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Slashback: Palmistry, Lecture, Quid Quo Pro
Small-town boy makes good colnago writes "First discussed many months ago, here's ArsDigita's first streaming lecture on the design of computer languages."
This requires RealPlayer, by the way. Cool to see this effort bearing fruit -- I hope that Philip et al will serve as role models for a whole bunch of online learning centers, and they don't have to be computer-centric. Home schooling, anyone?
What we meant by "stop" was ... Reader Chris Reagan passed on this note regarding what initially sounds like an attractive toy: "There is a huge issue brewing with Panasonic Showstoppers preventing their owners from even watching TV. It appears they were over aggressive with their Macrovision copy protection and are blocking certain channels in certain markets.
Even though ReplayTV allowed Panasonic to modify their boxes they're passing the buck back to Panasonic, who in turn just say 'that's how we designed it.' They refuse to change or recall the defective product."
He also sent links to these AVS Forum on this topic -- it seems people don't like getting blue screens on that box, either:
- Damn Panasonic Copyright Protection Mistake
- Petition to Get Showstopper Recalled Re: Macrovision
- Petition to get REPLAY to remove copy protection
- How Replay TV can fix the Macrovision Bug ASAP...
- Can Macrovision be forced onto the ReplayTV branded units?
Besides administer servers, track inventory, save the world and list groceries, of course. Dum2007 writes: "An open sourced Gameboy emulator for the Palm is available here. It might not be as feature-filled as Liberty, but it's free."
After all, many people get all in a tizzy over Microsoft's dominance of software operating systems. Yet the last time the Republicans or Democrats did not control both the Congress and the White House (and indirectly, the judiciary) was in 1854, when the Republicans ousted the Whigs.
Perhaps Americans have truly preferred the Democrats or Republicans for the past 146 years, but I'm inclined to believe the system is rigged.
Indeed Richard Wringer, editor of Ballot Access News argued that U.S. voting system is so rigged that it violates international law:
The Libertarian and Constitution party have already banded together to launch a lawsuit seeking to establish the constitutional illegality of the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the Commission for Presidential Debates (CPD), and the federal campaign funding system, by overturning the Buckley v. Valeo decision. There's an excellent summary of the unfair barriers the Democrats and Republicans have raised to third parties at http://www.realcampaignreform.org/. See also Richard Winger's article, The Importance of Ballot Access. (Spring 1994 Long Term View, Massachusetts School of Law, Andover, MA.) at http://www.ballot-access.orgOther reforms I'd like to see:
David Korn (of ksh fame) came up with the idea of an automated online Nader vote exchanger (check the whois database for voteswap.com and voteswap.org).
Now.. if we can just figure out how to add a nic card... and give it a ip, run it through a broadcasting server.. Yay free tv for the web!
He said Palmistry. Uhg Ugh.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Why, dosn't it happen in Congress all the time?
Seriously, there is a reason your vote is *secret.*
You may vote for anyone you want for any reason, even just because they have the best hair, and noone has the right to question it. It is YOUR vote.
This is nothing more than party politics, and it IS common practice in the legislative bodies.
Will they try to MAKE it illegal? Seems likely, it could be a powerful tool for third parties, and the ins arn't going to like it one bit, but the fact of the matter is, they can make the website illegal ( or at least try to, there's that nasty first ammendment thingy), they can make soliciting it illegal but they can't make DOING it illegal.
Ranking systems would work great. Here's the basic idea:
You'd vote for say 4 presidential candidates, for example. If you want Nader to win, but would rather have Gore over Bush, you would vote the following manner:
1) Nader
2) Gore
3) Gore
4) Gore
Now, the state counts a vote of the top choices, and gets say, 45% Bush, 20% Nader, and 35% Gore. Since no candidate has a >50% majority, the second choice votes are added to the total. So let's say that most die-hard Republicans listed Bush as their second choice as well, as did die-hard Democrats, but Nader voters listed Gore for the most part second. So now the vote would switch to something like 45% Bush, 10% Nader, and 45% Gore. Still no majority so take third and fourth into consideration resulting in: 45% Bush, 5% Nader, 50% Gore.
This of course looks a little contrived for a two-party system with a couple third parties, but imagine if there were say 6 parties. That is when this example would shine.
DranoK
Shh! Nobody knows I'm gay!
Shh! Nobody knows I'm gay!
