I disagree. While a base-10 counting system makes sense for distances,
Why? The scaling effect of our metric system would work just as well in any base number system.
It's all 10, 100, 1000, 10000, etc., because "10" means different things in different number systems.
2) Agreed, both candidates kind of sucked this election. Bush has some good ideas and I like his leadership style (delegation not micro-management), but some of his tax ideas are so stupid. I'm not a Gore fan. Frankly I find it ironic that you like Joe Leiberman, a candidate who is far more religious than Gore.
I do too. But I don't think that the Vice President has that much, if any more power than than he would be as Senator, anyway. The big selling point for me is that it would be a wonderful slap in the face to all the self-righteous anti-Semites in this country.
3) The electoral college isn't going anywhere. It is meant to balance both popular and regional will in the election of the president. It does so pretty well. Gore barely won the popular vote. Bush won the geographic area of the US by a landslide. Gore won solidly in the urban areas, but Bush had good showings in both many suburban and all rural areas. You may not like this, but do we want the political process to be dictated by the needs of NY, LA and Chicago while neglecting the heart land of America? This is the most likely outcome of a purely popular election.
Yes. The President should best represent the desires of all of the people in the Nation. Why should your vote be worth less if you live in a crowded city? A benefit to having states is that those states can elect officials to best regulate themselves on a smaller level. My question to you: Should Governors be elected using the same principle? Should more value be added to the votes of less populated counties? If not, why does your argument for the Electoral College not apply here?
Weren't there millions of absentee votes not counted in non-swing states like California, because it wouldn't make a difference in that state? Do we really know what the popular vote was?
Gore won't concede. He's shown that already. Do not blame other Democrats for his pro-litigation stand since most of them don't agree with it either. Gore knows that his only chance at the presidency is now. In four years he will be running from a weaker position and he will have lost a significant amount of support because of his actions to date. I already know many Gore supporters who will not vote for him in 4 years no matter what happens because of his behavior during this election.
(Note: I'm a Democratic/Green voter. Feel free to flame.)
So we're doomed to a Republican president for the next 8 years? *sigh* Well, I suppose I should look on the bright side of things: even if Al Gore loses this contest, I see three benefits coming from this squabble:
1) New voting equipment, especially in Florida. California has already started upgrading much of the old machinery to touch screens.
2) A different Democratic candidate than Gore, perhaps a better (IMHO less religious) one. I would have loved to see the Jewish Senator Lieberman become Vice President. An obvious indication that America has made further progress in terms of equality. But I think we all know that Joe's religion would have been too much of a barrier for him to win in 2004, even though he would likely take the primary.
3) More attention is being paid to Electoral College. Perhaps after all this is over we'll finally be able to gut the accursed thing.
"Just what the hell does 'five times thinner' mean anyway?!?!?"
Well, as "five times thicker" would be equivalent to 5 CDs stacked on each other, I'd guess that "five times thinner" would be 1/5 the thickness of a CD.
But this would also mean that what happened in Mars did not happen 100000000000000000000 years ago...
I'd think not, especially considering that 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 (100 quintillion) years is far older than our ~13,000,000,000 (13 billion) year old universe.
I would be willing to have a reasonable discussion about having an official language, but if you look at the various demagogues that espouse "English Only" or "English First" you will see that they are just barely to the left of neo-Nazi skinheads, albeit with better clothes and haircuts...
Um, that sounds a bit ad-hominem to me. Besides, I'm for English as the official language of the United States, and I lean so far to the left that I'm nearly a Socialist.
The classic theme was better, but I still found it lacking. I didn't see a way to show the navigation buttons with text only, and I miss the "bookmarks" button on the side of the URL bar. I'd imagine that the themes themselves contribute to how slow Netscape 7 runs.
Okay folks... it's clear that this dispute isn't going to be settled any time soon (at least not until all the votes are counted;), so let's compromise. I propose that we devote our spare time to Pac Man Jr. He has genetic code from both of the beloved dot-gobblers.
You get the best of both worlds, and a nifty beanie cap to boot!
You see there's a minimum of 3 electors per state (one for each senator and rep, the minimum being 2+1=3, e.g. Wyoming), This gives Wyoming much more say so in the presidential race on a people's-votes-per-elector ratio. In CA, the ratio is far lower. So this inequity compels presidential hopefule, not to IGNORE rural America.
People are ignored all the time in the process of campaigning. The Electoral College is no less guilty of encouraging this behavior itself. Sure -- idealy, the presidential canidates would spend an equal amount of time campaigning in all areas. Our President should exist to best represent the views of ALL people in the United States. But the Electoral college is about balancing out population density vs. landmass -- this makes very little sense. So you live on a farm in the middle of nowhere. Your vote should mean no more and no less than the vote of one person living in a crowded New York apartment! Plus, the Electoral college presents a big obstacle to moving towards superior voting systems, where each person can cast more than one vote. I want to see the EC abolished. The sooner the better.
