Re:From election official
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 1
Why should the election rules be changed?
First, it will be very expensive to have all that equipment and necessary security precautions for the elections.
Also by the time of the next election a lot of software and hardware could be outdated.
What are the advantages?
There is no reason to assume it will be any more fair. Maybe a little faster, but even that is not
certain.
It seems that changing the election system
just for the sole reason that you can vote from the comfort of you home is short-sighted.
What makes you think everyone should be allowed to vote? Divine Providence? What about children, should they be allowed to vote as well? What about
inmates or mentally handicapped?
You demonstrate such amazing conviction without giving any reasons why it should be so.
Hm... One different way to define the improtance of an individual vote, that comes to mind immediately, is to take the inverse difference (assuming two candidates) of votes and perhaps normalized in some way.
That seems like a fairer measure than probability, since how do you compute the probability for an actual election anyway?
You are forced to make some assumptions.
I find the logic of the paper flawed. The goal of an election is to elect a popular candidate, not to maximize the voting power. The current election system is unfair anyway (specifically the ranking of candidates may change if people drop out). There is only one system which does not suffer from this problem, i.e. where each person gives his first favourite canidate n points, second favourite - n-1, etc. The score is then calculated, the candidate with most points wins.
(So-called Borda's system). Recently it has been shown that this is the only system such that the results remain consistent , when candidates drop out.
I do not think the comparison with AMD is appropriate. K6 was a mediocre design and they
could not even produce them after K6 was announced. When the finally were able to produce it in quantity, Intel had faster and better processors and K6 was delegated to the low end.
Athlon on the other hand is a superior design
and AMD is digging deeply in Intel's market
share at the high end.
It took some time of course but Athlon's martket share have been growing since the introduction.
The problem was that the manufacturers initially (after K6) did not trust AMD's ability to produce enough of their processors.
The problem with Transmeta, however, is that it does not have a clearly superiour technology (i.e. the saving in battery life are offset by the fact the the performance is relatively poor).
I was surprised that so many manufacturers jumped on the bandwagon so fast. The defections are not surprising at all. If (a big if) Transmeta can keep up and deliver, they will be come back eventually.
I would hate to see the probability be 500 to 1.
Of course one has to understand that this numbers are even less reliable then the latest poll results. They have to be checked and rechecked several times.
Also how can it be either an asteroid of a Apollo leftover? Even the tiniest asteroid is much much bigger than any space rocket.
I do not know why so few people realize that the difference between P and NP has nothing to do with what is actually computable in practice.
If you have a polynomial problem where the computationnal complexity is a polynomial of degree 100, no amount of computing power will help. On the other hand, there is no reason why there cannot be practically efficient algorithms for NP problems.
While it is amusing that minesweeper is NP-complete, at least superficially, the problem of minesweeper consistency certainly seems no easier
than the travelling salesman problem.
It seems extremely short-sighted to tax trades as it would lower liquidity. Of course smaller investors would suffer much more from the lack of liquidity than institutions. Companies would also suffer as there will be less demand for shares.
The whole point of the stock market is that it allows companies to raise capital cheaper than taking out a loan from a bank and allows investors to get (potentially) higher returns. A tax would impair both.
It is hard to believe that intelligent people like Nader come up with such ideas.
The concept of ownership is imposed by the rules of the society. How can I really own land, a pet or anything at all?
The important thing is whether intellectual property is useful for the functioning of the society. I don't think there is much doubt about it. In fact the patent law greatly accelerated the development of technology as inventors do not have to keep their inventions and technologies secret (as often was the case earlier).
The situation is slightly different, when applied to music or books, but not all that much.
Music used to be subsidized by kings and wealthy individuals, which is not the case anymore.
Books used to be written by people of means or monks or inmates (Don Quixote, for example), i.e. people with pelnty of time on their hands. Being educated in those days pretty much implied being wealthy or a cleric. And arguably only educated people would have an inclination to write.
Again there is much weaker correlation between education and free time nowdays.
Thus new concepts were necessary and were found by way of intellectual property to
make creation of new music, literature and art possible.
The market cannot grow forever? I don't know about forever, but it would be safe to assume that a market can grow al least as fast as the population.
Think about the very mature US car market. Although it has not been growing very fast for a long time, still the growth over the last 20 years or so, far outpaced the population growth.
Computers are not anywhere close to cars in terms of market maturity.
Even on global warming they both support emission credit trading (actually seems very reasonable to me).
As to Mars, as much as I would like to see an expedition to Mars, it is certainly not a major issue, and any politician would consider it very carefully, before allocating the enormous resources needed.
Actually 1-800 numbers are relatively cheap.
The business you call pays not more that 10 cents/minute or less.
Also when you call a 1-800 number the business pays for usage, not a commission on each sale.
Businesses are already paying a lot for broadband intenet access for their servers. Now ATT wants to charge them a commission as well.
If ATT is sick of its customers, this is perhaps the best way to make them flee.
I did an Internet search and found the following article:
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/99/0531/6311070A.htm
The authors also come up with 13%, but as a percentage of US economy. That sounds a lot more reasonable to me as US has more computers per capita than most other countries.
