Your example requires amoral voters, journalists who don't care, etc. Elections don't take place in a vacuum. Don't you think that someone would smell a rat if $1000 per vote is on the table?
Illegal... but should it be?
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Voteauction.com
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This practice is almost certainly highly illegal in most states (and probably in many countries). However, it probably shouldn't be.
Under rational choice theories of political behavior (see, for example, Downs' An Economic Theory of Democracy), it is irrational to vote if the expected benefit of voting is negative. Since the universe is highly uncertain, and there are tens of thousands of voters in most democratic elections, the gross expected benefit of voting is damn close to zero already, and the net benefit rapidly turns negative when you incorporate the hour it takes to go and vote, the gas for your car, the forgone income or quality time with your family, etc. (Ego satisfaction may have some positive impact, but that's usually offset in most people by the other factors.) It is particularly irrational to vote in the United States, since Democrats and Republicans basically do the same thing once they are elected (take your money/freedom and spend it on their favored groups, without making any real societal changes).
Exchanging money for a vote changes the equation. People who don't otherwise care will vote because the net benefit of voting will be positive. Smaller groups in society benefit from this arrangement because they can "buy" support from apathetic (or even slightly opposed) voters, if they can translate their passion into money.
Imagine the following scenario: homosexuals in Colorado want to defeat an "anti-gay" state referendum (this actually happened). Under "non-vote-buying conditions", you get something like:
10% - Adamantly support gay rights
10% - Adamantly oppose gay rights
10% - Somewhat oppose gay rights
70% - Ambivilent; they probably split 35-35
In this situation, the gay rights people lose (the proposal wins 60-40). (The real vote was somewhat closer, 52-48, but the principle is the same.) Now imagine if the gay rights people gave $10 to anyone who voted against the anti-gay proposal (maybe they get the money from Liz Taylor or something; it's not important):
10% - Adamantly support gay rights
10% - Adamantly oppose gay rights
10% - Somewhat oppose gay rights
70% - Ambivilent; maybe split 50-20 since they get $10 for supporting gay rights (but $0 for opposing them).
In this situation, the outcome is a 60-40 vote against the proposal, and the gay rights people win by converting ambivilent voters. Of course, the anti-gay-rights people could do the same, but if you accept "passion = $$" (admittedly, an imperfect relationship, but well-evidenced by the Israel lobby and other groups) it makes for more equitable outcomes to groups that genuinely care about the issues.
WINE is a good thing... what I'm not sure about is "porting" WordPerfect 9 (aka WP 2000) to run on top of it. Let me catalog just some of its problems:
It crashes hard after opening 3 files with moderate formatting.
The TrueType font installer talks to your normal xfs and crashes it (on port 7100), instead of to Bitstream's font server (on port 7102).
The file selector, no matter what your CWD is, always opens in ~.
The window tries to take over the front of your desktop. You can't send it to back... it will even hide your dialogs from you.
Frankly, for any real work I have to revert to WP8 (or WP9 under Windows): even though WP8 only knows about 4 fonts, it at least can open files and you can edit them. As it stands now, Abiword is a better word processor than WP9 on Linux, and I didn't pay $140 for Abiword.
What ever happened to the "Joel 'Espy' Klecker" release...?
It's not the Joel "Espy" Klecker release. It's Debian 2.2 (or "potato"), dedicated to Joel "Espy" Klecker. Always has been; always will be. The last paragraph of the release announcement mentions it; a dedication is burned on each official CD. However, it's not the name of the release.
(By analogy, the movie The Negotiator is dedicated to late actor J. T. Walsh. Nobody calls it "The J. T. Walsh Movie"; that's not its name.)
Something I've been thinking about lately is the problem of why Libertarians seem to be "closer" to Republicans. I think I've come up with the reason: all of the Republicans' stupid ideas are harder to implement than all of the Democrats'.
The Democrats' stupid ideas basically boil down to "take more money from everyone with a job and give it to people without jobs." This is easy: you raise taxes. This is especially easy once you have everybody's guns.
The Republicans' stupid ideas basically boil down to "take freedom away from everyone who doesn't agree with us." This is hard; it requires a police state, and you also have to raise taxes to do it. Plus you have the minor problem of everyone still having guns (which makes the police state hard to create).