Seriously though, hasn't this dragged on for long enough? It's not even news any more, let alone stuff that matters.:-)
WHAT?! You want it to END? In this Jerry Springer Country? Pshaw! What nonsense! The people *love* it! (Just ask the media. Ca-hing!)
Seriously though, I don't know why people are so insistent on knowing who the next president will be *right now*. People aren't all that interested in the president when he's actually in office. Unless there's some sort of scandal in the works, of course. Hm... Perhaps we're so impatient because we're eager to see who the new female interns will be?
There should at least be an.adu that web designers choose voluntarily, homes for pages the web site owners don't want kids to see. It doesn't necessarily have to be a porn site, but focus around mature, adult-oriented issues. Easily filtered. So why have these adult names been rejected in part because of the "controversy" surrounding them? Are people insisting on limiting adult pages to these special domain names?
I always wondered why is was people kept trying to prove that it wasnt aliens that helped them. Come on folks; RA the sun god coming down in his golden chariot? Do you reallly think that?
No, its to say that their vote counts the way they cast it because any mistake they made was because they didn't care enough to be absolutely sure they they were punching the correct hole.
Nonsense. You go into a polling both expecting the process to be no-nonsense and simple. And older people have their own problems with the butterfly ballot. See the new report by Greg D. Adams / Prof. Chris Fastnow to see just how many people did screw it up. The process should be fair; you can't make it unfair just because you want one canidate to win. That's just selfish. What are you, some kind of Libertarian?
Buchanan was certainly on the ballot in the Republican primary in 1996, and he received 8,788 votes, according to the National Review. Further, we use an almost identical ballot in Cook County Illinois, the Daleys home county. And the Florida ballot was printed in extra large print, especially for the benefit of the seniors. Not to mention, there are arrows pointing precisely to the appropriate hole to punch for the candidate.
I'd love it if you could provide me with a picture of that ballot. Were the two most popular canidates listed first, as people might expect? If I had gone into that poll, I would probably have messed it up, too. To say that someone's vote doesn't count because they screwed it up because they are old and have poor eyesight, is no less than saying that their votes shouldn't count because they are old. We can't discriminate like that. And remember that the counterintuitive ballot wasn't the only fishy thing going on in Florida. Check your CNN Online news. Also, it's strange that the recount is coming out so different this time. Perhaps it's because such a close eye is being kept on the counters by both parties? With 65/67 precincts reporting, Bush is not about 2000, but a mere 225 votes ahead. Two counties to go, + overseas votes & legal action to take the vote accurately.
contrast the current reality of the US Space program with where it should be: We should be mining asteriods now, we should have a fuel station on phobos and deimos (Mar's moons), we should be claiming Europa. In case you didn't know Europo is a moon of Jupiter composed of Water Ice, the most valuable and precious material in space.
Um, hello? I thought we were worried about contaminating Europa?
I don't understand -- if they can't afford to reboost it every so often, why not just send it out into it's own orbit around the sun? We might not be able to get very much information from it anymore, but it still seems more sensible than destroying the entire device!
Why do these articles keep getting posted to the front page?
You mean Slashdot has a back page to post articles to? Nobody ever tells me anything! What else have I been missing out on? Is there a sports section? Funny pages?
You know, everyone on Slashdot seems to hate Rambus. But there has been positive artile after article and comments following them extolling the virtues of the Playstation 2. Not that it is a bad system -- its just that when you buy a Sony PS2 you are supporting RAMBUS -- The PS2 has 32 megs of RDRAM.
It would *really* have helped if the person who posted this subject mentioned it was satire... Slashdotters seem to read 85% of the article before running back here and shooting their mouths off...
Who here saw the large black print at the end of the article that said "This is satire"?
Slashdot Mirror
So what happens to the quaterly system that all of the worlds financial markets depend on?
*GASP*
13 is prime! There's no way to divide it! We're all screwed!! AAAAGGGHHH!!!
[/Panic]
Eh... then again we could just add a week to the quarterly cycle, splitting that 13th month. =)
I disagree. While a base-10 counting system makes sense for distances,
Why? The scaling effect of our metric system would work just as well in any base number system.
It's all 10, 100, 1000, 10000, etc., because "10" means different things in different number systems.
Actually, "thinner" is the "opposite" of "thicker". In mathematical terms, I believe it's called a reciprocal.
