It could also be a regional difference where the citizens just routinely avoid the law. I've been in some places where this seems true, but go 50 miles away and everyone seems to follow all the rules. I've seen cities on one European country where everyone waits for the pedestrian crossing light to allow them to go even though there is no oncoming traffic, and other cities where people just start wandering onto the road forcing cars to stop.
Also I have noticed that some of the drivers that seem to be the most aggressive, getting many tickets and complaining about them, are also more likely to adopt a position that the rules need to be changed, consider themselves are very good drivers, are more concerned about the slow cars being causing a hazard or being driven by untrained people, and they give these opinions loudly to anyone who cares. In other words, people who scare me enough that I won't be a passenger with them seem to think they're the ones doing things properly.
I'm of the opinion that people should just relax. Aggressive drivers are a problem, as are people in a hurry. Driving the speed limit is not hard at all. Ignoring the idiots on the road is slightly harder but quite doable. If someone cuts you off then just ignore it, don't fight for position like there's a competition. Keeps you healthier in the long run.
But vote counting is not an exact numeration! Run the same cards through an electronic reader and you get a different result. Even the ballots where you fill in bubbles will do the same thing. Now you remove those machines and insist that humans do the counting and the error rate goes up drastically.
Statistics is probably not the right word, I agree. Instead this is a measurement error. Two horses reached the finish line at the same time and the photograph of the finish can not discern which nose crossed the line first because the distance is less than the resolution of the camera. The votes may be a discrete number fut there's no reliable way to count them accurately. A logical conclusion would have been to split the electors equally (except that this would have angered the losing party and we'd have just as ugly a conflict in the courts). That's why people wanted electronic voting but that resulted in hurried decisions that caused many lousy machines to be purchased.
I would not blame Democrats alone, the Republicans were full of shenanigans as well. Each side felt that they were the pure honest people up against the rankest sorts of evil.
The difference in votes, comparing best result for Gore and best result for Bush according to results from a later count from news organizations, was about 750 votes. And still some people think that their votes don't count.
It was very educational though. Americans learned all about the weird ways in which we count votes, the petty officials that are put in charge of the process, the petty way that the "independent" petty officials will try to influence things, how little money is actually spent ensuring that voting is fair and properly run, etc.
We need ability to edit and delete posts. Too often there's a minor typo and you can't do anything about it except wait for the inevitable grammar nazis to question your English abilities. This doesn't mean ability to delete days later, but some limited amount of time would be great.
Oh, and unicode support (UDF8 please, not that other rubbish).
And return to having real news and not advertisements disguised as news, no blogs repeated word for word as a "summary", no links back to ad filled crap, no links to paywall sites, and no links to "the ten most annoying things to click through" sites.
Personally, I'd get rid of videos and instead add the occasional static pictures. It seemed strange that there was never a middle ground between plain text versus full boring video.
Remember though, that this is compared to the rest of the web. There are large swaths of the internet that make slashdot appear refined and cultured. The rest of the web doesn't worry about flame wars breaking out because the first flame war is still ongoing.
Well, libertarians ARE liberal. And conservative. Liberal in the sense of not wanting government restrictions on drugs, sex, religion, abortion, and so forth. But conservative in the sense of not wanting government restrictions on the market, economy, guns, etc.
I may not agree with their stances but the Libertarian party is practically the only party that recognizes that there is more than a simple one dimensional left to right spectrum (or liberal vs conservative). It would be nice if they recognized more than two dimensions though.
They just sort of happen to align somewhat with current small government wing of the Republican party, but that does not make them Republican.
And it's all utterly meaningless. The difference between the largest numbers there is less than a thousand votes total. That is an amazingly small number for the state of Florida. And all those small numbers obscured truth that these differences in counts were too small to matter. Neither candidate clearly won, neither candidate stole the election from the other. Recounts were essentially meaningless and the only fair thing would have been to have a runoff. Even a coin toss would have been fairer than a recount.
And yet some people seem to think that there can be a "true" count.
It was a tie. The election system we have does not know how to deal with statistical ties where the difference in votes is smaller than the margin of error in counting ballots.
Gore also lost because that campaign took the Nader voters for granted. I still see people today blaming it all on Nader, yet the campaign did not try to appeal to the Nader supporters and assumed that in the end they'd vote for Gore rather than have Bush win. The Nader supporters were voting for someone they wanted as president rather than voting against someone, and the Democratic campaign didn't understand that sort of thinking. They blame a third party candidate for this, and yet thank a third party candidate for letting Clinton win earlier. Probably they'll be able to thank the tea party for managing to get Hillary or Bernie elected this time. Hypocrisy.
It was a tie, statistically speaking. People for some reason despise that concept. There can be no tie, just more and more recounts will decide it, until the original ballots are shredded from too much handling. The margin of error was larger than the difference in votes. So 50 different recounts would have had 50 different results. A toin coss would have been equally fair and much less controversial (mathematically). So yes, I agree - get over it, nothing was stolen.
