We don't need UN support if actually attacked. It's right there in the rules. If attacked, you have the right not only to defend, but to attack back. It's the original attack that's illegal. You can even attack if it looks like they're massing troups to attack.
And I have to point out that the UN supported an attack on Afghanistan, and that was attacking a nation that just harbours people who attacked us, instead of attacking a nation that actually attacked us. Saying they'd suddenly not support us going to war against a nation if we were attacked by said nation is absurd right-wing propoganda.
I agree completely, except for one thing: People in Britain apparently believe it, also, at least to some extent.
And the citizens there are now even more pissed than the US citizens are. They fell for lies their government handled out, just like the US, and their government was in bed with the US.
It's because that, simply put, is not what the UN is for, and quite a lot of countries would leave it if it was, for fear they'd be next.
OTOH, that's not what the ICC is for, either. The ICC is for removing people, including people in power, and trying them for international law violations, which basically comes down to genocide and some acts you can only commit during war.
The US basically delibrately suttled the ICC for no reason except it apparently wants to be able to commit war crimes, like locking POWs up without following the Geneva convention. (Yes, yes, the ICC doesn't require a jury trial. But we're the 800 pound gorilla here...if we demanded a jury trial, by God the ICC would put that right in.) But let's pretend we've signed on to the ICC.
Let's use the example of North Korea, but one without any power. Let's assume both the UN and the ICC have can basically project whatever amount of military force is needed, and let's assume everyone wants to overthrow North Korea. (Except, presumably, them.) However, they have commited, as far as I know, no genocide. There's really nothing to charge them with. They aren't building nuclear weapons in violation of any treaty, because they haven't signed any such treaty, and, hell, they can always unsign them. They aren't violating the Geneva convention, they aren't even at war with anyone. (Locking up spies is not a violation.)
They, legally, aren't doing anything wrong. Neither the UN or the ICC can do anything about them. Even if they were doing something wrong, all you can do it put the people who were doing it on trial, not remove the entire government.
However, there is a way to overthrow such governments...support an insurrection from within, and come in with the military during the resultant civil war. This used to be how we overthrew governments.
Yes, but of course, that recital of fact omits that the administration got other nation's help by lying to them, just like the administration got the US to support the war by lying to them. It also pretended that current UN resolutions allowed us to do so. (A claim I've noticed since has been dropped when no WMD were found.)
And '49 nations' is mostly crap. We had one military significant and independent ally in that war that I know of.
What we need for 'war outside international law', aka, unprovoced and/or without UN mandate, isn't just 'international national support', (Which in this case means 'Britian'.), but a damn good reason.
No one's saying we shouldn't have intervened in Iraq if inspectors had found WMD and China, for whatever reason, had sat there and veto'd resolutions to invade it. Hell, if we'd honestly asked for a government change in Iraq, well, we can't do that through the UN, but maybe we don't want to play that game anymore if we can't.
The UN will rather quickly become irrelevant if it ignores US, Russia, China, or Europe, so it's not some magical solution to everything, especially if one of the nations we have a problem with is a strong ally of one of them, as was claimed with France.
However, Bush and co managed to trick the US, and several other countries, into thinking the UN was broken, when in fact it was functioning completely correctly, at least in respect to policing Iraq.
That really pisses me off, and should piss every American off, as the UN was our doing. The UN is where two quabbling nations can come and have a neutral third party decide their boundary, instead of fighting over it. It's the organization that demands the International Red Cross have access to POW camps, and by God they get it. It's the organization that will impartially observe you destroy WMD.
People don't generally know what it was like in the days before the UN/League of Nations, but anyone who doesn't know need to look at the start of the first world war.
The problem isn't 'their community', it's that in poor areas very little money gets spent on education. Whether this is because the community doesn't want to spend what little money they have on education, or if, in fact, they are spending all the money they can on education, and simply have no money, is something that can only be determined on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes, yes, it is the community, or at least the government. Sometimes, though, it's the lack of the ability to print some money to pay teachers.
And this has nothing to do with 'black and hispanic' communities...the same thing applies to every poor community. Basically as many white people in poor communities don't go to college, but if poor communities contain 15% of the white population and 40% of the black population, there'll will be the obvious inbalance in the resulting college population.
