Re:How can you trust this article?
on
Review: Halo Wars
·
· Score: 1
Halo 1/2/3 didn't come with the consoles except in later special Halo edition variants as I recall. They know people will buy Halo, so they purposefully did not pack it in.
Yes, most people do get a little confused. Which is why Meghan usually has to spell out her name to people who are writing it out, whereas Megan doesn't.
Everything is arbitrary, but some things are more arbitrary than others.
There's more types of hardcore geeks than the kind that are good at Linux.
The potential to be good at the concepts underlying Linux is probably in virtually all of them though, which should probably be good cause to sit up and listen when someone who considers themselves to be a hardcore geek starts having trouble with getting starts in Linux.
I fail to see why in the world consoles have the inability to use keyboard and mouse at least as an option. The 360 has USB ports, the PS3 has Bluetooth and USB. Why can't I just take my keyboard and mouse combo and use it for these systems as an option?
Some people have given me the excuse that MSFT/Sony/Nintendo want 'consistent gameplay' with the controllers that people will already have. If that's the case though, why do we have things like weird huge joysticks for mech games (360), Rockband kits, the Wii-Fit board, or the Duck Hunt stype zapper for the Wii??? These aren't your standard controllers, but are more than fine. I'm guessing that 'most' households with a game system have a USB keyboard and mouse laying around somewhere.
It has nothing to do with limiting the number of controllers people have. I bet it's actually that most people don't want to have to play against people with an advantage over them. No one reasonable, generally including even die-hard console fans, disputes that the mouse and keyboard is more precise. A lot of people do dispute, however, whether it's more fun to have a mouse and keyboard on your couch in the living room.
I know that as a console game player, I just wouldn't play any game online where a sizable percentage of the population is using a mouse and keyboard. They have an advantage over me, as surely as baseball players that use steroids have advantages over their clean brethren, and I don't want to adopt their tactics simply to remain competitive. I just wouldn't play, and the number of players like me is a lot larger than the number of players who want to use the mouse and keyboard, so it doesn't make sense to include the option.
Furthermore, and I'm not sure how widely held this view is, but at least for FPS, I actually prefer the lower accuracy of the game controller. The mouse makes it too easy to be unrealistically good, bunny jumping down the hallway while sniping people in the head with a high calibre rifle in mid jump. The fact that it's harder to do that on a console is a good thing to me. There's a reason we don't train our soldiers to jump all around while trying to snipe in real life.
Re:How can you trust this article?
on
Review: Halo Wars
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Like it or not, Halo is the most popular FPS out there by numbers, despite being on a console, and as a result it is the most common standard people use to compare by.
Note that I can say this without making any type of a judgment on gaming on PCs or consoles.
Kinda reminds me of the difference between small, swift companies not afraid to aim high or die trying, versus large established corporations.
In the long run, the large established corporation is the better bet in a one on one comparison, but there can be a lot of startup competitors, and every so often the radical innovations of someone not afraid to risk everything results in a breakthrough that changes everything and overturns the corporation's apple cart.
While your criticism holds for traditional Doom style run and gun AI, I think there's a number of ways you could still make a great game out of it, and I think the players would respond positively to a game with really great AI.
Just off the top of my head; 1) Halo style you're a tank with shields. Just because the AI is acting really smart, you're still a lot stronger than most of the enemies you face. That makes for a pretty entertaining scenario, and good AI would work great with it. 2) Enemies don't know you're coming. Okay, they can plan intelligently, but that doesn't mean they'd all cluster up in one spot and lay a trap for you if you're infiltrating their base. 3) Realistic AI should also include human weakness. Enemies should panic and run when the super human comes blasting through, and should flip out when half their squad is mowed down in 5 seconds. In real life, a single well-trained military unit can defeat a much larger number of untrained armed enemies.
Could someone provide a comprehensible description for non-physicists of what the Casimir Force is? I looked it up on Wikipedia (and like all math and physics related articles there) came up with a borderline unintelligible "summary".
It's overview is:
The Casimir effect can be understood by the idea that the presence of conducting metals and dielectrics alter the vacuum expectation value of the energy of the second quantized electromagnetic field. Since the value of this energy depends on the shapes and positions of the conductors and dielectrics, the Casimir effect makes itself manifest as a force between such objects.