Speaking as a decline-to-state voter with no party affiliation, that whole affair just proves there are far too many whiners in both parties.
A spelling by Humphry Davy who was trying to isolate the element was "aluminum", despite being British. Earlier he had used "alumium" briefly. Later someone objected to the spelling and wanted -ium at the end.
Remember, we have platinum, molybdenum.
Anyway, I'm annoyed at the "Americans are soooo stupid!" and "Americans refuse to conform" memes, when actually checking out etymology or history doesn't confirm it.
The whole poem is full of mispelled words, spelled that way to sort of represent a somewhat local dialect rather than being in proper Queen's English (foreign monarchs being easily overlooked on this side).
No, I upgraded mine because it basically stopped working. Touch screen wouldn't work on demand. No user serviceable parts. Shame because it was less than 3 years old, whereas the phone before it lasted nearly a decade.
Any real worker in Silicon Valley hated her. They knew she was destroying the heart of the tech culture. The media thought she was great, but the media resides outside of Silicon Valley. The media never understands Silicon Valley, they think it's all about entrepreneurs and investors and is just like those Hollywood movies and tv series.
We just got a new white male CEO end of last year. I don't think any woman was considered. Any time a woman is appointed CEO in Silicon Valley it makes the front pages; it's that rare.
A lot of groups can be kept to a minimal number, so even if you have a bell curve you can not afford to lose the bottom person, there's just too much work to do. But then management insists on across the board cuts and open job reqs are closed and the pinch really hurts with those who are left. Which means your top performers are likely to start leaving voluntarily.
That's sort of why I hate layoffs that reduce 10% from every department across the board. Which means you lose some really great employees while also retaining some utter morons.
I'm white male. I've never been dumped on for it. I've got it pretty darned good. I wish it were mixed up more, at work it's a total sausage fest. At the stores no one follows me around suspicious that I might shoplift. I've never been pulled over for driving while white. No one has ever assumed I could only have gotten where I was through a quota system. When I enter a nice upper class area no one ever asks me politely if I'm lost and need directions.
Silicon Valley is not all that liberal overall. It's got a very strong libertarian streak. You're thinking of other nearby regions, like San Francisco, Oakland, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a coworker like this. Loud, brash, supremely confident that he knew how to do it. Either how to speed safely, or how to win money in Vegas, etc.
Also at 20mph it is much more easy to stop quickly.
It could also be a regional difference where the citizens just routinely avoid the law. I've been in some places where this seems true, but go 50 miles away and everyone seems to follow all the rules. I've seen cities on one European country where everyone waits for the pedestrian crossing light to allow them to go even though there is no oncoming traffic, and other cities where people just start wandering onto the road forcing cars to stop.
Also I have noticed that some of the drivers that seem to be the most aggressive, getting many tickets and complaining about them, are also more likely to adopt a position that the rules need to be changed, consider themselves are very good drivers, are more concerned about the slow cars being causing a hazard or being driven by untrained people, and they give these opinions loudly to anyone who cares. In other words, people who scare me enough that I won't be a passenger with them seem to think they're the ones doing things properly.
I'm of the opinion that people should just relax. Aggressive drivers are a problem, as are people in a hurry. Driving the speed limit is not hard at all. Ignoring the idiots on the road is slightly harder but quite doable. If someone cuts you off then just ignore it, don't fight for position like there's a competition. Keeps you healthier in the long run.
Greek style wrestling would be a good idea too.
But vote counting is not an exact numeration! Run the same cards through an electronic reader and you get a different result. Even the ballots where you fill in bubbles will do the same thing. Now you remove those machines and insist that humans do the counting and the error rate goes up drastically.
Statistics is probably not the right word, I agree. Instead this is a measurement error. Two horses reached the finish line at the same time and the photograph of the finish can not discern which nose crossed the line first because the distance is less than the resolution of the camera. The votes may be a discrete number fut there's no reliable way to count them accurately. A logical conclusion would have been to split the electors equally (except that this would have angered the losing party and we'd have just as ugly a conflict in the courts). That's why people wanted electronic voting but that resulted in hurried decisions that caused many lousy machines to be purchased.
I would not blame Democrats alone, the Republicans were full of shenanigans as well. Each side felt that they were the pure honest people up against the rankest sorts of evil.
The difference in votes, comparing best result for Gore and best result for Bush according to results from a later count from news organizations, was about 750 votes. And still some people think that their votes don't count.
It was very educational though. Americans learned all about the weird ways in which we count votes, the petty officials that are put in charge of the process, the petty way that the "independent" petty officials will try to influence things, how little money is actually spent ensuring that voting is fair and properly run, etc.
We need ability to edit and delete posts. Too often there's a minor typo and you can't do anything about it except wait for the inevitable grammar nazis to question your English abilities. This doesn't mean ability to delete days later, but some limited amount of time would be great.
Oh, and unicode support (UDF8 please, not that other rubbish).
