And this is worse than having to pick between the lesser of two evils exactly how?
It's worse in that it becomes very difficult to vote. Under a plurality system, the logic behind voting is fairly simple. You might have to vote for your 2nd or 3rd choice or whatever (if you're voting strategically), but you never have to vote against someone you want to win. IRV is problematic in that it gives the illusion of being able to vote preferentially.
But it has the strength that it allows you to prioritise your candidates
It also has the strength to then choose the wrong winner based on those ballots. If you want to vote preferentially, then vote preferentially. Why not just use a better preferential system? Condorcet methods and Borda counts all allow you to prioritise your candidates; they also do a better job than IRV at fairly choosing a winner.
Sorry, I meant to address Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV), not STV. STV is a special case of IRV, but the problems I mentioned above afflict IRV in general.
Even if range voting does devolve into approval voting, you can't really say that range voting is worse than approval voting. Well, except that it might take more resources to count the ballots.
Other posters have correctly pointed out problems in your post: range voting is O(n) and Condorcet methods can be done in O(n^2). Further, range votes and Condorcet votes can be counted in a decentralized manner.
Also, IRV has serious problems. The theoretical problems are that ranking someone higher can cause them to lose, and ranking someone lower can cause them to win. The practical problems are that, in every country I'm aware of that has switched to IRV, it forces a two-party system even moreso than the system it replaced.
For countries that choose to switch to IRV, I never understood why they don't switch to approval instead. Pros of approval over IRV: it's simpler to make your ballet; it's simpler to count; votes can be verified easier; votes can be counted in a decentralized manner; it satisfies the monotonocity criterion (voting for someone will never cause them to lose, and voting against someone will never cause them to win); in TFA, they even mention that it does very well in Bayesian regret. Cons of approval over IRV: I can't think of any?
One thing is for certain: any system is better than the West's out-dated plurality voting system.
Not so. Single Transferrable Voting fails the monotonocity criterion. Basically, ranking someone higher can cause them to lose, and ranking someone lower can cause them to win. There's debate on how often this might come up in practice. It might be missing the larger point, though, which is that in STV, it's very hard to predict what impact your vote will actually have.
STV is the only mainstream electoral method which fails the monotonocity criterion. Even the much maligned plurality method, which everyone is familiar with, passes. Voting for someone will never cause them to lose, and not voting for someone will never cause them to win.
Arrow's Theorem says we can't have everything, but I consider the monotonocity criterion as something which is an absolute must. At the very least, if you are contemplating switching away from the plurality system to something else, be sure that it is strictly better than plurality, which STV is not.
...if we can construct a large enough triangle (or have very precise measuring tools)...
Or you could just observe that ships at sea disappear below the horizon, as people did centuries ago:P
As for your last paragraph, I think you have a narrow view of what a computer is. A computer is not a box fed by electrical power, based loosely on a Von Neumann architecture, with registers and logical gates. A computer is something that computes. A river is a computer (computing differential equations). Computers deal with overflow very well, thank you very much.
Your point about infinity is a good one. I might conjecture that anywhere in the universe where "infinity" exists, it's "infinity" only so far as it's being modelled awkwardly by humans.
No, it's not. Passing the Acid2 test says absolutely nothing about following any standards. As mentioned before, it's trivial to throw in a "if (webpage == acid2) { display acid2 jpg; }". Of course it's foolish to think that Microsoft would go that far to beat Acid2, but the point remains that if you're coding to specific test data, don't be surprised if you can't pass anything but that test data.
MMX was not useless. Despite its marketing name, it didn't have a whole lot to do with multimedia (though it did have obvious applications in multimedia). It was x86's initial introduction to vector/SIMD instructions. The ability to perform the same instruction to 4 numbers at once (rather than using a loop) was a huge boon. Intel might have marketed it strangely, but to some degree it was Intel playing catch-up to other architectures which had already added vector instructions.
