It reminds me of the orange juice test.
You organize an annual convention for hundreds of people.
You tell the banquet manager of the hotel you are considering that the morning breakfast must include a large glass of freshly squeezed orange juice for everyone of the attendees. It must be squeezed no more than two hours before the breakfast.
It is not possible to do so. Squeezing that much orange in much a short amount of time would be prohibitively expensive.
If the manager says yes he is either lying or incompetent and you'd better find someone else who will tell you it's not possible.
I first heard this in "The secrets of consulting" by Gerald Weinberg. The fuller version is that the manger is only allowed to say 'yes' if they tell you there is a cost associated with it (i.e. it isn't free).
That would work, can do 7 glasses a min. That means means 420 glasses an hour, which would be 840 glasses in the two hours. The question was about hundreds of guests and not thousands so your operating at the top range of that.
Large commercial hotel. It's not impossible they don't have this sort of equipment already.
The problem with checks like this is that you need to be intimately aware of the capabilities of an organisation to know whether it's reasonable or not. As people who work with technology know, things that seem impossible to the uninitiated can be remarkably trivial. We should probably assume that others have similarly impressive capabilities in areas we don't understand.
The advantage of the Van Halen test over this is that it's simple for everyone. This seems needlessly "clever" and is as a result wrong...
It is perfectly possible. One hotel I have been in had machine that produced freshly squeezed orange juice. Breakfast were available for few hours and anyone could take as much as he wanted. It never run out.
Fabulous stuff. I wonder how often he has/gets to hang out with random parrots since this document became widely known. In my mind he is surrounded constantly by sandal-wearing acolytes wielding exotic birds of every variety.
I'm hardly a fan of RMS, but if you want him to speak, it's on you to meet these rules. It's what I call "autistic-friendly": print up this list, check off each and every item, and you don't have to worry about anything else.
He has codified his behavior expectations. If someone didn't know RMS was particular, they weren't paying attention.
I think it's more brutal honesty, than anything. As an engineer and a disliker-of-politicians, I appreciate it, even though I agree it can easily be seen as egotistical or eccentric. When I have hosted guests, I have really wished I had such a clear "opeating manual" (as others in this thread have called it) for them, so I know how I can make them feel comfortable and make their trip most effective.
> The RMS rider is full of lecturing and childish demands.
They are no more demands than a request for him to speak somewhere is a demand.
Someone asks if he is willing to travel and speak to their audience, he says "yes though only if these conditions are met", and the someone then has a free choice of whether to continue or not.
A childish demand would be "we can't agree to X, but we expect you to come and talk anyway".
If you have previously done streaming using some streaming service and you can't immediately name the format it uses, chances are it is unacceptable and I won't let you use it for my speech.
..This might seem unfair--if a ticket is lost, it could be my fault. But my income is not large, and I cannot afford to assume this risk myself if the event offers me no income. The frustration I feel when I suffer such a loss is excruciating. It is better for me to decline to travel to a certain place than to take such a risk.
..DON'T make a hotel reservation until we have fully explored other options. If there is anyone who wants to offer a spare couch, I would much rather stay there than in a hotel (provided I have a door I can close, in order to have some privacy)... ... If you have found a person for me to stay with, please forward this section and the two following sections to that person.
..find out what temperature it can actually lower a room to, during the relevant
dates ..I like cats if they are friendly. ..Dogs that bark angrily and/or jump up on me frighten me .. .. find a host for me that has a friendly parrot.. ..DON'T buy a parrot figuring that it will be a fun surprise for me. To acquire a parrot is a major decision: it is likely to outlive you. If you don't know how to treat the parrot, it could be emotionally scarred and spend many decades feeling..
I do NOT use browsers, I use the SSH protocol.. .. If a hotel says "We have internet access.. .. What parameters does the user need to specify in order to talk with it?… … Don't rely on information from such a person--talk to someone who knows! .. their phone switchboard may not recognize the tones produced by modems..
