"The United States, despite its high murder rate, was among the middle ranking countries with a 21 percent victimization rate" (as opposed to 26% in England).
So for a start, the crime you need guns for (murder!) is *much* higher in the states than in the UK. I suspect reasons for higher victimisation rates in the UK being the much higher population density (people in cities get in a pub-brawl much more easily than someone living on a farm out in the country).
The chance to get shot is higher in the US than in other western country AFAIK. I will almost certainly not get shot here, cause even most criminals do *not* have guns.
And talking about switzerland as an example for guns is complete rubbish. People there have guns, because they are expected to serve in the army in the case of war, so they have army rifles! Not hand-guns you can buy from a supermarket. The reason crime is low in switzerland is essentially because Switzerland is rich! People who are well off don't commit crimes because they have a lot more to lose!
anyway, this is all completely off topic, but I get furious every time i hear this ridiculous argument about guns preventing crimes.
numbers are cool!
even 6-digit numbers have around 50 matches!
most 7-digit numbers have a couple...
the higher the number the less frequent it is, expceptions being 10, 100, etc.
it surprised me though that there were not significantly more instances of 42:), I guess with 23 million matches the couple of HGTTG references don't have much weight....
I remember many a drunken night making up the most horrendous acronyms:) But even though I recently found it again (on flipside or something like that) it doesn't seem to get a connection to the server. And YDKJ is offline as well! I thought these could actually make some money, I still remember some of the adverts from acrophobia, and that's more than a year ago, so it must be good advertising!
ponxx
As I understand originally a billion was 10^12, this is certainly still true in German (where 10^9 is called "Milliarde", whereas in the UK i believe it is a thousand millions).
it seems thought that today most people use the american billions (though this arguably is a less sensible system), but as long as we're not starting to quote pressures in psi or some equally silly unit i'm happy....
or can be represented by one anyway. Just this one happens to be prime! (or rather he probably played with it for a while until he found one that was prime).
The one reason this is interesting though is that it highlights an important question about code (and speach in general), does someone "create" it, or does one just "find" it. If I write a programme and combile it I could say I just researched for a while to come up with the hexadecimal number that executes to run a word processor...
Maybe, I can claim prior art on all code by just writing down a mathematical representation for all natural numbers (e.g. the commonly used N) + an algorithm for converting it into code (such as the change to hexadec. and gunzip it, or just rename to.exe and execute it). I have in effect written down all possible computer programmes, just because someone else "found" one of them as well does not mean I don't hold my rights to it:), and just because i haven't tested every single one of them, does not mean they don't exist...
It might be worth trying to get a US patent on all code that can be obtained from a single number:) (i.e. all code)
wasn't there just some story on the news that there were problems with the new barets the US army ordered because some of them were not manufactured in the US?
I think most armies have some form of protectionism built into their purchasing policies, this makes sense as you don't want to rely on someone who might end up on the wrong side in a conflict for supplies, and also because money fed into your own economy makes its way back into the budget in a few years anyway...
I believe the VLT is located in Chile, unless there are several sharing the same name...
I would be extremely surprised if Gemini could be used for optical interferometry, the purpose seems to be more to have complete coverage of the sky. For a start not much of the sky can be observed with both telescopes at once, and also you can't just take two pictures and then combine them. (Well you can, and it'll give you more intensity and slightly more contrast, but no more so than a longer exposure time, there will be no increase in resolution)
This might work with radiowaves as they are long enough to record the phase at both places and then combine them later, but i'd be impressed if they did that at visible wavelengths:). As far as I'm aware the interference is still done optically, thus requiring some proximity between the two parts of the interferometer.
Then again, I don't really have a clue about astrophysics, so i'll just shut up now...
That's a ludicrous idea, not even microsoft would want to stop people using their stereo to play sound... sound cards NEED an analogue output, at least for say another 20 years or so... and any OS will have to support it if people are to use it.
And the analogue output of a good sound card is damn good and certainly good enough for a recording (seeing that is what most everyone gets out of their computer anyway).