And, yes, if black and hispanic individuals personally valued education more, they could fight their way through, and end up in college, much like many of them do. But that's not incredibly relevant...almost anyone, if they're smart and determined enough, can get to college.
The point is that there are plenty of non-smart, non-determined rich kids at colleges, simply because being upper-middle class means that's basically automatic...they have the money, so the kids go to college. Lower-class, and even lower-middle class, does not have the money, and thus the only way to get there is through a lot of hard work and being natively intelligent, and willing to completely ignore the broken-ass grade school system they're exposed to, and they still have to get lucky.
Which, as I pointed out, there seem to be a larger number of oriental kids who do that as opposed to any other race.
And I have to point out poor people getting into college on scholarships doesn't scale, anyway.
That's the thing that gets me. Forget any copyright argument or arguments about imposing terms after a sale.
I just want to see someone prove that anonymous click was mine. I want them to prove a cat didn't jump on a keyboard, or some toddler didn't wander by.
That's what their lawyer should have argued. They should have asked Blizzard to point out exactly which of their employees agreed to that contract, and why Blizzard thought said employee could agree to a contract on behalf of the corporation. (This is, I believe, a fairly standard question in business contract law.)
But the gag here is...Blizzard doen't know who agreed to the 'contract', which makes it a rather absurd sort of contract. Blizzard had absolutely no idea if the person who agreed was even slightly authorized to agree to the contract on behalf of the company. Now, contract law says, if you think someone at a company is authorized to do something, and they represent themselves as such, the contract is valid...but you have to make at least a minimal sanity check, like 'Does the person actually work there?'.
Put 'All Rights Reserved' after that and you've got it. That means is that you're explicitly not giving up any rights provided to you under copyright law, so people can't claim some sort of implicit agreement to redistribute it.
Tell me, how do you pronounce 'school'? How about 'eschew'? When did 'sch' become pronounced 'sh'?
Someone's pronouncing the word 'schedule' wrong, but it isn't Americans.
I will, however, admit Americans say 'issue' wrong. There's no 'h' in it. (Of course, I sometimes wonder if the word is actually supposed to be pronounced 'is-hue' and it's just the English accent dropping the h.;) )
For those that don't know, those were fully 3-D adventure games. Not only that, but they managed to be interactive movies at the same time, right about all the time all the 'interactive movies' were failing. (Think CD-I, if that rings a bell.) The last one, Overseer, had a DVD with DVD quality video.
It's interesting that one of the first, and only, adventure games that managed to get 3-D enviroments right was also one of the first, and only, adventure games that managed to get full motion video right. They managed to combine DOOM quality movement (This is when we were all trying to get those fancy new VESA video cards, or running Sci-Tech if we didn't have one.) with quake quality once you stopped for a second, and a somewhat crappy actual recorded video obviously done on a bluescreen and pasted in front of the background. Rounded objects tended to be non-rotatable...
But, seriously, while the quality of the video sucked, the very first game in the series was for DOS and required a 386/25 SX and 4 megs of RAM.
You don't need all these new 3-D engines to make an adventure game. Access Software did it on a shoestring budget, using programmers and company executives as actors.
But then damn Microsoft bought Access Software for their golf game and stopped the series.
I own the second, The Pandora Directive and third, Overseer, and I hope that one day I can find the first cheap, Under a Killing Moon.
For once, no one's whining this is unfair...they're just pointing out that it's a bit absurd for MS to start whining about the opposite. Sure, people who didn't get a machine with Windows sometimes illegally use Windows, but plenty of people who legally got a machine with Windows don't use Windows. (This is why MS doesn't want you to resell Windows, and claims you are prohibited by law from transfering an OEM copy to anyone else.)
In fact, nearly all machines that currently run Linux and are older than a few years almost certainly have some random MS OS license that just basically got thrown away, whether XP or 2000 or 9x or even DOS and Win 3.1. Thanks to 'anti-piracy' measures, they're nearly impossible to sell.
I know, because I have a copy of Microsoft Office XP Professional that I was given, for free, by MS, at a developer convention, and wish to sell. I have another copy I was randomly mailed out of the blue because I apparently picked up a demo of something and a demo of Office and the demo of Office didn't work with the demo of the other thing, so they mailed me a real copy without asking me, in addition to the other copy I 'purchased' for free. (This second copy has 'not for resale' on it, which they can't actually do...you can't impose terms on goods randomly mailed to people. I didn't in any way order that second CD. And I never installed that copy, so I've never agreed to the EULA, or even seen it.)