Therefore, the problem Libertarians face is that Republicans aren't as dangerous to the things we believe in as Democrats.
A (admittedly hurried) reading of the patent (and its claims) indicates that it is rather broad; it seems to cover paged widgets in which you can select things that are consequently propogated to another area of the display. However, the legalese is so abstracted from reality that I can't make heads or tails of it. It seems to apply to more than palette selection, though...
(BTW, Extrans and Plain Old Text are reversed for me; anyone else see this problem?)
GNU libc is licensed under the LGPL, not the GPL. The only significant GNU library that is GPLed is Readline, I think (and there are compatible libraries that aren't GPLed, though I can't name them off the top of my head).
There was a small section in the article that said that many of the Debian developers have never met face to face. Whilst this is clearly true, most of them will never have met this way, I thought that before you get accepted as a Debian developer you had to go through a face to face meeting, to exchange public keys and the like. Is this true? Or am I barking up the wrong tree here?
Well, the procedures have changed a bit since the days of ~100-200 developers; I never met anyone, nor even had my key signed, for the first few years I was in the project. I only met another developer in the flesh 10 months ago (and then a whole bunch of them), at Atlanta Linux Showcase last October. Since then, I've met a few more (out in the Bay Area in March). I've still not met most of the developers; pairwise, I doubt any of us has met a majority of project members (although maybe Wichert and a few others who get around a lot have).
I guess it would be interesting to see a graph of "who's met who" in Debian. I suspect there are two large clusters (Europe and North America) with links between them, and lots of nodes off on their own or in small groups.
If you're looking for expandability, you should consider the TRGpro; while it's a bit more than the Visor ($330), it has a CompactFlash+ slot (which takes CF cards, modems, bar wand scanners, etc.) and has 2 MB of onboard flash, as well as 8 MB of RAM. Another nice feature is that the HotSync port is a standard Palm III port, so you can use Palm III/VII accessories (GoType keyboards, etc.) without any special adapters.
Another nice thing about CF is that it's electrically compatible with PCMCIA; you buy a cheap ($10) adapter, and your CF+ modem (or flash memory) will also work with a standard laptop.
A less flip response is that Debian has a standard menu system that is compatible with any window manager; you simply stick a file in/usr/lib/menu/[package], and update-menus in your post-install script does the rest. The user can also override these menu entries if she wants. I believe Debian has recommended menu entries for all interactive programs (i.e. ones that don't need command line options or a shell to do useful work) for a while (see policy section 3.6); packages that don't have menu entries usually get nasty bug reports filed against them;-).
The debian/Slackware issue: Debian has "official" releases like every 2 years, thus generating stats on it are near impossible. I know the distro is maintained (read:
http://www.securitypo rtal.com/lskb/articles/kben10000078.html), I am well aware of how dpkg/etc works. Here's the thing, you will never release a bug free software package, especially something like Debian which has a lot of packages. Like kernel 1.0 it's sometimes just best to shove it out the door and give users something a lot better then the last "officially stable" release.
If you want the latest and greatest, you can always install from the latest stable and then selectively (or indiscriminately) update to unstable. I've installed boxes from both stable and frozen CDs and updated them right away to unstable with minimal hassle.
Side note: looks like Debian will release the next major one before 2.4, meaning it'll be another year or two before "stable" gets a 2.4 kernel, sigh).
2.2.16 isn't even secure, and you want a 2.4 kernel? Sheesh. FWIW Debian 2.2 (potato) will ship with a 2.2.17 prepatch (or.17 final if Alan & Linus ever release it). Test Cycle 3 is in progress now, and the release manager is confident this will be the final one. You can always run 2.4 if you want; my Athlon box running unstable is running 2.4.0-test4 with no hassles (my laptop chokes on -test4 after a while, probably because the memory management is wacko still).
As for it being a year before woody ships with a 2.4 kernel, it may be a year before 2.4 is remotely stable. 2.4 may not even be feature frozen yet, despite claims to the contrary; Linus seems to be adding a new feature a week. IMHO shipping 2.4 as the default kernel in any distribution would be irresponsible at this point.
