Two Rants in One

Posted by Johnny at 10:53 a.m.

Tech as a Premise for Movie Plots
Andre and I watched "Man of the Year" last night and the premise was that a glitch in the computerized voting system allowed Tom Dobbs (Robin Williams' Jon Stewart-like character) to win a presidential election in spite of receiving < 20% of the vote. The glitch/bug involved handing the election to the candidate with the lowest alphabetical set of double letters in his last name (bb in Dobbs, gg in Kellogg, and ll in Mills). So in a race between Dobbs, Kellogg, and Mills, Dobbs would be the winner regardless of the actual vote count. (What about the ll in Kellogg?)

If you spend no longer than 1 second thinking about this, it seems reasonable. I spent about 2 seconds, however, and decided that it was incredibly stupid.

First of all, what exactly did this bug cause? Did it register 3 times as many votes for the candidate with the lowest double letters? Did it retain the actual vote count and just display the winner incorrectly? If the latter was true, one would hope that people would be rigorously checking the result logs to verify the reported winner; or even better, that the voting system didn't report a winner at all, leaving that up to statisticians and election officials responsible for interpreting the raw results.

Ok, forget what the bug actually did and focus on the bug itself. On the scale of mission-critical systems, I would rank a voting system slightly lower than air traffic controlling, life support, and traffic lights. For the sake of the developed world, I would hope that such an idiotic bug would NEVER make it into any system on this scale. In fact, this bug is so specific that it would have to be consciously coded into the system by a malicious employee. Not even incompetence could create something like this. And any software company creating a critical system like this who didn't test their system with production-scale data until a week before its release (like they did in the movie) should be put out of business forever, and its high-level managers should be sterilized.

Other than that, the movie wasn't bad - some decent political commentary.

"News"
I don't give a flying fuck about Britney Spears, so why would I want to know that she shaved her head? More importantly, why would I want every single media outlet, including celeb-obsessed friends, telling me how shocked they are that she shaved her head? WHO CARES? Similarly, what more needs to be said about Anna Nicole Smith's death than "she died due to blah, and the paternity of her daughter is in question"? We don't need to spend weeks analyzing the contents of her fridge and passing this off as news.

Celebrity news is not news. The root word of "news" is "new", which implies that for an event to be considered "news", something "new" has to have occurred. Personally, I wouldn't consider celebrities acting like spoiled idiots to be new in any way. Death is news, but it doesn't warrant hijacking front page headlines for weeks. The fact that this garbage dominates the media is further proof that the average person is an idiot and isn't worth my time.