It's true though that we didn't really have vectorizing compilers back then (and we still don't have many good ones: vectorizing is hard) so any programs (mostly games) that used MMX would have had hand-coded assembly, which limited its use a bit. But still, MMX and later 3DNow! were and are quite useful.
Sorry, I know it's bad manners to reply to oneself, but after reading through the paper, I see that Linux'/dev/random is vulnerable in a similar way (though they describe the attack on Windows to be "more efficient").
That's exactly the approach Linux uses with/dev/random (not to be confused with/dev/urandom): the kernel uses the timings between I/O interrupts (key strokes, hard drive seeks, etc.) to build up entropy. I'm no expert on the matter, but I believe people when they say it's good enough for crypto.
So far as I can tell, the only benefit over a thermal noise source over that scheme is that thermal noise gives you a pretty good and constant supply. If you're hitting/dev/random often, it's not hard to get it to block while it waits for more entropy.
I'll go out on a limb and say that if you were to come up with automated tests, those tests would show that SHA-1 is an absolutely glorious hashing algorithm, perfectly 100% without defects. In other words, your automated testing won't really have bought any more security.
Proving properties about algorithms is HARD. Writing an algorithm to prove properties about algorithms is HARDER. Unfortunately this idea still seems to pervade much of AI research, such as in machine learning: "well I'm not smart enough to solve this problem, but surely the AI I designed will be!" No. It won't. Whatever AI you create, it will be dumber than you are.
How do you propose to do that? I'm with the OP: a transparent society is inevitable. Privacy as a natural phenomenon can't really exist; it's a purely social phenomenon. The further we progress, the harder it is to enforce. We can continue to ask for the illusion of privacy, and give more power to those who are too dishonest to respect privacy. Personally I'm of the camp that we should embrace the transparent society. At least that way there's some equity.
Indeed. As I was reading through his manifesto, just about every sentence I thought "this could come from just about any Slashdotter", which I guess is slightly ironic considering it's all about how everyone is a robot/slave (part of the "retarded masses") and he's the only one intelligent/strong-minded enough to see through it. But what's the manifesto about? The human race is devolving, he's the most intelligent person to have ever lived, that social Darwinism is valid, that proper grammar is optional (okay that was a cheap shot considering English isn't his first language). Sounds like a run-of-the-mill Slashdot comment to me.
Admittedly the 89 YouTube videos put him over the top, but just based on his writings, he could be one of probably millions of angsty people in the world today.
I'll give you a little bit of credit and say that you were trying to make a fork-bomb there, maybe in C. That would look more like this: int main() { while (1) fork(); }. Of course we all know such things are trivially defeated by a few seconds with our good friend, ulimit, but still such a thing wouldn't constitute "infection" in any meaningful sense. It's a DOS, which admittedly sucks, but in the very worst case (you don't have any ulimit set, etc.), all you have to do is reboot the machine and it's gone. I think for something to constitute "infection", it should at least survive a reboot.
Still, I would say that assembly is necessary for CS grads (we still teach a course of it at my university). Crap about ELF headers is stuff you can look up online or in a reference book in a couple minutes, and frankly is extremely dull and pointless, but an understanding of computing at a very low level is important. Even if you're a CS student who's just focused on theory, proofs involving Turing machines are often done at a high level. Coding in assembly is one chance to say "okay, there's no abstracting your way out of this: you're going to have to sit down and work with a computational model in a concrete way and gain an appreciation for how computations work."
I would agree with you if you said "fonts", but I can't agree with "typography". I've always hated Windows' font rendering up until Vista. But the big problem is that Microsoft doesn't have much support for real typography, beyond just displaying letters. Where's the ligature support, for example? So far as I can tell, the fonts Microsoft has released here don't even have any ligatures defined for them! What's the point?
Actually, I would argue that translucency is used to show that things can't be done in 3D. In meat space, if you want to look behind something, you shift your head slightly to the side. Voilà, instant parallax effect. Sadly, user interfaces on computers have not reached that level yet (not that it hasn't been tried, but it's a hard thing to make painless). Translucency is a work-around. Obviously, it's not ideal, but there are a lot of cases where translucency is better than absolute opacity, and Apple's standard drop-down dialogs I think are actually quite a good example of that.
