using around 1000 SMSs a month, the cost savings from that alone is worth it.

Now, Verizon's 3G is noticeably slower than AT&T and while that doesn't matter much in the metro area where our primary residence is located as there is LTE, at our lake home (which has LTE about 500 feet outside of the cabin) we are stuck w/pokey 3G service that is comparable to the 1300/700 DSL service we get there.

For me I dropped more calls in dead zones with both T-mobile and AT&T than I have noticed w/VZW but the single biggest advantage Verizon has over any other carriers is coverage. I should NEVER, EVER, EVER have No Service show up along major interstates yet with both T-mobile and AT&T I did. I have never been w/o VZW service in the last year I've had it.

To me the $150/month is well worth it. YMMV.

Back in late 2009 and early 2010 I was scraping jail inmate registry records for Scott and Dakota County, MN. This was simply a script which incremented the ID numbers by one several times a day and put them out into a CSV. I uploaded these to Google Docs and had Docs Widgets build simple charts based on those data for a rolling ~6 month window of inmates.

As I started looking deeper into the data I started noticing I had ages lower than 18. Odd I thought but sure enough, Scott County was including their juvenile records in the data mixed with the adults even though it wasn't shown on their public website.

I contacted the County and they fixed the bug (you can read about that here: http://www.lazylightning.org/scott-county-quickly-fixes-juvenile-jail-roster-issue) but I was still surprised at the relative lack of security for juvenile records:

Within mere minutes of my e-mail they were on the phone with me and informed me they closed the hole. After mentioning that the only way someone may have been able to retrieve a juvenile record is if they âoeguessedâ the booking number, I replied that the booking numbers are sequential and thus âoeguessingâ is as simple as incrementing by 1. After our short discussion they asked me to let them know immediately if I noticed anything else with their data and the call was ended.

It's surprising how lax security is anywhere and to the poster elsewhere in this thread that said this is what you get when you outsource to India, this particular web stuff was not performed with outsourced talent so that comment was nothing short of asinine.

Their poor policy and the public's perception of that company. The more people hear about PayPal's poor internal decision making the better off everyone is about avoiding their biggest vulnerabilities.