Actually, making money from the float has been quite viable. Several states fund legal aid programs from the float of money that's held in escrow by lawyers (although Cato argues this violates the takings clause of the Constitution, as it is compulsory; you can't request that you get the interest, and it can be spent on things to which you might be philosophically opposed). And my bank (USAA) seems to make money enough off float to rebate ATM charges, give a 0.5% cashback award on debit card purchases, etc. Granted, some of the cash comes from not building a branch every 1/4 mile, but float is nice.
Back in my days as a wee youth, I reviewed movies for the Off Campus (teen) section of the Ocala Star-Banner. Several of my colleagues were under the impression that we wouldn't get to see any more movies if we gave bad reviews to them; I pointed out that the newspaper (not the movie studio) was paying for the movie tickets, so it didn't matter whether the review was positive or negative.
I will say that the temptation to give a glowing review to any new product is very strong when (a) you're not getting a lot of products and (b) the products are at least promising. Back in the days of the Amiga, there were only a couple of years in which reviews were objective, and that's only because there was real competition in the marketplace. Once most of the developers left, glowing reviews returned to the forefront.
There are two basic problems with initiatives and referenda; the state that does the most of them, California, exhibits both on a regular basis:
Minorities (particularly unpopular ones) are easy targets. This is the most common critique, but not the most damning one.
Every decision is made independently. There is no possibility of compromise, or net gains from trade, because there is no enforcement mechanism. In a legislature, you can get outputs desirable to most people because legislatures can enforce tradeoffs; if A wants X and B wants Y, and they are not mutually exclusive, A can promise to support Y and B can promise to support X, and defection will be punished (because nobody will ever trust the defector again).
The third problem is that it results in spineless legislators who cop-out of making meaningful decisions. Not surprisingly, California leads America in producing this outcome too.
I've been really happy with my DC280 ($525 at Buy.com about 6 months ago)... it comes with nice, rechargable NiMH batteries (and the charger too), so it has everything you need except the case and the PCMCIA adapter (the latter can be had for ~$10 if you need it). I hadn't touched my 35mm in years, but now I'm taking photos all the time.
I like the video out feature too; it's nice when you want to show pictures to people and the laptop isn't handy.
Coupled with my HP Photosmart 1100 printer (with CF slot), you have a nice little digital photography setup. Now only if Linux supported all the 1100's features (2-sided printing, high resolution, reading CF cards over the parallel cable)...
If it visually aligns with traditional 8-space tabs, you'll not have a problem. Python certainly isn't as location-dependent as Fortran; all you have to do is choose an indent and stick with it (I personally use 4, but you can use any n>1).
In any event, I recommend using '(setq indent-tabs-mode nil)' in Emacs to avoid the tabs in the first place (and something like Emacs' python-mode to keep your indentation consistent).
Sure. Though, in fairness, the MPAA? (regex) really needs to decide what its name is; furthermore, all of the lawsuits have been filed by the "MPAA". Now, the "MPA" may have had the kid arrested. All I know is that "industry stooge Jack Valenti" (tm) is involved with both. And I have $100 that says Katz got this right by accident (in the same way that the late Gene Siskel was only right about movies when he agreed with Roger Ebert).
This is starting to make my head hurt.
(Incidentally, the DVD fiasco made Reason Express this week; see here for details.)
Re:MPA is associated with MPAA, DUH lordsuck
on
China and the MPA
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MPA stands for "Music Publishers' Association." JonKatz is talking about the "Motion Picture Association of America." These are not the same thing.
That's like saying something is posted on Freshmeat, when it's really on Slashdot, and then trying to CYA because they're both owned by Andover.
'Fraid not (Ahem... MPA was in the proper context)
on
China and the MPA
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· Score: 2
The MUSIC PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION of the United States is what Jon was speaking of and he was very clear about it. As much as it pains me to side with Jon on ANYTHING, I must in this case.
From the beginning of Katz's article:
This week, the Motion Picture Association (MPA)...
I guess you can de-pain yourself;-)
Could we have some research, please...
on
China and the MPA
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· Score: 2
I realize this is the digital frontier, but if you're going to write an article about the arrogance and stupidity of the Motion Picture Association of America, the least you could do is get the name right.