The reason I find the 13% of global economy figure so difficult to believe is because countries like Russia and China have enormous electricity production (in case of Russia probably comparable to US per capita) but relatively few computers.
I am inclined to believe that Hazel Henderson had US economy in mind in his speech.
What is strange is how the notions of escape and
awakening interminge.
The notion of illusory reality
is nothing new it dates back thousands of years to Buddhism and Chinese philosophy. E.g. a Chinese
sage was dreaming he had become a moth which was dreaming about him. So who is whose dream?
Interestingly one of the names of Buddha is "the Awakened".
Also compare Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, Black Queen is dreaming about Alice, who in term is dreaming, of course Carroll, no doubt was aware of the earlier writings.
What was different about Orwell (and others) is that reality was not
just illusory, it was consciosly manufactured
with a certain purpose in mind.
So it is hard to attribute the stir made by movies
like The Matrix (fairly crude and not particularly believable, nice special effects), to anything
but ignorance about literature and history.
In fact most of the genre is a primitive interpretation of Buddhism. Dark City
provides an excellent example. The senseless interminable cycle of reincarnation on a vast space station controlled by evil aliens from the outer space is broken and
Nirvana (somehow associated with the sea) is reached...
Hm, I think the original teachings were rather more imaginative.
Granted, all the things you mentioned are valid.
However I still don't think they are a sufficient reason for putting an innocent man to death.
The bigger point however is that democracy by itself is not good or bad, it is a conduit for the views of the majority. If the majority thought that Socrates was corrupting the youth, a criminal he was and had to be put to death. Most
Germans believed that Hitler represented their views so they elected Hitler, etc.
Let us not forget that the wonderful democracy of Athens had put Socrates to death by poisoning after an entirely democratic proceedings where he
was found guilty of impiety and corrupting the minds of young citizens of Athens.
I like comparisons. Even if they (perhaps) do not
really illuminate the phenomena they are supposed
to illuminate, they give you a feeling for the vastness of the universe and inadequacy of your imagination.
Instead of shedding light on physical phenomena, they show limitations of one's ability to comprehend.
In fact if you do a little basic math you can very quickly get to the numbers so immense, that no comparison will be even possible.
For example, put
F(1,n) = 1+...+1, n+1 times
F(2,n) = F(1,F(1,F(1,F(...,F(1,n))...)), n+1 times
and so on. (These are so-called Ackermann numbers or something very similar to them as I do not remember the definition exactly).
It turns out that F(5,5) is already so large that no physical quantity one can think of can approach it. Even the number of all possible permutations of all particles in the Universe over the history
of the Universe comes nowhere close.
So does this mystical number really exist? And what is the meaning of it?
Other numbers, F(6,6), for example, are even much bigger, of course.
The physical computations in the article seem a little on the soft side. However it does make an interesting observation that we are still very very far from the physical limits of computational power.
On the other hand it is not clear whether such perceived limits exist in any meaningful sense and are not just reflections of our ignorance.
I recall reading about IBM building a superfast computer to model the process of protein folding
(if I remember correctly). Each such computation would take months on that (still nonexistant)
enormously fast computer. However thousands of such events occur every second in any living organism...
The thing they seem to be missing is that the computing power is cheap and getting cheaper by
the month. It is people's time that is expensive.
Thus you might get computer for free if you agree
to the ads no your screen, but you are very unlikely to make much money selling CPU time
of your computer.
Not enough to cover you electricity bill anyway...
Slashdot Mirror
Why should the election rules be changed? First, it will be very expensive to have all that equipment and necessary security precautions for the elections. Also by the time of the next election a lot of software and hardware could be outdated. What are the advantages? There is no reason to assume it will be any more fair. Maybe a little faster, but even that is not certain. It seems that changing the election system just for the sole reason that you can vote from the comfort of you home is short-sighted.
Why depending on the age?
You demonstrate such amazing conviction without giving any reasons why it should be so.
That seems like a fairer measure than probability, since how do you compute the probability for an actual election anyway? You are forced to make some assumptions.
I find the logic of the paper flawed. The goal of an election is to elect a popular candidate, not to maximize the voting power. The current election system is unfair anyway (specifically the ranking of candidates may change if people drop out). There is only one system which does not suffer from this problem, i.e. where each person gives his first favourite canidate n points, second favourite - n-1, etc. The score is then calculated, the candidate with most points wins. (So-called Borda's system). Recently it has been shown that this is the only system such that the results remain consistent , when candidates drop out.
Athlon on the other hand is a superior design and AMD is digging deeply in Intel's market share at the high end.
It took some time of course but Athlon's martket share have been growing since the introduction.
The problem was that the manufacturers initially (after K6) did not trust AMD's ability to produce enough of their processors.
The problem with Transmeta, however, is that it does not have a clearly superiour technology (i.e. the saving in battery life are offset by the fact the the performance is relatively poor). I was surprised that so many manufacturers jumped on the bandwagon so fast. The defections are not surprising at all. If (a big if) Transmeta can keep up and deliver, they will be come back eventually.