When you need to tell me about a problem in a plan, please do not start with a long apology. That is unbearably boring. …If I am typing on my computer and it is time to do something else, please tell me. Don't wait for me to "finish working" first, because you would wait forever. I have to squeeze in answering mail at every possible opportunity, which includes whenever I have to wait. I wait by working. If instead of telling me there is no more need for me to wait, you wait for me to stop waiting for you, we will both wait forever -- or until I figure out what's happening. … Please don't try to pressure me to "relax" instead, and fall behind on
my work
I do not eat breakfast. Please do not ask me any questions about ..what I will do breakfast. ..Please just do not bring it up .. If there is a chance to see folk dancing… … If you want to give me data about airplane tickets, please send that info as plain ASCII text
You know, I just read this again. I first read it in a ridiculing context (“Parrots? Really?”) and didn’t think much to put it out of that context, but looking at it now I have to say my view on it has changed.
I think it’s pretty alright, actually.
Some of his demands have to do with his strong ethical views on software, and while I don’t agree completely with him on this, I certainly can respect him for being uncompromising on that.
He frequently emphasises the need to communicate. Decisions that affect both him and the host have to be decided together. He also shows quite some willingness to find alternate solutions if his preferred solution is somehow not possible, but emphasises the need to communicate about those changes.
All the rest may be slightly quirky, but it’s all not especially hard to do with some care and attention. Hey, he doesn’t even want super-accomodating hospitality.
(Also, hotel internet is the worst. Good on him for insisting that be properly checked. He needs it to work, after all.)
Some of his demands have to do with his strong ethical views on software, and while I don’t agree completely with him on this, I certainly can respect him for being uncompromising on that.
If you're going to host a talk from RMS, I'd presume you'd be aware that he has strong ethical views. I mean, that's one of the main reasons to get him to talk!
Agreed. It might be quirky, but I many of the things he lists here must be things he has experienced (like people buying parrots because they heard he likes parrots) and doesn't want happening again.
It feels to me that you can't account for someone who would do something as ill considered as buying a parrot just because someone coming to stay with them for a couple of nights likes parrots.
The eccentricity or outlandishness is not in the actual content of the requests. He doesn't request anything expensive or difficult.
It's in expecting everyone involved to thoroughly read the 10,000 man page and make sure they follow everything. So, instead of calling up the hotel you always use, Lucy from event planning is presumably expected to test SSH on the hotel network and question the staff about air conditioning systems.
I think we have to differentiate between two things: structure and writing on the one hand, demands and requirements on the other hand.
You probably won’t find many people who wouldn’t agree that the writing could be significantly tidied up (mostly to remove all the explanations and reasons – it’s ok to just have a list of demands and requirements without always explaining why something is this way or that way) and the document could be better structured.
However, the demands, while quirky, don’t seem to unreasonable to me.
(Easily) arguably brilliant, important and (undeniably) quirky symbol of an interesting cultural and technological movement stays at your house for a day or two. Sends your wife a 14 page instruction manual for hosting him (enjoys parrots). Wears a hippy robe. Gets philosophically cranky at your kid's gameboy. Teaches your 9 year old daughter to emacs for email. Pulls out a creaky old laptop out at the dinner table. Your daughter now uses the web by emailing some program that fetches the relevant pages and emails them back. She installs GNU/Linux on her brother's gameboy. He cries.
Sounds like good story potential. Sheets are cheap.
Please don't be surprised if I pull out my computer at dinner and begin handling some of my email. I have difficulty hearing when there is noise; at dinner, when people are speaking to each other, I usually cannot hear their words. Rather than feel bored, or impose on everyone by asking them to speak slowly at me, I do some work.
Wow, I would find that really weird. I hope everyone at his dinners get to read that notice beforehand.
I have a similar problem with distinguishing speech from background noise - makes pubs / clubs / places with background music a nightmare for having conversations (and hence I tend towards the solitary these days since people tend towards those places for meeting.)
This happens to me as well. I've wondered for years if there is actually something wrong, or if I'm somehow just worse than most people at picking one stream of words from high background noise environments.
