He could have done this easily enough, but it would have resulted in less sales. He had to weigh the advantages of the marketing ploy against the risk of, well, what happened. If he had advertized as 'novelty only' and kept to just the specific polygraph training he probably would have been fine, or at least a much stronger case.

And here I am without mod points...

Generally when I have to worry about integration or longevity, it is still hard to compete with ASCII & LaTeX. While they do not have the every day visibility of various office document types or pdfs, renderers, search tools always know exactly what to do with them. They can even interact with version control systems cleanly since the underlying tools do not need to know anything about the formatting to manipulate it.

*nod* in a way, I think agile, as an actual methodology, has not failed at all, but instead has been integrated into the toolbag of any competent project manager (or ad-hoc equivalent). What has failed is the hyped up "A"gile method, which, like any hype, over promised on its universalness as a replacement for everything.

Sometimes I wonder if tech people are just inherently excitable. So much of our culture and identity is linked to loving what we do and related topics, it would not surprise me if we are unusually (but not uniquely) susceptible to irrational exuberance.

That would be an excellent example. If you use copyright to gain more control than you are legally permitted to have (there are limits in contract law regarding what a contract can and can not do) more than 6 times than you lose your ability to use such enforcement mechanisms. Given how they have been pushing to treat each download as a seperate infringement, that would mean if your DRM prevented more than 6 cases of time shifting than that is 6 violations and your rights are revoked.

Oh I agree those are real cases, but you get that with pretty much any development methodology . I have no problem with companies being called out on implementing a system badly or 'in name only', but that really does not feel what the author is doing. Instead he is casting failure of agile to be a failing of inferior developers and if people were more willing to work or change then it would have worked. This will no doubt be true in some cases, but it is also true when looking at waterfall or spiral patterns, so it really can not be claimed as a problem with 'agile' adoption.

All he has really done is rehash the 'if people were smart and hard working they would realize how brilliant I am' argument rather than address opposing views as having actual points or other solutions having their own strengths which shine or tarnish depending on the project.

This.

Small town corruption has always been a significant and insidious problem, and you can do a case study with pretty much any town under 20k people with a few families holding the power and retribution being common enough to simply assume.

On the other hand, one of the big 'battle grounds' with voting right now are conflicts regarding how narrow those windows are for casting a ballot, with a focus on decreasing availability to populations based on, well, who they tend to vote for.

One major advantage of postal and internet voting is they both are things that individuals can take steps to access on their own schedules, while polling places require enough community organization to counter decisions being made by other organizations. Individuals have little say.

While a similar problem, there is an issue of scale. With postal voting there is indeed an individual problem involved with not being able to determine who actually voted. Internet voting on the other hand opens up new problems of mass fraud by individuals or small groups, which presents a very different risk.

It is hard to take someone seriously when the argument seems to be 'my idea is brilliant! but most people are not good enough to implement it!' rather than 'hrm, maybe my idea is not the universal solution and one needs to fit the methodology to the requirements and resources involved?'

What country are you from? This was something specific to catholic groups operating in African nations. They were actively spreading rumors such as condoms being laced with AIDS.

Every time I see calls for harsh anti-piracy initiatives, I picture what would happen if equally harsh rules were put in place for some of the dirty IP tricks or outright theft MPAA members engage in. "Oh, your studio got caught taking a copyrighted screenplay submission, rejecting it, then handing it over to one of your own people again? Sorry, your access to distribution has been cut off and you will not be able to produce movies anymore"

Do not forget another big winner, retrogressive social reformers. The war on drugs has been a powerful tool in keeping racism alive while 'proving' it is all their fault in the first place and that brown people are simply too weak willed to join polite society.

The problem is, drug laws are doing exactly what the designers intended. They were intended to be public weapons against minority groups and immigrants, as well as assist in the political careers of people involved.... of which they have been extremely successful.

Well, I guess this is a nice visceral example against the argument that "only" government can censor people or affect what people say publically.

I am sure that gays who have been beaten to death or blown up, doctor who have been shot, etc, would feel this comparison is not exactly off.