Distressingly, ITER is actually on schedule per dollar with its original plan. It's the amount of dollars falling behind per unit time, rather than the science and engineering per dollar.
On the material science front, there's two issues - normal operation, and disruptions. With normal operation, there are materials that ought to be able to do a pretty good job of withstanding the environment inside the reactor, but the trick is finding ones that will do so without poisoning the plasma. Right now, there's some really cool work being done with liquid-lithium walled reactors to try and ameliorate those problems. As far as disruptions go, that's a confinement issue, there probably aren't materials that can deal with it. But almost all of the research being done with the computational plasma physicists I was working with this summer was going into understanding the magnetic reconnection events that lead to instability and disruptions. There are also reactor designs other than tokamaks which ought to be inherently more stable, but which have had tremendous difficulty getting funding due to the politicized nature of the work on ITER. NCSX, for example would have had some very interesting results had it not been cancelled, but thankfully other stellarator experiments are under way (HSX, LHD, and the Wendelstein 7-X).
I'd heard of Seamonkey before but I'd never heard it explained what it was. I just assumed it was Firefox's unloved little brother, and that all the cool stuff was in Firefox. The fact that I'm getting first post for the first time in my/. career suggests I'm not alone in this.
The reason they don't replace it with like/dislike, is that they want people to actually evaluate information content rather than simply people's opinions. Whether that's what actually happens is another matter.
It's not talking about who gets to claim responsibility, it's the question of if your vote is even relevant. If your party wins by 20,000 votes, 19,999 of them could have vote third party and it wouldn't have changed the outcome. Obviously one vote isn't much a margin of error, but the point was that virtually no major elections are ever decided by anywhere close to that sort of margin.
I'm not saying not to vote - and unless my reading comprehension was pretty bad, that article isn't either - it's saying that there is no such thing as a "pragmatic" vote.
And for the record, I think it's damn obvious the Democrats didn't listen to Nader, or the Republicans to Ron Paul. Look at the clown show we have running on both major party tickets for president right now. Both of them represent the antithesis of the 3rd parties on their respective sides of the political spectrum.
You're incoherent. I'm not sure how what you're saying is relevant in terms of analyzing costs or benefits for the act of voting.
But to answer your second question...I think there are a multitude of problems. The primary one is that our system of representative democracy was designed to provide proportional representation at the national level to strong state governments in a relatively weak federal government; instead we ended up with a strong federal government and disemboweled state governments. The winner-take-all elections at the state level for national office have turned our political system into a zero-sum game between the two parties, rather than the necessarily cooperative game of any parliamentary system with proportional representation. It benefits the parties to promote rabid and unthinking party devotion rather than to promote the formation of inter-party coalitions based on shared principles. Secondarily, but as a contributing factor, the primary "news" sources are effectively party mouthpieces (MSNBC, Fox) that participate in locking out the third parties.
The Greens and the Libertarians both have coherent ideologies, and represent the beliefs of significant portions of the population. The fact that right around a 3rd of U.S. population claim to be Independent even as the Democrats and Republicans typically take in 98% of the vote is very telling. So is the fact that even among the most educated and supposedly politically independent of my acquaintances, the response is typically "who are Johnson & Gray" (or Jill Stein, etc...) when I make a Facebook status about voting or watching the upcoming Free & Equal debate. Do I expect this election cycle to be any sort of decisive victory for third parties? No. But the short-term goals for 3rd parties are much lower (access to matching grants for campaign funding, less restrictive ballot access requirements), which means the relative worth of my vote is much higher for them than it is for a major party.
Quite the contrary. There's a reason our flagship magazine is called "Reason";)
Environmentalism and Libertarianism get along quite well. If you want something from a less partisan source, go read Thoreau, or Wendell Berry. Neither were self identified libertarians, but the intellectual roots are similar, and most of their arguments about land-care ethic and small government can be transplanted into a libertarian frame of reference without any difficulty. And Wendell Berry's take on property rights is great.