> Ever thought over power consumation of this thing
What makes you think MagLevs will consume huge amounts of power? Just keeping the train at a constant height does not take any power at all, whether it's done with wheels and a track or Magnets. (OK, so there is bound to be some loss, but with superconducting coils and whatever else they might be using its probably small)
Also, when the thing stops it's kinetic energy does not just go to waste but is converted back into useful power, the train basically acts as a generator.
Why would it take massive funding and hundreds of scientists to repeat an experiment that a few people did "by accident"? Also if I remember correctly, there was a HUGE hype surrounding this discovery and scientists all over the world tried to recreate it, the price of Palladium (which I think they used) shot up.
Every scientist would LOVE to prove such a discovery right, and many tried, but no-one could repeat it, not even the original researchers themselves.
If you had read the article you would have found that they are leaving the level of tax "to the officer of the local revenue board". They could say for example, this is worth about as much as windows (or maybe twice as much as it is more stable:) ) and then charge tax on this. It will be interesting to see how they apply this to downloads of free software over the web.
Another thought, MS give IE away for free, surely that is worth 5$ or something like that, is there going to be tax on that?
How about all the news-websites... information is valuable, how about a price tag for each CNN story you watch over the web?
I assume this will all die down once officials realise it is a ludicrous thing to do... they can charge an import tax on distributions, but not on actual free code itself!
All this talk of someone winning a popular vote by just winning the 5 largest states is complete nonsense. There is NO WAY a candidate would win ALL votes in California!
Also the ability to affect the outcome of a national popular vote by a "corrupt political machine" is smaller! Look at it now, if some corrupt Florida official has managed to change even just a 1000 votes this could decide the presidency (or stopped 1000 people from voting, or invalidated 1000 ballot papers). I think it would be very difficult to change 200,000 votes on a national level (and these numbers seem typical for close elections)! Either it would be obvious because it all came from the same place or you would need a very large criminal organisation which hopefully could get caught.
And what makes you think you'd have to recount the whole country??? If a party thinks something is wrong in a certain area they can ask for a recount there. Preferably you'd have representatives from all parties observing the vote/count in the first instance.
Incidentally, is there any explanation why Palm beach thinks it will take them 6 (!) working days for a manual count??? Most countries round the world count manually and the result is out by the next morning.... have they thought about having more than two officials counting? 400,000 votes/1000 workers: 4000 each counting 4 a minute -> 1000 minutes = less than a day!
> only the people who vote for the (eventual)
> winner count, everyone elses' vote means nothing
errr. it is kind of hard to avoid that when you elect a single person. Though I would agree if you had said only votes for the two biggest candidates really count (making it a 2-party system in essence).
Borda count does not work because of tactical voting, if you want Gore, put Bush last and vice versa, and who knows who would then win with all the 2nd votes. If you want a preferential system (where you rank candidates by order of preference) you HAVE to ensure that lower preferences do not mess up higher ones. The only system I know of that does that is the Alternative Vote (eliminate candidate with lowest number of votes, all votes that went for him go to their next preference instead, repeat).
If you want all votes to "count" you need proportional representation, but that can't be used to elect a single person (apart from having the parliament decide on the prime minister / chancellor like done in parts of europe and elsewhere), but a lot of people argue that this gives too much power to the political parties who set up the election lists (I disagree, they have this power in practice anyway...)
What about New Mexico and Oregon, no-one knows their results, but no-one cares either! The EC does not give power to small states, rather it gives power to large states which are evenly split between the political parties.
In a popular vote, every vote counts. Anywhere in the country. Whether you're a democrat in Alasca or a Republican in Washington, you have the same influence as everyone else. You do NOT let the whole election be decided by a couple of pensioners in Palm Beach (I'm not saying they should have no say, but not more than people in other states!)
random question: As Dick Cheney managed to quickly change his voter registration to be allowed to be VP despite coming from the same state as Bush, has any party thought about having a bunch of their members change their voter registration from a "safe" or "lost" state to a "swing" state? If the Republicans had got 10000 Texans to quickly register in Florida, it wouldn't even be close now!
Anyway, my view: Where you live should have nothing to do with how important your vote is!!!