It's a perfectly normal, legal thing for me to do, to sell these two copies, but MS has manipulated eBay into refusing to let me list them. They do the same thing with OS copies.
(Before anyone complains about me selling things I got for 'free', I have to point out that I spent a day of my time, at one of their stupid launch parties, to get those things.)
But when someone's raped, it isn't new life that's being formed?
I mean, there are basically two option here:
1. This some sort of moral judgement on children concieved by rapes, that they are not really people. I don't think anyone is trying to go there.
2. This is a moral judgement on parents who conceive by voluntarily having sex.
Those are really the only two ways to look at letting rape victims have abortions. It's either because their children are not people for some reason, or it's because they didn't do anything wrong. The only reason you won't admit 2 is that, at that point, you have admit what you're doing is punishing people for sex, but you (quite correctly) don't want to punish rape victims. The problem there, of course, is that sex is legal.
And, of course, you completely missed the point about negligence, pregnancy, and rape. I didn't say anyone deserved to be hurt. I'm saying they're all equally underdeserving, both of rape and of being forced to have a child.
A small amount of negligency, whether it's walking down the wrong alley or forgetting birth control pills, doesn't deserve whatever punishement is 'handed down by God' or the roll of a dice. In today's society, we don't even allow the universe to dictate punishment for large amounts of negligence or even outright criminal action, like in my nuclear device example.
Instead, we ourselves, dictate punishment, and allow the punished to be do whatever he wants outside of the punishment. I may end up in prison, but if I get tuberculous while there, I get treated, because I wasn't punished with a case of tuberculous, I was punished with prison. (Erm, okay, I'd get the death penalty, but whatever. Even people on death row get treated for diseases, although I do agree that sterilizing the needle for a lethal injection is a bit silly.)
You, on the other hand, appear to be saying that people who have consensual sex deserve to be forced to have children if they conceive. You seem to be reasoning from the concept that this is some sort of punishment, presumably handed down by God, even if you won't come out and say it. The rape exception is a dead giveaway, though. (Why God choses to punish rape victims with the added pain of either an abortion or a pregnancy is presumably still unknown. Probably the same reason that churches were disproportionally struck by lighting back when they were the tallest buildings in town.)
Robert's Rules of Order, which basically all 'meetings that vote on things' use, don't need any large modification, they work pretty well.
Robert's was designed to make everything come down to two choices. Yes, or no. It's when there are more than two choices that the system breaks down.
There are a few places it could be used, for example, who gets to speak next, or what bill should be considered next, but it's not really worth it...that's what chairmen are for, figuring out the direction of the meeting.
It's easier for smaller parties to run and get votes.
But it's not easier for them to win, because it has exactly the same spoiler effect as with the currect system once they get anywhere near a Ross Perot level of support.
But, of course, the spoiler effect kicks in later, so major parties are less likely to be inconvenienced. Yeah, that's what we need, the major parties to ignore other viewpoints more.
IRV is worse than the current system. It lets people freely vote for third parties only as long as those parties cannot win, exactly like the current system, it just move the spoiler effect from 5% of the total vote to around 30%.
Which would let the Democrats, for example, completely ignore the Greens, because the Greens can't influence the vote as long as everyone's voting '1st choice - Greens, 2nd choice - Democrats'...the Green votes will literally be thrown away unless they're near Democrat vote level. (This is not to endorse the Greens or the Democrats or anyone, it's just a current example of a significant subset of a party that is altering the elections results, and would not be able to under IRV.)
While what you are talking about is the sane way to do Condorcet ballots, it is, indeed, possible to vote via a grid and let votes come up with circular and identical weighed choices, and all sorts of silliness, and have it counted 'sanely'.
Not that we should let people do that, of course. It provides no benefit, and confuses the hell out of people.
To deal with system-wide circular ranking (As opposed to individual circular ranking, which is just idiotic and we shouldn't let people vote that way.), you need to use Condorcet. Condorcet can actually handle circular voting patterns.