Ad Hominem and all that. If you want to come up with a different cost/benefit analysis of voting and argue why your numbers are based on more accurate assumptions and/or statistics than theirs I might be interested in what you have to say. Otherwise, peace out.
The number of people who read articles in Reason, even after a Slashdotting, is so insignificant compared to the general voting population that I'm quite comfortable that it will continue to be relevant no matter how many people I share it with.
Yeah, basically, the only sensible cost/benefit analysis of voting is if the benefit is for your emotional state. And there are helpful goals for third parties for ballot access and campaign funding at much lower margins of support which means your vote is relatively more impactful, even if it still really doesn't count for much.
The Tea Partier will get uncomfortable if you bring up drugs. And the Libertarian will be able to argue you into a deontological system of ethics based on the non-aggression principle. Alternatively: one will talk about Sarah Palin, and one will talk about Murray Rothbard.
What are you ramblng about w.r.t. to Cython? It is a derivative of Pyrex, and it should not be confused with CPython. Being "easy as Python" is not the same as Python - and having written a good deal of both Cython AND Pyrex code, I can tell you they aren't nearly the same language as Python (support for strong typing, for example).
And the AC could very well have been working with Unladen Swallow, IronPython, Jython, PyPy, etc. None of those CPython, but they are also implementations of the Python language. Don't use equivalence relations for things that aren't equivalent.
What the fuck do you think you were using when you did the rest of the code in Python? Cython is Python.
Well, you just set off the "I don't know what I'm talking about" alarm.
Cython is a derivative of Pyrex, neither of which should be confused with CPython. And of course CPython is not Python either, it's the reference implementation of an interpreter for the Python language.
Slashdot Mirror
flamebait, huh? So much for 2880x1800 being, you know, an upgrade from 1920x1200.
He's not a OS X user anyway. Xubuntu, or Windows ought to do fine.
I'm sure I'll get downmodded, but have an Apple.
Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
Truth: this man speaks it.
.... "Get the f*** out of my country you f***ing a**hole."
Distressingly, ITER is actually on schedule per dollar with its original plan. It's the amount of dollars falling behind per unit time, rather than the science and engineering per dollar.
On the material science front, there's two issues - normal operation, and disruptions. With normal operation, there are materials that ought to be able to do a pretty good job of withstanding the environment inside the reactor, but the trick is finding ones that will do so without poisoning the plasma. Right now, there's some really cool work being done with liquid-lithium walled reactors to try and ameliorate those problems. As far as disruptions go, that's a confinement issue, there probably aren't materials that can deal with it. But almost all of the research being done with the computational plasma physicists I was working with this summer was going into understanding the magnetic reconnection events that lead to instability and disruptions. There are also reactor designs other than tokamaks which ought to be inherently more stable, but which have had tremendous difficulty getting funding due to the politicized nature of the work on ITER. NCSX, for example would have had some very interesting results had it not been cancelled, but thankfully other stellarator experiments are under way (HSX, LHD, and the Wendelstein 7-X).
Dammit, sniped by logging in. Oh well.
I'd heard of Seamonkey before but I'd never heard it explained what it was. I just assumed it was Firefox's unloved little brother, and that all the cool stuff was in Firefox. The fact that I'm getting first post for the first time in my /. career suggests I'm not alone in this.
The reason they don't replace it with like/dislike, is that they want people to actually evaluate information content rather than simply people's opinions. Whether that's what actually happens is another matter.
Sounds like a fun project though!
It's not talking about who gets to claim responsibility, it's the question of if your vote is even relevant. If your party wins by 20,000 votes, 19,999 of them could have vote third party and it wouldn't have changed the outcome. Obviously one vote isn't much a margin of error, but the point was that virtually no major elections are ever decided by anywhere close to that sort of margin.
I'm not saying not to vote - and unless my reading comprehension was pretty bad, that article isn't either - it's saying that there is no such thing as a "pragmatic" vote.
