Someone needs to explain what surplus and debt to the Republicrats.
We are 5 trillion dollars in the hole with our national debt.
The debt is increasing every year. Since the debt is increasing, this means:
- The budget is not balanced.
- THERE IS NO SURPLUS.
Also the "surplus" money that they refer to is Social Security fluctuation.
If they want to use that money to pay the debt, I'm fine with that, is that insures a better life more than a pyramid retirement system. But, any other use of that money is not appropriate.
"hey dad, if we owe more on the house than last year, why are you saying that there is extra money for a raise in our allowances?"
Some people, especially those that favor '3-rd'
party candidates, have
called for the ending of the electoral college
system to be replaced by
a simple purely popular vote, or at least allowing
for splitting the
electoral votes by each state. The best recent
example was the
Bush-Clinton election. Clinton received 43% of the
popular vote (but a
sufficient majority of the electoral vote),
whereas Perot got at least
10% of the popular vote but zero electoral votes.
If memory serves,
Vermont is the only state which does currently
allow for its votes to be
split; if someone wins 60% of the Vermont popular
vote, they get 2 votes
and the 40% candidate gets 1. This in contrast to
California, where
someone can get 51% of the popular vote, and
therefore gets 53 (or
whatever it is nowadays) electoral votes. What is
your position on this
issue?
Gush:
Well Carelton, this is a question I have been asked quite frequently.
The electoral system doesn't inhibit the voting system that much. It
makes it easy for people to relate the size of their state to the size of
other states. Originally, the U.S. was 13 colonies, with 13 separate
democracies. The electoral system promotes the individuality of the
various states, and thus preserves our heritage.
Bore:
Well Carelton, unlike my opponent, I am for a fair electoral system, one that gives each person an equal voice. As president, I will push this issue just like all my other promises.
Do any of the canidates think that the current election system is in need of reform, or is a two party electorial system the best way.
Is there a problem with corporate and media interest in our current election system.
What about a no-party two-pass voting system?
In this system, there would be no special power given to political parties. In fact, presidential primaries may not be needed.
The first pass would be the "vote your heart" vote. And the second pass would be choosing from the top candidates. This would greatly lesson the wasted vote fealing that people get in a two-party system.
Or are there other ideas for a more democratic election system?
Re:Can we a "Ask the Mozilla team" interview?
on
Send Some Mo' Zilla
·
· Score: 1
Forgive me if I'm wrong. And also forgive me if I sound too contrary.
1. By packages, you mean sets of.so components that are magically downloaded and configured by this mozilla installer.
I still would prefer a more conventional separation:
- Runtime separation by using separate executables. This could let me easily replace the Mozilla mailer with my own.
- Each "package" is distributed physically distributed separately(its own tgz, deb or rpm file).
- libraries common to all executables or some are in separate packages.
- use ordinary dependency, package install programs: dep, or a smart rpm, intead of some new magical installer.
I think distributing things as real separate packages(at least one library package and at least 4 independent exe/library packages) would untie any knots that still exist.
I wouldn't want KDE or GNOME to use some magic installer either.
2. As a web user, I don't want someone to be able to change my menus to use yellow text on pink background, if that's what CSS themes would allow.
Cool that Mozilla plans to provide native widgets as an option. I don't claim any knowledge here, but is XUL2GTK or XUL2QT possible?
They chased Netscape engineers dreams first.
on
Send Some Mo' Zilla
·
· Score: 1
I think a good portion of the public wanted Netscape to be broken up into: a browser, mail, and news reader. This is what I assumed they would tackle first.
But the Netscape team was not much interested in that. Instead they were interested in changing the GUI in some new way, and componentizing everything, and making it scriptable. Read the roadmap.
But the original problem has not really been addressed.
This is leading some to splinter Mozilla projects, like Galeon that separate the Browser out.
Eventually, I would hope that the main Mozilla project decides to fix the big problem themselves, but if they don't, other projects will come out that fix the problem themselves.