I've always dreamed of doing something like this in my own country. It's good to see some people actually getting together and doing it. I'll be watching (and hoping someone gets elected) and see how it turns out.
I like the idea of direct democracy quite a bit in a country which has a strong constitution. Probably most countries with a strong constitution could even stand to strengthen their constitutions more before going to direct democracy in a really strong way, to prevent tyranny of the majority and all that. But if I have to choose between trusting my wife-beating welfare-abusing neighbour and my Member of Parliament...well..I'd guess my neighbour has infinitely better judgement and ethics;)
Some things I'm wondering how they'll deal with:
What if people change their minds? Can the populous initiate legislation in any way? If the populous vote in favour of legislation X and, after a year sees it's a total muck-up, can they put in a motion to get the legislation repealed?
Is there any risk in having an "MP" holding contradictory views, or impossible views? What if the populous votes in favour of increasing social spending, in favour of decreasing taxes, and in favour of paying off government debt?
You make a lot of good points, but am I the only who was a bit alarmed that all throughout your post you seem to be implying that academics aren't humans? "Humans are more general than (academics)", etc.?
I could invest huge amounts of time in learning how to grow all my own vegetables, how to build my own car, how to refine my own fuel etc.
You're still talking in terms of scarcity. You have a replicating machine to instantly produce vegetables. Ditto for replicating your car. You have robot servants to clean and maintain every aspect of your life. You even have a Holodeck for when you having everything isn't even enough any more. The only thing you'd really need is companionship, which hopefully is still free, and if not, you've always got the aforementioned robot servants/sexbots and Holodeck.
As was mentioned in another comment, it basically comes down to energy/matter. That is the one thing that I think will always be somewhat scarce. You're going to need a lot of energy to run your replicating machine, especially if it's turning energy directly into matter.
But that still doesn't necessitate currency. Why come up with currency when energy is the only thing anyone could ever want? You'd be better off trading with energy directly.
What a coincidence! DirectX also covers the behaviour of joypads, keyboards, sound and 3D. It's almost as if DirectX were in competition with SDL and OpenGL, exactly like the GP said!
Slashdot Mirror
It's worse in that it becomes very difficult to vote. Under a plurality system, the logic behind voting is fairly simple. You might have to vote for your 2nd or 3rd choice or whatever (if you're voting strategically), but you never have to vote against someone you want to win. IRV is problematic in that it gives the illusion of being able to vote preferentially.
It also has the strength to then choose the wrong winner based on those ballots. If you want to vote preferentially, then vote preferentially. Why not just use a better preferential system? Condorcet methods and Borda counts all allow you to prioritise your candidates; they also do a better job than IRV at fairly choosing a winner.
Sorry, I meant to address Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV), not STV. STV is a special case of IRV, but the problems I mentioned above afflict IRV in general.
Even if range voting does devolve into approval voting, you can't really say that range voting is worse than approval voting. Well, except that it might take more resources to count the ballots.
Other posters have correctly pointed out problems in your post: range voting is O(n) and Condorcet methods can be done in O(n^2). Further, range votes and Condorcet votes can be counted in a decentralized manner. Also, IRV has serious problems. The theoretical problems are that ranking someone higher can cause them to lose, and ranking someone lower can cause them to win. The practical problems are that, in every country I'm aware of that has switched to IRV, it forces a two-party system even moreso than the system it replaced. For countries that choose to switch to IRV, I never understood why they don't switch to approval instead. Pros of approval over IRV: it's simpler to make your ballet; it's simpler to count; votes can be verified easier; votes can be counted in a decentralized manner; it satisfies the monotonocity criterion (voting for someone will never cause them to lose, and voting against someone will never cause them to win); in TFA, they even mention that it does very well in Bayesian regret. Cons of approval over IRV: I can't think of any?