So, therefore, "5 times thicker" would equal n*5=5n.
"5 times thinner" would be n*5^(-1)=n*(1/5)=n/5.
Thank you! I thought the last poster's logic seemed a bit fuzzy. "Because thinner refers to thickness, thinner means thicker"??
2) Agreed, both candidates kind of sucked this election. Bush has some good ideas and I like his leadership style (delegation not micro-management), but some of his tax ideas are so stupid. I'm not a Gore fan. Frankly I find it ironic that you like Joe Leiberman, a candidate who is far more religious than Gore.
I do too. But I don't think that the Vice President has that much, if any more power than than he would be as Senator, anyway. The big selling point for me is that it would be a wonderful slap in the face to all the self-righteous anti-Semites in this country.
3) The electoral college isn't going anywhere. It is meant to balance both popular and regional will in the election of the president. It does so pretty well. Gore barely won the popular vote. Bush won the geographic area of the US by a landslide. Gore won solidly in the urban areas, but Bush had good showings in both many suburban and all rural areas. You may not like this, but do we want the political process to be dictated by the needs of NY, LA and Chicago while neglecting the heart land of America? This is the most likely outcome of a purely popular election.
Yes. The President should best represent the desires of all of the people in the Nation. Why should your vote be worth less if you live in a crowded city? A benefit to having states is that those states can elect officials to best regulate themselves on a smaller level. My question to you: Should Governors be elected using the same principle? Should more value be added to the votes of less populated counties? If not, why does your argument for the Electoral College not apply here?
Weren't there millions of absentee votes not counted in non-swing states like California, because it wouldn't make a difference in that state? Do we really know what the popular vote was?
Gore won't concede. He's shown that already. Do not blame other Democrats for his pro-litigation stand since most of them don't agree with it either. Gore knows that his only chance at the presidency is now. In four years he will be running from a weaker position and he will have lost a significant amount of support because of his actions to date. I already know many Gore supporters who will not vote for him in 4 years no matter what happens because of his behavior during this election.
(Note: I'm a Democratic/Green voter. Feel free to flame.)
So we're doomed to a Republican president for the next 8 years? *sigh* Well, I suppose I should look on the bright side of things: even if Al Gore loses this contest, I see three benefits coming from this squabble:
1) New voting equipment, especially in Florida. California has already started upgrading much of the old machinery to touch screens.
2) A different Democratic candidate than Gore, perhaps a better (IMHO less religious) one. I would have loved to see the Jewish Senator Lieberman become Vice President. An obvious indication that America has made further progress in terms of equality. But I think we all know that Joe's religion would have been too much of a barrier for him to win in 2004, even though he would likely take the primary.
3) More attention is being paid to Electoral College. Perhaps after all this is over we'll finally be able to gut the accursed thing.
"Just what the hell does 'five times thinner' mean anyway?!?!?"
Well, as "five times thicker" would be equivalent to 5 CDs stacked on each other, I'd guess that "five times thinner" would be 1/5 the thickness of a CD.
But this would also mean that what happened in Mars did not happen 100000000000000000000 years ago...
I'd think not, especially considering that 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 (100 quintillion) years is far older than our ~13,000,000,000 (13 billion) year old universe.
=p
I would be willing to have a reasonable discussion about having an official language, but if you look at the various demagogues that espouse "English Only" or "English First" you will see that they are just barely to the left of neo-Nazi skinheads, albeit with better clothes and haircuts...
Um, that sounds a bit ad-hominem to me. Besides, I'm for English as the official language of the United States, and I lean so far to the left that I'm nearly a Socialist.
The classic theme was better, but I still found it lacking. I didn't see a way to show the navigation buttons with text only, and I miss the "bookmarks" button on the side of the URL bar. I'd imagine that the themes themselves contribute to how slow Netscape 7 runs.
Okay folks... it's clear that this dispute isn't going to be settled any time soon (at least not until all the votes are counted ;), so let's compromise. I propose that we devote our spare time to Pac Man Jr. He has genetic code from both of the beloved dot-gobblers.
You get the best of both worlds, and a nifty beanie cap to boot!
You see there's a minimum of 3 electors per state (one for each senator and rep, the minimum being 2+1=3, e.g. Wyoming), This gives Wyoming much more say so in the presidential race on a people's-votes-per-elector ratio. In CA, the ratio is far lower. So this inequity compels presidential hopefule, not to IGNORE rural America.
