Well in Canada we do factor in error. It's called spoiled ballots. And the election is not a statistical analysis of the votes of the population, it is the actual votes. There is no margin of error. You mark your ballot with an X in the proper bubble, which is beside the name and party of the candidate. It's nice and big and so is the name of the person. There are many signs at the polling station that tell you how to vote in very easy to understand pictures and the people running the polling station can easily tell you how to do it without referring to any candidate. If you mess that up, your vote doesn't count.

Margin of error puts the onus on the system. For an election to work the system must be held to a standard of infallibility and that all errors fall on the voter, if it's found not to be the case and is significant to have possibly affected the outcome a re-election is called.

So the margin of error is factored in, but more is taken into consideration than a mathematical equation.

So I wouldn't classify it as drudgework (although it is work). My wife found summer work, so I am handing the 3 kids and house.

I'm doing a poor job as my wife still cleans when she gets home.

Right now the cost of game development makes it hard to play to a smaller market. The major distributors and studios are loath to invest in something that won't appeal to the largest market possible. Indie games are starting to get some traction but it's a long way off. The games industry is the same boat the movie industry was in the 50s. The big studios control and squeeze every last dime out of the product, and they don't take chances on anything.

What we need are a few star developers to step in and push for a larger piece of the pie and then spread that around to indie stuff. Just like the bigwigs in hollywood do right now. Those multi-million dollar pay-cheques the stars get don't all go into their pockets, a lot goes to niche projects

Actually streaming is exactly what he wants to use. He doesn't want to pre-download what he or his friends might want to watch. He wants to just sit down and find out if he can watch x as soon as it pops into his head or his friends suggest it.

In the automotive analogy, it's like he's driving down the road and he or his passenger wants a hamburger, but he has to check 3 different maps for Wendy's McDonald's and Burger King to see if there's one at the next exit. It would be easier if he could just check one place.

What's interesting is that no one here has the same argument for books. I have paperbacks that are falling apart. My only option is to buy another copy.

Just because you bought it before doesn't mean you have it in perpetuity. If you don't maintain your copy you lose it. What is bad is restrictive DRM keeping you from backing up

Up here north of the border, for most it's just another friday, but for some it's also Buy-Nothing-Day. Which I believe was started by the magazine Ad-Busters, which also was responsible for the occupy movement.
For those that knew about Buy-Nothing-Day I'm pretty sure, up until this year, they didn't know that it fell on Black Friday in the states.

Still from what I read about what goes on, it doesn't compare to Boxing Day (Or Boxing Week) up here. THAT's crazy.

I'm currently in a class called internet investigations where we are doing exactly what is described. aggregating information about a target to build an accurate picture of who they are and what they're doing. We mainly use google (my professors words "Google has made the investigators life so much easier, 15 years ago you needed high level access to gather this kind of information, now it's just the right search terms")

At the moment the FBI doesn't care, but the minute they have some reason to suspect him of ANYTHING, they will be on him like white on rice and looking directly in all the areas he could have hidden anything, and with documenting his life to the degree he's doing, the places they'll look will be very intrusive

This is why I don't trust Certificates I haven't generated myself. In fact my prof for one of my security classes (I'm in Computer Security and Investigations at Fleming College) actually told us that untrusted certificate situations are more trustworthy, as the majority of attackers will go about getting a certificate through fraudulent means to avoid the scary pop-up window.

The trouble is that any app that shows ads, requires internet access to get the ads.

One of the major revenue streams in the android market are those ads as android users are much less likely to pay for an app.

What Google needs to do is separate the ad internet connection from any other internet connection.

Of all the posts, I never disliked a CmdrTaco post. You are/were the soul of this place really. I'm not sure where the site will be going, but this news just makes me feel older. I'll miss the slashdot of old and hopefully I'll feel just at home as it moves into the future.

They're not saying that the social networks are causing the civil unrest, what they're saying is that they're allowing those organizing it a much easier time communicating plan changes as it goes on. Shutting down those lines of communication would make it easier for the authorities to stop the unrest.

That makes sense. The government's job it to keep order and this is one way to aid that when things get out of hand. Remember the UK does have a very real terrorist threat in Northern Ireland. They need to think aobut these kinds of things, draconian as they are. It's inportant that they have this power, however the manner in which they weild it is far more important.

Wind Mobile does this in Canada. They say you have unlimited but if you go over 2GB, I think, they de-prioritize you and you get throttled if the network needs you throttled.

I agree with it completely, so long as they tell everyone exactly where the line is

At least with Roger and Fido pre-paid, which I both sold, they don't check a credit card. They only need a Canadian address and that was only used for account verification if you called in. Many times I had foreign customers just pull a random address out of the phone book. Payment was taken through our store credit card machine. You might have a problem buying refills over the phone, but buying top-ups from a kiosk or store is not a problem at all.

It's a bit cheaper to go with a monthly plan, but that needs valid Canadian ID

We have a law like that in Canada, only it has a provision that if you have a legal reason to create or use those tools you are fine.

So it must be proven that the tools are being created or used for criminal purposes in order to be prosecuted.

What drives me nuts is the over use of Foo and Bar as labels in programming examples. I completely failed my first course on C++ in college because the instructor would use nothing but Foo and Bar and derivatives for everything in his examples. I would get so lost because everything would look exactly the same and I would confuse foofoobar for foobarfoo (Made much worse when I would drift with my ADHD and come back and try to figure out what he did during the 2 minutes I wasn't paying attention).

Luckily now that I'm back in school 10 years later, my programming instructor has stressed that whatever you label you label it for what it does or what it will store, no matter how small or simple the program is going to be. Much easier to follow along now.