Democrats tagline about being the party for the little guy is every bit as truthful as Republicans ideas about being the party of fiscal responsibility.
Except that this year, it seems the "low information" Republican voters have actually figured this out and have created a full-on civil war within the GOP, by voting for Trump who doesn't adhere to traditional GOP stances at all. By contrast, the Democratic voters are happily voting for their obviously-corrupt establishment insider, somehow thinking someone who's good buddies with Wall Street actually cares about "the little guy".
The thing you're failing to remember is that, in the minds of most voters, they have precisely two choices here. So it doesn't matter that much if Trump is a slimy businessman and stabs people in the back, because the way they see it, Hillary is even worse. At least Trump is *saying* he's against H1-B abuse. Hillary and the Democrats are all for it, as seen with Senator Feinstein here. Even if he's lying, that's a better bet for an anti-H1-B voter than voting for Hillary who thinks we need far more H1-Bs. With Trump, there's a possibility he's telling the truth here. With Hillary, there's zero possibility she'll work in your favor.
I see this *so much* these days: people like you think that somehow if you point out how Trump is a douchebag, that it'll make people not vote for him. It doesn't work that way, because you're not giving him someone else to vote for who's better, for the issues that they care about (and who stands a chance of winning; even our 3rd-party picks are pretty lousy this time around, with Johnson being an obvious brain-fried pothead, who with his libertarian views won't care about the H1-B issue either because he thinks "the Invisible Hand" will fix it).
Yeah, but we'd be better off launching missions to sample asteroids and start developing the ability to capture them for resource extraction (and maybe also on the Moon if we can find useful materials there; this would probably require more probes as well). We need to do this *before* we get grand ideas about building giant spacecraft and sending manned missions to other planets, complete with habitats. These asteroids are buzzing right by us here on Earth; there's no excuse for ignoring them while trying to jump directly to what is really just a PR stunt. We already have rovers on Mars doing science work safely and remotely; it's a much better use of our space exploration dollars to develop resource-extraction capabilities in space near the Earth than to send humans to Mars at such an early stage.
Ok, I just googled this and it appears to be untrue. Snopes even has a page about it. It might be true for certain brands, but I wouldn't count on it; the stuff I read said that most 6V lantern batteries have 4 "F" cells inside, which aren't very useful to most people.
I agree about the growing science illiteracy on Slashdot, however I disagree about the specialness of named accounts. With a named account, when someone shows that they're some kind of fruitcake, I can put them in my "foes" list, and then they're automatically down-modded to oblivion so that I can't see their posts without specifically clicking on them, so I can easily ignore them. I could, of course, do this for ACs (I'm considering it...), as there is a setting for this, but I hate the idea of filtering out the useful AC comments that way. So I'd rather see them move to banning ACs and forcing interested posters to sign up for an account. I know it'd suck for people who just don't want to be bothered, or who are afraid of being connected to their real identity, but really it's a small thing to ask to be able to post on a web forum. Most places don't allow anonymous commenting any more anyway; just look at Reddit: there's no anonymous posting there, only pseudo-anonymous (but there, signing up for new accounts is quite a bit faster and easier than here, which leads to a lot of throwaway accounts). HN doesn't allow anonymous comments either.
You are not uncommon either but pushing forward an idea you are not totally informed on either.
I think you misunderstand me. I'm not saying that *other* people don't have real mental effects from drugs and alcohol. I'm just relating my own personal experience that I don't seem to have any for some odd reason. (Yes, I realize this is very tangential to the discussion here.) I'll admit that I've never taken *a lot* of either one, but I've taken plenty of hard pharmaceuticals for various medical procedures: Percocet, codeine, etc. (in the recommended doses).
Take a few pills and you *might* feel a bit 'good' and that's it.
I've never even felt that. I feel so little (including pain) that now if I have a procedure I don't even bother taking anything. I'm starting to wonder if I'm living in a simulation...
Take a handful and you will be geeked out.
Yeah, I'm not going to take more than the recommended dosage of anything. If I get a medical procedure, it's because I want to get better, not screw up my body with overly-high doses of pharmaceuticals.
