• Pleegwat (unregistered) in reply to PerdidoPunk
    PerdidoPunk:
    They could do even better by making one that says, "Choose a factor of the number 35 to request that we don't sell your email address to spammers."

    alt-f4

  • (cs) in reply to Badger
    Badger:
    Those long-ass EULAs have always puzzled me. You simply can't read them. They are the equivalent of about 50 pages of lawyerly text. They are too long to read, and even if you try, the dense legal jargon makes no sense to the average person. So every time I buy a game or install an app, I lie. As does everyone else. Are they enforceable?

    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.

  • (cs)

    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.

  • Look at me! I'm on the internets! (unregistered)

    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.

  • bc (unregistered)

    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.

  • unum (unregistered) in reply to ParkinT

    That's exactly why we do stuff like that.(Yes I work for an online polling company)

  • Chris (unregistered) in reply to misha

    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.

  • Flim McBoobie (unregistered) in reply to misha
    misha:
    Belcat:
    misha:
    Chucara:
    Simple CAPTCHA maybe, but I think it is more likely that it is to try to detect which users just slams in a random number to get on with the survey. Hence the quality control remark.

    That's not really a WTF in my opinion.

    Except that if I took that survey, I'd almost certainly not pick 6 out of sheer contrariness. Am I the only one?

    I think the bigger WTF though is the idea that anyone thinks shopping for DIY stuff could ever be "fun".

    I guess you don't like too look back on a project and say, it looks great, it's better quality than most contractors would use out there, it's exactly the parts I wanted to use (not some inferior parts), it's FUCKING AWESOME and I did it myself.

    Nope, because anything I build falls to pieces at once, usually with near fatal consequences.

    I do see the attraction of DIY itself, I just don't believe it can be fun to shop for bits of wood and nails and stuff.

    Please hand over your Man Card now. You don't deserve to carry one.

  • (cs)

    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.

  • TravisO (unregistered)

    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.

  • Bram (unregistered) in reply to misha

    I think you mistyped "could ever NOT be "fun"" ?

  • Yeeha (unregistered) in reply to anonymous

    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.

  • (cs) in reply to Yeeha
    Yeeha:
    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.

    Wrong. I just filled it out 5 minutes ago. There are about 30 questions.

  • (cs)

    Yes, No, Fortran.

  • wingcommander (unregistered) in reply to Bobble

    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.

  • (cs) in reply to gabba
    gabba:
    I guess the 'six' thing is a horribly misguided attempt to exclude bots? Dunno.

    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.

  • Jay (unregistered) in reply to notabot
    notabot:
    Andrei:
    The one about the customer service is a classic psychological trick. When I took a test for the army, they gave me a similar thing. Another trick is to ask the same questions but in other form, to see if the responses coincide.
    Not really accurate way of doing things, i've seen quite a few places do this on applications, and the rewording often changes the meaning of the question or puts spin on it.

    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.

  • (cs) in reply to DoggettCK
    DoggettCK:
    ...earn metric assloads ...

    So, is a metric assload >,<,= a buttload? Is metric assload redundant if a buttload is Imperial measurement?

  • (cs) in reply to SuperousOxide
    SuperousOxide:
    Eventually I got frustrated and just started saying C nonstop, even while the surveyer was reading the questions.

    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.)

  • Steve (unregistered)

    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.

  • Paolo G (unregistered) in reply to Northerner

    "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".

  • ELIZA (unregistered) in reply to chronos
    chronos:
    Sgt. Preston:
    Beau "Porpus" Wilkinson:
    The Canadian Dollar is worth more than the US Dollar?? That is an "OMGWTF." That should be a wake-up call for G.W. Bush, kinda like when a fat girl starts breaking chairs. Time to lay off the junk food...

    I don't mean to imply anything bad about Canada, it's just that we've passed a real milestone in terms of inflation.

    Yes, a major factor in the rapid rise of the loonie relative to the green back this year has been the fact that Canada is a net oil exporter and the US is a net oil importer. There's also the fact that the Canadian government's economic management and the Bank of Canada's monetary management have been, by and large (and with a couple of scandalous exceptions), fairly competent for the last decade or so while the US government has been bleeding money at an alarming rate to fund the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Canada's been paying down its public debt while the US has been adding to its. The loonie has made much more modest gains against the Euro.

    No, the biggest problem is the illegal aliens on the public dole. And don't tell me that they are just doing jobs that citizens don't want, or some other bullshit. And NO, they do not contribute to our economy - the number one source of foreign currency in Mexico is the cash sent by wetbacks back in to the country - to the tune of US$17 BILLION or more per year. If we weren't supporting the illegals, the war would be chump change...

    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.

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