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Admin
alt-f4
Admin
And of course, they put them in an scrollbox about 5 lines high, non-resizable.
But the point is, they don't want you to read them. They just want to be able to claim that you read them when they try to enforce the terms.
Admin
The No / Yes / No one makes some kind of sense... I work with coded data like this, and for Yes / No questions the two "standard" codings that people naturally use are:
0 = No 1 = Yes
and:
1 = Yes 2 = No
I suppose most people say "Yes/No" so it makes sense for Yes to come first, apart from when using 0, in which case it makes more sense for 0 to mean No.... Anyway, it would make some kind of sense to have a general code / decode mapping of:
0 = No 1 = Yes 2 = No
It would still be better to have only one coding though, for sure.
Admin
The real WTF is that they are using a ten point scale to measure satisfaction. Really, 5 options is enough:
Hell No Nah Meh Yeah, whatever. Right On!
Trying to create a finer granularity of my "caringness" just pisses me off.
Admin
I think the first example is not a wtf at all. Its actually quite clever. It lets you know if people are actually reading the survey. Chances are you can discard the ones who did not properly answer that question.
Admin
That's exactly why we do stuff like that.(Yes I work for an online polling company)
Admin
It's a lot more fun (to me) to shop for bits of wood, nails and other DIY paraphernalia than it is to actually build something with it. My home is littered with planks and other wood scraps from when I thought I'd build a shelf and had fun choosing a new drill, a saw, some wood, special screws, etc before remembering that shelves I build almost always fall down.
PS it's very tempting to type something in the CAPTCHA other than what it says in the image, y'know just to prove my non-sheeplike individuality.
Admin
Please hand over your Man Card now. You don't deserve to carry one.
Admin
I can't believe no-one's hit upon the real reason for the survey question.
It's to weed out those who are so illiterate or innumerate that they do not know "six" means 6.
As for EULAs - clicking agree without reading the terms will not defend you in court. For example, if you purchased the software online and the EULA says they will continue to debit your account each month you use the software, that's binding, even though the download website didn't mention it. More realistically, consider a term that says something like "You may not attempt to intercept, interfere with, or block the communications of the program with our servers". They can then sue you if you try and stop the noxious program 'phoning home'.
I scan the licenses, it doesn't take all that long. Though most of what I install on my own system is GPL anyway.
Admin
The only WTF is here that they are making people grade things on a 1 to 10 basis, when they could just as easily asked 3 options: unhappy, satisfied, happy... and HomeDepot could get just as useful data without having people split hairs.
In fact 3 options would give more reliable data as it's up to the person to decide is 7 a good score or an average score? Way too much interpretation there. I know personally if I can grade 1 to 10, I'd never give anybody a 10 unless they utterly blew me away, which has happened about 2 times in my lifetime.
Admin
I think you mistyped "could ever NOT be "fun"" ?
Admin
I tried filling out that survey once (you might win something like $1000 if you complete it). There are about 100 questions. After the first page, I did blindly go down each column without reading the questions.
Admin
Wrong. I just filled it out 5 minutes ago. There are about 30 questions.
Admin
Yes, No, Fortran.
Admin
Most surveys are way too long (see the progress bar). Anything longer than 5 questions or so weeds out anybody who has anything better to do with their lives. Now if you're selling to unemployed people who have web access, well, then that's the right survey.
Admin
Or people who just quickly pick random answers without reading the questions...
Surveys like this often have some built in reconciliation to make sure people aren't just randomly clicking answers to get points or the $5 or whatever reward is being offered for their time. Usually it's a little more sophisticated, such as asking the same question with different phrasing.
Admin
I've seen plenty of political surveys where subtle changes in wording gave completely different results. Like, on one survey they asked (not the exact words here, this is from memory, but you should get the idea) "Do you think we should have a system of universal health care paid for by the government?" Then they asked some unrelated questions and then, "Do you think we should have a system of universal health care paid for with tax dollars?". This was the same survey, the same people answering. And something like 30% of the people said "yes" to the first question and "no" to the second question. Part of the explanation is surely that people are stupid, but to put the best light on it, perhaps when people are undecided about something, different wording can push them one way or the other.