Drink a beer and you might get a buzz.
I can drink several glasses of wine and not feel anything at all. And I don't regularly consume alcohol either, so it's not from building up a tolerance. And I'm not very heavy either, so it's not from having a huge body weight. Now again, I'll admit I've never drank *a lot* of hard liquor all at once; that seems like a good way to have a really bad time. But even when my wife tried to get me a little a little drunk with several glasses of wine nothing happened. She was disappointed....
People react differently to drugs.
Yeah, apparently. They just don't seem to have much effect on me I guess.
This is merely the level of quality we can expect from Slashdot these days.
Honestly, I wish they'd just ban AC postings. They served a purpose in the past in case people wanted to inform about things without revealing their identity (which could be done by correlating with other posts under the same pseudonym). But no one really posts anything all that useful here these days, since most of the quality posters have abandoned this site. Banning ACs would help bring some semblance of quality back to the site by eliminating the numerous trolls.
I don't know what kind of battery you're thinking of, but a standard 6V lantern battery has two spring contacts, and that's it, no "screw cap". Here's a Wikipedia article about them that shows a 6V lantern battery in the first picture. They use springs because they work well in a flashlight with poor manufacturing tolerances and which can be subject to a lot of bumping and jostling and being dropped. You might be thinking of the protective plastic caps that are normally found on top of the springs when you first buy the battery. Those are just there so it doesn't get shorted out.
Ask yourself, what's the most insane thing you thought has been true while on some pain medication or hypnotic drug for whatever
I can't think of anything "insane" I ever thought while being on pain meds. In fact, I never noticed much effect at all from pain meds when I've taken them. Similarly, I've never noticed any kind of mental effect or "buzz" from drinking alcohol. Maybe I'm weird...
You'll launch it piece by piece and build the vessel in space (like the ship harbour of older movies, or like the real-world ISS).
No, if you want to build real interplanetary vessels, you'll build them in space, not on the Earth. Lifting the entire mass of a ship from the Earth's solution isn't economical or practical; all the major building materials we need are already in space.
I agree about needing to build spacecraft in orbit (or at a Lagrange point), however 50 years is either too long or too short. If we'd actually get off our asses and start developing our asteroid capture and mining capabilities and doing refining in space or on the Moon, then we could probably start building large, heavy (and heavily shielded) things in space in a decade or two. But at the rate we're going now, I expect this won't happen for a few centuries at the very soonest, and probably never to be honest.
The UK is only nominally part of western Europe. Ask anyone in continental western Europe if the UK is "European" and likely they'll disagree, especially now with Brexit. There's a very large cultural difference between the UK and continental western Europe. Additionally, there's a huge cultural difference between either of those and the USA, which is what I'm talking about. The groups of immigrants that are prevalent, and other ethnic groups, are quite different between the 3.
Finally, you never did address my point about southeast Asia. Are you still convinced that Korea and Japan are part of southeast Asia?
And you sound like a fucking arrogant moron who's shooting his mouth off about something he knows nothing about.
I didn't apply to a job requiring a CS degree, dipshit. Google didn't show me any kind of job requisition with any kind of detail about the position being hired for or its qualifications. It's no different from when I interviewed at Intel years ago; they just interview people willy-nilly, then bring them in and have them talk to a bunch of different managers and see who wants the candidate in their group. Intel's interview was pretty grueling, but nothing as ridiculous as Google's, and I got hired at Intel too.
It's the recruiter's and interviewer's responsibility to look at a candidate's resume and decide on an appropriate method of interviewing, given their skills. If they can't figure that out, they're wasting everyone's time. So fuck off with your shitty know-it-all attitude. It's not my fucking job to know how some company works internally. I've worked at multiple large companies (and interviewed at a bunch more) and I know perfectly well how interviewing works at them, and it's not all the same by a long shot. Some have fairly reasonable processes, but Google doesn't.
It's not an insult if it's true. Do you have some more polite way of calling recruiters incompetent?
