Should you be allowed to build a sign that obstructs his sign from view by anyone not one door away?
Again, there's nothing wrong with the information being there. It's just a matter of you shouldn't be able to put signs on his lawn that say "memorial across the street for some terrible thing that happened here last year". Which is effectively what Wikipedia is doing, along with google and big newspapers. The point of search is I'm trying to find something, if I already found it I wouldn't need search.
Where this is tricky is when it isn't intentional. If you and I have neigbouring (or competing) businesses, and I build a big sign, so you build a bigger sign thats' one thing. When some other company, as a result of it's broader arrangement with the sign hosting company comes along and blocks both our signs with theirs, that is 10x larger.
And yes, actually, he might be able to prevent you building a memorial. Areas are zoned for a reason. Even if it's another business, if your business will impede access to existing businesses (think MacDonalds and Wal Marts) you might not be allowed to set up shop there.
No doubt who wins matters, even to those of us fortunate enough to not live in the US. But that has nothing to do with the article.
A candidate has a viewpoint (or policy or whatever you want to call it), that people should go vote in the primary a particular way. He used robocalls (legally) to encourage this. In this case Robocalls aren't new, using them to support policy positions that are legal isn't new. There's nothing in the article relevant to technology or policy about technology.
The story from yesterday, about canadian robocalls that might have been used to attempt to illegally suppress voting, that's a story. Because while the technology itself is equally boring, the use is novel and potentially illegal (and a whole lot of other implications)./. isn't covering the election. It doesn't do the focus of the whole site to either swarm it with political material that has no relevance to technology (essentially drowning out the core focus of the site) or having a random shot of something purely political out of the broader context which is the entire election.
If this was the first robocall ever, or the first use of a robocall for this purpose, or if it is/was illegal, or if he was robocalling to support a position about technology, or some esoteric voting procedure or concept maybe. But the actually thing is exceptionally bland. It belongs on a political tracking site, not/. Now, if you want an article on how the candidates are using technology to get their messages out, or would impact technology if they get into office or any of that, that's fair game. But this seems to be more of a randomly grabbed article, and it's inconsistent with everything else that's been on the page in days, and it's not particularly important. I would go so far as to say even it isn't technology related it might warrant the front page if it's particularly novel "Rick Santorum gets endorsement from Pope as only "moral" candidate, or X plans to make religion Y the official religion of the United States' because those would be rather dramatic.
The whole article only has what, 3 sentences, 4 maybe, related to Robocalls, or other people making robocalls. The rest of it is just pointless blather about one random campaign stop. And none of the stuff on robocalls says much beyond 'they use robocalls for these things'.
interestingly their refusal to go public this long is something that has made me like them a lot less. Now that they're going public, and Zuck is going to keep 60% of the control makes me hate them even more. Even Bill Gates only kept 49% of the control.
If you're that big of an outfit and not going public you're either denying the people who built the company a piece of the pie, or trying to be a control freak (or I suppose, both). If I had money to be a shareholder I wouldn't want to be into an outfit like facebook, because if Zuckerberg does something outright crazy he's got 60% of the control, which means you can't get it back from him, and your money might be worthless. He could, essentially, vote to sell the entire assets of the corporation to himself for 1 dollar for example, and fuck over the people who have the other 75% of the ownership (but not voting rights). That's an extreme contrived (and probably illegal) example but I'm trying to be illustrative of the problem. In practice that 'crazy' is more likely to be trying to build a revenue stream that will clash with various privacy rules around the world, or trying to acquire businesses that might not actually be good buys.
And ya, they have to go public because they were using stock as compensation for employees. That's perfectly normal and reasonable, but they even got a deferment to delay their IPO when they exceeded the maximum number of shareholders before needing to be public. That is (legally) attempting to delay owners of the company their fair say in how that company is run.
Yahoo is being somewhat sleezy. But that's also part of the way the game is played. You hold patents, and bring them out when there's money to be made, either a competitor is big enough, or when someone is coming after you. If Yahoo had demanded licencing fees or royalties years ago they might be stuck with a pittance. Now they get to demand shares, and as the articles point out, this worked for them in 2004 with google to the tune of 2.4 million shares (1.4 billion dollars worth as of todays google stock price). That might be a good strategy with facebook too. Demand 0.5% of their business (which could justifiably rely on Yahoo patents), and see what the stock price does.
who needs guidance systems when you can send 100 million dollars in rockets after a 3 billion dollar ship and it only takes 1 hit to knock it out of commission for months.
The people aiming those missiles at ships need those guidance systems. If it takes 100 million dollars in missiles to damage zero dollars of ship, then you're not winning the price war. One of the lessons that the US had to learn about guidance systems is that unguided weapons are vastly less effective than guided ones. If your target is huge and unhardened like a city or island, then that's not so important. But if you're trying to knock out a military ship (or the case that started it all, a bridge), then even near misses can be useless.
That's only true because it's astronomically expensive for the US to get ordinance in the general area. It's not 'in general' true, well, it is if you're trying to blow up something the size of a bridge I suppose, but a ship is a much bigger target than a bridge. A handful of coloured flares or buoys as range indicators do the job reasonably well. For 100 million dollars the US would fire 200 missiles, the chinese 20 000 rockets from 1000 launch sites. Sure, your 200 missiles could each take out 1 rocket site, so they have 800 rocket sites, firing 16 000 rockets.... Accurate naval gunnery at range is a problem that has been managed reasonably well on the cheap for 100 years. Put coloring in the ordinance so if it lands in the water you can identify where the shot came from, and iterate from there. PGM's matter when you get one flyover.
I tend to think the US's view of it's military superiority is a myth. As we learned in Iraq, it rarely understands the war its fighting until after it gets there, and once its there it likes to live in a fantasy land about how awesome it is for years. That's fine against a few thousand guys with AK 47's, but against a competent adversary who has had time to invest in the future the US is in for one hell of a shock. It's the same as underestimating the Japanese at the start of WW2, except that in a protracted war the advantage goes to china not the US, they have the industrial base, the manpower advantage, and the local force, and their people are smarter, better educated and better prepared, especially since half of their top people were trained in the US they know their enemy far better than the other direction. In practice the US doesn't really have a lead on china, it's fighting the last war (Iraq...) not the next war. It has the wrong equipment, the wrong training, the wrong mindset. The question is only whether or not it's worth it to china to take over taiwan.