People are ignored all the time in the process of campaigning. The Electoral College is no less guilty of encouraging this behavior itself. Sure -- idealy, the presidential canidates would spend an equal amount of time campaigning in all areas. Our President should exist to best represent the views of ALL people in the United States. But the Electoral college is about balancing out population density vs. landmass -- this makes very little sense. So you live on a farm in the middle of nowhere. Your vote should mean no more and no less than the vote of one person living in a crowded New York apartment! Plus, the Electoral college presents a big obstacle to moving towards superior voting systems, where each person can cast more than one vote. I want to see the EC abolished. The sooner the better.
Seriously though, hasn't this dragged on for long enough? It's not even news any more, let alone stuff that matters. :-)
WHAT?! You want it to END? In this Jerry Springer Country? Pshaw! What nonsense! The people *love* it! (Just ask the media. Ca-hing!)
Seriously though, I don't know why people are so insistent on knowing who the next president will be *right now*. People aren't all that interested in the president when he's actually in office. Unless there's some sort of scandal in the works, of course. Hm... Perhaps we're so impatient because we're eager to see who the new female interns will be?
I doubt you're going to be able to get the population to change, unless something drastic happens. (And I mean something drastic.
Yea. Something terrible, like mixing up the units and smashing a valuable satellite into the surface of Mars or something.
Oh wait...
There should at least be an .adu that web designers choose voluntarily, homes for pages the web site owners don't want kids to see. It doesn't necessarily have to be a porn site, but focus around mature, adult-oriented issues. Easily filtered. So why have these adult names been rejected in part because of the "controversy" surrounding them? Are people insisting on limiting adult pages to these special domain names?
So much for the hopes of the astronomers who wanted to stop Iridium from blocking their view of a special wavelength in the sky...
I always wondered why is was people kept trying to prove that it wasnt aliens that helped them. Come on folks; RA the sun god coming down in his golden chariot? Do you reallly think that?
Ra, in a golden chariot?
Hmm... It must have been on loan from Apollo.
No, its to say that their vote counts the way they cast it because any mistake they made was because they didn't care enough to be absolutely sure they they were punching the correct hole.
Nonsense. You go into a polling both expecting the process to be no-nonsense and simple. And older people have their own problems with the butterfly ballot. See the new report by Greg D. Adams / Prof. Chris Fastnow to see just how many people did screw it up. The process should be fair; you can't make it unfair just because you want one canidate to win. That's just selfish. What are you, some kind of Libertarian?
Buchanan was certainly on the ballot in the Republican primary in 1996, and he received 8,788 votes, according to the National Review. Further, we use an almost identical ballot in Cook County Illinois, the Daleys home county. And the Florida ballot was printed in extra large print, especially for the benefit of the seniors. Not to mention, there are arrows pointing precisely to the appropriate hole to punch for the candidate.
I'd love it if you could provide me with a picture of that ballot. Were the two most popular canidates listed first, as people might expect? If I had gone into that poll, I would probably have messed it up, too. To say that someone's vote doesn't count because they screwed it up because they are old and have poor eyesight, is no less than saying that their votes shouldn't count because they are old. We can't discriminate like that. And remember that the counterintuitive ballot wasn't the only fishy thing going on in Florida. Check your CNN Online news. Also, it's strange that the recount is coming out so different this time. Perhaps it's because such a close eye is being kept on the counters by both parties? With 65/67 precincts reporting, Bush is not about 2000, but a mere 225 votes ahead. Two counties to go, + overseas votes & legal action to take the vote accurately.
contrast the current reality of the US Space program with where it should be: We should be mining asteriods now, we should have a fuel station on phobos and deimos (Mar's moons), we should be claiming Europa. In case you didn't know Europo is a moon of Jupiter composed of Water Ice, the most valuable and precious material in space.
Um, hello? I thought we were worried about contaminating Europa?
I don't understand -- if they can't afford to reboost it every so often, why not just send it out into it's own orbit around the sun? We might not be able to get very much information from it anymore, but it still seems more sensible than destroying the entire device!
Huh. I'll be!
Thanks.
Why do these articles keep getting posted to the front page?
You mean Slashdot has a back page to post articles to? Nobody ever tells me anything! What else have I been missing out on? Is there a sports section? Funny pages?
You know, everyone on Slashdot seems to hate Rambus. But there has been positive artile after article and comments following them extolling the virtues of the Playstation 2. Not that it is a bad system -- its just that when you buy a Sony PS2 you are supporting RAMBUS -- The PS2 has 32 megs of RDRAM.
Just an observation.
Putting advertisements up saying "I own XX amount of voting shares in this company. Happy to liquidate!"
*grin*
Ok, no, I *don't* know what I'm talking about.
It would *really* have helped if the person who posted this subject mentioned it was satire... Slashdotters seem to read 85% of the article before running back here and shooting their mouths off... Who here saw the large black print at the end of the article that said "This is satire"?