Why would the two big parties give up their stranglehold on American politics? And frankly, I think this is why it needs to go.
Well, I agree that a breath of fresh air would do everyone good, since most of people aren't really happy with either party these days.
However, the point from the column is well taken on me; specifically that the 2-party system produces tempered, mostly moderate policies that tend to lead to overall stability. This is a valid aim for the system to try to achieve.
Unless of course, you like more excitement. Didn't one of Michael Moore's Nader columns say something like, "Yeah, if we splintered the 2 parties, we'd have something raucous like the Knesset in Washington, people shouting during other's speeches, etc." It would be more interesting;-)
"Prejudice is wrong; you should hate everyone the same."
Damn man, your name wouldn't happen to be Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold, would it?;)
That is, of course, that neither candidate campaigned at all in the huge majority of the country, instead focusing all their efforts on a few key battleground states.
It's unclear to me that making the electoral college completely proportional would result in a better situation.
Specifically, say for instance each state's electoral votes were proportional to their population, and that it wasn't winner-take-all by state, but rather proportional winning of the state's electoral votes.
In that situation, it seems to me that the less populous areas of the country would get ignored in favor of the more populous areas, and still the candidates would spend most of their times in a small area.
I'm thinking here they would spend all their time in the Northeast, Southern California, etc., where the population is highest; thus blowing off most of the midwest, and large areas of the west.
This would be good on a per-person basis, but would be quite bad for many constituencies which are important for the country as a whole. Specifically, it seems that farmers and environmentalists, to name two, would never be considered very important for national elections.
This may be the end of the electoral college once people realize that the Executive branch of government is not truly representative of the people's will..
Well, that was pretty thoughtful...
So, either the Founding Fathers, who managed to get a couple other things right, were elitist snobs; or perhaps they were a bunch of idiots; OR maybe there's some purpose to having such a system, which takes an attention span longer than a sound bite to comprehend.
Please pardon the inflammatory tone of this post. If you're interested to hear an argument in favor of the electoral college, then here's an article which is more eloquent than I could be:
So, in other words, you're saying that the money is more safe in the hands of politicians (ie. the US Gov't) than in the hands of the people who earned the money in the first place...
Just a side thought: Does slashdot ever pan a book? Whenever I see a book reviewed here, it's always a case of: the reviewer has read it, and liked it either a LOT, or sufficiently to recommend it to others.
I've bought a couple books off the reviews, and liked the ones I've gotten. But it'd be interesting to see reviews of the full range (in goodness to badness) of books--
MSFT bought preferred shares, which puts them on a similar footing to debtors in case CORL files for Chapter 11.
From what I hear, CORL is not in the best shape financially. So, perhaps, MSFT sees this as a (cheap?) way to own a good bit of CORL's assets when the Chapter 11 happens. Plus, if they're shareholders, they have preference over other parties trying to bid for CORL's assets.
Perhaps they go for the apps, to kill the competition. But that doesn't seem to make sense from the monopoly point of view.
Perhaps they go for the OS? What plans to follow? To get a brand name, then fork Linux? Try to jump-start fragmentation a la Unix?
When/. announced 6.9beta, bero@redhat.com was down in the trenches, answering a lot about this question, among others. I would search for that article in the/. archive, then do a search on bero.
Sounds to me like an administrative decision -- "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft."
Also might be a legacy decision -- They've been flying with IBM Thinkpads since the early '90's ? (Read as, since Linux 0.01) Perhaps they didn't want to port all their software over -- the stuff for locating the shuttle in orbit, etc.
Then Katz would prolly run a story bout how the 'evil corporate republic' is stealing the best minds of other countries.
damned if you do, damned if you don't...
judging a community by its worst elements ...
on
Freenet 0.3 Released
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· Score: 1
reminds me a lot of the general public impression of the Internet a few years back, as a place where only geeks, bomb-makers, or kiddie porn people hung out
My own belief is that younger Americans, especially those on the Net, are actually information junkies, but the kinds of news they like and the form in which they receive it is very different from their parents' tastes and from the way news is defined by journalists and educators. The kids I encounter online devour enormous amounts of information on a daily basis. That makes sweeping descriptions of their information habits suspect.)