It's intro is similar:
In physics, the Casimir effect and the Casimir-Polder force are physical forces arising from a quantized field. The typical example is of two uncharged metallic plates in a vacuum, placed a few micrometers apart, without any external electromagnetic field. In a classical description, the lack of an external field also means that there is no field between the plates, and no force would be measured between them. When this field is instead studied using quantum electrodynamics, it is seen that the plates do affect the virtual photons which constitute the field, and generate a net force[1]â"either an attraction or a repulsion depending on the specific arrangement of the two plates. This force has been measured, and is a striking example of an effect purely due to second quantization.
Maybe you should read the article before you rant.
"Interestingly, the shanzhai employ a concept called the âoeopen BOMâ â" they share their bill of materials and other design materials with each other, and they share any improvements made; these rules are policed by community word-of-mouth, to the extent that if someone is found cheating they are ostracized by the shanzhai ecosystem."
It's actually kinda like the GPL. The Shanzhai guys aren't going to share their stuff with you, because you're not in the ecosystem and not gonna share with them.
I've not yet had a chance to check one of these out. As I understand it, the look and feel of reading the eink display is just like reading bright white paper fresh from the laser printer. I've never had problems reading text on computer screens for long stretches but many people say it causes eye strain for them.
I'm curious as to how this technology scales. It boggles the mind to think it took that much time and money to develop but now that they have it, how cheap can they make it? Could they get the readers down to a more reasonable cost?
It's really more similar to newsprint than to a bright white paper fresh from the laser print. Black on grey versus black on white. Which is fine from a readability standpoint, but could be prettier.
In terms of cost, I'm sure it can get even cheaper, but there are already cheaper alternatives to the Kindle, which comes bundled with lifetime wireless cell data service already paid for. For example, this is similar but more than a $100 cheaper: ESlick
But this is the Broken Window Fallacy. If you're going to call me out for saying so as being too obvious, then it seems like you should call out the post I responded to for causing me to respond with pointing it out.
Just because we have more jobs now making ink, and cutting down trees, and delivering newspapers, doesn't mean that it's a good thing to be having those jobs, if those jobs aren't creating value. Assuming the subscribers are just as happy with a Kindle, then the additional expenditures shifting money to those people create no additional value, they simply cost the publisher additional money that they could have been using productively to generate additional value.
A fraud action actually was brought by those injured by Rambus' purportedly fraudulent actions, i.e. the other memory manufacturers. The FTC wanted to also punish Rambus, so it brought a separate anti-trust case against Rambus, which was decided for Rambus by an appellate court, and that is what was just turned down for review by the Supreme Court.
The fraud actions failed after juries decided that Rambus had been showing off these technologies before the standards board meetings, and that the JEDEC standards board rules don't clearly require disclosure of the patents. Source: link.
For what it's worth though, Rambus seems to be having difficulties enforcing its patents. Apparently, it destroyed key documents related to them. Source: link.
I'm not really immediately clear on why, but this case was litigated on a different ground than everyone here is discussing (as of the time I am posting this comment).
JEDEC is a standards board that requires members to disclose their patent holdings. With proper disclosure, JEDEC could either adopt a non-proprietary standard, or require reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing. Rambus was a member, but failed to disclose its patents, and then convinced the standards board to adopt its patents as standards.
Rather than litigating on fraud, like most people are assuming, it seems that at least at the appellate level, the FTC proceeded on an anti-trust theory. In order to succeed in an anti-trust case under the Sherman Antitrust Act, it has to be shown that your conduct reduced competition. If a company already has a monopoly, under this law, simply using it to charge higher prices isn't illegal, it's using it to quash competition that is, and it must be shown that but-for the deceptive conduct another standard would have been adopted. Now Rambus' actions are a lot of things, but it's not immediately apparent they reduced competition simply by increasing prices, and that's what the appellate court found. I don't really understand at first glance why this wasn't a fraud case.
The Supreme Court didn't actually side with anyone. They declined to review, like they do for more than 90% of cases, and this decidedly does not mean they side with either side. It simply means they're very busy and decided this wans't one of the 100 most pressing cases facing the United States in this year. Therefore, the appellate level decision stands on this case.
Source on most of what I'm saying on Rambus: link.