I don't live in america and from what I hear this might go against the instincts of keeping "the government" from interfering in local matters, but surely for a presidential election it would be logical to have the same ballot paper layout everywhere in the nation?
Even if you have different candidates on it for senate/house/initiatives/whatever else, it should not be that difficult to define a certain format. I think it has a significant impact for a example in which order the candidates are presented, how easy it is to tell where to make your cross/punch a hole even if you are old and far-sighted.
What I'm trying to say, have the same layout everywhere, the same mechanism for voting, and no-one is going to complain afterwards because 100s of lawyers would look at it before. As I understand it at the moment every county has its own ballot paper (is that right?). Is there any good reason for that???
As far as I understand, Prof. Natapof is saying the electoral college system gives the individual voters more power on average. While this may be true, it does not give the same power to all voters. It gives huge power to individuals living in "swing states" while giving hardly any power to people living in states that are almost certain to vote for a certain candidate (e.g Texas)
the other argument often used for the electoral college system is that it requires the candidate to look at the whole country rather than just a majority of people, but IMHO it results in exactly the opposite. If you are a democrat why would you even try to campaign in Texas? Your money and efforts are much better spent in Florida or California.
anyway, most important argument for a national popular vote to decide for the president is that all votes are equally important, which I think is imperative in a country that holds equality as one of its most important principles!
I hear all the people say how making fuel expensive does not work, and how it will wreck the economy and affect the poor people most /...
I have lived in Germany, Britain and the states, and I can tell you it DOES work. Look at the kind of cars that are on the streets in the US. And it's not just people who drive their old Maverick doing 10 miles/gallon cause they can't afford a new car, no, even the new cars sold are mainly SUVs and the like, the bigger the engine the better. If you look around Europe people drive smaller cars, and even if you buy a BMW or Audi or whatever, they are more fuel efficient than most American cars, because it's what people ask for when they buy a car. How many car adverts in the US emphesize how little gas the car takes? In Germany almost all of them do these days! (my last car used 6 l/100km or approx. 40 miles/gallon(?) )
And for the economic effects. All the scare mondgering comes from people assuming that the government just eats up the money. Just because fuel tax is raised, doesn't mean the state needs more money! Lower the income tax, scrap VAT on essential things like food/clothing, on educational things like books, maybe scrap VAT alltogether?
One long term benefit from making people drive more fuel efficient cars is the lesser dependence on oil, as highlighted by recent shortages. What happens to the american economy if oil prices seriously skyrocket? people can't live without oil at the moment, so if the supply gets shorter there is nothing to stop the price going to 100$ / barrel. Surely an economy that only uses half the oil is much better off in this sort of scenario.
The last point I want to make in this admittedly way too long post is that fuel prices as well as any other prices are just a question of what you are used to. In Germany you pay just over 2 DM / liter at the moment, that's about 3.50 $/gallon I believe, and everyone says, maybe 10% less would be ok, but this is too much, in England they say the same about 4 $ a gallon, and in the US they say the same about 1 $ a gallon (sorry, numbers are order of magnitude estimates only, but you get the idea).
Anyway, enough rambling, I say tax finite resources, tax pollution, tax waste production, in return don't tax labour (income tax) and food/clothing (VAT). You say that's government interference? so what? having 40% income tax is government interference, cause it makes labour expensive!!
While most of this site seems to be written by Eric Weisstein, there is also a rather long list of contributors (google cached here). In his explanations about posting here I can't see that you would have to give up your rights to your posts. And while the actual mathematical fact is not copyrightable, it seems that the presentation thereof, and maybe the wording of an explanation is.
While most contributors will probably accept a parallel print version to the project they contribute to, I can't imagine they would be happy if the original purpose of their contributions, to share it with the community on the web, is not honored anymore.
Does anyone know whether these people have any legal rights? Shouldn't they get part of the royalties? Could they sue CRC to take out all passages contributed by them unless it is published again openly? It would seem to me as though it is impossible to take such a work of many people out of the public domain without either completely rewriting it or getting everyones permission...