Can we a "Ask the Mozilla team" interview?
on
Send Some Mo' Zilla
·
· Score: 1
I have just two curious questions:
1. The main problem with Netscape was that it was one huge program. Why is Mozilla still one huge package? Why not split things into different packages (libs and exe's: Mozilla-libs, Mozilla-browser, Mozilla-mail, Mozilla-news)?
2. Are themes really helpful?
KDE has themes, GNOME has themes, Windows 2001 will have themes, and Mac's will likely have themes.
So why not take advantage of that, and just let the toolkit do themes?
A middle button could be used for 2-D scroll with just some software (can KDE or Gnome do this?).
Hold down middle, and move the mouse to scroll.
Some would say, "I don't want to move the mouse to scroll". Well, you probably want a track ball, since you don't like moving the mouse. And again, some button would put it in scroll mode (software could make it act like a scroll lock button).
If someone buys it online from a music corporation, they watermark it uniquely so it can be traced to you.
Then the music corporation wouldn't need to sue Napter when you distribute the music without permission.
They just log the violation, notify the police, then something bad happens to you.
To avoid the ministry of information, you could:
- ignore SDMI like Circuit city DIVX. Let them dump money in another hole.
- keep buying CD's, and encode them yourself.
- never buy a MP3 player made by a music corporation.
- hack the watermarks to make them trace back to Hilary Rosen or someone similar.
- get unmarked mp3's or ogg's from the artist or a smaller then uncorrupt middle man like mp3.com.
From Segfault:
http://www.segfault.org/story.phtml?mode=2&id=39d1 03ec-039558a0
Dear Answer Guy,
I thought about buying an Athlon, but now my TV screams all the time
about some Bi-Athlon and even Tri-Athlon. Is that just a vaporware or
should I wait to buy such a beast?
-Ox Ford from Ohio
Dear Ox Ford,
Olympic Fever has struck the airwaves! Unknown to most people, the
Athlon is the official microprocessor of the 2000 Olympic Games. To
better suit Olympians, AMD came out with a Bi-Athlon and Tri-Athlon.
These are actually multiprocessor units that have many advantages over
their single-processor sibling. First, the processor speeds have been
doubled, allowing the CPU to use time-sharing more efficiently
(time-sharing is sometimes called "cycling," which is also an Olympic
event). Processes can be re-prioritized in hardware, allowing certain
applications to get a greater time share which causes it to run faster
(also called "sprinting," which is an Olympic sport). Also, think of
the Athlon as a unicycle, the Bi-Athlon as a bicycle, and the Tri-Athlon
as a tricycle. The Bi-Athlon and the Tri-Athlon are much better at
handling an unbalanced load, namely because they have more wheels. All
of these things make the Athlon family the number one choice among
Olympic athletes.
Seems like this region encoding thing should be challenged with a lawsuit.
Are there Europeans that are upset that region encoding makes the prices of US discs higher and the releases delayed? Unfair trade and price fixing is only natural with region encoding.
Or maybe a company like APEX or bigger should fight them in court.
I have the APEX "classic" too.
So the first thing that I did was turn off region.
I don't remember which discs(not Patriot or Giligans Perfect Storm), but a couple discs I watched checked for themselves if the disc id matched the player region. For these you have to set the player region to match.
Since I only currently have US discs, I just put set it to that.
So I good player would have to look at the disc and make the player region always match the disc.
Instead of that, if you have a flat tax or just a simple formula, then people (rich and poor) pay less taxes because they do not pay the salary of thousands of tax collecters.
If you want to vote for a non-corporate party, Nader is your man.
A pure Libertarian government has never been tested, and my suspision is that it would degrade to corporate rule. Here how:
You take away government sponsored welfare completely, and let private organizations do that. Ok, what you get is a mega-United-Way organization that is corporatly sponsored and determines who gets welfare. You don't vote for wellfare unless you are a major shareholder.
Or you privatize roads: AOL, Microsoft and Coke buy the roads and give you discounts if you use their products. Also the incentive to improve roads or prevent pollution is only driven by the bottom line of advertising.