Citizens should feel free to vote for the candidate that most represents their positions. Instead, we're seeing a spate of websites taking advantage of America's flawed and disparate Electoral College system.
Why should one citizen's vote be more/less valuable than another citizen's residing in a different state?
Clearly, proportional Electoral College representation (as opposed to the "winner-take-all" representation used by some states) would end any perceived need for vote-swapping.
I saw a Green Party t-shirt today that summed it succinctly:
Vote your conscience, not your fear
Here's a cluebot article (Will Vote Trading Website Be Shut Down?) that briefly discusses the dubious legality of vote trading.
Sincerely,
Vergil
Insects and Grafitti Photos
As you might have guessed, her TV had only one set of inputs, so she ran the DVD player through the VCR the same way most people do. Macrovision kicked in, and she couldn't watch her DVDs right. I tried looking for firmware hacks, but the only I found was firmware binaries, which didn't do my any could since I didn't have a EEPROM programmer and I really didn't feel like voiding my friend's player warranty, especially since she had to get a firmware upgrade anyway to get The Matrix to play. If not for the warranty voiding and the cost I would have told her to get a mod chip for the blasted thing just to make somebody in the movie industry mad.
I ended up having to go with her to Radio Shack and get a $30 adapter that would work with the various video connectors she was using and her TV. The guy there told me that last Christmas people kept coming to him and buying the same thing, since they found out that thanks to the movie industry you can't run an unmodded DVD player through a VCR.
The point I'm making is that if the movie industry doesn't get a little looser on their restrictions, then they're going to cut off their own growth. Sure, it all worked out for my friend since she knew someone who would dealt with this kind of thing all of the time, but what are the odds that most people have a techie friend to fix their DVD players for them? Even once I got it fixed, she was completely confused when I tried to explain exactly what Macrovision was to her, and I don't blame her.
People just want to put in a DVD and play it like a VCR tape, not buy adapters and cables so the movie industry can be sure that she can't copy the movies she has with a VCR. The irony here is that the very thing that the movie industry has created to preserve its DVD sales may kill it prematurely if people can't figure out how to hook up their own DVD players. I trust my parents to hook up a VCR, but not a DVD player (which fortunately hasn't become an issue yet), and that's not the right way to have to handle thing is DVDs are supposed to supplant VCRs.
It is interesting that www.thinkgeek.com (another andover.net property) just proudly gave away three of these heavily Macromediaized Panasonic Showstoppers, as well as featuring it proudly on the front of their most recent mailing.
You would think they would be promoting and selling Tivo's since they run Linux, and are much more hacker friendly. Eh, a foolish consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds... or so says Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Theory here is to permit a means for candidate G, with a "safe" marjority in a secure state, say NY, who needs votes in an insecure state, say M, to bleed votes from a candidate N, who has no interest in the electoral college result, but merely wants to obtain a reasonable total popular vote. A web-site is used to permit voters in NY and M to swap promises to vote differently.
In theory this cannot hurt G in NY, because no more than the percentage of N supporters will swap, and the margin in NY is not sufficient to give pause.
So, candidate B simply spoofs a whole bunch of registered M state voters, promising to vote for G in M in exchange for a vote for N in NY. If he does this well enough, he can actually unseat G in NY by fooling enough NY voters to think they are doing the cause to win in M. (The B voter in M, of course, simply votes his conviction, and not his --probably unenforceable-- promise, when he goes to the ballot box.)
Since there are so many B voters in any state, there is no problem here for B -- perhaps B can get all of NY to vote for N in lieu of G.
For example: I'm a serious lefty, so the idea of voting for Gore kind of makes me wretch. Let's say I arrange my votes like:
- Ralph Nader
- Al Gore
- George Dubya Bush
- Satan
- Pat Buchanan
Ralph won't get a majority, so my vote will probably end up going to Al Gore, who might be able to win. But I still can vote my conscience, and make a statement nonetheless.Do domain names matter?
Before you start proposing various systems, please, read this; e-mail me if you are interested. Please, mod this up - I am not karma whoring (couldn't care less); i'd just like people to actually know about this beautiful (and - surprise! - relevant) fact. Maybe some of you, like myself, will even switch to economics from coding
Arrow's Impossibility Theorem was published in an essay called A Difficulty in The Concept of Social Welfare. It demonstrates a profound and a priori lack of reliability of joint decision systems and a lack of coherence of any notion such as the will of the people.