Both of these voting systems have a problem that makes them inferior in my view, and that is that you can adversely affect the chances of your first choice candidate if you vote along with your true feelings towards the politicians. In Borda Count the "strategic" thing to do is have your first rate candidate first, and his strongest challenger last. In the Approval vote, you don't vote for the strongest challenger as this diminishes the chances of your 1st choice candidate.
The only system i see that does not have this problem is the Single Transferrable Vote (STV) system. Basically you rank people as in the Borda Count system. Then the candidate with the lowest number of 1st votes is eliminated and his votes are given to the next highest preference of his voters (so when your candidate is "out" you are asked who your second choice is, so you can safely vote Nader and still have your vote count for Gore vs Bush if Nader does not make it). This is basically like having several rounds of elections in which one candidate gets eliminated. The positive thing is that your lower choices only come into play, when your 1st choice candidate is already out of the competition! So strategic voting is much less likely (though i am aware that there are problems with compromise candidates being eliminated early...).
The electoral college system is so obviously flawed and anachronistic that it is hardly worth discussing. If you want a simple majority voting system you should just count all votes and whoever gets most wins...
Slashdot Mirror
american indians? (also known as "native americans")
"The United States, despite its high murder rate, was among the middle ranking countries with a 21 percent victimization rate" (as opposed to 26% in England).
So for a start, the crime you need guns for (murder!) is *much* higher in the states than in the UK. I suspect reasons for higher victimisation rates in the UK being the much higher population density (people in cities get in a pub-brawl much more easily than someone living on a farm out in the country).
The chance to get shot is higher in the US than in other western country AFAIK. I will almost certainly not get shot here, cause even most criminals do *not* have guns.
And talking about switzerland as an example for guns is complete rubbish. People there have guns, because they are expected to serve in the army in the case of war, so they have army rifles! Not hand-guns you can buy from a supermarket. The reason crime is low in switzerland is essentially because Switzerland is rich! People who are well off don't commit crimes because they have a lot more to lose!
anyway, this is all completely off topic, but I get furious every time i hear this ridiculous argument about guns preventing crimes.
even 6-digit numbers have around 50 matches!
most 7-digit numbers have a couple...
the higher the number the less frequent it is, expceptions being 10, 100, etc.
it surprised me though that there were not significantly more instances of 42 :), I guess with 23 million matches the couple of HGTTG references don't have much weight ....
"www" makes 326,000,000
"it" 262,000,000
"html" 188,000,000
(all out of a total of 1,346,966,000 pages according to google, so more than 60% of pages include "and", having fun with stats :) )
does anyone find anything better than "and"??? (to search type "+and" otherwise it will be ignored as it is a "common word")
I remember many a drunken night making up the most horrendous acronyms :) But even though I recently found it again (on flipside or something like that) it doesn't seem to get a connection to the server. And YDKJ is offline as well! I thought these could actually make some money, I still remember some of the adverts from acrophobia, and that's more than a year ago, so it must be good advertising!
ponxx
For a list of numbers take a look at http://www.todd.demon.co.uk/encyc/million.htm, which compares british and US usage.
it seems thought that today most people use the american billions (though this arguably is a less sensible system), but as long as we're not starting to quote pressures in psi or some equally silly unit i'm happy....
The one reason this is interesting though is that it highlights an important question about code (and speach in general), does someone "create" it, or does one just "find" it. If I write a programme and combile it I could say I just researched for a while to come up with the hexadecimal number that executes to run a word processor...
Maybe, I can claim prior art on all code by just writing down a mathematical representation for all natural numbers (e.g. the commonly used N) + an algorithm for converting it into code (such as the change to hexadec. and gunzip it, or just rename to .exe and execute it). I have in effect written down all possible computer programmes, just because someone else "found" one of them as well does not mean I don't hold my rights to it :), and just because i haven't tested every single one of them, does not mean they don't exist...
It might be worth trying to get a US patent on all code that can be obtained from a single number :) (i.e. all code)
I think most armies have some form of protectionism built into their purchasing policies, this makes sense as you don't want to rely on someone who might end up on the wrong side in a conflict for supplies, and also because money fed into your own economy makes its way back into the budget in a few years anyway...