You get the idea. Socialism has faith in Goverment. Democracy has faith in the people. Rebuplicanism is buffered democracy. Pure liberatarianism has little faith in Government, but has faith in Capitalism and Corporations. Voting for something that was goverment run is replaced with supply, demand and boycotting. You buy Pepsi products because they have cleaner roads, and donate money to needy private schools.
All that said, I do believe we need more Liberatarianism and less (zero) corporate government sponsorship, less Republicanism
and more Democracy.
Both the Democratic and Republican parties
tend to move towards a corporate republic and
away from Democracy.
Electing a Libertarian would be better than another Corporate sponsored Republic/Democracy canidate,
Voting for Nader would line up better long term.
I'm for a libertarian, socialistic, democratic republican goverenment without corporate sponsorship (bribes).
Here's one for you "One Point Shopping":
Go into a physical store. Leave your credit card
number and address.
Inform the store owner that when you you point
to something and say "Buy it", to charge you
credit and load it in you car.
If you think the idea is good or worth a patent, I'm sorry.
For some projects that I have written, I used a modified Artistic License, a "General Artistic License". Parts of the Perl Artistic License seemed to me to be specific to Perl, so I removed them.
If you have time, look at it, and tell me if its ok.
Slashdot Mirror
You said:
> A balanced budget has zero to do with how much debt you have.
Then:
> There is nothing about debt in [a balance budget] equation.
Then:
[Surplus] has absolutely nothing to do with the size of the national debt.
By "nothing to do", I am assuming you mean "no relationship".
While the debt does not affect a balanced budget or surplus, other than directly from interest, not having a balanced budget does affect the debt.
Using your story:
My Credit Card debt went from $5.413 Trillion in 1997 to $5.692 today. Now did that happen? I thought I was always under budget.
As for Bush, would he care about the debt, like his father?
Umm,
Someone needs to explain what surplus and debt to the Republicrats.
We are 5 trillion dollars in the hole with our national debt.
The debt is increasing every year. Since the debt is increasing, this means:
- The budget is not balanced.
- THERE IS NO SURPLUS.
Also the "surplus" money that they refer to is Social Security fluctuation.
If they want to use that money to pay the debt, I'm fine with that, is that insures a better life more than a pyramid retirement system. But, any other use of that money is not appropriate.
"hey dad, if we owe more on the house than last year, why are you saying that there is extra money for a raise in our allowances?"
I can't tell my elephant from my ass.
4) electoral reform
by carleton
Some people, especially those that favor '3-rd' party candidates, have called for the ending of the electoral college system to be replaced by a simple purely popular vote, or at least allowing for splitting the electoral votes by each state. The best recent example was the Bush-Clinton election. Clinton received 43% of the popular vote (but a sufficient majority of the electoral vote), whereas Perot got at least 10% of the popular vote but zero electoral votes. If memory serves, Vermont is the only state which does currently allow for its votes to be split; if someone wins 60% of the Vermont popular vote, they get 2 votes and the 40% candidate gets 1. This in contrast to California, where someone can get 51% of the popular vote, and therefore gets 53 (or whatever it is nowadays) electoral votes. What is your position on this issue?
Gush:
Well Carelton, this is a question I have been asked quite frequently. The electoral system doesn't inhibit the voting system that much. It makes it easy for people to relate the size of their state to the size of other states. Originally, the U.S. was 13 colonies, with 13 separate democracies. The electoral system promotes the individuality of the various states, and thus preserves our heritage.
Bore:
Well Carelton, unlike my opponent, I am for a fair electoral system, one that gives each person an equal voice. As president, I will push this issue just like all my other promises.
...unless we standardize on English.
This is THE key issue of the Buchanan Party.
Or a different way:
A Non-Democratic system is worse than Bush.
Maybe a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush (this year).
But in the long run, a vote for Bush or Gore is a vote for a two party corporate puppet government.
I would rather expose a broken electoral system than encourage it by voting for "lessor of two evils".
I don't understand why:
...