Does this strike anyone else as a weird paaragraph? In the style of Katz: "Kids do this. Geeks do this. This is the way they act. Therefore, you can classify them, b/c they're too individual."
They should just watch Mission to Mars!! I mean, the tent with its flaps blowing in the wind, the guy was living in for some months, it looked plenty good to me!
Dude, that interview is kinda old, isn't it? I didn't read all of it, but it seems kinda close on the release of Triumph of the Nerds, before Nerds 2.01. That's at least a coupla years isn't it?
Everyone knows you can go to www.moviefone.com today and get your tickets for this weekend? At least in the DC area...
Maybe someone should alert Iliad at userfriendly, though I suppose he thought it'd be funny to have Mike standing outside the theater for a week dressed as Cyclops. (And maybe he thought it'd be funny to give Mike huge pecs too:)
These guys were following the selection process between Lockheed and McDonnell-Douglas pretty closely.
As I remember, they lobbied for McDonnell-Douglas for a variety of reasons: small launchpad team, quick turnaround time, focused program that would have gone far if it hadn't been so strapped for cash. Perhaps they wouldn't have been so innovative and scrappy if they could have been more relaxed about the money. As I remember, there was a running situation where Congress had approved ~$40 million, but some bureaucrat at the Pentagon refused to release it.
So, Lockheed won the bid for the X-33, though, b/c they were better at schmoozing the bidding process. (Make a kitchen-sink type rocket, so every senator has a part of it built in his district...) Unfortunately, this rocket lost a lot of the advantages of the small, closely-knit, highly-focused team for McDonell-Douglas.
So from this point of view, it was again politics that won out over technical issues.
The Space Access guys don't have a full archive up of their updates, so you can only read about the tail-end of the selection process there, but it's a start.
Deaf-initely. He gave an interview after the Apollo 13 movie. He thought Ed Harris' portrayal of him was pretty accurate, except, as he put it, "all that emotional stuff.";)
Can you imagine Windows users getting used to configuring and using X?
But isn't that what companies like VA Linux are supposed to help with? Call them up, get a system already running Linux in the mail? If the user doesn't like the default wallpaper, they can just use KDE control center, for instance?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I agree that a breath of fresh air would do everyone good, since most of people aren't really happy with either party these days.
However, the point from the column is well taken on me; specifically that the 2-party system produces tempered, mostly moderate policies that tend to lead to overall stability. This is a valid aim for the system to try to achieve.
Unless of course, you like more excitement. Didn't one of Michael Moore's Nader columns say something like, "Yeah, if we splintered the 2 parties, we'd have something raucous like the Knesset in Washington, people shouting during other's speeches, etc." It would be more interesting ;-)
"Prejudice is wrong; you should hate everyone the same."
Damn man, your name wouldn't happen to be Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold, would it? ;)
It's unclear to me that making the electoral college completely proportional would result in a better situation.
Specifically, say for instance each state's electoral votes were proportional to their population, and that it wasn't winner-take-all by state, but rather proportional winning of the state's electoral votes.
In that situation, it seems to me that the less populous areas of the country would get ignored in favor of the more populous areas, and still the candidates would spend most of their times in a small area.
I'm thinking here they would spend all their time in the Northeast, Southern California, etc., where the population is highest; thus blowing off most of the midwest, and large areas of the west.
This would be good on a per-person basis, but would be quite bad for many constituencies which are important for the country as a whole. Specifically, it seems that farmers and environmentalists, to name two, would never be considered very important for national elections.
Well, that was pretty thoughtful...
So, either the Founding Fathers, who managed to get a couple other things right, were elitist snobs; or perhaps they were a bunch of idiots; OR maybe there's some purpose to having such a system, which takes an attention span longer than a sound bite to comprehend.
Please pardon the inflammatory tone of this post. If you're interested to hear an argument in favor of the electoral college, then here's an article which is more eloquent than I could be:
The Framers' Electoral Wisdom
Um, show me the money, or at least the software ?
