The anatomy of a clueless decision

Will someone tell Orange India that their site developers have conned them?

If you go to “My Orange”, log in, and ask to view your bills, this is the note that you’ll find at the bottom.

Note : To view your bill in shortest possible time please go to Tools on your tool bar and select Options.Choose privacy and set it at “LOW”.

and true enough, it won’t show you your bills unless you duly set your privacy to “low” in IE. I don’t see how changing privacy settings can affect speed of browsing. I am guessing what happened was:

Clueless client: Hey developer! The system you have developed shows up properly on the intranet, but isn’t showing up on the web.
Equally clueless developer(Has noticed it, doesn’t know why, but has found via trial-and-error that there is one way to make it work): You just have to set privacy settings to “low”.

Of course, if the developer had been smart, he would have googled and found this.

Question!

It is long since I’ve asked my readers a question. So I think I’ll pick their brains once more.
Nancy Gandhi says :

I love Bengali names Rituparno is such a pleasure to say

(It is a very old post – a review of the movie Raincoat)

I agree with her. But Bengali names are a pleasure to say because they are usually evocative Sanskrit terms drawn from literature or mythology. So can you tell me
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Right, Wrong and Society

Suppose that an assembly of citizens is gathered to decide on whether a homosexual should be executed or not. Two citizens – let’s call them Ravikiran and Nilu – are supposed to speak before the assembly to present their points of view.

Ravi speaks first. He argues against, not only putting the homosexual to death, but also against punishing him in any way whatsoever. He points out to his fellow citizens that this person has not harmed others. He argues that the assembly should adopt the principle that no one should be punished based on what the assembly finds distasteful, or even sacrilegious, because such criteria are apt to rebound on their perpetrators.
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“The government has collapsed”

Eugene Volokh has an interesting observation:

…The goal of many emerging parliamentary democracies, I think, is for citizens to be able to say “The government has collapsed. Now, which movie do you want to go see tomorrow?,”…

I am not a fan of our constitution. I think the framers did an awfully lazy job of it. But I think that the silliest thing they did was to adopt the Parliamentary system instead of the Presidential system. What do you people think?

Notice of change of nomenclature.

As I have been outed as a supporter of Marxism (I am! I always got good Marx in school ) I hereby give notice to all present that I hereby change my standard naming convention for them from “retards” to “harbingers of hope”

Incidentally, I also support congress – in the Kamasutra sense.

Old and Archaic Laws

Madman adds to my point about India having too many laws. He says that many of the laws are very old – many more than a hundred years old.

I agree with Amardeep Singh’s comment there. The age of a law by itself should not be a problem. In an ideal (and libertarian) world, the only reason to add new laws would be technological change. In fact, I’d say that if it turns out that a law needs frequent changes to keep up with changing realities, it probably means that the law is unnecessarily complex.
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We’ve had a visitor from an alternative reality.

Attention Cartelians, our secret is out. There is someone called Nerd who claims that we think that the Marxists are harbingers of hope.

I agree with ABC. Many times I have read blogs of “libertarians” like Gaurav Sabnis and others who claim that Congress and Marxists are the harbingers of hope and BJP and its allies are a blot on democracy. And most of the time, the judgement is passed even without due knowledge of what happened or even before the judiciary passes its judgement on the case. Take for example, the case of Babri Masjid demolition – everyone had put blame on Advani among others as conspirators but later a former IB person revealed that Congress has suppressed the tape that proved that Advani was not involved. Also, there have been many confessions from caught Naxalities that they are being funded by Marxists and CPI-Ms of West Bengal but I never find a single post on your blogs implicating them. For secularists, these parties are the ones who defend democracy.

I must say that we are doing a pretty good job of getting our secret message across to the gullible masses. Long live Marxism!