I would be worried about some kind of convoluted power grab conspiracy scheme where one person intentionally runs a non-publicized campaign and wins with a handful of positive votes. I suppose you could add in an additional requirement without needing a positive total to win: the winning candidate must receive over x% (x being quite small) of the total votes cast, regardless of if they were positive votes or not. That is, if the cutoff is 100 votes, you could beat WillTaxYouMore and DrownsKittensAndBabies with a score of -1000, but at least someone knows you exist. Better the devil you know...
Russia used to have a simple system: a "None of the Above" box. If it wins, the election is rerun with a fresh slate.
You could actually work that in alongside the negative votes. A vote for "None of the Above" is kind of like a negative vote for everyone. Make it so you have to beat that and have a positive total... both of those, because you could cast a token vote against "None of the Above" which means "DEAR GOD END THIS ELECTION CYCLE ALREADY MAKE THE CAMPAIGN ADS STOP I GIVE UP".
Well theoretically that's already happening and we just don't have the data to make us face the facts, so that's an existential crisis I would welcome with open arms. Ideally it would be somewhat self-correcting in that a negative "winner" would encourage others to get into politics, maybe even before hitting the actual negative point. Or we can start down the road to a bloody revolution, I'm OK with either.
That would be an interesting way to increase voter turnout. Let me cast -1 votes for a candidate instead of voting for the other guy that I don't really care for. Treat them as -1 votes for the actual result, but publish them separately to show the difference between a broad mandate for the winning candidate and "we're only supporting you because your opponent is a total fucking nutbag".
Might even make a nice dent in the two-party system. Making up numbers for a moment, suppose a quarter of Democratic voters in 2012 were really sending a message of "holy fuck Republicans are crazy" and voted Democrat because they were afraid of whatever Republican candidate winning. That's a quarter of the votes for the Democratic candidate gone. Almost gives the Greens a fighting chance without necessarily gaining a lot of supporters on their own. Same goes for the various Libertarian-leaning parties on the right.
with Linux being "unstandardized" due to the many different distributions."
Of course, Windows has a similar number of different major "distributions" -- XP, 2003, 2008, 7, 8, Vista, etc.
You're comparing apples to oranges. Supporting multiple versions of one OS does not equate to supporting different Linux distributions. Supporting Windows back to XP is more like supporting Ubuntu going back many versions (pre-4.10 if you want to do it by year, but if you want to normalize for number of OS versions you could go by what Canonical supports and start with 10.04 LTS).
A quick overview of public school policy and university politics, television programming and advertisments, pop music, and (recently) video games, makes it quite obvious.
Go far as what, slimeball sociopath politicians? If you're such an entitled precious little angel so lacking in a moral compass that you drug your own parents for such a trivial reason as going on a wild night of Facebooking, you should be thrown out into the wilderness alone and left to fend for yourself for a month without your silver spoon. See just how resourceful you really are without mommy and daddy and their oh so nasty internet curfews.
I'm still hedging my bets on 2013 being the year of 3D Printing on Desktop.
Don't hold your breath. It's a great tool for rapid prototyping for engineers and small-run craft businesses, but that's about it for now. It's an amazing technology, but sadly overhyped given the price of a good printer (by "good" I mean "anything nicer than a reprap or older Makerbot -- something like a Replicator 2 as a baseline). Check back in 2015-2016 or so when things like the Replicator 2 and Form 1 are showing their age and coming down in price.
A desktop environment is a bundling of a window manager with a suite of software to go along with it. KWin is the window manager for KDE. What then makes KDE a desktop environment is packaging KWin together with Dolphin, Konqueror, Kontact, Konsole, etc.
Serious petitions happen on there all the time. The administration doesn't take them seriously. The responses generally amount to "explain what we're already doing and going to continue doing".
Can? Yes, theoretically. Realistically, probably (ballpark) less than 5% of television ads are bought by individuals. I can't think of a single example.
thinking all the stupid articles about bitcoin have stopped.
You want a real currency? they're called gold and silver. They have lasted thousands of years, and will last thousands of years more, short of us figuring out a way to create them in the lab.
And someone has to turn the robot on. That isn't a fine enough distinction to separate cruise missiles from robots.
The person involved still gives a target location (which generally has collateral damage taken into consideration) for a cruise missile that it can hit quite accurately. When you turn the robot on, you're not sure who it's going to kill where. It will be a very long time before a machine can make those kinds of decisions with respect to collateral damage and civilian casualties.
There's a pretty damn big distinction between "blow up that building (and cease to exist afterwards)" and "go hang out over there and kill anything that looks hostile".
Cruise missiles are more of a robot then a drone is. Fact is drones are just remotely piloted planes. The problem isn't their existence but there misuse.
And this is about neither. It's about theoretical future drones that don't have a remote operator making the decision to take a human life.
I take it you don't own a smartphone then. Apple's in-house chip is called the A6. Most ARM SoC's are based on ARM Cortex A-series cores (A8, soon A15, etc). Never mind that Olimex is a well-known company, let's all be paranoid about anything that starts with the letter A.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, meant to say 1000 cutoff.
I would be worried about some kind of convoluted power grab conspiracy scheme where one person intentionally runs a non-publicized campaign and wins with a handful of positive votes. I suppose you could add in an additional requirement without needing a positive total to win: the winning candidate must receive over x% (x being quite small) of the total votes cast, regardless of if they were positive votes or not. That is, if the cutoff is 100 votes, you could beat WillTaxYouMore and DrownsKittensAndBabies with a score of -1000, but at least someone knows you exist. Better the devil you know...
Russia used to have a simple system: a "None of the Above" box. If it wins, the election is rerun with a fresh slate.
