MTV Interview

Obama was opposed to Prop 8 because he felt a ban on gay marriage should not be enshrined in a constitution. He also said that marriage was between a man and a woman and was opposed to gay marriage.

You can see the full remark in the link above. The article is dated November 1, 2008.

Funny, it seems that government interference is closing the markets by making it more and more difficult for new companies to enter markets.

Is it not government interference that keeps new ISPs from entering many markets?

The first search from Google on Oracle SELinux is "3.7 Configuring and Using SELinux" and it discusses the difference between discretionary and mandatory access control.

There's a difference between a vendor saying they don't support something or it doesn't work and scads of administrators who say, "This security crap is too hard, just turn it off."

It's not just belligerence. I'm seeing many of the mod points being used to express agreement and disagreement. One word posts bashing a political party are reaching a moderation level of 5 for insightful and informative but controversial posts are being modded as Troll.

I've got 15 moderator points right now and I feel the most I can do is spend them on overrated/underrated. I used to spend a lot of time spending those points and now I just want to give up.

I used to give presentations to our customers and prospects in our "Corporate Visit Center" and was always extremely disappointed with the dog-and-pony shows I experienced. The problem goes well beyond PowerPoint and gets into people who have no idea how to present an idea. I'd follow speakers who would have 100 slides for a 45 minute presentation, average 3-4 minutes per slide and then wonder why they were behind schedule.

I would show up with my PowerPoint presentation queued up and then I would challenge the audience to ask enough questions to be able to break free from it. After a while I got pretty good at never even getting past the title slide before breaking into a back-and-forth discussion and white-board diagramming. I consistently rated as the most popular speaker because I didn't walk in and present to the audience - I engaged and would talk about anything they wanted to talk about.

I remember a new guy came on board and he was sent to watch me after I was billed as the best presenter. He reported back that I never got past the first slide and the response from my manager was, "Exactly!"

PowerPoint is just one symptom of a larger problem: the inability to interact with an audience and discuss what they want to discuss. Even for those who needed PowerPoint in order to present I would coach them to not read the slides. The audience will read the words on the slides as you speak. The presenter should be telling a story that engages an audience - the presentation can be used as reminder points to the speaker or as either supplemental content for the audience to read or important/complex points you want them to take home for later study.

I'm not arguing whether it's a good or bad idea but California requires all health care documents be available in the following "threshold languages":

Arabic, Armenian, Chinese, Farsi, Hmong, Khmer/Cambodian, Korean, Lao, Russian, Tagalog ad Vietnamese

Furthermore, health care providers are required to provide translation assistance for their enrollees in the enrollee's "preferred spoken and written languages."

Many of the healthcare regulations have spilled over into other governmental departments such as the DMV and voting.

I ship items that have to be taken to the shipper and are not eligible for pickup. I often visit UPS hubs and USPS. UPS hubs almost never have more than 1 or 2 people waiting to ship. USPS is almost always at the other end of the spectrum. I hate going to a UPS hub because it's a 45 minute drive for me. I hate going to USPS because it's such a long wait and a hassle.

Skipping efficiency for a moment and commenting on your concept of "update cycle," I'm still amazed that an organization that basically visited every address in the nation on an almost everyday basis completely missed out on the opportunity that made FedEx and UPS what they are today. UPS, in the name of efficiency, had their package car drivers recording GPS coordinates for the addresses they visited and ended up in the map-data business.

The last time I had to mail something via the post office (about 6 months ago):

- I had to wait in line 20 minutes
- The shipping information was filled out on multi-part NCR paper
- The sheets of paper were peeled apart, each one stamped and filed in a separate bin
- I was given a sheet of paper as my receipt
- The tracking options were minimal, at best

The last time I shipped via UPS:

- I filled out the shipping information online
- I printed a mailing label and affixed it to my box
- I dropped it off at a UPS store after waiting about 30 seconds
- I was given a sheet of paper as a drop-off receipt
- I could track the package

A shipping organization that still collects shipping information in triplicate, separately stamps each of the copies, files them in separate bins for later processing and can't provide adequate tracking information is, in my opinion, inefficient.

Brilliant, I wish I had seen it before.