Obviously it's impossible for the US to keep up with china for most of the century. Until chinas populaton starts to radically shrink due to population controls they're going to be 3 or 4x the country the US is. But then they're going to have their own problems to worry about as they need to figure out how to run a country that is shrinking. That isn't going to be a fun problem.
Well to me that's a sort of legitimate 'matter of degree', those articles really did exist, accurate or not, but being 7th or 8th on the list seems about appropriate compared to something actually accurate.
Well why should the first search result for the business across the street from your memorial bring up your business (memorial) and not theirs? That's a dominos pizza vs pizza hut problem. You're saying you should be able to hijack their brand for your own purposes. When wikipedia does it they aren't even doing it intentionally (nor generally does a newspaper), that's the problem.
Erm... a cell phone camera (admittedly a good cell phone camera) on a balloon, note, I did not say hot air balloon, just a balloon will see 100Km reasonably well, actually I have just such photos on an 8 MP camera out to a range of about 80Km. (I just happened to be on something about 500m in the air overlooking a coast over the summer, but I don't have the exact numbers, the CN tower for example in toronto is about 500M above sea level). I grant you it's not perfect, but you're also looking for something that's going to be a 150-200m long if not a great deal larger than that (that would be your zumwalt class destroyers). A small balloon need only carry a few hundred grams of payload, and it's basically too small to do much about.
Shooting down a balloon is a bugger of a problem. We had a actual scientific balloon in canada that was supposed to get a few KM around alberta, it ended up getting all the way to ireland despite repeated attempts to shoot it down. They even actually hit it, it just didn't do any good. It cost more to try (and fail) to shoot it down, than it cost to build it.
Suppling Taiwan is easy, again, it's only 200Km from their ports, and they will have control over the channel in both directions. In fact, from the top of the highest point in Taiwan you can almost, but not quite see the mainland (there's about a 50Km gap there). Anywhere near there would be a ring of death for ships. Obviously it's possible to cross under fire, just uh... lossy. Pretty much any missile will cover the gap, and they don't even need good missiles, volume will do wonders, hell, rockets would do the trick, who needs guidance systems when you can send 100 million dollars in rockets after a 3 billion dollar ship and it only takes 1 hit to knock it out of commission for months. This is the problem of 'mass' with china. They could put hundreds of thousands of soldiers into play, and taiwan is big enough a lot of their supply could be 'locally sourced' (i.e. looted). For the anyone to re-invade is a much harder problem, because you only really have two directions you can come from, Japan or the phillipines.
Actually I think that's the sort of war the US has no experience in. The last major operation the US was involved in was 650 000 (540k in saudi 100k in turkey and then 300k or so external support) or so personnel to invade iraq, 21 years ago. To pull of a similar stunt the US would require a massive military buildup (again), hard when the chinese now control 15-25% of all of the stuff that goes into building your equipment, by virtue of their possession of all the factories in china, and the foundries in Taiwan. The iraqi's spent the 10 preceeding years to 91 figuring out how to fight a WW1 style enemy in Iran, but being vastly outnumbered. China has spent the last 50 years thinking about how to fight americans, how to mitigate, or eliminate US advantages. And the scale would easily be that many people, but the chinese will actually play to win, close quarters urban combat where necessary on land, small fast 'suicide boats' or equivalent at sea and they can use that huge industrial base to produce a mountain of munitions that are hard to do much about at close range.
As you say, their problem is their ability to supply, they'd be pushing their luck much outside of Taiwan, they probably couldn't pull of much against japan for a long long time for example, nor the phillipines. But Taiwan or north korea...
And on the flip side, don't these other sites, the ones that have info about the disaster, deserve their place in the search listing?
Sure, so now we're arguing degree. Should the first result for Nuremberg be the city, or the laws passed by the Nazi's? Which search ranks matter, the top 3, top 5, top 10? Does it matter how exactly they're displayed? If I'm searching for this specific phrase should the top result be that specific phrase, or a more popular variant thereof.
If I search for slashdut I may really specifically mean whatever the hell slashdut is, or I may mean slashdot. The priority should go to the actual thing slashdut with the variants lower down the list, and or a 'did you mean slashdot' on the top. If there is no such thing as slashdut, or if it's a generic (Think Pizza vs Pappa Johns Pizza vs Pizza Hut, vs Pizza Pizza etc.) then all bets are off.
This sounds like: "Please adjust the rules in my favor"
It sounds like "your search enigne is fucking over my business the law says you have to change your algorithm to make it stop unfairly disadvantaging me". SEO is the enemy of accurate information. That's the problem. Why does wikipedia, or some spanish newspaper, or some google properties (youtube) deserve a higher priority than the actual business in question? Should a giant media company (say a newspaper) be able to write an article about something near you (infront of webnut77's business there was a horrific murder of a child with a knife sort of thing), and because they're paying for SEO get their article from 30 years ago ahead of your actual result, which is for a say... web design company. If we want to argue degree, then ok, I'll grant you, if the murder happened say... this week, it might legitimately be higher priority, but how about 1 year later. 5? 10? 33?
If you grant (as the EU essentially has) that search results can essentially represent or defame a business, which is probably not far off from realistic, then their influence on downstream businesses needs to be done in a regulated fashion. Compare to a phone book, where, if I could buy out all results for webnut plus a wildcard then I can seriously undermine your reputation. Now the difference in search is that it's not necessarily intentional, Wikipedia doesn't have some plan to go and screw over this poor campground, it just sort of happens that the nature of their business is such that they dominate results. Which is why you need a mechanism in place to override that if the algorithm unfairly represents something. So then we're back to arguing a matter of degree as to what does, or does not fairly represent something.
My argument is precisely that this is a problem that extends well beyond one site or business. This is a general problem that if I search for a specific string, and the first result is that string + some other tuple/parameter/string, with what I actually searched for further down then I'm not getting a good result, in fact you're biasing the result against the actual thing I searched for.
The classic example would be if I do a search for Pizza Hut and the first result is Dominos. Now if I search for "Pizza" all bets are off, I would expect the first results to be either a map to all places with a keyword pizza, or an article about pizza or the like. But if I searched for Pizza hut, no matter how much more popular the related search Dominos is, I really specifically searched for Pizza Hut
In order are: The wiki about the disaster Pictures of the disaster The offical website (without thumbnail) Newspaper about the disaster (with picture) A youtube video about the explosion Two campground things Results related to the current discussion about their search problem.
Search from Ontario Canada.