With Condorcet, if four million put X over Y, and five million put Y over X, that comes to a million Y over X. This is why it's called a pairwise system...instead of one election, there are X * (X-1) elections tallied, where each person was in a hypothetical race with each other person.
Sometimes there will be a clear winner (If A won every hypothetical race), usually not. At that point what happened is called circular voting. A is better than B is better than C is better than A.
So what do we do? Well, first, we throw away D, who didn't win any virtual elections. He didn't beat out anyone, so we drop him. This doesn't accomplish anything except make the rest of the math easier, because the votes that had him in first, then C, A, and B, were already counted, unlike in IRV.
And we repeat that...if E only beat D, now he's gone. And so on.
Honestly, by this point, we'd be pretty much done with any election in recent history, but let's take our hypothetical and figure out if A, B, or C won.
So now we just have a single loop. So what we do is find the virtual election with the smallest margin of victory, and just throw it out. And we do it until someone wins all remaining virtual elections.
It gets rather more confusing if we have A beats B and C, C and B beats D, C beats B, and D beats A, and other such crazy results. But the math is worked out and doable.
IRV, the system with issues with circular ballots, is just a way to let people 'safely' vote for third parties while entrenching the two party system, anyway.
Yeah, any sort of 'pick more than one candidate' ballot needs to have a 'no' box.
I'm for Condorcet voting, using computers. (Which then print the ballots. None of the black box shit.)
It would be very easy in most cases, giving a list of names, and saying 'pick the person you most want to be president'. You touch their name, and they move to another part of the screen, and you repeat the process. You can stop at any time, to satify people who would be completely outraged at voting for Bush, which is silly. I wouldn't vote for Bush either, but I'd rather have him than the Nazi party. That's all a vote in the Condorcet system means...you'd rather have X than Y. It doesn't mean you actually want X.
Although it would be funny to have a 'no one' vote in there that doesn't count, it would just mark some arbitratry point, below which you think that none of those people would be a good choice.;)
At the end, you have a list, in order.
And, yes, under Condorcet, the system can theoretically handle things where a person wants A over B, B over C, and C over A. Unlike others proponents, I don't try to explain this as a feature, but merely point out we don't have to let people vote like spastics. Just because the system can handle a vote like that doesn't mean we need to allow people to cast it. Such voting is just extremely silly.
Also my system doesn't let you express equal preferences for two candidates, and I don't care about that either. Just flip a coin or something. All equal prefences would mean that, if you could do that, and if it came down to your vote, we'd be unable to decide on one! It makes no sense to try to have that happen.
Condorcet when people can say 'I want random candidate X over random candidate Y' is confusing. You can get loops, you can get two completely difference sets of candidates (A over B, B over C, X over Y, Z over X.), you can do all sorts of crazy stuff, and the system can count it and be 'fair'. But we don't need to let people do that, it's just as fair if all you're allowed to do is number the candidates.
Yeah, I don't see the logic here. It's taking the current system we have, and giving everyone five votes instead of one.
I can't imagine how that will help things. It will mostly just multple the number by five. Except in states with spoilers, where people will be faced with an even more confusing question, how much they should vote for the spoiler, and how much for the party with the chance of winning. (As opposed to now, where it's a binary choice.)
Oh, I'm all for completely green energy production...solar, hydroelectric, and wind.
I just don't think we are at the point we can use them to generate all our power.Coal and nuclear generate one or two orders of magnitude more than any 'green' energy production method, unless you happen to have a Hoover Dam at your disposal. (And engineering dams on that scale has other enviromental problems, and takes forever.)
Sure, you could replace one or two coal plants with some 'perfect' energy production, but, really, we need to replace them all, now. They're absolutely horrible for the enviroment.
If we actually did nuclear power correctly, like France, we could have very little radioactive byproducts, and absolutely no chance of anything bad happening. We need to start using the method they use to recycle their fuel, I don't really understand how it works, but it apparently does.
It's not ideal, but it's a damn site better than all the radon our coal mines are pumping into the air, and coal dust and CO2 our power plants are pumping into the air.
I read somewhere that our coal mining releases more radioactivity a year, thanks to radon, than all nuclear accidents combined have ever released. And I'm completely avoiding mentioning the dangers to people working in a coal mine. Coal burning is just stupid.