This is just begging to be discussed by the article series featured on Slashdot last week, "You Are Not A Lawyer", which had the stated purpose to "try to disabuse computer scientists and other technically minded people of some commonly held misconceptions about the law (and the legal system).": http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/10/1749208&from=rss
At the time, the comments were filled with snark about how it is an unfair stereotype that geeks don't understand the law and try to "hack" the law with overly cute tricks. This article is the stereotype.
And won't people figure out a way to beat the armor, or beat the system. Imagine a sniper rifle that fires a decoy bullet, that knocks the target down (as he evades the first bullet) and puts the armor wearer in a prone position on the ground, making him or her easy to target. Or perhaps a decoy bullet is shot from one barrel and the real bullet follows in a pre-calculated trajectory requiring no manual aiming for the sniper. Perhaps a bullet can be made undetectable to the electromagnetic pulse that the armor gives off. Maybe the armor can be jammed? You fire a bullet with an electromagnetic pulse destabilizer and then pick off your target when the armor fails.
You make a lot of good points, but this is just wet blanket quibbling. If our enemies have to be using special sniper rifles with computers built in that fire multiple bullets just to hit one of our guys, I think that means the system worked. Same for them having to use special ammunition.
I would actually think that regional interests tend to be much less significant than interests associated with membership in other groups. Who has more in common against 'mainstream' America, rural citizens that live in Iowa, or citizens that believe in fundamentalist Islam?
I think even the argument that it supports rural regions is kinda bunk. It supports arbitrary traditions. Who's stronger in the electoral college, a voter that lives in Rhode Island, or one that lives in Iowa? Rhode Island is not exactly rural. Why are Wyoming voters stronger than Iowa? They're both rural. The fact is that the political borders of the states are arbitrary divides that were created not based on the belief that this would be the ideal way to split up the country, but political happenstance. The fact that it helps rural America at the expense of most of the population of America is a side effect. Like someone else pointed out, you might as well have a system of popular vote, where you just give rural voters 1.5 votes per person. Sounds a lot less fair that way though.
By the way, I actually don't think catering to groups other than geography that have common interests is a particularly good idea either. It just seems that they are comparable ideas.
The persecution/martyr complex of America's rural poor would be funny if it didn't have such negative real world outgrowths. The poor suffering NY upstate rural voters, so ignored by the NYS government that doesn't have an electoral college or a geography based Senate, such that they're forced to accept $11 billion from the city of New York each year that they don't give back in benefits. Source
Your Constitutional argument has nothing to say on this particular reform, because all of this is being done in the context of reforms that are legal under the Constitution. And an appeal to tradition has nothing to say from a good idea/bad idea point of view either. In terms of whether the current electoral college is a good idea, there doesn't appear to me to be much more of a rational basis for apportioning votes based on geography than based on race, or sexual orientation, or disability, etc.
Where did you see me say that Iowa should tell people in cities how they should live either?
You said it when you assumed that by not giving Iowans disproportionate representation, that people in big cities would be telling Iowans how to live their lives. If you assume Iowans are not exercising their disproportionate influence to receive disproportionate benefits from the federal government, then there is no reason to assume that city centers would do so either if voting was made equitable among all citizens (as opposed to among pieces of geography).
Regarding Vermont, you're right, I was mistaken. Amend that to Delaware, New Jersey, New Hampshire, etc. then for the small states that forced this inequitable result.
That is not a principled reason, but instead is based on self-interest, which I already freely acknowledged is with Iowa keeping the existing system.
If you are presenting this as a principled matter, then why should people in Iowa get to tell people in the big cities how to live their life? The federal government affects everyone, and just because we needed to make a Faustian bargain with Delaware, New Jersey, Vermont, etc. (man I bet they regret that now) to be able to form this country doesn't mean it's right for the country to spend a disproportionate amount of money on the few.
Or maybe it does, and we should have spaces reserved in the electoral college for each racial minority. That way, we can guarantee the candidates won't care only about the needs of white Americans.
States rights does not have to be binary. There is no reason one cannot advocate states rights where it makes sense, and to set it aside where it does not. Just because the electoral college has lost its original reason for existence (educated electors chosen by the people to utilize their education to pick the best person to lead) does not mean that leaving concepts such as gun control to state and local bodies cannot be effective still.