Every example I cited I specifically searched for in advance to be specifically illustrative of the problem, why is one place saddled with search engine results that are negative and another not? Absolutely nothing there was a rant. If you search for a definite 'thing' I expect results about that 'thing' "Tianamen Square' is a discreet thing, as was the "Tianamen Square Massacre" (or protests or whatever you want to call it). From that standpoint a search for "Alfaques" should bring up "Alfaques" first, and "Alfaques + tuple" second.
You can make the same argument the other way. If I want info on Tianamen Square massacre shouldn't I have to type that in first? If I just want info on tianamen square, I just want info on Tianamen square, I don't necessarily want the Tianamen Square official website, but I do want information about Tianamen Square.
Why is one prioritized over the other, and is that merely a self fulfilling prophecy, again, how far back do we want to drag history. Just because it happened after the advent of colour photography or in an era of mass media doesn't make it all that much more important.
100 Km off a coast is nothing. You may as well be 10. A balloon with a cell phone camera 650 meters in the air (that's not exact, but close enough, 650 +/- 10%) can see 100 Km, and that's assuming you don't have a building or a tower or any other elevation to start from. Eliminating the chinese airforce is completely impractical, because you're right next to them. You could take all their best aircraft for all it matters, you're still right next to them, they can make crappy homebrew 'drones' or similar and they can position anti ship missiles inland further than your railgun can hit.
The premise you're working from is that a railgun is a cheap alternative after missiles and aircraft have done all the work protecting them. At that point you're not exactly getting a lot of cost savings, since you still need the air power to dominate an adversary. Now in Syria this is a reasonable prospect, in China, not so much.
Invading Taiwan is a matter of mass, not precision. At least for China. Going the other way to liberate taiwan from a PRC occupation it's a matter of precision. The chinese are happy to flatten the place as they go, saves the hassle of dealing with an insurgency later. They want the prestige from reunification, the people, their stuff are a distant afterthought. There's no advantage to them for accurate firepower, you always want to concentrate to some degree, but basically anything of value on the Island is on the western 15 or 20Km of it, with one city area in the northeast, flatten those, and starve resistance out of the mountains.
If I want to visit Nuremberg on business I don't necessarily need a slew of results about Nuremberg laws. If I'm going to China I probably want to see Tianamen square, just as I would want to see Trafalgar square in the UK. One happened to have a massacre in it, but unless that massacre is happening *right now* I care more about directions, parking etc.
It's not that there's a problem to have results that list all of the terrible things that have happened somewhere in the past, it's that they are just that, history, and if you want to go camping something that happened 34 years ago is not really relevant. It's not that the links shouldn't be there, just they should maybe be slightly deprioritized over current events or status. If there's a flood in Nuremberg I'd rather that be at the top of the list, than an event, horrific as it may be, that happened 70 years ago.
Do you really want a world where the first search for Kansas is about bleeding kansas and the fight over slavery that happened there 160 years ago? That might be history, and it might make for some historical sites worth visiting (having never been to kansas I have no idea), but I may care more about a map than about one specific event that happened to be the worst thing to ever happen to a place. The history of the world is full of dirty laundry, that's important, but it's probably more relevant that the top result for anything be somewhat current.
We might be arguing about degree. If I search for Tianamen square should the first 3 results be: a map, tourist info, and the offical website of the place or should it be a series of things about the 'protests' of 1989 and videos of tank man? How about the "National Mall" in DC (I think that's what it's called) where there have been a few shootings over the years? Should a search for verden (a town in germany) produce a page full of results for a massacre in verden ordered by Charlemange in 782, before information such as the local government webpage, or a map? I tend to think the first few results should be relevant to right now, and the lower results still have all of the messy history, and, especially in Europe, lets face it, there are a LOT of layers of history, you kinda get used to it, and focus on today even if your local bank branch is in a 900 year old castle.
Eliminating chinese control and knowledge that close to its own coast isn't feasible. This isn't libya, which is a very sparse country of only about 6 million people, or Iraq, which was softened up for 12 years.
Rapid fire doesn't do you any good if your platform is flattened before it's in range to rapid fire. That's kinda the problem, the only base relevant to a war with china is at sea (the nearest islands are about 250-300Km away), so you're talking about naval assets, which are, relative to the cost of just the guns, pretty expensive.
No, chinas advantage in this is that they are local, have a huge population, a massive industrial base, control a huge portion of the electronics business (even if they can't utilize it effectively in weapons they deprive their enemies of those supplies), and they are rapidly expanding their technology.
I don't think the PRC is going to waltz over Taiwan tomorrow. Probably 10 years would be pushing their luck. 25 years from now... harder to say. They're not in this for a short term game, this is a long term play, and they may never find it worthwhile to forcibly reintegrate Taiwan. Not because they can't, in the same way the US could take over canada and mexico and there's bugger all we could do about it. It's that it's not worth the cost to business, trade lost lives etc. The US is playing right into chinas hand with a 'pacific first' strategy, so the PRC can use that to further suppress demand for political freedoms 'those people are just in bed with the americans who are trying to keep our people separate!' sort of nonsense.
But as a military matter, if they want Taiwan we'll lose. It's 200Km from their shores, they've got us by the balls on trade and manufacturing and the longer they wait the stronger they become, and the relatively weaker the rest of us become.
to deal with a PRC attack on Taiwan you will wake up in the morning and find a hammer and sickle hanging over taipei, and have to decide if you want to launch an invasion to liberate them from the phillipines or Japan, and if so how in the hell you're going to pull that off with china in control of the whole area at sea.
Unmaned drones are all well and good against enemies who's greatest weapon is a 20 year old shoulder mounted anti aircraft missile you sold them, or a state that has no real interest in putting up a fight, with soldiers who don't want to die for the dipshit in charge. China is none of those things. You will run out of missiles long before china runs out of things worth bombing, and they aren't going to fuck around without electronic warfare capabilities. If they decide to take taiwan by force you're going to be scrambling to source electronic components, because they will control the sea around taiwan, shipping around korea will be treacherous at best, and the same could be said of most of japan and thailand, and it suddenly looks much harder to run a high tech war without reliable access to most of those goods. Possible, but difficult.
not that rail guns are all that much more use. On a good day they're about 100Km range, and you can't get much more than that without assistance (rocket powered) simply because the air has too much of an impact beyond that point (friction, drag, random wind orientation in the intervening space etc.). I suppose if you had a ring around taiwan of rail guns it would give coverage over half the straights with china, but still, going in the other way a good missile will knock a ship out of commission for months at much longer range. Rail guns might be cost effective, but it remains to be seen if the cost savings is worth the tradeoff. It's basically like a new version of a battleship with triple the range, but still against missiles and aircraft carriers with ranges 5x the base, so I'm not sure it gets enough to be a deciding factor.