If, we built these plants and then ten years latter we figure out how to power the nation using wind, solar, and hydro power...well, life is ironic sometimes. We'll dismantle them, or at least pull out the radioactive material and turn them off. But it was better, those ten years, to be using nuclear power than coal.
Of course we need more nuclear plants, because we still have coal power plants.
Until we have no more coal plants, we need to replace them with anything, as fast as possible. Anything else is just silly and very damaging to the enviroment.
And the only workable contenders are hydroelectric and nuclear. And hydroelectric is limited in location.
The hunger problem isn't a money issue, either, it's a political issue. Keep the people starving and all they do is complain about starving, and the people in power can do whatever they want.
You know, if we're going to start using US forces to overthrow governments openly, let's do it to those bastards. At least under Saddam, people had food. They might be dragged off by goons and tortured to death, but they had food. There are places where people don't have food because of delibrate government action.
Slashdot Mirror
He's just not getting the same pasting in the US media.
And I have to point out that the UN supported an attack on Afghanistan, and that was attacking a nation that just harbours people who attacked us, instead of attacking a nation that actually attacked us. Saying they'd suddenly not support us going to war against a nation if we were attacked by said nation is absurd right-wing propoganda.
And the citizens there are now even more pissed than the US citizens are. They fell for lies their government handled out, just like the US, and their government was in bed with the US.
OTOH, that's not what the ICC is for, either. The ICC is for removing people, including people in power, and trying them for international law violations, which basically comes down to genocide and some acts you can only commit during war.
The US basically delibrately suttled the ICC for no reason except it apparently wants to be able to commit war crimes, like locking POWs up without following the Geneva convention. (Yes, yes, the ICC doesn't require a jury trial. But we're the 800 pound gorilla here...if we demanded a jury trial, by God the ICC would put that right in.) But let's pretend we've signed on to the ICC.
Let's use the example of North Korea, but one without any power. Let's assume both the UN and the ICC have can basically project whatever amount of military force is needed, and let's assume everyone wants to overthrow North Korea. (Except, presumably, them.) However, they have commited, as far as I know, no genocide. There's really nothing to charge them with. They aren't building nuclear weapons in violation of any treaty, because they haven't signed any such treaty, and, hell, they can always unsign them. They aren't violating the Geneva convention, they aren't even at war with anyone. (Locking up spies is not a violation.)
They, legally, aren't doing anything wrong. Neither the UN or the ICC can do anything about them. Even if they were doing something wrong, all you can do it put the people who were doing it on trial, not remove the entire government.
However, there is a way to overthrow such governments...support an insurrection from within, and come in with the military during the resultant civil war. This used to be how we overthrew governments.
Now, of course, that's called 'terrorism'.
And '49 nations' is mostly crap. We had one military significant and independent ally in that war that I know of.
What we need for 'war outside international law', aka, unprovoced and/or without UN mandate, isn't just 'international national support', (Which in this case means 'Britian'.), but a damn good reason.
No one's saying we shouldn't have intervened in Iraq if inspectors had found WMD and China, for whatever reason, had sat there and veto'd resolutions to invade it. Hell, if we'd honestly asked for a government change in Iraq, well, we can't do that through the UN, but maybe we don't want to play that game anymore if we can't.
The UN will rather quickly become irrelevant if it ignores US, Russia, China, or Europe, so it's not some magical solution to everything, especially if one of the nations we have a problem with is a strong ally of one of them, as was claimed with France.
However, Bush and co managed to trick the US, and several other countries, into thinking the UN was broken, when in fact it was functioning completely correctly, at least in respect to policing Iraq.
That really pisses me off, and should piss every American off, as the UN was our doing. The UN is where two quabbling nations can come and have a neutral third party decide their boundary, instead of fighting over it. It's the organization that demands the International Red Cross have access to POW camps, and by God they get it. It's the organization that will impartially observe you destroy WMD.
People don't generally know what it was like in the days before the UN/League of Nations, but anyone who doesn't know need to look at the start of the first world war.
And this has nothing to do with 'black and hispanic' communities...the same thing applies to every poor community. Basically as many white people in poor communities don't go to college, but if poor communities contain 15% of the white population and 40% of the black population, there'll will be the obvious inbalance in the resulting college population.
