An attorney locally in a city council meeting was reduced to throwing chairs at a shooter to try to defend himself after the attacker killed two police officers guarding the room *and took their guns* for use against the room's occupants.
And Dick Cheney legally shot a man, and then got him to apologize for standing in the way of Dick's shotgun. Anecdotes are fun.
An interesting idea to think about when people say "Arming everyone would make everyone safer because the criminals would be scared". Well, who wouldn't be? The Surgeon General estimates that at any point in time 20% of Americans are suffering from a diagnosable mental condition. Do you really want 60 million people with mental problems armed and ready to kill at the drop of a hat?
If you say no, then you're going against the intent of the constitution, if you say yes, well it's a blood bath waiting to happen.
Um, no. The European Union has produced the world's wealthiest nation, Luxembourg (per Capita) or the EU (Gross). Your economy is on the brink of a yawning chasm, and your status as Biggest superpower is clearly in danger. All because you Americans seemed to think you could elect a moron to head your country and not pay the consequences.
Our belief in the existence of justice, love, and fairness are irrational? I don't follow you on that. The belief that perfect versions of these exist? Potentially that could be irrational, but that's usually bordering on the religious when it's not explicitly religious. However, striving to be as just, as loving, as fair as possible is still a worthwhile and rational effort. Because these are qualities we'd prefer in others and thus it's rational to exhibit the qualities we'd like other to have.
The belief in karma, is in fact, just a different religion. The belief in the perfection of people is, of course, irrational and more foolish than belief in the divine. We have ample proof that people are not perfect.
Either I don't understand what you are trying to say, or it's wrong. Trusting in other people isn't irrational, it's a calculated risk even if the risk is undertaken subconsciously.
Of course, maybe you're saying that people in love aren't rational and that we approve of love. But love's an emotion that's acted upon, not an irrational belief that is the basis for building your entire life. The people who build their entire life on the basis of a belief in love, are most commonly referred to as stalkers.
No, he's right. Faith in a supernatural being does eventually lead to irrational choices, sometimes the irrational choice will pay off, that gets called a miracle and is used to demonstrate that the supernatural exists, when the irrational choice doesn't, it is generally ignored or trivialized.
The problem is that faith in the existence of one or more beings of which there is no proof and can be no proof is well, farsical. Furthermore belief that you know what these beings whom you can never encounter want you to do for a reward which may or may not exist is ludicrous. This fundamental magical faith is the evil at the heart of most religion, it is this belief that allows good men to knowingly do evil. It's because Religion makes the mistake of believing in the messager instead of the message.
People believe in Jesus. Jesus heals. Jesus saves. Jesus will transform your life. They believe in God. They believe that there is only one God and Mohammed is his prophet. However, these beliefs don't mean anything in themselves. The trouble is these beliefs are the basis of moral and ethical systems. However, a supernatural base for a moral or ethical system makes the system mutable beyond what is generally considered rational ethics by secular thinkers. The mysterious origins allow any ethical statement to be held true no matter how unethical it would be without the magical origin. This is particularly true in monotheistic religion where things are good because God said they were. God says killing Jews is good? Well then it must be because there is only one God and his word is truth. God says it's evil to shave? Well then it must be so. God says putting cheese on a hamburger is sacrilege? Well then it must not be eaten.
Secularism requires a slightly more rigorous proof that something is good or evil. But for religions, especially established religions, the fact that something was said a long time ago, is proof enough of it's truthyness.
It's from Kenzer Co (http://www.kenzerco.com/), they licensed the 1st Edition rules to make a real 3rd Edition of D&D. It still has some short comings, but the system is pretty good and fixes a lot of the rules problems in different ways than 3rd Edition does.
It's a good system for gamers who don't want to take the game too seriously.
It has nothing to do with learning the system. Second edition was better than 3rd Edition in many ways. I prefer the older system, not because it's older and more familiar but because the flavour of the rules changed in too many ways for 3rd Edition. Some people prefer 3rd Edition and that's fine.