They don't have the TSA, they actually have healthcare.
If you look hard enough you can find good ideas everywhere. Europe has a couple of glaring examples of good ideas the US should be copying, and a lot of bad ideas it shouldn't. A 2 dollar breathalyser that you must have in your vehicle that costs thousands, with fuel that costs about that much per litre isn't exactly an onerous requirement. It's more of a "am I too drunk to drive? Oh... I guess I am" device, which, for 2 dollars is about a reasonable tradeoff. It's a weaker (and cheaper) requirement than needing to have working headlights, which seems fairly reasonable.
They aren't. They're just single use breathalyzers. They aren't ignition control devices. It's more of a "am I too drunk too drive, lets find out" than a "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that".
The other guy basically summed it up, but I was referring to the linked article and what it implies, whether or not the article paints an accurate picture of the situation I have no idea.
sure they are. A party with 3% of the vote is a fringe party. Even a party with 10% of the vote can be a fringe party. The difference between a bill passing in canada, and not, is the difference between 155 votes for, and 153 against. Or even 154 for, and 153 against (with one absent). That *1* seat, represents about 0.3% of the electorate in canada. But the difference between having 49.85 and 50.15% of the vote is 100% of the power. Which significantly empowers the radical minority 'swing' voters, and depowers the majority.
Imagine a situation in canada where we had the Pirate Party, always popular on/., as a swing party. Now imagine the issue of the day is another war over the falklands, and whether or not canada should side with the UK or Argentina as to who is the legal government of the Falklands? Do you really want a party who's whole platform is copyright reform being the swing vote to be bought off with promises on from any side of an issue? Is it really good for politics if the way to enact the auto bailout is to tack on native fishing rights changes, or to guarantee israeli settlements in the west bank? That's what proportional does. In belgium they actually have basically a collection of fringe parties none of whom have much of a national strategy (which, admittedly, is a strategy if you're an independence party like the new flemish alliance). In that situation forming a government at all is a matter of fringe parties trading with each other over their pet issues, none of which are actually serving the national will, they're just trading one groups idea for another in exchange for support, regardless of whether even 20% of the population wants it. Which is pretty much how proportional representation plays out. If you want my support you have to go along with my issue, even if that issue is unsupported by a majority, or even a sizable minority.
I don't see how as a practical matter you could be one and not the other and be any good at your job. A newspaper publisher either has to do its own journalism, or it has to just aggregate other peoples. An intelligence company needs to either aggregate other peoples information (which is really analysis, rather than data sourcing), and it will need a source of that information. The difference between a publisher that contracts independent sources, and a company with regular employees doing these things is not that big a deal.
The actual article isn't 'intelligence agency vs intelligence publisher' it's an intelligence company that as one of the things it's doing is trying to bribe people for insider information, and to resell that insider information in violation of corrupt practices and insider trading rules.
If you want information (call it journalism, intelligence, verification or whatever) on the health of say Hugo Chavez, your options are limited on how to get that which isn't illegal (assuming he isn't telling the truth). If you're being contracted to train intelligence analysts or agents from a government agency you need to have people who have past experience with intelligence gathering and analysis. To accomplish either of those things it's pretty obvious what they're up to. How do journalists get sources or info? Right, either you pay them, or they volunteer for the promise of future payoffs. That's the nature of the business and insofar as journalism is legal, it is legal.
The only thing particularly more sleazy than the nature of the business itself is the insider trading and related work (either paying off private or government persons for information about information that is not yet public). That's the sort of thing that journalists, parliament/congress etc. have particular legal walls around, because you really really really cannot use information that will be public before it becomes public. It shouldn't even be surprising that these things happen, it's only a matter of if or when they get caught by people who aren't in on the deal.
Just in general doing business in most of the world requires paying off the right people, in cash, in the right currency, at the right time. Everyone knows it, no one admits to it, no one really does anything about it because that's just how the world works. It used to be tax deductible for businesses in germany to pay bribes overseas for example, it's just the cost of doing business.
Right, but to get to 50% you start making arrangements with fringe parties in exchange for their not bringing down the government. These fringe parties may be single issue parties, or they may just in general live in a fantasy land (these are your pirate parties, decriminalization of cannabis parties, various independence and radical environmentalists, communists etc).
If we actually had proportional representation the selection of disenfranchised conservatives who are anti abortion, anti gay marriage, anti immigrant would come out hiding and have their own party (or parties). And the left would have at least a 3 way split with the greens, the liberals and the NPD. In effect, for any group to get a majority it would need to align with, and therefore go along with the ideas of either this selection of disenfrachised cons, or the greens. Neither of whom have the support of canadians, at all.
In proportional representation the will of narrow minorities trumps that of large blocks of people, because it is the only way to get a government to function. It has been more or less a disaster in Belgium (record for the longest any country has been without a government, including recolonized Iraq), Israel (had to change the rules so they could get a prime minister), Germany, the Netherlands, Iceland (waffling incompetence nearly bankrupted the country), Japan (7 prime ministers in 10 years), Turkey goes so far as to exclude any party with less than 10% so as to block Kurds getting influence (which by your argument is the primary advantage of the system).
How many other countries use proportional, and how well does that work out? In ontario we rejected proportional for a reason.
First past the post cuts out the crazies from the process. To the point that they don't even bother to run, and their supporters don't bother to vote. It also makes it much easier to form a majority government, which, regardless of whether you like what the conservatives are doing, is vastly preferably to a system where the government cannot pass a budget and then all hell breaks loose. With proportional representation we could end up in a scenario where we'd have 35% of the seats conservative, 25% liberal, 20% ndp, 10% bloc and then 'other'. Which would then leave control of the government up to the ability to pander to those fringes to get them on board to get you over a majority. In effect it would be handing the stability of the country over to the White Rose Party, the Greens, The Bloc, republicans, religious nutters or anything else, even a pirate party. None of which makes for good policy.
Proportional representation is more democratic, I'll grant anyone that. But it's a far worse way to run a government, because of the realities of majority voting in the upper or lower house/chamber/congress/senate/etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Should you be allowed to build a sign that obstructs his sign from view by anyone not one door away?