FWIW, my hearing is excellent, and I have a headphone hobby. I definitely notice small details in music. I almost always wear earplugs at clubs / loud environments, and in general loud sounds seem to bother me a bit more than others, while my tolerance for extremely loud sounds is low (permanent hearing damage etc).
I have the same problem. My hearing is also excellent. I have worked out what the problem is, though. The truth is, nobody can hear everything in a place like that. But other people can fill in gaps in speech, possibly from other signals like watching the face, but I think mainly from a conversation model in their brain. For some reason I either lack the model, or it's just not trained properly (more likely tbh), so I have to hear everything to understand.
Oh, my hearing is definitely not excellent after many years of gigs/clubs without earplugs. It's not bad - I can hear a ticking clock from many rooms away if I'm trying to sleep - I just think it's been confused and now doesn't really cope with extracting human speech frequencies from the melange of a noisy environment.
These don't seem crazy at all in the context of someone with particular tastes arranging their life in their own home.
RMS has been travelling and giving talks for decades, and is most likely thoroughly fed up with it. If he's making the effort to travel to give an unpaid talk, he wants the organisers to make sure the experience is not much more frustrating than just staying at home.
I've said it before and will say it again, this is not a crazy rider. I've been organizing fairly large bands and their riders have been similar in "craziness" if you will.
It would be interesting to read the stories or incidents that caused all these clauses to be added. Imagine the parrot clause, what tripped this off to be added?
"A supply of tea with milk and sugar would be nice. If it is tea I
really like, I like it without milk and sugar. With milk and sugar,
any kind of tea is fine. I always bring tea bags with me, so if we
use my tea bags, I will certainly like that tea without milk or sugar.
If I am quite sleepy, I would like two cans or small bottles of
non-diet Pepsi. (I dislike the taste of coke, and of all diet soda;
also, there is an international boycott of the Coca Cola company for
killing union organizers in Colombia and Guatemala; see
killercoke.org.) However, if I am not very sleepy, I won't want
Pepsi, because it is better if I don't drink so much sugar."
This isn't eccentric, it's poor communications though.
It could basically be summarised as:
"Please provide tea making facilities: tea bags, milk, sugar and hot water. If possible a couple of cans of Pepsi (not diet or other brands please) would be appreciated."
Really, the person organising the speech doesn't really care how someone takes their tea or why they don't like Pepsi or what the conditions (which are totally out of their hands) are which will mean you do or don't choose to drink one drink over another. Given that he says he carries his own tea bags (and if he's using them he wouldn't want milk or sugar) the request could be: "Hot water and a cup for making tea - don't worry about providing tea bags, milk or sugar."
It's all quite sweet but really, the excess guff and explanations make it more likely someone will miss something.
I would wager that you'd end up being handed a can of Coke at good proportion of the time.
"Oh sorry, they don't serve Pepsi here."
Richard Stallman's way makes it clear that he does not want to support Coke. He does not want you to hand him a Coke by mistake. Since I assume that is his goal, he communicated it well.
His story helps you to notice, and remember, this seemingly trivial detail.
I'm confused why you think him saying "I only want Pepsi" is in any way clearer than my saying "I only want Pepsi".
EDIT: Make it clearer by saying "Pepsi (absolutely not Coke or any other brand)" by all means but the person buying the drink wants to make sure you get what you want and then get on with their lives, they're really not interested in the why.
It feels to me that Stallman wants to use this - as with most of what he does - as something of a polemic about what he believes. That's fine but it does make the whole document less clear about the actual detail of what he wants.
Stallman's "I want pepsi" reads more like "I specifically don't want Coke, and Pepsi is the most common alternative". With that information in hand, I'd probably suggest he try some of the more boutique cola brands that are available. Your "I only want Pepsi" reads like "I specifically want Pepsi", without accounting for regional flavour differences, etc.
I wouldn't supply anything other than Pepsi for fear of needing to know the history and practices of the local company that makes the soda I thought would be a fun surprise for rms.