Let's socialize all these public services, get rid of the private "high margin stuff" and reduce our choice down to 1 sucky provider answerable to no one.

Then we'll all be equal at the lowest-common denominator.

Yep, just what I desire - internet service as efficient as the Postal service.

Before anyone goes off on how I can send a letter all the way across the country for whatever the 1st class rate is today really consider how inefficient their operation runs. I go out of my way to use private entities in lieu of the US Postal service.

There is nothing preventing government services from being properly internet enabled today. The problem with government services is, wait for it, the government.

The government has done more to prevent me from getting the internet service I desire than they've done to enable high quality, high speed service.

Why does internet service have greater penetration in poor neighborhoods than telephone service (which is subsidized for those neighborhoods)? Could it be that individuals are better equipped to determine what services are best for them.

Yep, if you want the government to provide basic services then that's just what you'll get, BASIC services.

You should read part of the PDR sometime; many medicines are quite toxic and their pages look exactly like the ones that are less toxic. Sometimes, the result of taking a toxin is better than not taking it for a particular patient.

But, more to your point, you seem to suggest that because someone doesn't take the time to read the FUCKING BOLD PRINT that we should then hold the author accountable for mistakes the reader makes in comprehension. Your "courage to say no" sounds an awful lot like infringing someone's free speech because some idiot reader couldn't comprehend the plain language of the document or simply decided not to read it.

I'll go ahead and judge who actually did wrong - it was a presumably well-educated man who made a mistake and sought to place the blame elsewhere.

Perhaps we really do need a take-it-back button. We did this with the airlines who are now required to offer refunds on non-refundable tickets for 24 hours after purchase. If we extend the idea far enough then perhaps all those poor saps who contributed to Obama expecting him to close Gitmo, or who really thought they could keep their health insurance should be entitled to refunds as well.

From the summary: 'Dr. Ray Bellamy, the Tampa Bay donor mentioned above, intended to give money to candidate Alex Sink, but evidently didn't notice this line in bold print, just above the "Donate" button: "Make a contribution today to help defeat Alex Sink and candidates like her."'

Is this how you want your doctor reading the physicians desk reference?

If you look at the web site or the photos in the article it's pretty hard to miss that one is contributing to "help defeat Alex Sink."

Yep, let's start protecting ourselves from more than just the fine print. Let's protect ourselves from the bolded headlines also. A little reading comprehension may have helped the good doctor realize just what he was doing.

I started back in 1978 and I remember someone coming in to pitch a database technology in 2006 for which they had patents pending and it would replace relational databases. They kept describing it using catch phrases and turning rows into columns and I just couldn't grasp WTF they were talking about. I finally asked them to draw a picture and they mapped it out on the white board.

I then asked if they had ever read about IMS and hierarchical databases. They had not. I wished them good luck on their patents and sent them packing.

I dropped out of college back in 1983 but did very well in the computer science classes I took. After dropping out I started tutoring computer science students at a rate of $10/hour for a little scratch. My tutored students did very well on their projects and exams and I soon had a growing list of students interested in my services.

What scares me about these types of regulatory schemes is we are replacing the market and individual choice and responsibility with government oversight that is incapable or uninterested in measuring results. Rather than allowing the market to decide on a product based on results we are implementing entry thresholds to be sure the "right people" are delivering the services. However, when we seek to abdicate all market responsibility to the government we simply create a set of rules so that our educators look the way the government wants them to look.

Some argue that the government should have the power to regulate because some of these students are using government money and that, in my opinion, is the ultimate issue. Once we start using public funds we create more opportunity for corruption. It is not longer necessary to rip off one student at a time and hope the market doesn't catch on because you can meet some bureaucratic threshold and be fed a steady stream of students who have no personal investment in the process outside of their own time.

Once we accept regulatory schemes such as this we open ourselves up to whatever whims the bureaucrats decide upon. We'll move from meeting a threshold of requirements in order to teach to a system where the content becomes mandated.

I don't expect the government to be making ANY social economic decisions, informed or otherwise.

Expecting, or even allowing, the government to make those decisions reverses the relationship that should exist between citizen and government. If, on the other hand, we were subjects then they could probably do damn well as they please.