It's an urban legend that's floated around in various forms: in some it's an ice cream parlor rather than a store and they pack the vanilla faster, in some it's only the vanilla that gets hand-packed so it takes longer, it's pistachio that takes longer and triggers the problem, or butter pecan.
Snopes covered this one and they cite to an urban legends book from 1989: "Curses, Broiled Again" by Jan Harold Brunvand. Brunvand prints the "vanilla takes longer" version and reports also having a "pistachio takes longer" version printed in a magazine in 1978, which itself referred to another magazine as its source. In the book's version it's a Texas car dealer who's looking into the problem. The same author's later book from 1999 covers the story again and includes versions dating back further, plus a 1992 version which is this one where it's Pontiac and the problem is the vanilla being in a separate case at the front of the store.
In the Pontiac version you can go and pick at various implausible details stacked up together, that Pontiac's president cares enough to send an engineer out, that the engineer is there when the car won't start on the first night but still just comes back many more times rather than looking at the car or presumably noticing that it starts a couple minutes later, that this guy is buying a new container of ice cream every night and never stocking up, that he never takes any other trip where it's a short stop... You can go on each of those and say they do happen: like presidents and CEOs do sometimes go digging deep on random problems customers put in front of them. But if you look at the whole thing I think you need to recognize it as a piece of storytelling, not fact.
Maybe there's some kernel of a true story in there, but if so it's probably a pretty small kernel. Anyway it doesn't matter much: it's just a fun story that teaches a little lesson so people like to share it around.
They haven't been all that aggressive against the decompile/recompile projects, interestingly. They're sometimes/often set up so you need the original to grab assets etc., but that code is copyrighted too and I'd have to imagine a decompile that purposely compiles to an identical binary would be a derivative work.
My best guess is that for them it's not worth the hassle or any possibility of a negative result in court as long as people have to jump through some hoops by providing an original, and for the projects that don't do that, you have very straightforward easy infringement cases without even getting into the decomp stuff. Though really even ROMs seem to be tacitly tolerated to some extent lately. Maybe there's an attitude that keeping people involved with the franchise is worth it, again so long as it doesn't become too easy.
There's a recording from the 80s where he makes the same point in the middle of reciting the poem. It's a really good version.
"A lot of times people see battles and skirmishes on TV and they say 'Ah-ha! The revolution is being televised!' Nah. The results of the revolution are being televised. The first revolution is when you change your mind, about how you look at things, and see that there might be another way to look at it that you have not been shown. What you see later on is the results of that, but the revolution, that change that takes place, will not be televised."
Same but different issues. Now you have to know that the dots were filled in correctly to be readable. Having someone make an obvious attempt at selection but not readable by the reader is also problematic. No reason to not count their vote. You may laugh about not being able to do it correctly, but it happens.
Only if the scantron shows that each position on the ballot was counted and the voter is not allowed to leave until the person monitoring the scan confirms with the voter their ballot was scanned would this give confidence. Any issues with the scan, and the voter is allowed to correct the issue. There should never be an issue of reading the ballot by the scanner as an acceptable outcome.
of course, all of this is assuming in person voting only
Checking each ballot for completeness sounds like a good improvement to the system. Right now people are just expected to mark carefully and double-check their work before feeding their ballot into the machine and request a new ballot if they mess up.
It might slow things down a little bit, but making sure that the machine can detect a vote for each race/question (even if it's just "Abstain") would make sure people didn't forget to fill out something and help prevent the fill-in-the-bubble equivalent of hanging chads.
I like the idea that "abstain" should be an option for each position on the ballot to remove the ambiguity of it just being skipped mistakenly. Require every position on the ballot to need a response from the voter regardless. That would definitely simplify the tally process even if it does require the voter to go back to fill in additional spots. Better to be right on even if it takes 30 more seconds.
The author looks like they've only looked at the color of the dead space so probably not significant for this specifically.
The trend against skueuomorphism maybe equally relevant: that early example is a descendant of Apple's previous brushed-metal UI. Though even among the flat ones there's been a trend toward lightening.
It'd also be interesting to see what area the author picked on each screenshot: a big difference, at least before Tahoe, if you decide that the Finder sidebar or top bar is what you're going to look at.
Yeah the flood of these Chrome UAs with every version number under the sun, and a really large portion being *.0.0.0 version numbers, that's what I've tended to experience lately. Also just kind of every browser user agent ever:
There were waves of big and sometimes intrusive traffic admitting to being from Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Meta, etc., but those are easy to block or throttle and aren't that big a deal in the scheme of things.
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