One further point that I wish to make for those who still think the electoral college is a good idea.
Why do you think that rural Californian voters or New York voters should get no meaningful vote at all at the expense of favoring rural Midwestern voters?
Slashdot Mirror
You are confusing mistake of fact with mistake of law. The former may be a defense, and the latter is generally not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistake_of_fact
Halo 1/2/3 didn't come with the consoles except in later special Halo edition variants as I recall. They know people will buy Halo, so they purposefully did not pack it in.
Yes, most people do get a little confused. Which is why Meghan usually has to spell out her name to people who are writing it out, whereas Megan doesn't.
Everything is arbitrary, but some things are more arbitrary than others.
There's more types of hardcore geeks than the kind that are good at Linux.
The potential to be good at the concepts underlying Linux is probably in virtually all of them though, which should probably be good cause to sit up and listen when someone who considers themselves to be a hardcore geek starts having trouble with getting starts in Linux.
I fail to see why in the world consoles have the inability to use keyboard and mouse at least as an option. The 360 has USB ports, the PS3 has Bluetooth and USB. Why can't I just take my keyboard and mouse combo and use it for these systems as an option?
Some people have given me the excuse that MSFT/Sony/Nintendo want 'consistent gameplay' with the controllers that people will already have. If that's the case though, why do we have things like weird huge joysticks for mech games (360), Rockband kits, the Wii-Fit board, or the Duck Hunt stype zapper for the Wii??? These aren't your standard controllers, but are more than fine. I'm guessing that 'most' households with a game system have a USB keyboard and mouse laying around somewhere.
It has nothing to do with limiting the number of controllers people have. I bet it's actually that most people don't want to have to play against people with an advantage over them. No one reasonable, generally including even die-hard console fans, disputes that the mouse and keyboard is more precise. A lot of people do dispute, however, whether it's more fun to have a mouse and keyboard on your couch in the living room.
I know that as a console game player, I just wouldn't play any game online where a sizable percentage of the population is using a mouse and keyboard. They have an advantage over me, as surely as baseball players that use steroids have advantages over their clean brethren, and I don't want to adopt their tactics simply to remain competitive. I just wouldn't play, and the number of players like me is a lot larger than the number of players who want to use the mouse and keyboard, so it doesn't make sense to include the option.
Furthermore, and I'm not sure how widely held this view is, but at least for FPS, I actually prefer the lower accuracy of the game controller. The mouse makes it too easy to be unrealistically good, bunny jumping down the hallway while sniping people in the head with a high calibre rifle in mid jump. The fact that it's harder to do that on a console is a good thing to me. There's a reason we don't train our soldiers to jump all around while trying to snipe in real life.
Like it or not, Halo is the most popular FPS out there by numbers, despite being on a console, and as a result it is the most common standard people use to compare by.
Note that I can say this without making any type of a judgment on gaming on PCs or consoles.
Kinda reminds me of the difference between small, swift companies not afraid to aim high or die trying, versus large established corporations.
In the long run, the large established corporation is the better bet in a one on one comparison, but there can be a lot of startup competitors, and every so often the radical innovations of someone not afraid to risk everything results in a breakthrough that changes everything and overturns the corporation's apple cart.
While your criticism holds for traditional Doom style run and gun AI, I think there's a number of ways you could still make a great game out of it, and I think the players would respond positively to a game with really great AI.
Just off the top of my head;
1) Halo style you're a tank with shields. Just because the AI is acting really smart, you're still a lot stronger than most of the enemies you face. That makes for a pretty entertaining scenario, and good AI would work great with it.
2) Enemies don't know you're coming. Okay, they can plan intelligently, but that doesn't mean they'd all cluster up in one spot and lay a trap for you if you're infiltrating their base.
3) Realistic AI should also include human weakness. Enemies should panic and run when the super human comes blasting through, and should flip out when half their squad is mowed down in 5 seconds. In real life, a single well-trained military unit can defeat a much larger number of untrained armed enemies.
Could someone provide a comprehensible description for non-physicists of what the Casimir Force is? I looked it up on Wikipedia (and like all math and physics related articles there) came up with a borderline unintelligible "summary".
It's overview is:
It's intro is similar:
Maybe you should read the article before you rant.
