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Rick Santorum's Fake Donation Meter

ricksantorum.com

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Re: Rick Santorum's Fake Donation Meter

#34

Post by d0mine »

FaceKicker wrote: post #3

This is used to decide what dollar amount to display on the donation meter on this page: https://www.ricksantorum.com/stillneedhelp/ You can infer from the Javascript, but it just displays a dollar amount equal to the number of seconds elapsed since a certain time (edit: whoops, see below), according to your computer clock. If you refresh every second it will go up by $1 each time. If you set your clock back a year,…

Largest DOUBLE value: 1.79769E+308

Re: Rick Santorum's Fake Donation Meter

#35

Post by Zirro »

luigi wrote: post #30
hrabago wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the Tab character.

Ah, so it is. Then I'm disturbed that browsers render a tab as 8 spaces.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS/tab-size was just implemented in the newest browsers, for all your tab-sizing needs :)

Re: Rick Santorum's Fake Donation Meter

#36

Post by duskwuff »

VikingCoder wrote: post #33

For comparison, does someone want to post the source code to GMail's meter: "Over 10250.602608 megabytes (and counting) of free storage."

GMail's meter is fine -- it's displaying the state of a value which Google has decreed will increase at a set rate. Unlike Santorum's donations, it's not an unpredictable measurement.

Re: Rick Santorum's Fake Donation Meter

#37

Post by thebigshane »

barrkel wrote: post #27

I don't think there's anything wrong, in principle, with this approach, so long as the simulated rate is calibrated frequently to the actual average donation rate. Having it all wired up properly would require a whole lot of infrastructure, particularly for donation mechanisms that aren't online and aren't all tied in to a single system.

There doesn't appear to be anything in this code to calibrate to the actual average donation rate. In fact it's not tied to any real amounts or rates at all. It's just a function of the current datetime.

UPDATE: They took the donation page down...

   Forbidden
 
   You don't have permission to access /stillneedhelp/ 
   on this server.
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