And, yes, if black and hispanic individuals personally valued education more, they could fight their way through, and end up in college, much like many of them do. But that's not incredibly relevant...almost anyone, if they're smart and determined enough, can get to college.
The point is that there are plenty of non-smart, non-determined rich kids at colleges, simply because being upper-middle class means that's basically automatic...they have the money, so the kids go to college. Lower-class, and even lower-middle class, does not have the money, and thus the only way to get there is through a lot of hard work and being natively intelligent, and willing to completely ignore the broken-ass grade school system they're exposed to, and they still have to get lucky.
Which, as I pointed out, there seem to be a larger number of oriental kids who do that as opposed to any other race.
And I have to point out poor people getting into college on scholarships doesn't scale, anyway.
Ah. Well, nevermind.
I just want to see someone prove that anonymous click was mine. I want them to prove a cat didn't jump on a keyboard, or some toddler didn't wander by.
That's what their lawyer should have argued. They should have asked Blizzard to point out exactly which of their employees agreed to that contract, and why Blizzard thought said employee could agree to a contract on behalf of the corporation. (This is, I believe, a fairly standard question in business contract law.)
But the gag here is...Blizzard doen't know who agreed to the 'contract', which makes it a rather absurd sort of contract. Blizzard had absolutely no idea if the person who agreed was even slightly authorized to agree to the contract on behalf of the company. Now, contract law says, if you think someone at a company is authorized to do something, and they represent themselves as such, the contract is valid...but you have to make at least a minimal sanity check, like 'Does the person actually work there?'.
Put 'All Rights Reserved' after that and you've got it. That means is that you're explicitly not giving up any rights provided to you under copyright law, so people can't claim some sort of implicit agreement to redistribute it.
Tell me, how do you pronounce 'school'? How about 'eschew'? When did 'sch' become pronounced 'sh'?
Someone's pronouncing the word 'schedule' wrong, but it isn't Americans.
I will, however, admit Americans say 'issue' wrong. There's no 'h' in it. (Of course, I sometimes wonder if the word is actually supposed to be pronounced 'is-hue' and it's just the English accent dropping the h. ;) )
For those that don't know, those were fully 3-D adventure games. Not only that, but they managed to be interactive movies at the same time, right about all the time all the 'interactive movies' were failing. (Think CD-I, if that rings a bell.) The last one, Overseer, had a DVD with DVD quality video.
It's interesting that one of the first, and only, adventure games that managed to get 3-D enviroments right was also one of the first, and only, adventure games that managed to get full motion video right. They managed to combine DOOM quality movement (This is when we were all trying to get those fancy new VESA video cards, or running Sci-Tech if we didn't have one.) with quake quality once you stopped for a second, and a somewhat crappy actual recorded video obviously done on a bluescreen and pasted in front of the background. Rounded objects tended to be non-rotatable...
But, seriously, while the quality of the video sucked, the very first game in the series was for DOS and required a 386/25 SX and 4 megs of RAM. You don't need all these new 3-D engines to make an adventure game. Access Software did it on a shoestring budget, using programmers and company executives as actors.
But then damn Microsoft bought Access Software for their golf game and stopped the series.
I own the second, The Pandora Directive and third, Overseer, and I hope that one day I can find the first cheap, Under a Killing Moon.
For once, no one's whining this is unfair...they're just pointing out that it's a bit absurd for MS to start whining about the opposite. Sure, people who didn't get a machine with Windows sometimes illegally use Windows, but plenty of people who legally got a machine with Windows don't use Windows. (This is why MS doesn't want you to resell Windows, and claims you are prohibited by law from transfering an OEM copy to anyone else.)
In fact, nearly all machines that currently run Linux and are older than a few years almost certainly have some random MS OS license that just basically got thrown away, whether XP or 2000 or 9x or even DOS and Win 3.1. Thanks to 'anti-piracy' measures, they're nearly impossible to sell.
I know, because I have a copy of Microsoft Office XP Professional that I was given, for free, by MS, at a developer convention, and wish to sell. I have another copy I was randomly mailed out of the blue because I apparently picked up a demo of something and a demo of Office and the demo of Office didn't work with the demo of the other thing, so they mailed me a real copy without asking me, in addition to the other copy I 'purchased' for free. (This second copy has 'not for resale' on it, which they can't actually do...you can't impose terms on goods randomly mailed to people. I didn't in any way order that second CD. And I never installed that copy, so I've never agreed to the EULA, or even seen it.)