I do just fine finding jobs. The secret is not wasting a lot of time with incompetent recruiters. There's some good ones out there, plus you can easily get a lot of jobs by applying directly with companies (ones which aren't so incompetent with their hiring), and talking directly to hiring managers (who generally *are* competent, since they're the ones with open positions and know exactly what kind of candidates will and won't work).
Yeah, I guess if a company really likes hiring incompetent ditzes to do their recruiting, maybe someone who calls them out on that isn't fit to work at their company...
I got contacted by them recently. I responded that I'm an embedded engineer and asked if the position dealt with embedded devices or not, since it looked like the position was for web stuff, and never heard back. Honestly, I expect this kind of incompetence (not understanding that embedded stuff is nothing like web stuff) from Indian "shotgun-style" recruiters, but not from internal recruiters for large, successful companies.
This can't be good for the company as a whole either. They're wasting money on these ditzy 20-something sorority-girl recruiters' salaries, they're wasting highly-paid developers' time on interviewing candidates for positions they're unqualified for, and there've been a bunch of articles about how bad Google's hiring process is and how it's keeping out the best candidates.
Sooner or later, the house of cards is going to tumble. The company can only get away with milking its cash cows of search, GMail, Maps, Android stuff, and Adwords/Adsense for so long. Well, I guess we've probably said the same thing about MS for a couple decades now, and they're still chugging along, so maybe Google will too, while constantly blowing money on side projects and then canceling them before anyone's even heard about them, and wasting money on terrible interview practices.
but we as a society deserve better. Western civilization was founded on high standards and greater morals.
Huh? WTF are you talking about? Western civilization was founded on conquering. Go read about the history of the Roman Empire; it was all about conquering as much land as possible and setting up trade networks for economic benefit. "High standards and greater morals" weren't part of it. Later on, Christianity took over, and then the feudal ages came, and Christians were burning each other at the stake for being the wrong kind of Christian. Not to mention all the stupid wars between feudal lords. No high standards or greater morals there either.
I don't know of any large society in human history "founded on high standards and greater morals". Any time those things have happened, it's been by accident, mainly because a society has finally gotten to a place where its citizens had enough power and wealth to worry about such things instead of just survival.
I don't know about your conspiracy theory, but I had a phone interview with Google, and I wasn't too impressed. Personally, my theory is that Google's recruiters are incompetent 20-something girls fresh out of college and sororities, and they're just contacting people to do make-work and justify their salaries. And then the obnoxious and arrogant 20-something male developers who conduct the initial phone interviews are only doing it because it's part of their job, and don't really want to hire anyone.
It's like the old maxim: never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Organizations are always coming up with stupid policies for various reasons, and then the people who work there simply carry them out. That's the impression I got of Google. In my case, my resume quite clearly shows I have a EE degree and hardware background, and all my programming experience is low-level embedded stuff, and the phone interviewer immediately asked me a bunch of CS algorithm questions. I don't have a CS degree, so of course that stuff is not my strong suite nor do I want a job doing algorithmic stuff. But from what I read, that's exactly how Google interviews are. I seriously wonder how they get any engineering work done that doesn't involve heavy CS stuff. Maybe they just outsource it.
Yep, for anyone reading this, if it looks like your relationship is over, don't let the other person talk you into coming back. If you're having that many problems, it's most likely best to just part ways and look for someone more compatible. I've been there too (it wasn't at the brink of divorce like with you; once I decided I wanted a divorce that was it): there were times in a past relationship when it was on the rocks and I should have just quit.
I completely disagree about plurality. No, 45% or 35% is not enough. Only with a majority does a leader have a legitimate claim to a seat. A voting system other than FPTP can do this with multiple candidates, which is why FPTP needs to be banned.
If the election were held again with Cruz, Trump, and Kasich, and an approval or ranked voting system used, I think Kasich would probably be the winner. Trump and Cruz are too polarizing. In a democratic system, the leaders should reflect the overall will of the people, and you don't get that with polarizing candidates who only a minority vote for. Someone more moderate like Kasich might not be anyone's first choice, but if he's the most agreeable to a majority, then he's the one who should win.