Again, there's nothing wrong with the information being there. It's just a matter of you shouldn't be able to put signs on his lawn that say "memorial across the street for some terrible thing that happened here last year". Which is effectively what Wikipedia is doing, along with google and big newspapers. The point of search is I'm trying to find something, if I already found it I wouldn't need search.
Where this is tricky is when it isn't intentional. If you and I have neigbouring (or competing) businesses, and I build a big sign, so you build a bigger sign thats' one thing. When some other company, as a result of it's broader arrangement with the sign hosting company comes along and blocks both our signs with theirs, that is 10x larger.
And yes, actually, he might be able to prevent you building a memorial. Areas are zoned for a reason. Even if it's another business, if your business will impede access to existing businesses (think MacDonalds and Wal Marts) you might not be allowed to set up shop there.
No doubt who wins matters, even to those of us fortunate enough to not live in the US. But that has nothing to do with the article.
A candidate has a viewpoint (or policy or whatever you want to call it), that people should go vote in the primary a particular way. He used robocalls (legally) to encourage this. In this case Robocalls aren't new, using them to support policy positions that are legal isn't new. There's nothing in the article relevant to technology or policy about technology.
The story from yesterday, about canadian robocalls that might have been used to attempt to illegally suppress voting, that's a story. Because while the technology itself is equally boring, the use is novel and potentially illegal (and a whole lot of other implications). /. isn't covering the election. It doesn't do the focus of the whole site to either swarm it with political material that has no relevance to technology (essentially drowning out the core focus of the site) or having a random shot of something purely political out of the broader context which is the entire election.
If this was the first robocall ever, or the first use of a robocall for this purpose, or if it is/was illegal, or if he was robocalling to support a position about technology, or some esoteric voting procedure or concept maybe. But the actually thing is exceptionally bland. It belongs on a political tracking site, not /. Now, if you want an article on how the candidates are using technology to get their messages out, or would impact technology if they get into office or any of that, that's fair game. But this seems to be more of a randomly grabbed article, and it's inconsistent with everything else that's been on the page in days, and it's not particularly important. I would go so far as to say even it isn't technology related it might warrant the front page if it's particularly novel "Rick Santorum gets endorsement from Pope as only "moral" candidate, or X plans to make religion Y the official religion of the United States' because those would be rather dramatic.
The whole article only has what, 3 sentences, 4 maybe, related to Robocalls, or other people making robocalls. The rest of it is just pointless blather about one random campaign stop. And none of the stuff on robocalls says much beyond 'they use robocalls for these things'.
interestingly their refusal to go public this long is something that has made me like them a lot less. Now that they're going public, and Zuck is going to keep 60% of the control makes me hate them even more. Even Bill Gates only kept 49% of the control.
If you're that big of an outfit and not going public you're either denying the people who built the company a piece of the pie, or trying to be a control freak (or I suppose, both). If I had money to be a shareholder I wouldn't want to be into an outfit like facebook, because if Zuckerberg does something outright crazy he's got 60% of the control, which means you can't get it back from him, and your money might be worthless. He could, essentially, vote to sell the entire assets of the corporation to himself for 1 dollar for example, and fuck over the people who have the other 75% of the ownership (but not voting rights). That's an extreme contrived (and probably illegal) example but I'm trying to be illustrative of the problem. In practice that 'crazy' is more likely to be trying to build a revenue stream that will clash with various privacy rules around the world, or trying to acquire businesses that might not actually be good buys.
And ya, they have to go public because they were using stock as compensation for employees. That's perfectly normal and reasonable, but they even got a deferment to delay their IPO when they exceeded the maximum number of shareholders before needing to be public. That is (legally) attempting to delay owners of the company their fair say in how that company is run.
Yahoo is being somewhat sleezy. But that's also part of the way the game is played. You hold patents, and bring them out when there's money to be made, either a competitor is big enough, or when someone is coming after you. If Yahoo had demanded licencing fees or royalties years ago they might be stuck with a pittance. Now they get to demand shares, and as the articles point out, this worked for them in 2004 with google to the tune of 2.4 million shares (1.4 billion dollars worth as of todays google stock price). That might be a good strategy with facebook too. Demand 0.5% of their business (which could justifiably rely on Yahoo patents), and see what the stock price does.
who needs guidance systems when you can send 100 million dollars in rockets after a 3 billion dollar ship and it only takes 1 hit to knock it out of commission for months.
The people aiming those missiles at ships need those guidance systems. If it takes 100 million dollars in missiles to damage zero dollars of ship, then you're not winning the price war. One of the lessons that the US had to learn about guidance systems is that unguided weapons are vastly less effective than guided ones. If your target is huge and unhardened like a city or island, then that's not so important. But if you're trying to knock out a military ship (or the case that started it all, a bridge), then even near misses can be useless.
That's only true because it's astronomically expensive for the US to get ordinance in the general area. It's not 'in general' true, well, it is if you're trying to blow up something the size of a bridge I suppose, but a ship is a much bigger target than a bridge. A handful of coloured flares or buoys as range indicators do the job reasonably well. For 100 million dollars the US would fire 200 missiles, the chinese 20 000 rockets from 1000 launch sites. Sure, your 200 missiles could each take out 1 rocket site, so they have 800 rocket sites, firing 16 000 rockets.... Accurate naval gunnery at range is a problem that has been managed reasonably well on the cheap for 100 years. Put coloring in the ordinance so if it lands in the water you can identify where the shot came from, and iterate from there. PGM's matter when you get one flyover.
I tend to think the US's view of it's military superiority is a myth. As we learned in Iraq, it rarely understands the war its fighting until after it gets there, and once its there it likes to live in a fantasy land about how awesome it is for years. That's fine against a few thousand guys with AK 47's, but against a competent adversary who has had time to invest in the future the US is in for one hell of a shock. It's the same as underestimating the Japanese at the start of WW2, except that in a protracted war the advantage goes to china not the US, they have the industrial base, the manpower advantage, and the local force, and their people are smarter, better educated and better prepared, especially since half of their top people were trained in the US they know their enemy far better than the other direction. In practice the US doesn't really have a lead on china, it's fighting the last war (Iraq...) not the next war. It has the wrong equipment, the wrong training, the wrong mindset. The question is only whether or not it's worth it to china to take over taiwan.
Obviously it's impossible for the US to keep up with china for most of the century. Until chinas populaton starts to radically shrink due to population controls they're going to be 3 or 4x the country the US is. But then they're going to have their own problems to worry about as they need to figure out how to run a country that is shrinking. That isn't going to be a fun problem.