It's a perfectly normal, legal thing for me to do, to sell these two copies, but MS has manipulated eBay into refusing to let me list them. They do the same thing with OS copies.
(Before anyone complains about me selling things I got for 'free', I have to point out that I spent a day of my time, at one of their stupid launch parties, to get those things.)
I mean, there are basically two option here:
1. This some sort of moral judgement on children concieved by rapes, that they are not really people. I don't think anyone is trying to go there.
2. This is a moral judgement on parents who conceive by voluntarily having sex.
Those are really the only two ways to look at letting rape victims have abortions. It's either because their children are not people for some reason, or it's because they didn't do anything wrong. The only reason you won't admit 2 is that, at that point, you have admit what you're doing is punishing people for sex, but you (quite correctly) don't want to punish rape victims. The problem there, of course, is that sex is legal.
And, of course, you completely missed the point about negligence, pregnancy, and rape. I didn't say anyone deserved to be hurt. I'm saying they're all equally underdeserving, both of rape and of being forced to have a child.
A small amount of negligency, whether it's walking down the wrong alley or forgetting birth control pills, doesn't deserve whatever punishement is 'handed down by God' or the roll of a dice. In today's society, we don't even allow the universe to dictate punishment for large amounts of negligence or even outright criminal action, like in my nuclear device example.
Instead, we ourselves, dictate punishment, and allow the punished to be do whatever he wants outside of the punishment. I may end up in prison, but if I get tuberculous while there, I get treated, because I wasn't punished with a case of tuberculous, I was punished with prison. (Erm, okay, I'd get the death penalty, but whatever. Even people on death row get treated for diseases, although I do agree that sterilizing the needle for a lethal injection is a bit silly.)
You, on the other hand, appear to be saying that people who have consensual sex deserve to be forced to have children if they conceive. You seem to be reasoning from the concept that this is some sort of punishment, presumably handed down by God, even if you won't come out and say it. The rape exception is a dead giveaway, though. (Why God choses to punish rape victims with the added pain of either an abortion or a pregnancy is presumably still unknown. Probably the same reason that churches were disproportionally struck by lighting back when they were the tallest buildings in town.)
Either that or they just fight to the death.
Robert's was designed to make everything come down to two choices. Yes, or no. It's when there are more than two choices that the system breaks down.
There are a few places it could be used, for example, who gets to speak next, or what bill should be considered next, but it's not really worth it...that's what chairmen are for, figuring out the direction of the meeting.
Think of it as pre-emptive term limits. ;)
But it's not easier for them to win, because it has exactly the same spoiler effect as with the currect system once they get anywhere near a Ross Perot level of support.
But, of course, the spoiler effect kicks in later, so major parties are less likely to be inconvenienced. Yeah, that's what we need, the major parties to ignore other viewpoints more.
IRV is worse than the current system. It lets people freely vote for third parties only as long as those parties cannot win, exactly like the current system, it just move the spoiler effect from 5% of the total vote to around 30%.
Which would let the Democrats, for example, completely ignore the Greens, because the Greens can't influence the vote as long as everyone's voting '1st choice - Greens, 2nd choice - Democrats'...the Green votes will literally be thrown away unless they're near Democrat vote level. (This is not to endorse the Greens or the Democrats or anyone, it's just a current example of a significant subset of a party that is altering the elections results, and would not be able to under IRV.)
Not that we should let people do that, of course. It provides no benefit, and confuses the hell out of people.
Look, if you're going to crib directly from the wikipedia, at least format it correctly.
With Condorcet, if four million put X over Y, and five million put Y over X, that comes to a million Y over X. This is why it's called a pairwise system...instead of one election, there are X * (X-1) elections tallied, where each person was in a hypothetical race with each other person.
Sometimes there will be a clear winner (If A won every hypothetical race), usually not. At that point what happened is called circular voting. A is better than B is better than C is better than A.