You know that an instruction can be short, unambiguous, accompanied by best designed clear easy to understand diagram / logo, and that someone will ignore it and do something terrible.
"A few cans of Pepsi (NOT COCA COLA (http://example.com) and not any diet product please)" does have the advantage of being more check-list like, allowing people to hghlight / crossout the items they've done or not done yet.
The post-mortem of a kickstarter posted to HN yesterday, where someone managed to print and deliver a poster with a misspelling of the word "BROOKLYN" as "BROOKLYIN" has made me think about how people find and prevent errors.
HN isn't a good audience to ask that question because there are different ways to write code. There is only one way to write BROOKLYN.
While semantically your suggestion may seem equivalent to his, there's a big difference between saying "My cola of choice is Pepsi" and "I equate Coca Cola with murder".
I totally agree. Look at his bit about parrots (part of a larger bit about pets):
>DON'T buy a parrot figuring that it will be a fun surprise for me. To acquire a parrot is a major decision: it is likely to outlive you. If you don't know how to treat the parrot, it could be emotionally scarred and spend many decades feeling..
This right here is why I can't stand RMS. He's putting together a rider for all his (borderline unreasonable) demands when he speaks. And even when he's adding irrelevant things, he still manages to be a condescending know-it-all who has to tell you why your decisions are wrong, and why the way he thinks is the correct way to see things.
I don't know why you have to read that clause that way. I thought it was amusing, (though it appears he wasn't amused) the only reason he would have put that clause in there is because someone actually bought a parrot because they thought he would like it. I imagine it probably didn't happen in the US, but in a country where parrots don't cost as much as a month's wages.
Tea needs to be made with _boiling_ not boiled water. The amount of places that present you with a cup of warm water and expect you to put a tea-bag into it, is upsetting*.
To be fair to him an apology and an explanation are different things.
He's basically giving his reasoning which under some circumstances is fine but on matters of beverages feels to me at least to be something you should file under unnecessary detail.
I guess it depends what he's trying to achieve with the document. As an aid to hosting Richard Stallman, it's too wordy. As a combination pollemic / Richard Stallman FAQ (though with some of these things frequently would seem to be stretching it) it's probably fine.
So you have to buy him pepsi but might be stuck with some undrunk pepsi afterward. Also, does he really want cans or small bottles over the more economical large bottle and a glass?
(Yes, I'm currently imagining wat it'd be like to have him over. I think we'd get along fine on the tea thing, but I hate unnecessary waste.)
Less economical — paying $2 for a small pepsi fully drunk is better value than paying $3 for one twice the size, if half is left undrunk (wasted). I like it almost as much as, "anyone who wants to offer a spare couch, I would much rather stay there than in a hotel" — keep it simple, don't waste, operate efficiently and without friction.
Yeah, but it's two pepsis. Then I think a single large one becomes more economical. Less bottle too. And I can return the large bottle but not the small ones.
"
Out of frustration with the long and seemingly useless chain of approvals required of component specifications during which no actual checking seemed to occur, an engineer at Signetics once created a specification for a write-only memory and included it with a bunch of other specifications to be approved. This inclusion came to the attention of Signetics management only when regular customers started calling and asking for pricing information. Signetics published a corrected edition of the data book and requested the return of the 'erroneous' literature."
One of the interesting things about tech work is that it's almost all "brown M&Ms". It's amazing how important attention to detail is in this field and how quickly something will simply not work if the details aren't sweated.
We see it time and again when things go into production where the "brown M&Ms" haven't been looked into and we end up with things like enterprise class websites that cost millions of dollars to produce crumbling under the load of a dozen simultaneous users.
That's something that I've done with data processing and security contracts for the last 4 or 5 years. It's an addendum to the main commercial contract and is deliberately long. Almost all of it is non-exceptional "just do it right" kind of stuff, but there are a handful of clauses I've put in that absolutely no company could reasonably agree to. If they agree to it without challenging those clauses, I then know that I am going to need to grill them on the detail of everything that they do. It's proved very effective for me.
edit: I actually refer to them as my "Brown M&M Clauses" too!