And return to having real news and not advertisements disguised as news, no blogs repeated word for word as a "summary", no links back to ad filled crap, no links to paywall sites, and no links to "the ten most annoying things to click through" sites.
Personally, I'd get rid of videos and instead add the occasional static pictures. It seemed strange that there was never a middle ground between plain text versus full boring video.
+1 train wreck in progress
Remember though, that this is compared to the rest of the web. There are large swaths of the internet that make slashdot appear refined and cultured. The rest of the web doesn't worry about flame wars breaking out because the first flame war is still ongoing.
Well, libertarians ARE liberal. And conservative. Liberal in the sense of not wanting government restrictions on drugs, sex, religion, abortion, and so forth. But conservative in the sense of not wanting government restrictions on the market, economy, guns, etc.
I may not agree with their stances but the Libertarian party is practically the only party that recognizes that there is more than a simple one dimensional left to right spectrum (or liberal vs conservative). It would be nice if they recognized more than two dimensions though.
They just sort of happen to align somewhat with current small government wing of the Republican party, but that does not make them Republican.
And it's all utterly meaningless. The difference between the largest numbers there is less than a thousand votes total. That is an amazingly small number for the state of Florida. And all those small numbers obscured truth that these differences in counts were too small to matter. Neither candidate clearly won, neither candidate stole the election from the other. Recounts were essentially meaningless and the only fair thing would have been to have a runoff. Even a coin toss would have been fairer than a recount.
And yet some people seem to think that there can be a "true" count.
It was a tie. The election system we have does not know how to deal with statistical ties where the difference in votes is smaller than the margin of error in counting ballots.
Gore also lost because that campaign took the Nader voters for granted. I still see people today blaming it all on Nader, yet the campaign did not try to appeal to the Nader supporters and assumed that in the end they'd vote for Gore rather than have Bush win. The Nader supporters were voting for someone they wanted as president rather than voting against someone, and the Democratic campaign didn't understand that sort of thinking. They blame a third party candidate for this, and yet thank a third party candidate for letting Clinton win earlier. Probably they'll be able to thank the tea party for managing to get Hillary or Bernie elected this time. Hypocrisy.
It was a tie, statistically speaking. People for some reason despise that concept. There can be no tie, just more and more recounts will decide it, until the original ballots are shredded from too much handling. The margin of error was larger than the difference in votes. So 50 different recounts would have had 50 different results. A toin coss would have been equally fair and much less controversial (mathematically). So yes, I agree - get over it, nothing was stolen.
Speaking as a decline-to-state voter with no party affiliation, that whole affair just proves there are far too many whiners in both parties.
A spelling by Humphry Davy who was trying to isolate the element was "aluminum", despite being British. Earlier he had used "alumium" briefly. Later someone objected to the spelling and wanted -ium at the end.
Remember, we have platinum, molybdenum.
Anyway, I'm annoyed at the "Americans are soooo stupid!" and "Americans refuse to conform" memes, when actually checking out etymology or history doesn't confirm it.
This was HTC One X. Case is glued on, no screws. No service center to fix the screen, etc.
The whole poem is full of mispelled words, spelled that way to sort of represent a somewhat local dialect rather than being in proper Queen's English (foreign monarchs being easily overlooked on this side).
No, I upgraded mine because it basically stopped working. Touch screen wouldn't work on demand. No user serviceable parts. Shame because it was less than 3 years old, whereas the phone before it lasted nearly a decade.
Any real worker in Silicon Valley hated her. They knew she was destroying the heart of the tech culture. The media thought she was great, but the media resides outside of Silicon Valley. The media never understands Silicon Valley, they think it's all about entrepreneurs and investors and is just like those Hollywood movies and tv series.
We just got a new white male CEO end of last year. I don't think any woman was considered. Any time a woman is appointed CEO in Silicon Valley it makes the front pages; it's that rare.
She's ok, but she's no Janet Reno!
A lot of groups can be kept to a minimal number, so even if you have a bell curve you can not afford to lose the bottom person, there's just too much work to do. But then management insists on across the board cuts and open job reqs are closed and the pinch really hurts with those who are left. Which means your top performers are likely to start leaving voluntarily.
That's sort of why I hate layoffs that reduce 10% from every department across the board. Which means you lose some really great employees while also retaining some utter morons.
Count all the CEOs in Silicon Valley, the majority are white male. If you look at the entire country the vast majority are white male.
And last I checked, Microsoft isn't a Silicon Valley company and its CEO doesn't work here.
When it happens to them it's discrimination. When it happens to others it's because of unrelated reasons.
I'm white male. I've never been dumped on for it. I've got it pretty darned good. I wish it were mixed up more, at work it's a total sausage fest. At the stores no one follows me around suspicious that I might shoplift. I've never been pulled over for driving while white. No one has ever assumed I could only have gotten where I was through a quota system. When I enter a nice upper class area no one ever asks me politely if I'm lost and need directions.
Silicon Valley is not all that liberal overall. It's got a very strong libertarian streak. You're thinking of other nearby regions, like San Francisco, Oakland, etc.