Your comments seem to indicate that you're someone who simply cannot conceive of a voting system other than FPTP.
I get it that Trump didn't have 16 other candidates all the way through the race, but he did have more than 1 almost all the way, and just 3 roughly-equal candidates in a FPTP election will necessarily result in a "split vote".
In this case, near the end it was split between Trump, Rubio, Cruz, and Kasich.
Not only that, but all the early elections count too; it's not like they go back to IA and NH and let people re-vote instead of wasting their vote on someone like Paul or Huckabee who dropped out so early. In a truly democratic contest, the only thing that would really matter is how many *total* votes did Trump (the winner) get, compared to the other candidates, regardless of state? On the Democratic side, unfortunately, Hillary was the clear winner here with millions more votes than Bernie, so even if you just took all the votes for each and threw them in two piles and tossed out the superdelegates (and delegates too), Hillary would still win. I'm pretty sure that's not the case with Trump, as he didn't win a majority of votes (just a plurality).
Personally, I don't think anyone should ever be able to win an election with a plurality. If you can't get a majority of the voters to give you a vote, you don't deserve the office, and it's not democratic. If the election system prevents this, then the election system needs to be changed. FPTP is a horrible and antiquated and downright stupid voting system that should have been banned in the days of Ancient Greece. With modern mathematics, we can do much better.
What would be the ideal, would be something like UL listings, except instead of electrical safety, is for security.
Won't work. People used to value UL ratings because they were worried about electrical appliances catching on fire. People don't even care about UL ratings any more because this just doesn't happen, except with things that have lithium batteries.
The fact is, consumers just don't care about security. They don't know anything about it, they don't want to know, they just know the nebulous "hackers" are "out there" and there's nothing they can do about them, so they stick their heads in the sand and hope for the best.
Slashdot Mirror
Democrats tagline about being the party for the little guy is every bit as truthful as Republicans ideas about being the party of fiscal responsibility.
Except that this year, it seems the "low information" Republican voters have actually figured this out and have created a full-on civil war within the GOP, by voting for Trump who doesn't adhere to traditional GOP stances at all. By contrast, the Democratic voters are happily voting for their obviously-corrupt establishment insider, somehow thinking someone who's good buddies with Wall Street actually cares about "the little guy".
The thing you're failing to remember is that, in the minds of most voters, they have precisely two choices here. So it doesn't matter that much if Trump is a slimy businessman and stabs people in the back, because the way they see it, Hillary is even worse. At least Trump is *saying* he's against H1-B abuse. Hillary and the Democrats are all for it, as seen with Senator Feinstein here. Even if he's lying, that's a better bet for an anti-H1-B voter than voting for Hillary who thinks we need far more H1-Bs. With Trump, there's a possibility he's telling the truth here. With Hillary, there's zero possibility she'll work in your favor.
I see this *so much* these days: people like you think that somehow if you point out how Trump is a douchebag, that it'll make people not vote for him. It doesn't work that way, because you're not giving him someone else to vote for who's better, for the issues that they care about (and who stands a chance of winning; even our 3rd-party picks are pretty lousy this time around, with Johnson being an obvious brain-fried pothead, who with his libertarian views won't care about the H1-B issue either because he thinks "the Invisible Hand" will fix it).
Yeah, but we'd be better off launching missions to sample asteroids and start developing the ability to capture them for resource extraction (and maybe also on the Moon if we can find useful materials there; this would probably require more probes as well). We need to do this *before* we get grand ideas about building giant spacecraft and sending manned missions to other planets, complete with habitats. These asteroids are buzzing right by us here on Earth; there's no excuse for ignoring them while trying to jump directly to what is really just a PR stunt. We already have rovers on Mars doing science work safely and remotely; it's a much better use of our space exploration dollars to develop resource-extraction capabilities in space near the Earth than to send humans to Mars at such an early stage.