I would be extremely surprised if Gemini could be used for optical interferometry, the purpose seems to be more to have complete coverage of the sky. For a start not much of the sky can be observed with both telescopes at once, and also you can't just take two pictures and then combine them. (Well you can, and it'll give you more intensity and slightly more contrast, but no more so than a longer exposure time, there will be no increase in resolution)
This might work with radiowaves as they are long enough to record the phase at both places and then combine them later, but i'd be impressed if they did that at visible wavelengths :). As far as I'm aware the interference is still done optically, thus requiring some proximity between the two parts of the interferometer.
Then again, I don't really have a clue about astrophysics, so i'll just shut up now...
And the analogue output of a good sound card is damn good and certainly good enough for a recording (seeing that is what most everyone gets out of their computer anyway).
What makes you think MagLevs will consume huge amounts of power? Just keeping the train at a constant height does not take any power at all, whether it's done with wheels and a track or Magnets. (OK, so there is bound to be some loss, but with superconducting coils and whatever else they might be using its probably small)
Also, when the thing stops it's kinetic energy does not just go to waste but is converted back into useful power, the train basically acts as a generator.
>not that the communist government would give a damn about environment anyway
unlike the new leader of the free world....
Every scientist would LOVE to prove such a discovery right, and many tried, but no-one could repeat it, not even the original researchers themselves.
> QWERTUIOP!!
:)
neither can you...
QWERTYUIOP
Another thought, MS give IE away for free, surely that is worth 5$ or something like that, is there going to be tax on that?
How about all the news-websites... information is valuable, how about a price tag for each CNN story you watch over the web?
I assume this will all die down once officials realise it is a ludicrous thing to do... they can charge an import tax on distributions, but not on actual free code itself!
Also the ability to affect the outcome of a national popular vote by a "corrupt political machine" is smaller! Look at it now, if some corrupt Florida official has managed to change even just a 1000 votes this could decide the presidency (or stopped 1000 people from voting, or invalidated 1000 ballot papers). I think it would be very difficult to change 200,000 votes on a national level (and these numbers seem typical for close elections)! Either it would be obvious because it all came from the same place or you would need a very large criminal organisation which hopefully could get caught.
And what makes you think you'd have to recount the whole country??? If a party thinks something is wrong in a certain area they can ask for a recount there. Preferably you'd have representatives from all parties observing the vote/count in the first instance.
Incidentally, is there any explanation why Palm beach thinks it will take them 6 (!) working days for a manual count??? Most countries round the world count manually and the result is out by the next morning.... have they thought about having more than two officials counting? 400,000 votes/1000 workers: 4000 each counting 4 a minute -> 1000 minutes = less than a day!
errr. it is kind of hard to avoid that when you elect a single person. Though I would agree if you had said only votes for the two biggest candidates really count (making it a 2-party system in essence).
Borda count does not work because of tactical voting, if you want Gore, put Bush last and vice versa, and who knows who would then win with all the 2nd votes. If you want a preferential system (where you rank candidates by order of preference) you HAVE to ensure that lower preferences do not mess up higher ones. The only system I know of that does that is the Alternative Vote (eliminate candidate with lowest number of votes, all votes that went for him go to their next preference instead, repeat).
If you want all votes to "count" you need proportional representation, but that can't be used to elect a single person (apart from having the parliament decide on the prime minister / chancellor like done in parts of europe and elsewhere), but a lot of people argue that this gives too much power to the political parties who set up the election lists (I disagree, they have this power in practice anyway...)
In a popular vote, every vote counts. Anywhere in the country. Whether you're a democrat in Alasca or a Republican in Washington, you have the same influence as everyone else. You do NOT let the whole election be decided by a couple of pensioners in Palm Beach (I'm not saying they should have no say, but not more than people in other states!)
random question: As Dick Cheney managed to quickly change his voter registration to be allowed to be VP despite coming from the same state as Bush, has any party thought about having a bunch of their members change their voter registration from a "safe" or "lost" state to a "swing" state? If the Republicans had got 10000 Texans to quickly register in Florida, it wouldn't even be close now!