LinuxOne, the second coming? Perhaps it could be dubbed, "LinuxTwo" ?
So, in other words, you're saying that the money is more safe in the hands of politicians (ie. the US Gov't) than in the hands of the people who earned the money in the first place ...
I've bought a couple books off the reviews, and liked the ones I've gotten. But it'd be interesting to see reviews of the full range (in goodness to badness) of books--
From what I hear, CORL is not in the best shape financially. So, perhaps, MSFT sees this as a (cheap?) way to own a good bit of CORL's assets when the Chapter 11 happens. Plus, if they're shareholders, they have preference over other parties trying to bid for CORL's assets.
Perhaps they go for the apps, to kill the competition. But that doesn't seem to make sense from the monopoly point of view.
Perhaps they go for the OS? What plans to follow? To get a brand name, then fork Linux? Try to jump-start fragmentation a la Unix?
Let me be the first to say, 'Holodeck, here we come!'
When /. announced 6.9beta, bero@redhat.com was down in the trenches, answering a lot about this question, among others. I would search for that article in the /. archive, then do a search on bero.
Sounds to me like an administrative decision -- "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft."
Also might be a legacy decision -- They've been flying with IBM Thinkpads since the early '90's ? (Read as, since Linux 0.01) Perhaps they didn't want to port all their software over -- the stuff for locating the shuttle in orbit, etc.
damned if you do, damned if you don't ...
reminds me a lot of the general public impression of the Internet a few years back, as a place where only geeks, bomb-makers, or kiddie porn people hung out
And hell, they run Linux.
Yeah, but they run Red Hat Linux--
SELLOUTS!!!!
Don't know whatever came of that--
Does this strike anyone else as a weird paaragraph? In the style of Katz: "Kids do this. Geeks do this. This is the way they act. Therefore, you can classify them, b/c they're too individual."
um . . . ?
Did he also say why he did them, all 3, even though he disliked it so much?
They should just watch Mission to Mars!! I mean, the tent with its flaps blowing in the wind, the guy was living in for some months, it looked plenty good to me!
Dude, that interview is kinda old, isn't it? I didn't read all of it, but it seems kinda close on the release of Triumph of the Nerds, before Nerds 2.01. That's at least a coupla years isn't it?
THE CHILDREN!! THE CHILDREN !! WON'T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN ??
I agree. All the little Linux companies are gonna band together now, in common opposition against M$.
It's still gonna be a couple years before Linux crushes M$, and the bickering begins ...
Maybe someone should alert Iliad at userfriendly, though I suppose he thought it'd be funny to have Mike standing outside the theater for a week dressed as Cyclops. (And maybe he thought it'd be funny to give Mike huge pecs too :)
www.space-access.org
These guys were following the selection process between Lockheed and McDonnell-Douglas pretty closely.
As I remember, they lobbied for McDonnell-Douglas for a variety of reasons: small launchpad team, quick turnaround time, focused program that would have gone far if it hadn't been so strapped for cash. Perhaps they wouldn't have been so innovative and scrappy if they could have been more relaxed about the money. As I remember, there was a running situation where Congress had approved ~$40 million, but some bureaucrat at the Pentagon refused to release it.
So, Lockheed won the bid for the X-33, though, b/c they were better at schmoozing the bidding process. (Make a kitchen-sink type rocket, so every senator has a part of it built in his district...) Unfortunately, this rocket lost a lot of the advantages of the small, closely-knit, highly-focused team for McDonell-Douglas.
So from this point of view, it was again politics that won out over technical issues.
The Space Access guys don't have a full archive up of their updates, so you can only read about the tail-end of the selection process there, but it's a start.
Deaf-initely. He gave an interview after the Apollo 13 movie. He thought Ed Harris' portrayal of him was pretty accurate, except, as he put it, "all that emotional stuff." ;)
Here's a press release from Debian a couple years ago. They used Debian to control one of the on-board experiments:
http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-announ ce-97/msg00005.html
But isn't that what companies like VA Linux are supposed to help with? Call them up, get a system already running Linux in the mail? If the user doesn't like the default wallpaper, they can just use KDE control center, for instance?