Something to remember, by the way, when you read a news story declaring that a survey shows the people are for or against whatever.
Admin
So, is a metric assload >,<,= a buttload? Is metric assload redundant if a buttload is Imperial measurement?
Admin
WHY didn't you HANG UP? (Maybe the REAL survey was how much people put up with wasting their time before they hang up so as to gauge future ones? If so, way to confound that one.)
Admin
The "please choose 6 for this item" is to stop people from choosing all 10s or 1s without reading the question. Not a bug, fairly common.
Admin
"Tsk, tsk, tsk. Every one knows that Real Trinary choices are Yes, No, and FileNotFound."
Tsk, tsk, tsk. Everyone knows that the word is "ternary".
Admin
Sigh.... A) You are thinking of the term Milliard: $17 billion is larger than the GNP of the entire United States of America, and utterly dwarfs the GNP of the United States of Mexico, black market included; there might be ten billion USD in circulation, but I doubt it; also, the southern USA fruit industry is dependent on the illegals because of the necessity for large amounts of labour. Illegal immigrants are generally paid far below the minimum-wage and are thus generally too poor to pay large amounts of income tax, but are illegal and thus do not benefit from many of the services a legal alien or citizen with the same income would benefit from; they do pay the appropriate income taxes, though, unless they are being paid completely under the table, and do pay far more than their fair share of sales taxes, which are the most regressive taxes (especially per-unit taxes, which are in my view barbarically regressive). B) You are utterly misguided about how expensive wars in fact are. Back when the plan was simply "Marshall a hundred thousand men and give them pikes and muskets, and march them to do battle", could you fund a war for twenty milliard of today's dollars: Back in the blitz my home town saved up and bought three spitfires to be placed at the disposal of the RAF (the old-mannishness may be faux but the population of a first-world town could do that in World War II), while in the glory days of the divinely beautiful F-4 Phantom II a fighter aircraft could be bought for $2.4 million USD (from the wikipedia article), but now fighter aircraft are millions of dollars apiece (F-15C, 29.9; F/A-18, 41; F-35, 83; F-22, 137.5) and then there are tanks (M1 Abrahms A2 variant, 4.35) and helicopters (AH-64, 18) and APCs (M2 Bradley, 3.166) and a literally untold number of other pieces of equipment (missiles are worth thousands of dollars each, such as the $85k Sidewinder and the $340k AIM-120); a hundred thousand soldiers, fewer than they have there, at ten thousand dollars or so per year per soldier put into their bank accounts, and I would argue that that is far too low unless we want to consider a draft, comes to (10000x100000=10x100000000=1000000000), or a round milliard; in total, war is far more expensive than it was in times hence, even without bloated corporations spurred on by Cost-Plus contracts which are a WTF in themselves (in essence, CP contracts are vulnerable to massive abuse: Suppose you as an employee need to rent an expensed car and can choose between a no-frills adequate vehicle, or an excessively powerful luxury car which is way in excess of your needs; for every dollar they reimburse you on the rent, the brinkspeople who gave them the contract pay $1 (the cost) + x (the plus), so what do they encourage you to rent? The company has an incentive in the absence of oversight to waste money, and some CP contractors (according to the documentary Iraq For Sale) actually expensed their employees' rental cars, which they rented so long that it would have been far cheaper to buy them outright; they would write off a truck, and profit 50000x for buying its successor, because it suffered a flat tyre), and you can see why war is so expensive. C) The true WTF is the utterly irresponsible tax cuts Bush had Congress pass which were more than a billion dollars in extent: Either Bush is brain-dead, or he was so fixated on the tax cuts that he lost sight of or did not care about the fact that they would grievously wound the US treasury, or both; also, the behaviour of various normally level-headed people makes me wonder if Al Qaeda agents could have slipped something into the traditional speakers' jug to help the cuts pass congress.