Anyway, my view: Where you live should have nothing to do with how important your vote is!!!
according to all graphics i have seen, e.g. this the number next to Gore is "5"!!! How does that make you punch the 3rd hole??
Even if you have different candidates on it for senate/house/initiatives/whatever else, it should not be that difficult to define a certain format. I think it has a significant impact for a example in which order the candidates are presented, how easy it is to tell where to make your cross/punch a hole even if you are old and far-sighted.
What I'm trying to say, have the same layout everywhere, the same mechanism for voting, and no-one is going to complain afterwards because 100s of lawyers would look at it before. As I understand it at the moment every county has its own ballot paper (is that right?). Is there any good reason for that???
the other argument often used for the electoral college system is that it requires the candidate to look at the whole country rather than just a majority of people, but IMHO it results in exactly the opposite. If you are a democrat why would you even try to campaign in Texas? Your money and efforts are much better spent in Florida or California.
anyway, most important argument for a national popular vote to decide for the president is that all votes are equally important, which I think is imperative in a country that holds equality as one of its most important principles!
I have lived in Germany, Britain and the states, and I can tell you it DOES work. Look at the kind of cars that are on the streets in the US. And it's not just people who drive their old Maverick doing 10 miles/gallon cause they can't afford a new car, no, even the new cars sold are mainly SUVs and the like, the bigger the engine the better. If you look around Europe people drive smaller cars, and even if you buy a BMW or Audi or whatever, they are more fuel efficient than most American cars, because it's what people ask for when they buy a car. How many car adverts in the US emphesize how little gas the car takes? In Germany almost all of them do these days! (my last car used 6 l/100km or approx. 40 miles/gallon(?) )
And for the economic effects. All the scare mondgering comes from people assuming that the government just eats up the money. Just because fuel tax is raised, doesn't mean the state needs more money! Lower the income tax, scrap VAT on essential things like food/clothing, on educational things like books, maybe scrap VAT alltogether?
One long term benefit from making people drive more fuel efficient cars is the lesser dependence on oil, as highlighted by recent shortages. What happens to the american economy if oil prices seriously skyrocket? people can't live without oil at the moment, so if the supply gets shorter there is nothing to stop the price going to 100$ / barrel. Surely an economy that only uses half the oil is much better off in this sort of scenario.
The last point I want to make in this admittedly way too long post is that fuel prices as well as any other prices are just a question of what you are used to. In Germany you pay just over 2 DM / liter at the moment, that's about 3.50 $/gallon I believe, and everyone says, maybe 10% less would be ok, but this is too much, in England they say the same about 4 $ a gallon, and in the US they say the same about 1 $ a gallon (sorry, numbers are order of magnitude estimates only, but you get the idea).
Anyway, enough rambling, I say tax finite resources, tax pollution, tax waste production, in return don't tax labour (income tax) and food/clothing (VAT). You say that's government interference? so what? having 40% income tax is government interference, cause it makes labour expensive!!
i believe this is how it works...
While most contributors will probably accept a parallel print version to the project they contribute to, I can't imagine they would be happy if the original purpose of their contributions, to share it with the community on the web, is not honored anymore.
Does anyone know whether these people have any legal rights? Shouldn't they get part of the royalties? Could they sue CRC to take out all passages contributed by them unless it is published again openly? It would seem to me as though it is impossible to take such a work of many people out of the public domain without either completely rewriting it or getting everyones permission...
The only system i see that does not have this problem is the Single Transferrable Vote (STV) system. Basically you rank people as in the Borda Count system. Then the candidate with the lowest number of 1st votes is eliminated and his votes are given to the next highest preference of his voters (so when your candidate is "out" you are asked who your second choice is, so you can safely vote Nader and still have your vote count for Gore vs Bush if Nader does not make it). This is basically like having several rounds of elections in which one candidate gets eliminated. The positive thing is that your lower choices only come into play, when your 1st choice candidate is already out of the competition! So strategic voting is much less likely (though i am aware that there are problems with compromise candidates being eliminated early...).
The electoral college system is so obviously flawed and anachronistic that it is hardly worth discussing. If you want a simple majority voting system you should just count all votes and whoever gets most wins...