The first troll editorial was news.
Why anyone would need to respond to it.
Why a reponse to a troll editorial is news.
It would have been more useful if UNIX review
wrote some new columns:
"Is Windows a GUI" - because it doesn't have a "real" tool bar or multiple desktops, or focus policy choices,
"Are MAC pointing devies mice?" - Because they don't have 3 buttons and a scrolly thingy.
Anyone know why internet2.edu, not internet2.org?
Do any of the canidates think that the current election system is in need of reform, or is a two party electorial system the best way.
Is there a problem with corporate and media interest in our current election system.
What about a no-party two-pass voting system?
In this system, there would be no special power given to political parties. In fact, presidential primaries may not be needed.
The first pass would be the "vote your heart" vote. And the second pass would be choosing from the top candidates. This would greatly lesson the wasted vote fealing that people get in a two-party system.
Or are there other ideas for a more democratic election system?
Forgive me if I'm wrong. And also forgive me if I sound too contrary.
.so components that are magically downloaded and configured by this mozilla installer.
1. By packages, you mean sets of
I still would prefer a more conventional separation:
- Runtime separation by using separate executables. This could let me easily replace the Mozilla mailer with my own.
- Each "package" is distributed physically distributed separately(its own tgz, deb or rpm file).
- libraries common to all executables or some are in separate packages.
- use ordinary dependency, package install programs: dep, or a smart rpm, intead of some new magical installer.
I think distributing things as real separate packages(at least one library package and at least 4 independent exe/library packages) would untie any knots that still exist.
I wouldn't want KDE or GNOME to use some magic installer either.
2. As a web user, I don't want someone to be able to change my menus to use yellow text on pink background, if that's what CSS themes would allow.
Cool that Mozilla plans to provide native widgets as an option. I don't claim any knowledge here, but is XUL2GTK or XUL2QT possible?
I think a good portion of the public wanted Netscape to be broken up into: a browser, mail, and news reader. This is what I assumed they would tackle first.
But the Netscape team was not much interested in that. Instead they were interested in changing the GUI in some new way, and componentizing everything, and making it scriptable. Read the roadmap.
But the original problem has not really been addressed.
This is leading some to splinter Mozilla projects, like Galeon that separate the Browser out.
Eventually, I would hope that the main Mozilla project decides to fix the big problem themselves, but if they don't, other projects will come out that fix the problem themselves.
I have just two curious questions:
1. The main problem with Netscape was that it was one huge program. Why is Mozilla still one huge package? Why not split things into different packages (libs and exe's: Mozilla-libs, Mozilla-browser, Mozilla-mail, Mozilla-news)?
2. Are themes really helpful?
KDE has themes, GNOME has themes, Windows 2001 will have themes, and Mac's will likely have themes.
So why not take advantage of that, and just let the toolkit do themes?
I really do not get these mice with a 1-D scroll.
A middle button could be used for 2-D scroll with just some software (can KDE or Gnome do this?).
Hold down middle, and move the mouse to scroll.
Some would say, "I don't want to move the mouse to scroll". Well, you probably want a track ball, since you don't like moving the mouse. And again, some button would put it in scroll mode (software could make it act like a scroll lock button).
End of rant.
If someone buys it online from a music corporation, they watermark it uniquely so it can be traced to you.
Then the music corporation wouldn't need to sue Napter when you distribute the music without permission.
They just log the violation, notify the police, then something bad happens to you.
To avoid the ministry of information, you could:
- ignore SDMI like Circuit city DIVX. Let them dump money in another hole.
- keep buying CD's, and encode them yourself.
- never buy a MP3 player made by a music corporation.
- hack the watermarks to make them trace back to Hilary Rosen or someone similar.
- get unmarked mp3's or ogg's from the artist or a smaller then uncorrupt middle man like mp3.com.
http://www.segfault.org/story.phtml?mode=2&id=39d
Dear Answer Guy,
I thought about buying an Athlon, but now my TV screams all the time about some Bi-Athlon and even Tri-Athlon. Is that just a vaporware or should I wait to buy such a beast?