Well to me that's a sort of legitimate 'matter of degree', those articles really did exist, accurate or not, but being 7th or 8th on the list seems about appropriate compared to something actually accurate.
If that was a good algorithm to use we wouldn't have the issue.
Arguing degree is determining where in the pagerank it should be, not whether or not it should be there at all. .
Well why should the first search result for the business across the street from your memorial bring up your business (memorial) and not theirs? That's a dominos pizza vs pizza hut problem. You're saying you should be able to hijack their brand for your own purposes. When wikipedia does it they aren't even doing it intentionally (nor generally does a newspaper), that's the problem.
Erm... a cell phone camera (admittedly a good cell phone camera) on a balloon, note, I did not say hot air balloon, just a balloon will see 100Km reasonably well, actually I have just such photos on an 8 MP camera out to a range of about 80Km. (I just happened to be on something about 500m in the air overlooking a coast over the summer, but I don't have the exact numbers, the CN tower for example in toronto is about 500M above sea level). I grant you it's not perfect, but you're also looking for something that's going to be a 150-200m long if not a great deal larger than that (that would be your zumwalt class destroyers). A small balloon need only carry a few hundred grams of payload, and it's basically too small to do much about.
Shooting down a balloon is a bugger of a problem. We had a actual scientific balloon in canada that was supposed to get a few KM around alberta, it ended up getting all the way to ireland despite repeated attempts to shoot it down. They even actually hit it, it just didn't do any good. It cost more to try (and fail) to shoot it down, than it cost to build it.
Suppling Taiwan is easy, again, it's only 200Km from their ports, and they will have control over the channel in both directions. In fact, from the top of the highest point in Taiwan you can almost, but not quite see the mainland (there's about a 50Km gap there). Anywhere near there would be a ring of death for ships. Obviously it's possible to cross under fire, just uh... lossy. Pretty much any missile will cover the gap, and they don't even need good missiles, volume will do wonders, hell, rockets would do the trick, who needs guidance systems when you can send 100 million dollars in rockets after a 3 billion dollar ship and it only takes 1 hit to knock it out of commission for months. This is the problem of 'mass' with china. They could put hundreds of thousands of soldiers into play, and taiwan is big enough a lot of their supply could be 'locally sourced' (i.e. looted). For the anyone to re-invade is a much harder problem, because you only really have two directions you can come from, Japan or the phillipines.
Actually I think that's the sort of war the US has no experience in. The last major operation the US was involved in was 650 000 (540k in saudi 100k in turkey and then 300k or so external support) or so personnel to invade iraq, 21 years ago. To pull of a similar stunt the US would require a massive military buildup (again), hard when the chinese now control 15-25% of all of the stuff that goes into building your equipment, by virtue of their possession of all the factories in china, and the foundries in Taiwan. The iraqi's spent the 10 preceeding years to 91 figuring out how to fight a WW1 style enemy in Iran, but being vastly outnumbered. China has spent the last 50 years thinking about how to fight americans, how to mitigate, or eliminate US advantages. And the scale would easily be that many people, but the chinese will actually play to win, close quarters urban combat where necessary on land, small fast 'suicide boats' or equivalent at sea and they can use that huge industrial base to produce a mountain of munitions that are hard to do much about at close range.
As you say, their problem is their ability to supply, they'd be pushing their luck much outside of Taiwan, they probably couldn't pull of much against japan for a long long time for example, nor the phillipines. But Taiwan or north korea...
And on the flip side, don't these other sites, the ones that have info about the disaster, deserve their place in the search listing?
Sure, so now we're arguing degree. Should the first result for Nuremberg be the city, or the laws passed by the Nazi's? Which search ranks matter, the top 3, top 5, top 10? Does it matter how exactly they're displayed? If I'm searching for this specific phrase should the top result be that specific phrase, or a more popular variant thereof.
If I search for slashdut I may really specifically mean whatever the hell slashdut is, or I may mean slashdot. The priority should go to the actual thing slashdut with the variants lower down the list, and or a 'did you mean slashdot' on the top. If there is no such thing as slashdut, or if it's a generic (Think Pizza vs Pappa Johns Pizza vs Pizza Hut, vs Pizza Pizza etc.) then all bets are off.
This sounds like: "Please adjust the rules in my favor"
It sounds like "your search enigne is fucking over my business the law says you have to change your algorithm to make it stop unfairly disadvantaging me". SEO is the enemy of accurate information. That's the problem. Why does wikipedia, or some spanish newspaper, or some google properties (youtube) deserve a higher priority than the actual business in question? Should a giant media company (say a newspaper) be able to write an article about something near you (infront of webnut77's business there was a horrific murder of a child with a knife sort of thing), and because they're paying for SEO get their article from 30 years ago ahead of your actual result, which is for a say... web design company. If we want to argue degree, then ok, I'll grant you, if the murder happened say... this week, it might legitimately be higher priority, but how about 1 year later. 5? 10? 33?
If you grant (as the EU essentially has) that search results can essentially represent or defame a business, which is probably not far off from realistic, then their influence on downstream businesses needs to be done in a regulated fashion. Compare to a phone book, where, if I could buy out all results for webnut plus a wildcard then I can seriously undermine your reputation. Now the difference in search is that it's not necessarily intentional, Wikipedia doesn't have some plan to go and screw over this poor campground, it just sort of happens that the nature of their business is such that they dominate results. Which is why you need a mechanism in place to override that if the algorithm unfairly represents something. So then we're back to arguing a matter of degree as to what does, or does not fairly represent something.
My argument is precisely that this is a problem that extends well beyond one site or business. This is a general problem that if I search for a specific string, and the first result is that string + some other tuple/parameter/string, with what I actually searched for further down then I'm not getting a good result, in fact you're biasing the result against the actual thing I searched for.
The classic example would be if I do a search for Pizza Hut and the first result is Dominos. Now if I search for "Pizza" all bets are off, I would expect the first results to be either a map to all places with a keyword pizza, or an article about pizza or the like. But if I searched for Pizza hut, no matter how much more popular the related search Dominos is, I really specifically searched for Pizza Hut
The top result for "Alfaques"
In order are:
The wiki about the disaster
Pictures of the disaster
The offical website (without thumbnail)
Newspaper about the disaster (with picture)
A youtube video about the explosion
Two campground things
Results related to the current discussion about their search problem.
