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Comment: Re:Awesome! (Score 4, Insightful) 713

by Mateorabi (#39991671) Attached to: Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore
The reason the current icons are good is that they are now unambiguous in their meaning, being up to date with current culture/tech has no bearing on this. The dated-ness of them actually helps, since they come from an age of unitaskers. They are good simply because each icon can only have one possible, reasonable interpretation.* If you were to try and make them modern, in our age of multitaskers, you'd get generic meaningless icons.

*ok, clipboard for paste, but not copy is a little ambiguous, but always appears near the less ambiguous paper doppelganger for "copy."

Comment: Re:Machines Not Tested (Score 1) 378

by Mateorabi (#39950121) Attached to: Overheated Voting Machine Cast Its Own Votes
I facepalmed at that too. Typical head-in-the-sand behavior. Of course election officials aren't going to want to go looking too too hard for evidence that they wasted millions of taxpayer dollars awarding the contract to someone who already had a track record of over-voting bugs. Nothing to see here, just a small hiccup, inconsequential, could never happen on a big scale, move along.

How much you want to bet that the "replaced machine" gets shoved in a dank basement, or recycled for scrap, rather than stripped down to every wire/line of code looking for the fault or design flaw? (Preferably by the engineer who designed it, who is being flogged the whole time.)

I also like how they emphasize that this wasn't a close district. That just made it easier to detect. It's not like the machines somehow "know" when they are in a 95% leaning district and then allow themselves to malfunction only then.

Comment: Re:Why So Many Problems? (Score 1) 378

by Mateorabi (#39950025) Attached to: Overheated Voting Machine Cast Its Own Votes
Because the companies building them put their engineering A-team on the ATMs. The B-team gets stuck with the product for governments. Because waaaay more money is on the line if they screw up an ATM. The banks that bought them will hold their feet to the fire. Unlike state elections officials.

Do you think NY state officials are going to ask for a refund to replace all the machines? Blacklist ES&S? At least demand a full code audit and proof that any replacement get properly tested to JDEC/IEEE/ISO/whatever environmental standard applies? Demand a quick and proper fix? Demand testing above and beyond mere consumer grade electronics? Demand the head of the responsible manager from the company that cut corners, either on cost or rushing to meet the hanging-chad hysteria, by failing to test the damn thing above room temp?

Or just quietly accept whatever pitiful "patch" is offered to them by the manufacturer that is as much fig leaf as actual fix? The head of elections in the state is probably the one responsible for choosing the product and the millions of taxpayer dollars to spend on the units; admitting fault would mean loosing face. And they can't be fired or thrown on their sword like a bank VP could be. So there is a huge incentive for the state to help the company spin this as only a minor incident not worthy of voter concerns.

Comment: Re:missing option (Score 1) 608

by Mateorabi (#39803957) Attached to: Who Is Your Favorite Fictional Robot or Android?
My bet is that the alien hieroglyphics on earth (and elsewhere?) are to lure species technologically advanced enough for space travel to come and wake up a bio-weapon ship that will head for the explorer's home planet. The bio-weapon isn't "crashed". It crashes on take off at the climactic end of the film as a result of the human crew heroically preventing it from dropping alien eggs on earth.

But yes, some word/rumor/tidbit gets back to Weyland, who then sees to it that their Nostromo crew (fodder) "just happens" to wander past the system with a signal of "unknown origin." Just like they then send colonists to a planet near where the Nostromo "just happened" to go missing in Aliens.

I don't think they have the chutzpa now-days to kill off the very last human in a dark, ominous ending. As much as I'd like to see that. Those robot feelings are going to kick in somewhere.

Comment: Profit & Lies (Score 5, Insightful) 730

by Mateorabi (#39166793) Attached to: YouTube Identifies Birdsong As Copyrighted Music
Of course I'm also sure that none of this has anything to do with the fact that YouTube gets a cut of those ad proceeds. And that a small user posting original content would probably opt not to insert ads, such that YouTube would be then getting a cut of zero.

I'm also willing to venture that after going through the figleaf of a process of he-said, she-said, he-said, that there is little recourse. My guess is that any future attempt by a little guy to appeal/refute/re-dispute a big copyright holders' refutation of the original dispute will fall down some big black rabbit hole of non-responsiveness from YouTube corporate bureaucracy, complete with lack of any personal points of contact for trying to actually resolve this.

"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order" -- The Doctor, "Doctor Who"

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