Also, use of the phrase "industry stooge (or shill) Jack Valenti" is de rigeur in any discussion of the MPAA. Please use it in any future articles on this topic; it would warm my heart.
E*Trade definitely has some of the funniest commercials out there. My personal favorite has to be the "Blow'd Up" ad; it starts out as an advertisement for a "$200 million blockbuster" starring Anna Nicole Smith and George Takei (Sulu from Star Trek, playing the megalomanical bad guy), and features lots of stuff getting blown up (including, improbably, a picnic basket). Tagline: "This movie's gonna blow." Then we realize someone's watching the ad on TV, and he liquidates his shares in TriMount Studios, the distributor of the movie.
I have to say, though, the best ad I saw this Superbowl was the Herding Cats one, even though I can't remember what it was for anymore.
I guess I forgot to mention that UPS has a major sorting station in Memphis (Oakhaven Hub; you'll see it if you ever track stuff from Buy.com, since one of their main warehouses is just north of Memphis).
That, and Oxford is about 60 miles from Memphis.
About 3/4 of my packages via UPS arrive before I even know they've been shipped (Buy.com seems to wait several days before figuring out that things have been shipped). The other 1/4 seem to go on a long sojourn first.
Slashdot Mirror
Your example requires amoral voters, journalists who don't care, etc. Elections don't take place in a vacuum. Don't you think that someone would smell a rat if $1000 per vote is on the table?
Under rational choice theories of political behavior (see, for example, Downs' An Economic Theory of Democracy), it is irrational to vote if the expected benefit of voting is negative. Since the universe is highly uncertain, and there are tens of thousands of voters in most democratic elections, the gross expected benefit of voting is damn close to zero already, and the net benefit rapidly turns negative when you incorporate the hour it takes to go and vote, the gas for your car, the forgone income or quality time with your family, etc. (Ego satisfaction may have some positive impact, but that's usually offset in most people by the other factors.) It is particularly irrational to vote in the United States, since Democrats and Republicans basically do the same thing once they are elected (take your money/freedom and spend it on their favored groups, without making any real societal changes).
Exchanging money for a vote changes the equation. People who don't otherwise care will vote because the net benefit of voting will be positive. Smaller groups in society benefit from this arrangement because they can "buy" support from apathetic (or even slightly opposed) voters, if they can translate their passion into money.
Imagine the following scenario: homosexuals in Colorado want to defeat an "anti-gay" state referendum (this actually happened). Under "non-vote-buying conditions", you get something like:
- 10% - Adamantly support gay rights
- 10% - Adamantly oppose gay rights
- 10% - Somewhat oppose gay rights
- 70% - Ambivilent; they probably split 35-35
In this situation, the gay rights people lose (the proposal wins 60-40). (The real vote was somewhat closer, 52-48, but the principle is the same.) Now imagine if the gay rights people gave $10 to anyone who voted against the anti-gay proposal (maybe they get the money from Liz Taylor or something; it's not important):- 10% - Adamantly support gay rights
- 10% - Adamantly oppose gay rights
- 10% - Somewhat oppose gay rights
- 70% - Ambivilent; maybe split 50-20 since they get $10 for supporting gay rights (but $0 for opposing them).
In this situation, the outcome is a 60-40 vote against the proposal, and the gay rights people win by converting ambivilent voters. Of course, the anti-gay-rights people could do the same, but if you accept "passion = $$" (admittedly, an imperfect relationship, but well-evidenced by the Israel lobby and other groups) it makes for more equitable outcomes to groups that genuinely care about the issues.- It crashes hard after opening 3 files with moderate formatting.
- The TrueType font installer talks to your normal xfs and crashes it (on port 7100), instead of to Bitstream's font server (on port 7102).
- The file selector, no matter what your CWD is, always opens in ~.
- The window tries to take over the front of your desktop. You can't send it to back... it will even hide your dialogs from you.
Frankly, for any real work I have to revert to WP8 (or WP9 under Windows): even though WP8 only knows about 4 fonts, it at least can open files and you can edit them. As it stands now, Abiword is a better word processor than WP9 on Linux, and I didn't pay $140 for Abiword.What ever happened to the "Joel 'Espy' Klecker" release...?