Search from Ontario Canada.
Every example I cited I specifically searched for in advance to be specifically illustrative of the problem, why is one place saddled with search engine results that are negative and another not? Absolutely nothing there was a rant. If you search for a definite 'thing' I expect results about that 'thing' "Tianamen Square' is a discreet thing, as was the "Tianamen Square Massacre" (or protests or whatever you want to call it). From that standpoint a search for "Alfaques" should bring up "Alfaques" first, and "Alfaques + tuple" second.
You can make the same argument the other way. If I want info on Tianamen Square massacre shouldn't I have to type that in first? If I just want info on tianamen square, I just want info on Tianamen square, I don't necessarily want the Tianamen Square official website, but I do want information about Tianamen Square.
Why is one prioritized over the other, and is that merely a self fulfilling prophecy, again, how far back do we want to drag history. Just because it happened after the advent of colour photography or in an era of mass media doesn't make it all that much more important.
100 Km off a coast is nothing. You may as well be 10. A balloon with a cell phone camera 650 meters in the air (that's not exact, but close enough, 650 +/- 10%) can see 100 Km, and that's assuming you don't have a building or a tower or any other elevation to start from. Eliminating the chinese airforce is completely impractical, because you're right next to them. You could take all their best aircraft for all it matters, you're still right next to them, they can make crappy homebrew 'drones' or similar and they can position anti ship missiles inland further than your railgun can hit.
The premise you're working from is that a railgun is a cheap alternative after missiles and aircraft have done all the work protecting them. At that point you're not exactly getting a lot of cost savings, since you still need the air power to dominate an adversary. Now in Syria this is a reasonable prospect, in China, not so much.
Invading Taiwan is a matter of mass, not precision. At least for China. Going the other way to liberate taiwan from a PRC occupation it's a matter of precision. The chinese are happy to flatten the place as they go, saves the hassle of dealing with an insurgency later. They want the prestige from reunification, the people, their stuff are a distant afterthought. There's no advantage to them for accurate firepower, you always want to concentrate to some degree, but basically anything of value on the Island is on the western 15 or 20Km of it, with one city area in the northeast, flatten those, and starve resistance out of the mountains.
If I want to visit Nuremberg on business I don't necessarily need a slew of results about Nuremberg laws. If I'm going to China I probably want to see Tianamen square, just as I would want to see Trafalgar square in the UK. One happened to have a massacre in it, but unless that massacre is happening *right now* I care more about directions, parking etc.
It's not that there's a problem to have results that list all of the terrible things that have happened somewhere in the past, it's that they are just that, history, and if you want to go camping something that happened 34 years ago is not really relevant. It's not that the links shouldn't be there, just they should maybe be slightly deprioritized over current events or status. If there's a flood in Nuremberg I'd rather that be at the top of the list, than an event, horrific as it may be, that happened 70 years ago.
Do you really want a world where the first search for Kansas is about bleeding kansas and the fight over slavery that happened there 160 years ago? That might be history, and it might make for some historical sites worth visiting (having never been to kansas I have no idea), but I may care more about a map than about one specific event that happened to be the worst thing to ever happen to a place. The history of the world is full of dirty laundry, that's important, but it's probably more relevant that the top result for anything be somewhat current.
We might be arguing about degree. If I search for Tianamen square should the first 3 results be: a map, tourist info, and the offical website of the place or should it be a series of things about the 'protests' of 1989 and videos of tank man? How about the "National Mall" in DC (I think that's what it's called) where there have been a few shootings over the years? Should a search for verden (a town in germany) produce a page full of results for a massacre in verden ordered by Charlemange in 782, before information such as the local government webpage, or a map? I tend to think the first few results should be relevant to right now, and the lower results still have all of the messy history, and, especially in Europe, lets face it, there are a LOT of layers of history, you kinda get used to it, and focus on today even if your local bank branch is in a 900 year old castle.
Eliminating chinese control and knowledge that close to its own coast isn't feasible. This isn't libya, which is a very sparse country of only about 6 million people, or Iraq, which was softened up for 12 years.
Rapid fire doesn't do you any good if your platform is flattened before it's in range to rapid fire. That's kinda the problem, the only base relevant to a war with china is at sea (the nearest islands are about 250-300Km away), so you're talking about naval assets, which are, relative to the cost of just the guns, pretty expensive.
No, chinas advantage in this is that they are local, have a huge population, a massive industrial base, control a huge portion of the electronics business (even if they can't utilize it effectively in weapons they deprive their enemies of those supplies), and they are rapidly expanding their technology.
I don't think the PRC is going to waltz over Taiwan tomorrow. Probably 10 years would be pushing their luck. 25 years from now... harder to say. They're not in this for a short term game, this is a long term play, and they may never find it worthwhile to forcibly reintegrate Taiwan. Not because they can't, in the same way the US could take over canada and mexico and there's bugger all we could do about it. It's that it's not worth the cost to business, trade lost lives etc. The US is playing right into chinas hand with a 'pacific first' strategy, so the PRC can use that to further suppress demand for political freedoms 'those people are just in bed with the americans who are trying to keep our people separate!' sort of nonsense.
But as a military matter, if they want Taiwan we'll lose. It's 200Km from their shores, they've got us by the balls on trade and manufacturing and the longer they wait the stronger they become, and the relatively weaker the rest of us become.
to deal with a PRC attack on Taiwan you will wake up in the morning and find a hammer and sickle hanging over taipei, and have to decide if you want to launch an invasion to liberate them from the phillipines or Japan, and if so how in the hell you're going to pull that off with china in control of the whole area at sea.
Unmaned drones are all well and good against enemies who's greatest weapon is a 20 year old shoulder mounted anti aircraft missile you sold them, or a state that has no real interest in putting up a fight, with soldiers who don't want to die for the dipshit in charge. China is none of those things. You will run out of missiles long before china runs out of things worth bombing, and they aren't going to fuck around without electronic warfare capabilities. If they decide to take taiwan by force you're going to be scrambling to source electronic components, because they will control the sea around taiwan, shipping around korea will be treacherous at best, and the same could be said of most of japan and thailand, and it suddenly looks much harder to run a high tech war without reliable access to most of those goods. Possible, but difficult.
not that rail guns are all that much more use. On a good day they're about 100Km range, and you can't get much more than that without assistance (rocket powered) simply because the air has too much of an impact beyond that point (friction, drag, random wind orientation in the intervening space etc.). I suppose if you had a ring around taiwan of rail guns it would give coverage over half the straights with china, but still, going in the other way a good missile will knock a ship out of commission for months at much longer range. Rail guns might be cost effective, but it remains to be seen if the cost savings is worth the tradeoff. It's basically like a new version of a battleship with triple the range, but still against missiles and aircraft carriers with ranges 5x the base, so I'm not sure it gets enough to be a deciding factor.
