Certain areas of Texas, however, have likewise not been without controversy regarding the accuracy of their tests.

I've barely worked with Rails, but from what you're describing, isn't this bug somewhat like the security problems with register_globals in PHP, which started defaulting to "off" almost a decade ago?

Everything old is new again...

Iowa has this issue, and it's actually a little worse than that there, as there is no way to "quit-claim" a car.

This came up in my divorce, actually. She was getting a car that had both our names on it. Iowa law says that the owner of a vehicle is liable for whatever happens with it (which, of course, is what liability insurance addresses). By the time the divorce was actually finalized, I had been living in another state for almost a year. I was attempting to follow the decree and sign over title to the car, except that Iowa has no mechanism for doing so. The new owner has to complete his or her part of the process, and let's just say that cooperation had been an issue near the end.

Now, she should have been able just to take the decree and the title to the county administration office and get the title transferred, since the decree said it could be used in place of a signature in order to carry out its requirements (a decree is a court order, of course, so it has a judge's signature on it). But, I just have to hope she actually did this.

When I tried to get car insurance for myself in my new state of residence, I was wondering why the rates were so much higher than I was paying in Iowa. I found out when I got a call from the insurer I eventually used to go through my driving record, etc. It turns out that she had two accidents in that car between when I filed for divorce and when the divorce was finalized that she never told me about, which is a big problem since legally, I was liable. She still had insurance, apparently, which is good, but the accidents were initially making my insurance go up since they were recorded as being in my vehicle. The insurance agent had that corrected, and my rate went down.

In Minnesota, both Democratic Senators publicly supported PIPA, while my Republican Representative opposed SOPA (though only after getting a lot of constituent contact about it -- I'd guess he barely knows what the Internet is, much less how SOPA would have affected it). With that backdrop, I attended my Democratic precinct caucus last night and proposed as a resolution:

WHEREAS all persons have a right to freedom of speech and to the exchange of information and ideas,
WHEREAS the technologies that comprise the Internet need to be designed for efficiency and ease of use, using principles that must be free of compromise due to technologically ignorant legislation, and
WHEREAS major stakeholders in intellectual property are already fully capable of funding their own legal actions to protect the broad intellectual property rights granted under U.S. law,
BE IT RESOLVED THAT:
We should not enact laws similar to the Stop Online Piracy Act (H.R. 3261) or the Protect IP Act (S. 968) that engage in prior restraint of speech, impose ineffective yet burdensome restrictions on technology providers, and deny due process of law by restricting access to websites not yet proven to be acting illegally.

I live in a rural area, and no one in the room likely had any real idea what the technological considerations were. I didn't think I did a great job of explaining the issues, but by using an analogy of DNS to a phone book and by naming who was behind the bills, I persuaded the caucus to pass the resolution unanimously.

We'll see if this resolution makes it up the chain, but I think even this anecdote shows that regular people who want to hear what you have to say can understand the issues and decide accordingly.

No, you're thinking of ReiserFS.

It did no good, of course, but I wrote an e-mail to the State of Minnesota complaining about the Minnesota Revenue "Where's My Refund" site. I can't think of any legitimate reason for a site like this to use Silverlight (or Flash or any other plugin). Here was my message:

Do you offer a non-Silverlight version of the income tax refund status application? It does not seem to work with a recent stable version of Moonlight, though I have tried little to try to make it work.

Further, why would Silverlight be of any benefit for such a (relatively) simple application? I deal with ASP.NET for a living, and I can't imagine any serious consideration of Silverlight for a public application like this one. Unless there are some requirements of which I am unaware, a simple ASP.NET application would more than suffice (because your site is already .NET-based).

Of course, there is little that can be done now, but perhaps next year...

Here was the ridiculous response:

Good Morning, There is no other version offered at this time. I do not know why this version was chosen.

Thank you for using our website.

Regards,
<name omitted to protect the stupid>

<name omitted to protect the stupid, again, since it was here twice>
Minnesota Department of Revenue
Individual Income Tax Division

This was in 2010, and of course, the same application is still in place.

Along with your idea, perhaps all users above a certain Karma can mod those questions from a separate mod limit (maybe three points per question)? Just a thought.

I think grandparent means that the weakness is in not making it easy to figure out what each site is and how to use the sites. Moderation on the sites varies from friendly to pointlessly draconian (Programmers has gotten so bad that I won't participate anymore until there is a moderator election, and maybe not then if the same mods are re-elected), and there are lots of edge cases for and bickering about which types of questions belong on each site. The network has its weaknesses, which Jeff Atwood and others freely acknowledge. All that said, though, the whole network, and particularly StackOverflow, do form a good question/answer system for Google searching, which is one of their goals.

E-mail I got on April 28, 2011 from "Google Apps Team":

Hello,

We recently announced upcoming changes to the maximum number of users for Google Apps. We want to let you know that, as a current customer, the changes will not affect you.

As of May 10, any organization that signs up for a new account will be required to use the paid Google Apps for Business product in order to create more than 10 users. We honor our commitment to all existing customers and will allow you to add more than 10 users to your account for mydomain.com at no additional charge, based on the limit in place when you joined us.

Sincerely,

The Google Apps Team

That statement is incorrect in regard to nearly all schools. The teachers' boss is nearly always the principal, who is (directly or by delegation to other administrators) responsible for evaluating the teachers, among all other boss-like duties.

And, actually, that's a huge part of the problem: PHBs are just as prevalent in schools as they are everywhere else. You point out that evaluating teachers is difficult, but when you add a complete moron doing the job, it becomes impossible. Very often, the problem with a school is at the top of the administrative structure.

Occasionally, someone with some experience is hired specifically to implement some of these "best practice" changes. That's the situation I'm in at present. But, agreed, it may not be the norm.

You can get 30 days of Prime free without buying anything anyway. Note the "Start Your One Month Free Trial" button on the right side of the page.

I'm not a lawyer either, but my understanding is that EPIC would have to appeal (to the relevant Court of Appeals -- I'm not sure what that is officially called for the D.C. Circuit) and lose before they could make a petition for certiorari, which is a petition to persuade the Supreme Court to hear their case. EPIC can't even appeal because they missed the deadline for doing so. That means they don't get to appeal to the Supreme Court either.

Maybe, but that has nothing to do with this case.

SCOTUS has already decided that the reason for which the trial court upheld the denial of EPIC's FOIA request is no longer valid. Unfortunately, the ruling did not come in time to help EPIC, whose attorneys apparently knew about the case before the Supreme Court but did not appeal EPIC's case in the allowed time for appeal.

See the linked decision.