Ok, I just googled this and it appears to be untrue. Snopes even has a page about it. It might be true for certain brands, but I wouldn't count on it; the stuff I read said that most 6V lantern batteries have 4 "F" cells inside, which aren't very useful to most people.
I agree about the growing science illiteracy on Slashdot, however I disagree about the specialness of named accounts. With a named account, when someone shows that they're some kind of fruitcake, I can put them in my "foes" list, and then they're automatically down-modded to oblivion so that I can't see their posts without specifically clicking on them, so I can easily ignore them. I could, of course, do this for ACs (I'm considering it...), as there is a setting for this, but I hate the idea of filtering out the useful AC comments that way. So I'd rather see them move to banning ACs and forcing interested posters to sign up for an account. I know it'd suck for people who just don't want to be bothered, or who are afraid of being connected to their real identity, but really it's a small thing to ask to be able to post on a web forum. Most places don't allow anonymous commenting any more anyway; just look at Reddit: there's no anonymous posting there, only pseudo-anonymous (but there, signing up for new accounts is quite a bit faster and easier than here, which leads to a lot of throwaway accounts). HN doesn't allow anonymous comments either.
You are not uncommon either but pushing forward an idea you are not totally informed on either.
I think you misunderstand me. I'm not saying that *other* people don't have real mental effects from drugs and alcohol. I'm just relating my own personal experience that I don't seem to have any for some odd reason. (Yes, I realize this is very tangential to the discussion here.) I'll admit that I've never taken *a lot* of either one, but I've taken plenty of hard pharmaceuticals for various medical procedures: Percocet, codeine, etc. (in the recommended doses).
Take a few pills and you *might* feel a bit 'good' and that's it.
I've never even felt that. I feel so little (including pain) that now if I have a procedure I don't even bother taking anything. I'm starting to wonder if I'm living in a simulation...
Take a handful and you will be geeked out.
Yeah, I'm not going to take more than the recommended dosage of anything. If I get a medical procedure, it's because I want to get better, not screw up my body with overly-high doses of pharmaceuticals.
Drink a beer and you might get a buzz.
I can drink several glasses of wine and not feel anything at all. And I don't regularly consume alcohol either, so it's not from building up a tolerance. And I'm not very heavy either, so it's not from having a huge body weight. Now again, I'll admit I've never drank *a lot* of hard liquor all at once; that seems like a good way to have a really bad time. But even when my wife tried to get me a little a little drunk with several glasses of wine nothing happened. She was disappointed....
People react differently to drugs.
Yeah, apparently. They just don't seem to have much effect on me I guess.
This is merely the level of quality we can expect from Slashdot these days.
Honestly, I wish they'd just ban AC postings. They served a purpose in the past in case people wanted to inform about things without revealing their identity (which could be done by correlating with other posts under the same pseudonym). But no one really posts anything all that useful here these days, since most of the quality posters have abandoned this site. Banning ACs would help bring some semblance of quality back to the site by eliminating the numerous trolls.
I don't know what kind of battery you're thinking of, but a standard 6V lantern battery has two spring contacts, and that's it, no "screw cap". Here's a Wikipedia article about them that shows a 6V lantern battery in the first picture. They use springs because they work well in a flashlight with poor manufacturing tolerances and which can be subject to a lot of bumping and jostling and being dropped. You might be thinking of the protective plastic caps that are normally found on top of the springs when you first buy the battery. Those are just there so it doesn't get shorted out.
Ask yourself, what's the most insane thing you thought has been true while on some pain medication or hypnotic drug for whatever
I can't think of anything "insane" I ever thought while being on pain meds. In fact, I never noticed much effect at all from pain meds when I've taken them. Similarly, I've never noticed any kind of mental effect or "buzz" from drinking alcohol. Maybe I'm weird...
You'll launch it piece by piece and build the vessel in space (like the ship harbour of older movies, or like the real-world ISS).
No, if you want to build real interplanetary vessels, you'll build them in space, not on the Earth. Lifting the entire mass of a ship from the Earth's solution isn't economical or practical; all the major building materials we need are already in space.