Same thing with software outsourcing contracts to China (for instance). On purpose, send the half-finished specs. You know there are huge gaps in the specs, they can't be implemented without asking clarifying questions. What does the outsourcing vendor say? We read the specs, we understand them very well, no problem, we'll do it. Fire vendor.
What are some examples of these clauses, if you don't mind sharing them? Presumably you don't actually ask for brown M&Ms, but rather for something technical and infeasible.
for example, the right to audit their premises at our convenience and their expense without giving notice.
There is a legit requirement for us to be able to audit, but placing the other conditions on it makes it, at the very least, unreasonable but the "without notice" bit means that if they agree to it we have can disrupt their business at our leisure (since an audit requires their resources to conduct too).
another example is requesting infeasible levels of application logging, insane retention periods, and onerous evidence that they're acting on that information.
Yes its quite common now. Working in my high schools theater which was the largest in the town we'd get these types of requests so I imagine in they would be even more common for something that mattered
Sometimes these riders serve a purpose (Van Halen's case), sometimes they are indeed a caprice, or a joke. If I recall correctly it was Pearl Jam, who once demanded their M&M's to be segregated into jars, and each jar could only contain one color of a candy. There were photos floating around the net with the band members laughing and posing with that jars and the guy who felt into the trap. Oh, life of a rock star ;)
Maybe something like this should appear in the legal stuff everyone always just clicks I agree -> next on. Instead of an 'I agree', you are to send a picture of a jar of M&M's with a certain color missing. Cleverly hidden somewhere deep in legalese.
That was published on 1st of April. It's an april fool's joke. There are loads of April Fool's RFCs. It's not a litmus test for reading, it's a community having fun.
I think the litmus test being suggested is to include the joke RFC in the reference section of a different technical specification as a way to verify the specification is being reviewed in detail.
There are quite a few applications that do something similar, they leave a "disabled=1" or similar in the config to make sure people look at the config before trying to run the software.
I remember the eggdrop IRC bot doing it (http://cvs.eggheads.org/viewvc/eggdrop1.6/eggdrop.conf?view=... , look for the lines starting with die) this and I'm sure there are more.
I recall reading that the "no brown M&M's" clause was added after a near-fatal accident on stage where a member of the Van Halen band got electrocuted because of bad wiring on the stage.
Lesser severity of unintentional contact with a live conductor could be described as "shocked" (or "electroshocked" if there is potential ambiguity with the emotional state) or "electrotetanized", with the latter reserved for currents strong enough to cause complete muscle seizure (as occurs with a stun gun, for instance).
"Electrocution" is a portmanteau of "electrical execution", which not only implies that the person died, but that it was intentional and sanctioned. Lack of a better word has expanded usage to any death caused by electrical current.
I doublechecked with a google search before posting, I missed that one. Thanks for the re-correction, though I wonder what Google's source is. MW for one does not cite injury: http://www.merriam-webster.com/concise/electrocution
Technical requests are usually handled by different people than catering and hospitality requests.
The people in charge catering and hospitality would not be expected to read the technical requests to do with electronic and sound systems, and vice versa.
The guy at the TRC podcast actually searched out their contracts, and the brown M&M clause isn't in the middle of technical requirements, but is in the hospitality section among requests of meals, beverages and dressing room requirements, and there's no mention that the concert would be cancelled if brown M&Ms were found.
So seems unlikely to be true, and just be the guy from Van Halen telling a fun story.
Once I buried a crazy request in a list of "you need to agree on these points or the book won't make the deadline" email to my publisher. My editor flat out agreed to them all.
That's how I knew she was lying about having read them and I had to escalate to the production editor.
The .asp extension actually tells you nothing other than that the .asp extension was used. On the balance of probabilities, it's likely the case that the site runs on ASP classic on a Windows server, but it could as easily have been moved to, say, the LAMP stack configured (using httpd.conf or .htaccess) to invoke PHP when files bearing the .asp extension are requested. It's not a common thing to do, but it can be the easiest way to solve the link rot problem.