"Interestingly, the shanzhai employ a concept called the âoeopen BOMâ â" they share their bill of materials and other design materials with each other, and they share any improvements made; these rules are policed by community word-of-mouth, to the extent that if someone is found cheating they are ostracized by the shanzhai ecosystem."
It's actually kinda like the GPL. The Shanzhai guys aren't going to share their stuff with you, because you're not in the ecosystem and not gonna share with them.
I've not yet had a chance to check one of these out. As I understand it, the look and feel of reading the eink display is just like reading bright white paper fresh from the laser printer. I've never had problems reading text on computer screens for long stretches but many people say it causes eye strain for them.
I'm curious as to how this technology scales. It boggles the mind to think it took that much time and money to develop but now that they have it, how cheap can they make it? Could they get the readers down to a more reasonable cost?
It's really more similar to newsprint than to a bright white paper fresh from the laser print. Black on grey versus black on white. Which is fine from a readability standpoint, but could be prettier.
In terms of cost, I'm sure it can get even cheaper, but there are already cheaper alternatives to the Kindle, which comes bundled with lifetime wireless cell data service already paid for. For example, this is similar but more than a $100 cheaper:
ESlick
But this is the Broken Window Fallacy. If you're going to call me out for saying so as being too obvious, then it seems like you should call out the post I responded to for causing me to respond with pointing it out.
Just because we have more jobs now making ink, and cutting down trees, and delivering newspapers, doesn't mean that it's a good thing to be having those jobs, if those jobs aren't creating value. Assuming the subscribers are just as happy with a Kindle, then the additional expenditures shifting money to those people create no additional value, they simply cost the publisher additional money that they could have been using productively to generate additional value.
Your argument seems to me like an instance of the Broken Window Fallacy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window.
Interesting, do you have a cite for this? I couldn't find anything on it after a minute or two Googling. Just a lot of junk on the La Brea tar pits.
Not to go too far offtopic, but I was intrigued by your post and looked into it a bit more.
According to Wikipedia, "There are only a few known asphalt lakes [the proper term for tar pit] worldwide."
Probably seems for the best to keep it that way then.
After more digging, I think I get it now.
A fraud action actually was brought by those injured by Rambus' purportedly fraudulent actions, i.e. the other memory manufacturers. The FTC wanted to also punish Rambus, so it brought a separate anti-trust case against Rambus, which was decided for Rambus by an appellate court, and that is what was just turned down for review by the Supreme Court.
The fraud actions failed after juries decided that Rambus had been showing off these technologies before the standards board meetings, and that the JEDEC standards board rules don't clearly require disclosure of the patents. Source:
link.
For what it's worth though, Rambus seems to be having difficulties enforcing its patents. Apparently, it destroyed key documents related to them.
Source:
link.
I'm not really immediately clear on why, but this case was litigated on a different ground than everyone here is discussing (as of the time I am posting this comment).
JEDEC is a standards board that requires members to disclose their patent holdings. With proper disclosure, JEDEC could either adopt a non-proprietary standard, or require reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing. Rambus was a member, but failed to disclose its patents, and then convinced the standards board to adopt its patents as standards.
Rather than litigating on fraud, like most people are assuming, it seems that at least at the appellate level, the FTC proceeded on an anti-trust theory. In order to succeed in an anti-trust case under the Sherman Antitrust Act, it has to be shown that your conduct reduced competition. If a company already has a monopoly, under this law, simply using it to charge higher prices isn't illegal, it's using it to quash competition that is, and it must be shown that but-for the deceptive conduct another standard would have been adopted. Now Rambus' actions are a lot of things, but it's not immediately apparent they reduced competition simply by increasing prices, and that's what the appellate court found. I don't really understand at first glance why this wasn't a fraud case.
The Supreme Court didn't actually side with anyone. They declined to review, like they do for more than 90% of cases, and this decidedly does not mean they side with either side. It simply means they're very busy and decided this wans't one of the 100 most pressing cases facing the United States in this year. Therefore, the appellate level decision stands on this case.
Source on most of what I'm saying on Rambus:
link.
This is just begging to be discussed by the article series featured on Slashdot last week, "You Are Not A Lawyer", which had the stated purpose to "try to disabuse computer scientists and other technically minded people of some commonly held misconceptions about the law (and the legal system).":
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/10/1749208&from=rss
At the time, the comments were filled with snark about how it is an unfair stereotype that geeks don't understand the law and try to "hack" the law with overly cute tricks. This article is the stereotype.