I agree about needing to build spacecraft in orbit (or at a Lagrange point), however 50 years is either too long or too short. If we'd actually get off our asses and start developing our asteroid capture and mining capabilities and doing refining in space or on the Moon, then we could probably start building large, heavy (and heavily shielded) things in space in a decade or two. But at the rate we're going now, I expect this won't happen for a few centuries at the very soonest, and probably never to be honest.
The UK is only nominally part of western Europe. Ask anyone in continental western Europe if the UK is "European" and likely they'll disagree, especially now with Brexit. There's a very large cultural difference between the UK and continental western Europe. Additionally, there's a huge cultural difference between either of those and the USA, which is what I'm talking about. The groups of immigrants that are prevalent, and other ethnic groups, are quite different between the 3.
Finally, you never did address my point about southeast Asia. Are you still convinced that Korea and Japan are part of southeast Asia?
And you sound like a fucking arrogant moron who's shooting his mouth off about something he knows nothing about.
I didn't apply to a job requiring a CS degree, dipshit. Google didn't show me any kind of job requisition with any kind of detail about the position being hired for or its qualifications. It's no different from when I interviewed at Intel years ago; they just interview people willy-nilly, then bring them in and have them talk to a bunch of different managers and see who wants the candidate in their group. Intel's interview was pretty grueling, but nothing as ridiculous as Google's, and I got hired at Intel too.
It's the recruiter's and interviewer's responsibility to look at a candidate's resume and decide on an appropriate method of interviewing, given their skills. If they can't figure that out, they're wasting everyone's time. So fuck off with your shitty know-it-all attitude. It's not my fucking job to know how some company works internally. I've worked at multiple large companies (and interviewed at a bunch more) and I know perfectly well how interviewing works at them, and it's not all the same by a long shot. Some have fairly reasonable processes, but Google doesn't.
It's not an insult if it's true. Do you have some more polite way of calling recruiters incompetent?
I do just fine finding jobs. The secret is not wasting a lot of time with incompetent recruiters. There's some good ones out there, plus you can easily get a lot of jobs by applying directly with companies (ones which aren't so incompetent with their hiring), and talking directly to hiring managers (who generally *are* competent, since they're the ones with open positions and know exactly what kind of candidates will and won't work).
Yeah, I guess if a company really likes hiring incompetent ditzes to do their recruiting, maybe someone who calls them out on that isn't fit to work at their company...
I got contacted by them recently. I responded that I'm an embedded engineer and asked if the position dealt with embedded devices or not, since it looked like the position was for web stuff, and never heard back. Honestly, I expect this kind of incompetence (not understanding that embedded stuff is nothing like web stuff) from Indian "shotgun-style" recruiters, but not from internal recruiters for large, successful companies.
This can't be good for the company as a whole either. They're wasting money on these ditzy 20-something sorority-girl recruiters' salaries, they're wasting highly-paid developers' time on interviewing candidates for positions they're unqualified for, and there've been a bunch of articles about how bad Google's hiring process is and how it's keeping out the best candidates.
Sooner or later, the house of cards is going to tumble. The company can only get away with milking its cash cows of search, GMail, Maps, Android stuff, and Adwords/Adsense for so long. Well, I guess we've probably said the same thing about MS for a couple decades now, and they're still chugging along, so maybe Google will too, while constantly blowing money on side projects and then canceling them before anyone's even heard about them, and wasting money on terrible interview practices.
but we as a society deserve better. Western civilization was founded on high standards and greater morals.
Huh? WTF are you talking about? Western civilization was founded on conquering. Go read about the history of the Roman Empire; it was all about conquering as much land as possible and setting up trade networks for economic benefit. "High standards and greater morals" weren't part of it. Later on, Christianity took over, and then the feudal ages came, and Christians were burning each other at the stake for being the wrong kind of Christian. Not to mention all the stupid wars between feudal lords. No high standards or greater morals there either.
I don't know of any large society in human history "founded on high standards and greater morals". Any time those things have happened, it's been by accident, mainly because a society has finally gotten to a place where its citizens had enough power and wealth to worry about such things instead of just survival.