The snopes site is quite old. If they did move to a newer technology, it would be better for them to stick with their .asp extension so that they didn't have to change the URLs with redirects. They are well ranked across a lot of keywords - there is no upside for them to change their URL.
A buddy once had a client that decided their site needed to be in a different technology, "for browser compatibility". A quick remap later and the client was satisfied.
I’ve heard similar stories regarding developers and IT Services
Where the devs weren’t allowed access to the Production environment so would have to leave written instructions on how to deploy the software they’ve written. And convinced that IT Services weren’t reading their instructions they would write something really offensive in there and see if they complained
I remember having to do this. And if you left out one single instruction, the whole thing had to be done again from scratch. The power-trippers would say 'it doesn't say here to click on the 'finish' button. You must re-do the entire document and go through QA again.
Ugh. Thankfully we live in a world where multiple deployments per day is considered OK.
I've read thru a bunch of other nit-picky riders. Strikes me that an under-discussed factor is that these high-value stars (contracts running into the $millions) are under extreme pressure, which is severely aggravated by so much change on a daily/hourly basis; something as "trivial" as wrong-temperature or brand drinks (I dislike Poland Spring water, and prefer Mt Dew in cans not bottles), uncomfortable seats, or even brown M&Ms (hey, everyone has a pet peeve) can be an unnerving "last straw". Having a few "perfect" arrangements everywhere gives them something to center on for mental stability.
ETA: I realize this is a tangent. Methinks it's relevant.
Because unlike what you stated, the removal of brown M&Ms doesn't have much to do with comforting the high-value stars, but more like a "flag" that Van Halen looks for in order to determine whether or not the stage crew has read the contract properly. If they did read the contract, the crew would have removed the brown M&Ms. If not, then there is a high likelihood that they have not read the contract, and not only did they not remove then brown M&Ms, but they also probably omitted crucial elements in the set-up, possibly to a point it can be life threatening if omitted.
Interesting lesson about getting confidence by adding bugs. This was mentioned at a recent tech talk about Java Mutation Testing and PIT http://pitest.org/ - video here http://vimeo.com/89083982
This reminds me of some IRCd configurations, in which the server will not function properly unless you've thoroughly read through the conf file and found the single commented line which disables the entire process.
I've seen same kind of tests on one of the fire ranges. You have to read safety rules. One of the points was to put x mark on the 2nd page if you read that.
I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand contract law, delivering something "close enough" is all that's required to satisfy a contract. Let's pretend everything's perfect except for one brown M&M. I'm sure a lawyer can explain it better, but if everything else is in order, I think Van Halen would have to perform their end of the deal.
In general, you go with 'what would a reasonable person say'. Now, for a rock concert, the color a backstage M&Ms in isolation is probably not enough to convince a judge that it was a good reason to break the contract.
But the M&Ms aren't used in isolation. They're used as a flag, where their presence suggests that the venue did not follow through on their technical demands. Once you know that, then you just look for problems (probably the demands immediately around the M&M line first). Once you found an actual problem, well then, there you go.
...but the whole thing break down as soon as distinct teams are taking care of catering and checking the venues floor's mechanical load specs, so using this indicator only makes sense as long as the venues (and the teams working in them) are sufficiently small.
Nowadays the "big shows" employ teams of dozens of guys travelling and dozens of helpers employed locally, it would be severely negligent if checking of basic requirements would only be done only on the basis if the catering guys met the random demand for colour-sorted sweets.
Even in those organizations, there will be controlling and Q&A. Orgs being sloppy in one regard are often sloppy in another and probably gave down bad orders in the one direction _and in the other, too_.
I organize smaller events, but you wouldn't believe the number of f-ups a bad manager can produce left and right. Often, the "ground crew" isn't even at fault - e.g. I had events where the ground crew was briefed to a standard timetable layout, although we had provided a timetable usable for them beforehand, having them fix a lot of things on the fly.