Also how can it be either an asteroid of a Apollo leftover? Even the tiniest asteroid is much much bigger than any space rocket.
While it is amusing that minesweeper is NP-complete, at least superficially, the problem of minesweeper consistency certainly seems no easier than the travelling salesman problem.
The whole point of the stock market is that it allows companies to raise capital cheaper than taking out a loan from a bank and allows investors to get (potentially) higher returns. A tax would impair both.
It is hard to believe that intelligent people like Nader come up with such ideas.
How can you get _maximum_ power for _minimum_ price? Does not make much sense, does it?
Must be a cult - it does not grant a tax-exempt status.
The important thing is whether intellectual property is useful for the functioning of the society. I don't think there is much doubt about it. In fact the patent law greatly accelerated the development of technology as inventors do not have to keep their inventions and technologies secret (as often was the case earlier).
The situation is slightly different, when applied to music or books, but not all that much. Music used to be subsidized by kings and wealthy individuals, which is not the case anymore. Books used to be written by people of means or monks or inmates (Don Quixote, for example), i.e. people with pelnty of time on their hands. Being educated in those days pretty much implied being wealthy or a cleric. And arguably only educated people would have an inclination to write. Again there is much weaker correlation between education and free time nowdays.
Thus new concepts were necessary and were found by way of intellectual property to make creation of new music, literature and art possible.
Think about the very mature US car market. Although it has not been growing very fast for a long time, still the growth over the last 20 years or so, far outpaced the population growth.
Computers are not anywhere close to cars in terms of market maturity.
I don't think this word exists. I just checked in the OED and it is not there. Are you sure you spelled it right?
As to Mars, as much as I would like to see an expedition to Mars, it is certainly not a major issue, and any politician would consider it very carefully, before allocating the enormous resources needed.
I guess science is never a very important campaign issue. And I don't know whether it should be.
Also when you call a 1-800 number the business pays for usage, not a commission on each sale. Businesses are already paying a lot for broadband intenet access for their servers. Now ATT wants to charge them a commission as well.
If ATT is sick of its customers, this is perhaps the best way to make them flee.
Perhaps you will have an easier time looking for jobs if you learn how to spell first.
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/99/0531/6311070A.htm
The authors also come up with 13%, but as a percentage of US economy. That sounds a lot more reasonable to me as US has more computers per capita than most other countries.
The reason I find the 13% of global economy figure so difficult to believe is because countries like Russia and China have enormous electricity production (in case of Russia probably comparable to US per capita) but relatively few computers.
I am inclined to believe that Hazel Henderson had US economy in mind in his speech.
Could you give a reference for that? Sounds rather dubious.
The notion of illusory reality is nothing new it dates back thousands of years to Buddhism and Chinese philosophy. E.g. a Chinese sage was dreaming he had become a moth which was dreaming about him. So who is whose dream? Interestingly one of the names of Buddha is "the Awakened".
Also compare Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, Black Queen is dreaming about Alice, who in term is dreaming, of course Carroll, no doubt was aware of the earlier writings.
What was different about Orwell (and others) is that reality was not just illusory, it was consciosly manufactured with a certain purpose in mind.
So it is hard to attribute the stir made by movies like The Matrix (fairly crude and not particularly believable, nice special effects), to anything but ignorance about literature and history.
In fact most of the genre is a primitive interpretation of Buddhism. Dark City provides an excellent example. The senseless interminable cycle of reincarnation on a vast space station controlled by evil aliens from the outer space is broken and Nirvana (somehow associated with the sea) is reached... Hm, I think the original teachings were rather more imaginative.
The bigger point however is that democracy by itself is not good or bad, it is a conduit for the views of the majority. If the majority thought that Socrates was corrupting the youth, a criminal he was and had to be put to death. Most Germans believed that Hitler represented their views so they elected Hitler, etc.
Let us not forget that the wonderful democracy of Athens had put Socrates to death by poisoning after an entirely democratic proceedings where he was found guilty of impiety and corrupting the minds of young citizens of Athens.
In fact if you do a little basic math you can very quickly get to the numbers so immense, that no comparison will be even possible.
For example, put F(1,n) = 1+...+1, n+1 times F(2,n) = F(1,F(1,F(1,F(...,F(1,n))...)), n+1 times and so on. (These are so-called Ackermann numbers or something very similar to them as I do not remember the definition exactly).
It turns out that F(5,5) is already so large that no physical quantity one can think of can approach it. Even the number of all possible permutations of all particles in the Universe over the history of the Universe comes nowhere close.
So does this mystical number really exist? And what is the meaning of it?
Other numbers, F(6,6), for example, are even much bigger, of course.
On the other hand it is not clear whether such perceived limits exist in any meaningful sense and are not just reflections of our ignorance.
I recall reading about IBM building a superfast computer to model the process of protein folding (if I remember correctly). Each such computation would take months on that (still nonexistant) enormously fast computer. However thousands of such events occur every second in any living organism...
Thus you might get computer for free if you agree to the ads no your screen, but you are very unlikely to make much money selling CPU time of your computer.
Not enough to cover you electricity bill anyway...