And for the record, I think it's damn obvious the Democrats didn't listen to Nader, or the Republicans to Ron Paul. Look at the clown show we have running on both major party tickets for president right now. Both of them represent the antithesis of the 3rd parties on their respective sides of the political spectrum.
You're incoherent. I'm not sure how what you're saying is relevant in terms of analyzing costs or benefits for the act of voting.
But to answer your second question...I think there are a multitude of problems. The primary one is that our system of representative democracy was designed to provide proportional representation at the national level to strong state governments in a relatively weak federal government; instead we ended up with a strong federal government and disemboweled state governments. The winner-take-all elections at the state level for national office have turned our political system into a zero-sum game between the two parties, rather than the necessarily cooperative game of any parliamentary system with proportional representation. It benefits the parties to promote rabid and unthinking party devotion rather than to promote the formation of inter-party coalitions based on shared principles. Secondarily, but as a contributing factor, the primary "news" sources are effectively party mouthpieces (MSNBC, Fox) that participate in locking out the third parties.
The Greens and the Libertarians both have coherent ideologies, and represent the beliefs of significant portions of the population. The fact that right around a 3rd of U.S. population claim to be Independent even as the Democrats and Republicans typically take in 98% of the vote is very telling. So is the fact that even among the most educated and supposedly politically independent of my acquaintances, the response is typically "who are Johnson & Gray" (or Jill Stein, etc...) when I make a Facebook status about voting or watching the upcoming Free & Equal debate. Do I expect this election cycle to be any sort of decisive victory for third parties? No. But the short-term goals for 3rd parties are much lower (access to matching grants for campaign funding, less restrictive ballot access requirements), which means the relative worth of my vote is much higher for them than it is for a major party.
Quite the contrary. There's a reason our flagship magazine is called "Reason" ;)
Environmentalism and Libertarianism get along quite well. If you want something from a less partisan source, go read Thoreau, or Wendell Berry. Neither were self identified libertarians, but the intellectual roots are similar, and most of their arguments about land-care ethic and small government can be transplanted into a libertarian frame of reference without any difficulty. And Wendell Berry's take on property rights is great.
Ad Hominem and all that. If you want to come up with a different cost/benefit analysis of voting and argue why your numbers are based on more accurate assumptions and/or statistics than theirs I might be interested in what you have to say. Otherwise, peace out.
The number of people who read articles in Reason, even after a Slashdotting, is so insignificant compared to the general voting population that I'm quite comfortable that it will continue to be relevant no matter how many people I share it with.
Yeah, basically, the only sensible cost/benefit analysis of voting is if the benefit is for your emotional state. And there are helpful goals for third parties for ballot access and campaign funding at much lower margins of support which means your vote is relatively more impactful, even if it still really doesn't count for much.
I posted this link in this conversation already but.....voting for them won't have any more or less of an effect than voting for anyone else. Your vote doesn't matter.
Your vote doesn't count regardless of who you vote for. Might as well vote for someone you like.
The Tea Partier will get uncomfortable if you bring up drugs. And the Libertarian will be able to argue you into a deontological system of ethics based on the non-aggression principle. Alternatively: one will talk about Sarah Palin, and one will talk about Murray Rothbard.
"I am all that is man"
Like....this?
Actually, I think this is probably the only thing that needs to be posted in response to this question.
What are you ramblng about w.r.t. to Cython? It is a derivative of Pyrex, and it should not be confused with CPython. Being "easy as Python" is not the same as Python - and having written a good deal of both Cython AND Pyrex code, I can tell you they aren't nearly the same language as Python (support for strong typing, for example). And the AC could very well have been working with Unladen Swallow, IronPython, Jython, PyPy, etc. None of those CPython, but they are also implementations of the Python language. Don't use equivalence relations for things that aren't equivalent.
Well, you just set off the "I don't know what I'm talking about" alarm. Cython is a derivative of Pyrex, neither of which should be confused with CPython. And of course CPython is not Python either, it's the reference implementation of an interpreter for the Python language.
oh, huh, I guess I missed that somehow.