Not so. Single Transferrable Voting fails the monotonocity criterion. Basically, ranking someone higher can cause them to lose, and ranking someone lower can cause them to win. There's debate on how often this might come up in practice. It might be missing the larger point, though, which is that in STV, it's very hard to predict what impact your vote will actually have.
STV is the only mainstream electoral method which fails the monotonocity criterion. Even the much maligned plurality method, which everyone is familiar with, passes. Voting for someone will never cause them to lose, and not voting for someone will never cause them to win.
Arrow's Theorem says we can't have everything, but I consider the monotonocity criterion as something which is an absolute must. At the very least, if you are contemplating switching away from the plurality system to something else, be sure that it is strictly better than plurality, which STV is not.
Or you could just observe that ships at sea disappear below the horizon, as people did centuries ago :P
As for your last paragraph, I think you have a narrow view of what a computer is. A computer is not a box fed by electrical power, based loosely on a Von Neumann architecture, with registers and logical gates. A computer is something that computes. A river is a computer (computing differential equations). Computers deal with overflow very well, thank you very much.
Your point about infinity is a good one. I might conjecture that anywhere in the universe where "infinity" exists, it's "infinity" only so far as it's being modelled awkwardly by humans.
Here you are, your majesty.
No, it's not. Passing the Acid2 test says absolutely nothing about following any standards. As mentioned before, it's trivial to throw in a "if (webpage == acid2) { display acid2 jpg; }". Of course it's foolish to think that Microsoft would go that far to beat Acid2, but the point remains that if you're coding to specific test data, don't be surprised if you can't pass anything but that test data.
Happy birthday!
MMX was not useless. Despite its marketing name, it didn't have a whole lot to do with multimedia (though it did have obvious applications in multimedia). It was x86's initial introduction to vector/SIMD instructions. The ability to perform the same instruction to 4 numbers at once (rather than using a loop) was a huge boon. Intel might have marketed it strangely, but to some degree it was Intel playing catch-up to other architectures which had already added vector instructions.
It's true though that we didn't really have vectorizing compilers back then (and we still don't have many good ones: vectorizing is hard) so any programs (mostly games) that used MMX would have had hand-coded assembly, which limited its use a bit. But still, MMX and later 3DNow! were and are quite useful.
Sorry, I know it's bad manners to reply to oneself, but after reading through the paper, I see that Linux' /dev/random is vulnerable in a similar way (though they describe the attack on Windows to be "more efficient").
That's exactly the approach Linux uses with /dev/random (not to be confused with /dev/urandom): the kernel uses the timings between I/O interrupts (key strokes, hard drive seeks, etc.) to build up entropy. I'm no expert on the matter, but I believe people when they say it's good enough for crypto.
So far as I can tell, the only benefit over a thermal noise source over that scheme is that thermal noise gives you a pretty good and constant supply. If you're hitting /dev/random often, it's not hard to get it to block while it waits for more entropy.
Indeed. It may seem a bit paradoxical, but in order for a transparent society to have any merit, the watchers must be the first to be watched.
I'll go out on a limb and say that if you were to come up with automated tests, those tests would show that SHA-1 is an absolutely glorious hashing algorithm, perfectly 100% without defects. In other words, your automated testing won't really have bought any more security.
Proving properties about algorithms is HARD. Writing an algorithm to prove properties about algorithms is HARDER. Unfortunately this idea still seems to pervade much of AI research, such as in machine learning: "well I'm not smart enough to solve this problem, but surely the AI I designed will be!" No. It won't. Whatever AI you create, it will be dumber than you are.
How do you propose to do that? I'm with the OP: a transparent society is inevitable. Privacy as a natural phenomenon can't really exist; it's a purely social phenomenon. The further we progress, the harder it is to enforce. We can continue to ask for the illusion of privacy, and give more power to those who are too dishonest to respect privacy. Personally I'm of the camp that we should embrace the transparent society. At least that way there's some equity.