-Ox Ford from Ohio
Dear Ox Ford,
Olympic Fever has struck the airwaves! Unknown to most people, the Athlon is the official microprocessor of the 2000 Olympic Games. To better suit Olympians, AMD came out with a Bi-Athlon and Tri-Athlon. These are actually multiprocessor units that have many advantages over their single-processor sibling. First, the processor speeds have been doubled, allowing the CPU to use time-sharing more efficiently (time-sharing is sometimes called "cycling," which is also an Olympic event). Processes can be re-prioritized in hardware, allowing certain applications to get a greater time share which causes it to run faster (also called "sprinting," which is an Olympic sport). Also, think of the Athlon as a unicycle, the Bi-Athlon as a bicycle, and the Tri-Athlon as a tricycle. The Bi-Athlon and the Tri-Athlon are much better at handling an unbalanced load, namely because they have more wheels. All of these things make the Athlon family the number one choice among Olympic athletes.
Seems like this region encoding thing should be challenged with a lawsuit.
Are there Europeans that are upset that region encoding makes the prices of US discs higher and the releases delayed? Unfair trade and price fixing is only natural with region encoding.
Or maybe a company like APEX or bigger should fight them in court.
I have the APEX "classic" too.
So the first thing that I did was turn off region.
I don't remember which discs(not Patriot or Giligans Perfect Storm), but a couple discs I watched checked for themselves if the disc id matched the player region. For these you have to set the player region to match.
Since I only currently have US discs, I just put set it to that.
So I good player would have to look at the disc and make the player region always match the disc.
How "does" one edit a post?:)
US IRS employs tens of thousands of people.
Instead of that, if you have a flat tax or just a simple formula, then people (rich and poor) pay less taxes because they do not pay the salary of thousands of tax collecters.
If you want to vote for a non-corporate party, Nader is your man.
A pure Libertarian government has never been tested, and my suspision is that it would degrade to corporate rule. Here how:
You take away government sponsored welfare completely, and let private organizations do that. Ok, what you get is a mega-United-Way organization that is corporatly sponsored and determines who gets welfare. You don't vote for wellfare unless you are a major shareholder.
Or you privatize roads: AOL, Microsoft and Coke buy the roads and give you discounts if you use their products. Also the incentive to improve roads or prevent pollution is only driven by the bottom line of advertising.
You get the idea. Socialism has faith in Goverment. Democracy has faith in the people. Rebuplicanism is buffered democracy. Pure liberatarianism has little faith in Government, but has faith in Capitalism and Corporations. Voting for something that was goverment run is replaced with supply, demand and boycotting. You buy Pepsi products because they have cleaner roads, and donate money to needy private schools.
All that said, I do believe we need more Liberatarianism and less (zero) corporate government sponsorship, less Republicanism
and more Democracy.
Both the Democratic and Republican parties
tend to move towards a corporate republic and
away from Democracy.
Electing a Libertarian would be better than another Corporate sponsored Republic/Democracy canidate,
Voting for Nader would line up better long term.
I'm for a libertarian, socialistic, democratic republican goverenment without corporate sponsorship (bribes).
-don
Sorry.
Evidently people thout I was serious.
Here's one for you "One Point Shopping":
Go into a physical store. Leave your credit card
number and address.
Inform the store owner that when you you point
to something and say "Buy it", to charge you
credit and load it in you car.
If you think the idea is good or worth a patent, I'm sorry.
Someone should reverse engineer the OneClick technology and write up an open document that explains it.
This is needed for those of us that cannot afford to pay Amazon to for the OneClick specification.
We could call it OpenClick or DeClick and print out how to single click on T-shirts.
For some projects that I have written, I used a modified Artistic License, a "General Artistic License".
Parts of the Perl Artistic License seemed to me to be specific to Perl, so I removed them.
If you have time, look at it, and tell me if its ok.
http://www.dma.org/~dma hurin/files/software/wkn/doc/LICENSE