Yeah, I severely doubt Van Halen were such primadonnas, and that clause was just a sanity check. I'm somehow sure more modern pop artists took cases like this as an excuse to make exorbitant demands and throw a fit if they weren't met though.
Maybe a mathematician can explain whether this "trick" works or not? Intuitively, I can't see that knowing whether the M&M demand was filled makes it more probable that the other demands are filled.
Say you have a pile with five black or white marbles. You want them all to be black. So you check that the first marble in the pile is black (ie no brown m&m:s). Is it now more probable that the other four marbles also are black?
Because you are just checking one specific marble instead of sampling a number of randomly chosen marbles (which of course would increase the probability), I don't see how it can work.
Because it's not like marbles. It's not a math thing.
It's more like a canary in the coal mine. If the canary dies, you should check on the air quality. If they went through the trouble of removing the brown m&ms you have a fairly strong indicator they actually read the document in the first place. And a strong indicator they have a good attention to detail.
Exactly, a concept also known as a "litmus test", if you pass the test you may still fail the actual, but if you fail the litmus test there's more or less no way you'll pass.
You assume independence between the color of the marbles. This is highly unlikely. Promoters probably don't read the terms randomly and completely randomly fulfill them. Likely whether one of the marbles is black or white tells you a lot about whether the other ones are black or white, especially if it's a marble that you selected before hand in a way that will often change depending on how the marbles are colored.
But you are assuming there exists a positive correlation between absence of brown M&M:s and whether the other demands are also filled or not. I don't think you can show that since the M&M demand was singled out. Had they instead randomly inspected once piece of equipment and found an error that would have been totally different.
This is not about rigorous statistics, it's about human nature. In the sixth grade, my math teacher offered a test at the beginning of the year that included quite a lot of complicated instructions. The last instruction told students to ignore all the previous instructions, and just write their name at the top of the paper and turn it in.
Guess how well the typical top scorers in the class did on this one.
That prank is horrible because the document is self-contradictory yet assumes a single correct interpretation, unless the document is very carefully written and formatted using an agreed semantics.
A well-written document would be a great illustration of Haskell-style lazy evaluation, though
But you are assuming there exists a positive correlation between absence of brown M&M:s and whether the other demands are also filled or not. I don't think you can show that since the M&M demand was singled out.
Yes, that is the assumption. Many mathematical models make assumptions like that. It seems much more likely than the opposite assumption which is that they are independent.
Since you're attempting to model human behavior you are going to have to make assumptions that are ultimately incorrect. That's how humans process information. We join the dots and infer things in countless ways that mean we could be incorrect, but which none-the-less are better than wildly guessing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases). It would be probably better, if you are trying to model this, to think of it as a machine learning classifier. Brown M&Ms existing would be a prominent feature, not proof.
First of, now we know from another commentor that that the M&M-test didn't work at all since catering was handled by a completely different crew than those setting up the stage equipment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7754636).
Second, let's imagine that M&M:s and safety is handled by the same people. Then brown M&M:s could easily be negatively correlated with equipment errors because a competent technician would spend more time double-checking equipment than full-filling bullshit demands.
Its not that they expect to see a bowl of brown M+Ms - its that they expect to see someone come back to them during negotiations with - "M+M's - seriously?"
If no-one comes back they know they need to give that venue more attention.
Yeah, the quote on that page mentions an even better litmus test for this: "Provide us with 15A outlets that give 19A of electricity." This should be an immediate red flag for any facilities manager reviewing the contract before it's signed.
You tell the banquet manager of the hotel you are considering that the morning breakfast must include a large glass of freshly squeezed orange juice for everyone of the attendees. It must be squeezed no more than two hours before the breakfast.
It is not possible to do so. Squeezing that much orange in much a short amount of time would be prohibitively expensive.
If the manager says yes he is either lying or incompetent and you'd better find someone else who will tell you it's not possible.