Let Prefersi(a,b) mean that person i prefers a to b. Let Prefers be some joint decision procedure that, thus, generates either Prefers(a,b) or Prefers(b,a) for any a, b in some decision set, Set.
Then Arrow's impossibility Theorem says that the following 5 reasonable conditions on the joint preference relation Prefers cannot all be met by any single decision process:
- Prefers is independent of irrelevant alternatives
- Prefers is non-dictatorial
- Prefers is pareto-inclusive
- Prefers is transitive.
- Prefers is a complete ordering on Set.
A Brief Note on Consequencesthat is to say, the ordering of any 2 items in Prefers is a function only of their ordering with respect to each other within each of the Prefersi.
that is to say, Prefers is not necessarily identical to Prefersi for some i.
that is to say, Prefers will rank 2 elements of Set in a particular order if all Prefersi do.
Note that the first 3 conditions are different from the last 2. The first 3 are what might be called the morality conditions. They say that a joint decision system should respect the individual wills of those elements of which it is composed. The last 2 conditions are what might be called rationality conditions. They say that a joint decision process should display consistent behaviour (which is really what rational means.).
So what Arrow's Impossibility Theorem says is that any joint decision process which is in a reasonable sense democratic and respecting of individuality is also irrational or if you prefer a less loaded term, unreliable. It is likely to display behaviour where its decisions can be controlled by control of its order of making of parts of decisions; or where its behaviour does not respect the independence (in ethics and metaphysics, it's called the freedom) of its elements; or where it is capable of ignoring the unanimous will of its elements.
In other words, you can't trust bureaucracy. This, I think, if there is one, is the reason why traditional state-run-enterprise socialism fails. There are also a great many other interesting consequences of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, many of them obtained when we abandon our instinctive prejudices regarding what a decision system is, and consequently what Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is about.
A less emotional comparison of alternate election methods can be found here.
You seem happy to do as you're told, so just wanted to give you another tip there.
Seriously, though -
but with this new "vote-swapping", all you're doing is voicing someone else's opinion.
You didn't read the article, did you? Your opinion is still there (if everyone is honest), and it counts more - it beats the rigged electoral college system.
---
IMHO, there is only one reason to cast a vote for anyone, ever : you believe that vote will have some net positive effect. Furthermore, a reasonable addendum might be that you should probably cast the vote which you think will have the greatest positive effect. That is, cast the vote which will make the world "best" according to whatever metric you like. This is assuming that you don't find the very act of voting for a particular candidate inherently immoral. So the question for prospective Nader (or Browne, Hagelin -- I'm mangling the spelling here, sorry) voters is just this: do you believe that the greatest good is accomplished by voting for Nader, possibly winning the Green Party more than 5 percent of the popular vote, hence guaranteeing that they will receive money in the 2004 elections, and hence maybe, eventually contributing to having more than a two-party system in this country? Do you think that the simple message sent by a vote for Nader -- loosely translated, perhaps, as "the major parties are completely ignoring issues of very real importance to me" -- in conjunction with the above possibilities for funding in later elections, are more important than the possible consequences of a Bush victory?
This is something about which reasonable people may differ. I happen to think that the best outcome can be accomplished by voting for Gore -- that is, I think I like the results of voting for him more than the likely results of voting for any other candidate. Your results may vary.
What complicates the decision is that estimate of the likely effect of casting a particular vote -- and that's where this "wait until the last minute" idea comes in. If you live in a state which is absolutely certain to go to one or the other of the major candidates, what is the net effect of casting a vote for one of those candidates? The way I see it, very little -- it sends no strong message, has no effect on who governs or what their policies are, etc. A vote for a 3rd-party candidate, however, might still have a net positive effect -- particularly with respect to the funding in 2004 issue. Waiting until you have the best sense of the effect your vote will have -- if such an estimate is ever possible -- can only make the decision easier.
This point comes up every time the discussion comes up where people are only voting for the "better of two evils" -- but, c'mon people, shouldn't we change the system? How can people effectively vote their hearts if they are too distracted by the FUD in the media about how Gore might lose if Nader gets too many votes?
What we need is some kind of reform -- either I should be able to cast an approve/disapprove vote for any of the candidates, or I should rank them in the order that I would like to see them as president. (or senator, or representative, or whatever.) I think it would be easier to implement the approve/disapprove model, but I think the ranking system would give more more accurate results.
Any thoughts? All I know is that we need to kick this two-party duopoly in the butt.