Indeed. As I was reading through his manifesto, just about every sentence I thought "this could come from just about any Slashdotter", which I guess is slightly ironic considering it's all about how everyone is a robot/slave (part of the "retarded masses") and he's the only one intelligent/strong-minded enough to see through it. But what's the manifesto about? The human race is devolving, he's the most intelligent person to have ever lived, that social Darwinism is valid, that proper grammar is optional (okay that was a cheap shot considering English isn't his first language). Sounds like a run-of-the-mill Slashdot comment to me.
Admittedly the 89 YouTube videos put him over the top, but just based on his writings, he could be one of probably millions of angsty people in the world today.
What? The OP said "infected".
I'll give you a little bit of credit and say that you were trying to make a fork-bomb there, maybe in C. That would look more like this: int main() { while (1) fork(); }. Of course we all know such things are trivially defeated by a few seconds with our good friend, ulimit, but still such a thing wouldn't constitute "infection" in any meaningful sense. It's a DOS, which admittedly sucks, but in the very worst case (you don't have any ulimit set, etc.), all you have to do is reboot the machine and it's gone. I think for something to constitute "infection", it should at least survive a reboot.
Still, I would say that assembly is necessary for CS grads (we still teach a course of it at my university). Crap about ELF headers is stuff you can look up online or in a reference book in a couple minutes, and frankly is extremely dull and pointless, but an understanding of computing at a very low level is important. Even if you're a CS student who's just focused on theory, proofs involving Turing machines are often done at a high level. Coding in assembly is one chance to say "okay, there's no abstracting your way out of this: you're going to have to sit down and work with a computational model in a concrete way and gain an appreciation for how computations work."
I would agree with you if you said "fonts", but I can't agree with "typography". I've always hated Windows' font rendering up until Vista. But the big problem is that Microsoft doesn't have much support for real typography, beyond just displaying letters. Where's the ligature support, for example? So far as I can tell, the fonts Microsoft has released here don't even have any ligatures defined for them! What's the point?
Actually, I would argue that translucency is used to show that things can't be done in 3D. In meat space, if you want to look behind something, you shift your head slightly to the side. Voilà, instant parallax effect. Sadly, user interfaces on computers have not reached that level yet (not that it hasn't been tried, but it's a hard thing to make painless). Translucency is a work-around. Obviously, it's not ideal, but there are a lot of cases where translucency is better than absolute opacity, and Apple's standard drop-down dialogs I think are actually quite a good example of that.
That's lorem ipsum. It's standard in the design world.
I've always dreamed of doing something like this in my own country. It's good to see some people actually getting together and doing it. I'll be watching (and hoping someone gets elected) and see how it turns out.
I like the idea of direct democracy quite a bit in a country which has a strong constitution. Probably most countries with a strong constitution could even stand to strengthen their constitutions more before going to direct democracy in a really strong way, to prevent tyranny of the majority and all that. But if I have to choose between trusting my wife-beating welfare-abusing neighbour and my Member of Parliament...well..I'd guess my neighbour has infinitely better judgement and ethics ;)
Some things I'm wondering how they'll deal with:
You make a lot of good points, but am I the only who was a bit alarmed that all throughout your post you seem to be implying that academics aren't humans? "Humans are more general than (academics)", etc.?
You're still talking in terms of scarcity. You have a replicating machine to instantly produce vegetables. Ditto for replicating your car. You have robot servants to clean and maintain every aspect of your life. You even have a Holodeck for when you having everything isn't even enough any more. The only thing you'd really need is companionship, which hopefully is still free, and if not, you've always got the aforementioned robot servants/sexbots and Holodeck.
As was mentioned in another comment, it basically comes down to energy/matter. That is the one thing that I think will always be somewhat scarce. You're going to need a lot of energy to run your replicating machine, especially if it's turning energy directly into matter.
But that still doesn't necessitate currency. Why come up with currency when energy is the only thing anyone could ever want? You'd be better off trading with energy directly.
What a coincidence! DirectX also covers the behaviour of joypads, keyboards, sound and 3D. It's almost as if DirectX were in competition with SDL and OpenGL, exactly like the GP said!