It's not the Joel "Espy" Klecker release. It's Debian 2.2 (or "potato"), dedicated to Joel "Espy" Klecker. Always has been; always will be. The last paragraph of the release announcement mentions it; a dedication is burned on each official CD. However, it's not the name of the release.
(By analogy, the movie The Negotiator is dedicated to late actor J. T. Walsh. Nobody calls it "The J. T. Walsh Movie"; that's not its name.)
Something I've been thinking about lately is the problem of why Libertarians seem to be "closer" to Republicans. I think I've come up with the reason: all of the Republicans' stupid ideas are harder to implement than all of the Democrats'.
The Democrats' stupid ideas basically boil down to "take more money from everyone with a job and give it to people without jobs." This is easy: you raise taxes. This is especially easy once you have everybody's guns.
The Republicans' stupid ideas basically boil down to "take freedom away from everyone who doesn't agree with us." This is hard; it requires a police state, and you also have to raise taxes to do it. Plus you have the minor problem of everyone still having guns (which makes the police state hard to create).
Therefore, the problem Libertarians face is that Republicans aren't as dangerous to the things we believe in as Democrats.
A (admittedly hurried) reading of the patent (and its claims) indicates that it is rather broad; it seems to cover paged widgets in which you can select things that are consequently propogated to another area of the display. However, the legalese is so abstracted from reality that I can't make heads or tails of it. It seems to apply to more than palette selection, though...
(BTW, Extrans and Plain Old Text are reversed for me; anyone else see this problem?)
Funny, all I did was:
Any other conspiracy theories?(Also, how exactly are they benefitting from giving the away this third-party installer that you don't really need anyway?)
GNU libc is licensed under the LGPL, not the GPL. The only significant GNU library that is GPLed is Readline, I think (and there are compatible libraries that aren't GPLed, though I can't name them off the top of my head).
Well, the procedures have changed a bit since the days of ~100-200 developers; I never met anyone, nor even had my key signed, for the first few years I was in the project. I only met another developer in the flesh 10 months ago (and then a whole bunch of them), at Atlanta Linux Showcase last October. Since then, I've met a few more (out in the Bay Area in March). I've still not met most of the developers; pairwise, I doubt any of us has met a majority of project members (although maybe Wichert and a few others who get around a lot have).
I guess it would be interesting to see a graph of "who's met who" in Debian. I suspect there are two large clusters (Europe and North America) with links between them, and lots of nodes off on their own or in small groups.
Another nice thing about CF is that it's electrically compatible with PCMCIA; you buy a cheap ($10) adapter, and your CF+ modem (or flash memory) will also work with a standard laptop.
GNOME and KDE also have a similar concept.
As for it being a year before woody ships with a 2.4 kernel, it may be a year before 2.4 is remotely stable. 2.4 may not even be feature frozen yet, despite claims to the contrary; Linus seems to be adding a new feature a week. IMHO shipping 2.4 as the default kernel in any distribution would be irresponsible at this point.
Actually, making money from the float has been quite viable. Several states fund legal aid programs from the float of money that's held in escrow by lawyers (although Cato argues this violates the takings clause of the Constitution, as it is compulsory; you can't request that you get the interest, and it can be spent on things to which you might be philosophically opposed). And my bank (USAA) seems to make money enough off float to rebate ATM charges, give a 0.5% cashback award on debit card purchases, etc. Granted, some of the cash comes from not building a branch every 1/4 mile, but float is nice.
Back in my days as a wee youth, I reviewed movies for the Off Campus (teen) section of the Ocala Star-Banner. Several of my colleagues were under the impression that we wouldn't get to see any more movies if we gave bad reviews to them; I pointed out that the newspaper (not the movie studio) was paying for the movie tickets, so it didn't matter whether the review was positive or negative.
I will say that the temptation to give a glowing review to any new product is very strong when (a) you're not getting a lot of products and (b) the products are at least promising. Back in the days of the Amiga, there were only a couple of years in which reviews were objective, and that's only because there was real competition in the marketplace. Once most of the developers left, glowing reviews returned to the forefront.