I hate prestige classes, I loathe 3rd Edition clerics, I can't stand the 4 combats a day design, I find the super high magic level of standard 3rd Edition to be sickening. The class books that came out after 3rd Edition released were literally tripe. The books had formatting errors, not to mention the complete and utter rubbish that was actually in them. Class spell lists are the lazy editors way of padding out books. They're garbage for any significantly expandable system.
I found the skills were broken in a different way than 2nd Edition, the combat system was different and more tactical, which is both good and bad. The Attack of Opportunity stuff was neat but messy. Overall, the system was much more open to abuse by munchkins, power gamers and "roleplayers". But overall, I found it less fun than 2nd Edition had been.
3rd Edition dumped many of my favourite parts on 2nd Edition, and added garbage to fill up the space.
I'm slightly more hopeful about 4th Edition, not that it matters. It sounds like the designers are taking to heart that worst issues of 3rd Edition are almost all centered on terrible back end rules. I just wish they'd put back spell spheres for clerics and spell schools for mages. Spell lists are a terribly cumbersome way to handle expanding your classes. You have to update every class in every book that adds new spells and you have to list spells from every expansion in every book that adds a new class. That's simply not maintainable.
Frankly, I already felt that way about 3rd Edition. It was the first big step towards Computer RPGs. Personally 4th Edition looks like they're at least fixing the basic mechanics of the game so they work instead of the utter brokeness of 3rd Edition.
Of course, the real problem with 3rd Edition was that Hasbro rushed the game out a year ahead of time to cash in on the upgrade cycle.
Those answers are completely irrelevant to the questions, it's exactly like his staff cut and pasted the answers to different questions to make up this "interview".
I don't think Microsoft is terribly great place to put your faith. Microsoft prospers because of it's monopolies and pretty much only because of it's monopolies. My experience is that the smart people do not generally go to Microsoft. In fact, it was the incompetent, lazy and phony people from my University days who ended up as MS employees.
And if that's any indication of their hiring practices in general it's no wonder Vista was late and utter garbage.
Are you kidding? Writing in complaints just proves you watched their show. They're more likely to think it indicates success and continue it in the future. The only thing you can do to protest this is not watch Fox News and encourage your friends & family to not watch it. If their actual ratings go down then they'll try something different.
They've already gone to court before to defend their right to lie to their audience, mere complaints about their lies aren't going to budge them.
Sadly, that's wrong. Conservatives are people who don't want things to change, or if they must, want gradual changes over time. Liberals are people who want to use the government to guarantee personal freedoms and equality of opportunity. They are generally attempting to work for equality and personal liberty. You're thinking of Libertarians who are against any government interference (for good or bad) in the lives of the people, excepting, of course laws against fraud and theft. To a libertarian, stupid people who starve death have earned their fate, the government has no right to interefere in what is, by thier definition, justice.
Now, the people who are pushing for censorship belong to none of those groups. They are most likely statists, the opposite of libertarians. They believe that the government has not only the right, but the duty to interfere in the lives of it's people. Liberals will often fall somewhere between libertarian and statist because they believe in positive interferance and may fall differently depending on how much intervention each believes is necessary and/or desireable.
So while liberals believe in programs such as government sponsored health care, education, and welfare because properly implemented those programs increase the prosperity of the poorest members of a nation, and thus make the nation more egalitarian. It is not typical for them to believe in the censorship, with the notable exception of hate speech which is seen as a way of decreasing the liberty and prosperty of the targetted people.
No we're talking about an anarchist government here. There's no cops anymore, only people who decide to use force to make their own rules. You speed down what used to be a highway and accidentally hit a girl who runs onto the road while you're doing 60 over the broken remains of an old road. She's killed instantly and you loose control of your car and skid out. Her father, stricken more with rage than grief, shoots you while you're still trying to get your bearings and the wipeout. He shoots you 15 times while her mother cries over their daughter's body. Eventually they haul your out of your car and leave it rot by the road. After stripping you of everything valuable. Nobody cares*. It's just another day in United States of Anarchy.
* That not entirely true: The hobo who takes your clothes and boots cares as does the one who shoots and eats the vulture that was chewing on your intestines a few days later. Eventually, some children play with your bleached bones.