You could actually work that in alongside the negative votes. A vote for "None of the Above" is kind of like a negative vote for everyone. Make it so you have to beat that and have a positive total... both of those, because you could cast a token vote against "None of the Above" which means "DEAR GOD END THIS ELECTION CYCLE ALREADY MAKE THE CAMPAIGN ADS STOP I GIVE UP".
Well theoretically that's already happening and we just don't have the data to make us face the facts, so that's an existential crisis I would welcome with open arms. Ideally it would be somewhat self-correcting in that a negative "winner" would encourage others to get into politics, maybe even before hitting the actual negative point. Or we can start down the road to a bloody revolution, I'm OK with either.
That would be an interesting way to increase voter turnout. Let me cast -1 votes for a candidate instead of voting for the other guy that I don't really care for. Treat them as -1 votes for the actual result, but publish them separately to show the difference between a broad mandate for the winning candidate and "we're only supporting you because your opponent is a total fucking nutbag".
Might even make a nice dent in the two-party system. Making up numbers for a moment, suppose a quarter of Democratic voters in 2012 were really sending a message of "holy fuck Republicans are crazy" and voted Democrat because they were afraid of whatever Republican candidate winning. That's a quarter of the votes for the Democratic candidate gone. Almost gives the Greens a fighting chance without necessarily gaining a lot of supporters on their own. Same goes for the various Libertarian-leaning parties on the right.
with Linux being "unstandardized" due to the many different distributions."
Of course, Windows has a similar number of different major "distributions" -- XP, 2003, 2008, 7, 8, Vista, etc.
You're comparing apples to oranges. Supporting multiple versions of one OS does not equate to supporting different Linux distributions. Supporting Windows back to XP is more like supporting Ubuntu going back many versions (pre-4.10 if you want to do it by year, but if you want to normalize for number of OS versions you could go by what Canonical supports and start with 10.04 LTS).
A quick overview of public school policy and university politics, television programming and advertisments, pop music, and (recently) video games, makes it quite obvious.
Care to cite examples?
http://anarchycamp.tumblr.com/post/18845167175/ive-made-a-robot-that-screams-why
I've made a robot that s/screams/vomits!
Why?
I say reward them for being so resourceful!
I think they'll go far in life.
Go far as what, slimeball sociopath politicians? If you're such an entitled precious little angel so lacking in a moral compass that you drug your own parents for such a trivial reason as going on a wild night of Facebooking, you should be thrown out into the wilderness alone and left to fend for yourself for a month without your silver spoon. See just how resourceful you really are without mommy and daddy and their oh so nasty internet curfews.
Oh no, I appear to have a dangling quotation mark. I'm so sorry.
I'm still hedging my bets on 2013 being the year of 3D Printing on Desktop.
Don't hold your breath. It's a great tool for rapid prototyping for engineers and small-run craft businesses, but that's about it for now. It's an amazing technology, but sadly overhyped given the price of a good printer (by "good" I mean "anything nicer than a reprap or older Makerbot -- something like a Replicator 2 as a baseline). Check back in 2015-2016 or so when things like the Replicator 2 and Form 1 are showing their age and coming down in price.
Maybe you would prefer a 40 inch tablet! How big are your pockets?
What pocket are you putting ANY tablet in? My Galaxy S3 (with case) is a snug fit in my (not-skinny) pants pocket as-is, let alone a Nexus 7.
"We still have his powerpoint slides."
Normally I'm not a fan of Oracle (who is?), but good on them for shutting Lynch down with actual facts.
A desktop environment is a bundling of a window manager with a suite of software to go along with it. KWin is the window manager for KDE. What then makes KDE a desktop environment is packaging KWin together with Dolphin, Konqueror, Kontact, Konsole, etc.
Is that as opposed to an Offline Lead-Gen Site?
Tim Cook needs to sue them for that one.
Beat me to it like a redheaded stepchild.
Serious petitions happen on there all the time. The administration doesn't take them seriously. The responses generally amount to "explain what we're already doing and going to continue doing".
Can? Yes, theoretically. Realistically, probably (ballpark) less than 5% of television ads are bought by individuals. I can't think of a single example.
It's a limitation on corporate speech. Yet another example of what happens when you apply 1st Amendment rights to corporations: they get a megaphone.
Leader is referred to as a prophet? Check.
thinking all the stupid articles about bitcoin have stopped.
You want a real currency? they're called gold and silver. They have lasted thousands of years, and will last thousands of years more, short of us figuring out a way to create them in the lab.
Not a stable currency for long.
http://www.planetaryresources.com/
And someone has to turn the robot on. That isn't a fine enough distinction to separate cruise missiles from robots.
The person involved still gives a target location (which generally has collateral damage taken into consideration) for a cruise missile that it can hit quite accurately. When you turn the robot on, you're not sure who it's going to kill where. It will be a very long time before a machine can make those kinds of decisions with respect to collateral damage and civilian casualties.
There's a pretty damn big distinction between "blow up that building (and cease to exist afterwards)" and "go hang out over there and kill anything that looks hostile".
Cruise missiles are more of a robot then a drone is. Fact is drones are just remotely piloted planes. The problem isn't their existence but there misuse.
And this is about neither. It's about theoretical future drones that don't have a remote operator making the decision to take a human life.
Where do you draw the definitional line? Isn't a cruise missile a robot that kills people?
Someone had to push the launch button.
I take it you don't own a smartphone then. Apple's in-house chip is called the A6. Most ARM SoC's are based on ARM Cortex A-series cores (A8, soon A15, etc). Never mind that Olimex is a well-known company, let's all be paranoid about anything that starts with the letter A.