- Minorities (particularly unpopular ones) are easy targets. This is the most common critique, but not the most damning one.
- Every decision is made independently. There is no possibility of compromise, or net gains from trade, because there is no enforcement mechanism. In a legislature, you can get outputs desirable to most people because legislatures can enforce tradeoffs; if A wants X and B wants Y, and they are not mutually exclusive, A can promise to support Y and B can promise to support X, and defection will be punished (because nobody will ever trust the defector again).
The third problem is that it results in spineless legislators who cop-out of making meaningful decisions. Not surprisingly, California leads America in producing this outcome too.It certainly fits with Alan Cox's recent comments on linux-kernel.
Waldo refers to "one of our lawyers." The obvious implication is that he is speaking on behalf of KDE (or at least that KDE has lawyers).
I've been really happy with my DC280 ($525 at Buy.com about 6 months ago)... it comes with nice, rechargable NiMH batteries (and the charger too), so it has everything you need except the case and the PCMCIA adapter (the latter can be had for ~$10 if you need it). I hadn't touched my 35mm in years, but now I'm taking photos all the time.
I like the video out feature too; it's nice when you want to show pictures to people and the laptop isn't handy.
Coupled with my HP Photosmart 1100 printer (with CF slot), you have a nice little digital photography setup. Now only if Linux supported all the 1100's features (2-sided printing, high resolution, reading CF cards over the parallel cable)...
If it visually aligns with traditional 8-space tabs, you'll not have a problem. Python certainly isn't as location-dependent as Fortran; all you have to do is choose an indent and stick with it (I personally use 4, but you can use any n>1).
In any event, I recommend using '(setq indent-tabs-mode nil)' in Emacs to avoid the tabs in the first place (and something like Emacs' python-mode to keep your indentation consistent).
May I be pained again now?
Sure. Though, in fairness, the MPAA? (regex) really needs to decide what its name is; furthermore, all of the lawsuits have been filed by the "MPAA". Now, the "MPA" may have had the kid arrested. All I know is that "industry stooge Jack Valenti" (tm) is involved with both. And I have $100 that says Katz got this right by accident (in the same way that the late Gene Siskel was only right about movies when he agreed with Roger Ebert).
This is starting to make my head hurt.
(Incidentally, the DVD fiasco made Reason Express this week; see here for details.)
MPA stands for "Music Publishers' Association." JonKatz is talking about the "Motion Picture Association of America." These are not the same thing.
That's like saying something is posted on Freshmeat, when it's really on Slashdot, and then trying to CYA because they're both owned by Andover.
The MUSIC PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION of the United States is what Jon was speaking of and he was very clear about it. As much as it pains me to side with Jon on ANYTHING, I must in this case.
;-)
From the beginning of Katz's article:
This week, the Motion Picture Association (MPA)...
I guess you can de-pain yourself
I realize this is the digital frontier, but if you're going to write an article about the arrogance and stupidity of the Motion Picture Association of America, the least you could do is get the name right.
Also, use of the phrase "industry stooge (or shill) Jack Valenti" is de rigeur in any discussion of the MPAA. Please use it in any future articles on this topic; it would warm my heart.
E*Trade definitely has some of the funniest commercials out there. My personal favorite has to be the "Blow'd Up" ad; it starts out as an advertisement for a "$200 million blockbuster" starring Anna Nicole Smith and George Takei (Sulu from Star Trek, playing the megalomanical bad guy), and features lots of stuff getting blown up (including, improbably, a picnic basket). Tagline: "This movie's gonna blow." Then we realize someone's watching the ad on TV, and he liquidates his shares in TriMount Studios, the distributor of the movie.
I have to say, though, the best ad I saw this Superbowl was the Herding Cats one, even though I can't remember what it was for anymore.
I guess I forgot to mention that UPS has a major sorting station in Memphis (Oakhaven Hub; you'll see it if you ever track stuff from Buy.com, since one of their main warehouses is just north of Memphis).
That, and Oxford is about 60 miles from Memphis.
About 3/4 of my packages via UPS arrive before I even know they've been shipped (Buy.com seems to wait several days before figuring out that things have been shipped). The other 1/4 seem to go on a long sojourn first.