And won't people figure out a way to beat the armor, or beat the system. Imagine a sniper rifle that fires a decoy bullet, that knocks the target down (as he evades the first bullet) and puts the armor wearer in a prone position on the ground, making him or her easy to target. Or perhaps a decoy bullet is shot from one barrel and the real bullet follows in a pre-calculated trajectory requiring no manual aiming for the sniper. Perhaps a bullet can be made undetectable to the electromagnetic pulse that the armor gives off. Maybe the armor can be jammed? You fire a bullet with an electromagnetic pulse destabilizer and then pick off your target when the armor fails.
You make a lot of good points, but this is just wet blanket quibbling. If our enemies have to be using special sniper rifles with computers built in that fire multiple bullets just to hit one of our guys, I think that means the system worked. Same for them having to use special ammunition.
I would actually think that regional interests tend to be much less significant than interests associated with membership in other groups. Who has more in common against 'mainstream' America, rural citizens that live in Iowa, or citizens that believe in fundamentalist Islam?
I think even the argument that it supports rural regions is kinda bunk. It supports arbitrary traditions. Who's stronger in the electoral college, a voter that lives in Rhode Island, or one that lives in Iowa? Rhode Island is not exactly rural. Why are Wyoming voters stronger than Iowa? They're both rural. The fact is that the political borders of the states are arbitrary divides that were created not based on the belief that this would be the ideal way to split up the country, but political happenstance. The fact that it helps rural America at the expense of most of the population of America is a side effect. Like someone else pointed out, you might as well have a system of popular vote, where you just give rural voters 1.5 votes per person. Sounds a lot less fair that way though.
By the way, I actually don't think catering to groups other than geography that have common interests is a particularly good idea either. It just seems that they are comparable ideas.
The persecution/martyr complex of America's rural poor would be funny if it didn't have such negative real world outgrowths. The poor suffering NY upstate rural voters, so ignored by the NYS government that doesn't have an electoral college or a geography based Senate, such that they're forced to accept $11 billion from the city of New York each year that they don't give back in benefits.
Source
Your Constitutional argument has nothing to say on this particular reform, because all of this is being done in the context of reforms that are legal under the Constitution. And an appeal to tradition has nothing to say from a good idea/bad idea point of view either. In terms of whether the current electoral college is a good idea, there doesn't appear to me to be much more of a rational basis for apportioning votes based on geography than based on race, or sexual orientation, or disability, etc.
Where did you see me say that Iowa should tell people in cities how they should live either?
You said it when you assumed that by not giving Iowans disproportionate representation, that people in big cities would be telling Iowans how to live their lives. If you assume Iowans are not exercising their disproportionate influence to receive disproportionate benefits from the federal government, then there is no reason to assume that city centers would do so either if voting was made equitable among all citizens (as opposed to among pieces of geography).
Regarding Vermont, you're right, I was mistaken. Amend that to Delaware, New Jersey, New Hampshire, etc. then for the small states that forced this inequitable result.
That is not a principled reason, but instead is based on self-interest, which I already freely acknowledged is with Iowa keeping the existing system.
If you are presenting this as a principled matter, then why should people in Iowa get to tell people in the big cities how to live their life? The federal government affects everyone, and just because we needed to make a Faustian bargain with Delaware, New Jersey, Vermont, etc. (man I bet they regret that now) to be able to form this country doesn't mean it's right for the country to spend a disproportionate amount of money on the few.
Or maybe it does, and we should have spaces reserved in the electoral college for each racial minority. That way, we can guarantee the candidates won't care only about the needs of white Americans.
I am in favor of a more nuanced view.
States rights does not have to be binary. There is no reason one cannot advocate states rights where it makes sense, and to set it aside where it does not. Just because the electoral college has lost its original reason for existence (educated electors chosen by the people to utilize their education to pick the best person to lead) does not mean that leaving concepts such as gun control to state and local bodies cannot be effective still.
One further point that I wish to make for those who still think the electoral college is a good idea.
Why do you think that rural Californian voters or New York voters should get no meaningful vote at all at the expense of favoring rural Midwestern voters?
Is tradition worth that much?