So what do we do? Well, first, we throw away D, who didn't win any virtual elections. He didn't beat out anyone, so we drop him. This doesn't accomplish anything except make the rest of the math easier, because the votes that had him in first, then C, A, and B, were already counted, unlike in IRV.
And we repeat that...if E only beat D, now he's gone. And so on.
Honestly, by this point, we'd be pretty much done with any election in recent history, but let's take our hypothetical and figure out if A, B, or C won.
So now we just have a single loop. So what we do is find the virtual election with the smallest margin of victory, and just throw it out. And we do it until someone wins all remaining virtual elections.
It gets rather more confusing if we have A beats B and C, C and B beats D, C beats B, and D beats A, and other such crazy results. But the math is worked out and doable.
IRV, the system with issues with circular ballots, is just a way to let people 'safely' vote for third parties while entrenching the two party system, anyway.
I'm for Condorcet voting, using computers. (Which then print the ballots. None of the black box shit.)
It would be very easy in most cases, giving a list of names, and saying 'pick the person you most want to be president'. You touch their name, and they move to another part of the screen, and you repeat the process. You can stop at any time, to satify people who would be completely outraged at voting for Bush, which is silly. I wouldn't vote for Bush either, but I'd rather have him than the Nazi party. That's all a vote in the Condorcet system means...you'd rather have X than Y. It doesn't mean you actually want X.
Although it would be funny to have a 'no one' vote in there that doesn't count, it would just mark some arbitratry point, below which you think that none of those people would be a good choice. ;)
At the end, you have a list, in order.
And, yes, under Condorcet, the system can theoretically handle things where a person wants A over B, B over C, and C over A. Unlike others proponents, I don't try to explain this as a feature, but merely point out we don't have to let people vote like spastics. Just because the system can handle a vote like that doesn't mean we need to allow people to cast it. Such voting is just extremely silly.
Also my system doesn't let you express equal preferences for two candidates, and I don't care about that either. Just flip a coin or something. All equal prefences would mean that, if you could do that, and if it came down to your vote, we'd be unable to decide on one! It makes no sense to try to have that happen.
Condorcet when people can say 'I want random candidate X over random candidate Y' is confusing. You can get loops, you can get two completely difference sets of candidates (A over B, B over C, X over Y, Z over X.), you can do all sorts of crazy stuff, and the system can count it and be 'fair'. But we don't need to let people do that, it's just as fair if all you're allowed to do is number the candidates.
I can't imagine how that will help things. It will mostly just multple the number by five. Except in states with spoilers, where people will be faced with an even more confusing question, how much they should vote for the spoiler, and how much for the party with the chance of winning. (As opposed to now, where it's a binary choice.)
I just don't think we are at the point we can use them to generate all our power.Coal and nuclear generate one or two orders of magnitude more than any 'green' energy production method, unless you happen to have a Hoover Dam at your disposal. (And engineering dams on that scale has other enviromental problems, and takes forever.)
Sure, you could replace one or two coal plants with some 'perfect' energy production, but, really, we need to replace them all, now. They're absolutely horrible for the enviroment.
If we actually did nuclear power correctly, like France, we could have very little radioactive byproducts, and absolutely no chance of anything bad happening. We need to start using the method they use to recycle their fuel, I don't really understand how it works, but it apparently does.
It's not ideal, but it's a damn site better than all the radon our coal mines are pumping into the air, and coal dust and CO2 our power plants are pumping into the air.
I read somewhere that our coal mining releases more radioactivity a year, thanks to radon, than all nuclear accidents combined have ever released. And I'm completely avoiding mentioning the dangers to people working in a coal mine. Coal burning is just stupid.
If, we built these plants and then ten years latter we figure out how to power the nation using wind, solar, and hydro power...well, life is ironic sometimes. We'll dismantle them, or at least pull out the radioactive material and turn them off. But it was better, those ten years, to be using nuclear power than coal.
Until we have no more coal plants, we need to replace them with anything, as fast as possible. Anything else is just silly and very damaging to the enviroment.
And the only workable contenders are hydroelectric and nuclear. And hydroelectric is limited in location.
You know, if we're going to start using US forces to overthrow governments openly, let's do it to those bastards. At least under Saddam, people had food. They might be dragged off by goons and tortured to death, but they had food. There are places where people don't have food because of delibrate government action.