They don't have the TSA, they actually have healthcare.
If you look hard enough you can find good ideas everywhere. Europe has a couple of glaring examples of good ideas the US should be copying, and a lot of bad ideas it shouldn't. A 2 dollar breathalyser that you must have in your vehicle that costs thousands, with fuel that costs about that much per litre isn't exactly an onerous requirement. It's more of a "am I too drunk to drive? Oh... I guess I am" device, which, for 2 dollars is about a reasonable tradeoff. It's a weaker (and cheaper) requirement than needing to have working headlights, which seems fairly reasonable.
They aren't. They're just single use breathalyzers. They aren't ignition control devices. It's more of a "am I too drunk too drive, lets find out" than a "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that".
The other guy basically summed it up, but I was referring to the linked article and what it implies, whether or not the article paints an accurate picture of the situation I have no idea.
sure they are. A party with 3% of the vote is a fringe party. Even a party with 10% of the vote can be a fringe party. The difference between a bill passing in canada, and not, is the difference between 155 votes for, and 153 against. Or even 154 for, and 153 against (with one absent). That *1* seat, represents about 0.3% of the electorate in canada. But the difference between having 49.85 and 50.15% of the vote is 100% of the power. Which significantly empowers the radical minority 'swing' voters, and depowers the majority.
Imagine a situation in canada where we had the Pirate Party, always popular on /., as a swing party. Now imagine the issue of the day is another war over the falklands, and whether or not canada should side with the UK or Argentina as to who is the legal government of the Falklands? Do you really want a party who's whole platform is copyright reform being the swing vote to be bought off with promises on from any side of an issue? Is it really good for politics if the way to enact the auto bailout is to tack on native fishing rights changes, or to guarantee israeli settlements in the west bank? That's what proportional does. In belgium they actually have basically a collection of fringe parties none of whom have much of a national strategy (which, admittedly, is a strategy if you're an independence party like the new flemish alliance). In that situation forming a government at all is a matter of fringe parties trading with each other over their pet issues, none of which are actually serving the national will, they're just trading one groups idea for another in exchange for support, regardless of whether even 20% of the population wants it. Which is pretty much how proportional representation plays out. If you want my support you have to go along with my issue, even if that issue is unsupported by a majority, or even a sizable minority.
I don't see how as a practical matter you could be one and not the other and be any good at your job. A newspaper publisher either has to do its own journalism, or it has to just aggregate other peoples. An intelligence company needs to either aggregate other peoples information (which is really analysis, rather than data sourcing), and it will need a source of that information. The difference between a publisher that contracts independent sources, and a company with regular employees doing these things is not that big a deal.
The actual article isn't 'intelligence agency vs intelligence publisher' it's an intelligence company that as one of the things it's doing is trying to bribe people for insider information, and to resell that insider information in violation of corrupt practices and insider trading rules.
If you want information (call it journalism, intelligence, verification or whatever) on the health of say Hugo Chavez, your options are limited on how to get that which isn't illegal (assuming he isn't telling the truth). If you're being contracted to train intelligence analysts or agents from a government agency you need to have people who have past experience with intelligence gathering and analysis. To accomplish either of those things it's pretty obvious what they're up to. How do journalists get sources or info? Right, either you pay them, or they volunteer for the promise of future payoffs. That's the nature of the business and insofar as journalism is legal, it is legal.
The only thing particularly more sleazy than the nature of the business itself is the insider trading and related work (either paying off private or government persons for information about information that is not yet public). That's the sort of thing that journalists, parliament/congress etc. have particular legal walls around, because you really really really cannot use information that will be public before it becomes public. It shouldn't even be surprising that these things happen, it's only a matter of if or when they get caught by people who aren't in on the deal.
Just in general doing business in most of the world requires paying off the right people, in cash, in the right currency, at the right time. Everyone knows it, no one admits to it, no one really does anything about it because that's just how the world works. It used to be tax deductible for businesses in germany to pay bribes overseas for example, it's just the cost of doing business.
Right, but to get to 50% you start making arrangements with fringe parties in exchange for their not bringing down the government. These fringe parties may be single issue parties, or they may just in general live in a fantasy land (these are your pirate parties, decriminalization of cannabis parties, various independence and radical environmentalists, communists etc).
If we actually had proportional representation the selection of disenfranchised conservatives who are anti abortion, anti gay marriage, anti immigrant would come out hiding and have their own party (or parties). And the left would have at least a 3 way split with the greens, the liberals and the NPD. In effect, for any group to get a majority it would need to align with, and therefore go along with the ideas of either this selection of disenfrachised cons, or the greens. Neither of whom have the support of canadians, at all.
In proportional representation the will of narrow minorities trumps that of large blocks of people, because it is the only way to get a government to function. It has been more or less a disaster in Belgium (record for the longest any country has been without a government, including recolonized Iraq), Israel (had to change the rules so they could get a prime minister), Germany, the Netherlands, Iceland (waffling incompetence nearly bankrupted the country), Japan (7 prime ministers in 10 years), Turkey goes so far as to exclude any party with less than 10% so as to block Kurds getting influence (which by your argument is the primary advantage of the system).
How many other countries use proportional, and how well does that work out? In ontario we rejected proportional for a reason.
First past the post cuts out the crazies from the process. To the point that they don't even bother to run, and their supporters don't bother to vote. It also makes it much easier to form a majority government, which, regardless of whether you like what the conservatives are doing, is vastly preferably to a system where the government cannot pass a budget and then all hell breaks loose. With proportional representation we could end up in a scenario where we'd have 35% of the seats conservative, 25% liberal, 20% ndp, 10% bloc and then 'other'. Which would then leave control of the government up to the ability to pander to those fringes to get them on board to get you over a majority. In effect it would be handing the stability of the country over to the White Rose Party, the Greens, The Bloc, republicans, religious nutters or anything else, even a pirate party. None of which makes for good policy.
Proportional representation is more democratic, I'll grant anyone that. But it's a far worse way to run a government, because of the realities of majority voting in the upper or lower house/chamber/congress/senate/etc.