I don't know about your conspiracy theory, but I had a phone interview with Google, and I wasn't too impressed. Personally, my theory is that Google's recruiters are incompetent 20-something girls fresh out of college and sororities, and they're just contacting people to do make-work and justify their salaries. And then the obnoxious and arrogant 20-something male developers who conduct the initial phone interviews are only doing it because it's part of their job, and don't really want to hire anyone.
It's like the old maxim: never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Organizations are always coming up with stupid policies for various reasons, and then the people who work there simply carry them out. That's the impression I got of Google. In my case, my resume quite clearly shows I have a EE degree and hardware background, and all my programming experience is low-level embedded stuff, and the phone interviewer immediately asked me a bunch of CS algorithm questions. I don't have a CS degree, so of course that stuff is not my strong suite nor do I want a job doing algorithmic stuff. But from what I read, that's exactly how Google interviews are. I seriously wonder how they get any engineering work done that doesn't involve heavy CS stuff. Maybe they just outsource it.
Touche.
Yep, for anyone reading this, if it looks like your relationship is over, don't let the other person talk you into coming back. If you're having that many problems, it's most likely best to just part ways and look for someone more compatible. I've been there too (it wasn't at the brink of divorce like with you; once I decided I wanted a divorce that was it): there were times in a past relationship when it was on the rocks and I should have just quit.
Should the current election-cycle un-democratic manifestations of the purportedly Democratic Party actually be celebrated? Seriously?
Yes, of course, if you're a Democratic Party insider or cheerleader. Why not?
Is the iPhone UL-rated?
I completely disagree about plurality. No, 45% or 35% is not enough. Only with a majority does a leader have a legitimate claim to a seat. A voting system other than FPTP can do this with multiple candidates, which is why FPTP needs to be banned.
If the election were held again with Cruz, Trump, and Kasich, and an approval or ranked voting system used, I think Kasich would probably be the winner. Trump and Cruz are too polarizing. In a democratic system, the leaders should reflect the overall will of the people, and you don't get that with polarizing candidates who only a minority vote for. Someone more moderate like Kasich might not be anyone's first choice, but if he's the most agreeable to a majority, then he's the one who should win.
Your comments seem to indicate that you're someone who simply cannot conceive of a voting system other than FPTP.
Yes, but what were the final vote totals?
I get it that Trump didn't have 16 other candidates all the way through the race, but he did have more than 1 almost all the way, and just 3 roughly-equal candidates in a FPTP election will necessarily result in a "split vote".
In this case, near the end it was split between Trump, Rubio, Cruz, and Kasich.
Not only that, but all the early elections count too; it's not like they go back to IA and NH and let people re-vote instead of wasting their vote on someone like Paul or Huckabee who dropped out so early. In a truly democratic contest, the only thing that would really matter is how many *total* votes did Trump (the winner) get, compared to the other candidates, regardless of state? On the Democratic side, unfortunately, Hillary was the clear winner here with millions more votes than Bernie, so even if you just took all the votes for each and threw them in two piles and tossed out the superdelegates (and delegates too), Hillary would still win. I'm pretty sure that's not the case with Trump, as he didn't win a majority of votes (just a plurality).
Personally, I don't think anyone should ever be able to win an election with a plurality. If you can't get a majority of the voters to give you a vote, you don't deserve the office, and it's not democratic. If the election system prevents this, then the election system needs to be changed. FPTP is a horrible and antiquated and downright stupid voting system that should have been banned in the days of Ancient Greece. With modern mathematics, we can do much better.
What would be the ideal, would be something like UL listings, except instead of electrical safety, is for security.
Won't work. People used to value UL ratings because they were worried about electrical appliances catching on fire. People don't even care about UL ratings any more because this just doesn't happen, except with things that have lithium batteries.
The fact is, consumers just don't care about security. They don't know anything about it, they don't want to know, they just know the nebulous "hackers" are "out there" and there's nothing they can do about them, so they stick their heads in the sand and hope for the best.