Anarchy's not a pretty place, it doesn't last long because real people want assurances that they won't be killed tomorrow because somebody feels like killing them for fun. Invariably, people group together for mutual protection and when those groups get large enough they have to work out rules to govern themselves and another government is born out of anarchy.
Actually it won't. Truly obnoxious speech continues until something is done about it or the speakers die. The majority of the truly obnoxious speech isn't actually motivated by desire to have people listen. They don't change the message to make it more palatable. It's motivated by dementia and obsession. If nobody's listening they just shout it louder, because after all, it's so obviously true that if only people would listen then they too could understand "the truth".
Truly obnocious speech will generally lose out in a society committed to truth, but in a society committed to freedom it will continue forever.
It's simple, you make it policy to delete it because then you don't have to turn it over during discovery for a lawsuit, and it's not obstruction because you had the policy to delete them before the lawsuit began.
Mostly, it's to limit fishing expeditions and the limit the cost of turning over that information. If you archive everything than you have 2 choices: Give the person who wants to sue you everything, or have people go and find the specific emails that the person suing you is asking for. It's much cheaper if you can tell them "Sorry, that's more than 3 months ago, we routinely delete that information".
I don't think it's clear that there's been fraud. It's clear there is a problem with the results. It could be a malfunction of some sort since it is split along counting methods. We don't know who could have tampered with the results or when they could have done it.
I think the problem might be worse than you think. The message that Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich are sending out, doesn't match what the media thinks it's audience wants to hear (or in some cases, should hear based on their own political agenda), thus they don't carry the message. This is a logical consequence of consolidated media ownership. Ironically, that's something that Ron Paul would probably make worse by getting rid of the minimally effective rules against it.
Remember the news is just another show that has to bring in the ratings.
It's corruption. Simply put, it's usually the people who are in charge who benefit from the corruption, so they don't take steps to fix it. When they're out of power they can't take steps to fix it.
It's mind boggling that any U.S. citizen would accept an Election Commissioner who is also the head of a political parties election campaign. This is a blatant conflict of interest. Yet we see this time and again in the States where the person in charge of the election also has a stake in the outcome.
Americans, however, seem to be ok with cheating, as long as the cheating favours their particular interests. It's not just the mechanics of the elections, however, that are allowed to be corrupted. The actual day-to-day business of Congress is incredibly open to corruption. New laws are bundled with unrelated laws to bribe other congressmen to vote for the bill, or unpopular laws are attached to popular laws to manipulate the votes. Add in the fact that congressman are continually working on their re-election campaign and you can easily scare them into voting stupid but "popular" laws because they a) don't have the time to understand the laws they're passing abd b) don't want to look back to their consitutents by voting against the America Loves Puppies Act even though there's a rider that allows the government to torture political prisoners attached to it. They're more afraid of the media running the headline "Congressman Smith Hates Puppies" than they are of the media running "Congress legalizes torture".
The systems need to be refactored to bring back sanity to the process.
The "unconstitutional" part of the budget is a large part of what made the U.S. extraordinarily rich in the 20th century. That tax money which is "sucked" away helped to create an unprecidented wealthy middle class which helps to drive investment.
I'm sorry but whenever I see Libertarian policies, I need only look at third world nations to see how those policies have played out in the real world. Those countries which have made no effort to help their poor are themselves poor.
There were no riots because the media told people that the election was fair and a landslide for Bush. Hell, the exit polling company went so far as to tamper with the results of the exit polls for fear that they would upset people with their obvious evidence of electoral fraud.
So no, they didn't flaunt it in the faces of the people. I think there would have been riots if Bush had won because 10 of Kerry's electors had voted for Bush instead. In fact, if that had been the case, I expect Bush would be already be rotting in his grave.
That is an inevitable consequence of the First Past the Post voting system, and will always occur in a well contested election, regardless of the quality of the candidates. It is possible to have a system where the person elected at least has the potential to have a majority of support.
There was an article about Range Voting not too long ago...
Well, the current system is neither a popular vote nor the electoral college as it's supposed to work. Simply put you aren't supposed to vote for the President. You're supposed to elect a group of electors who will, in turn, elect a president and vice-president.
The idea, of course, is that normal people are too unreliable to vote directly for the president. They would be easily fooled into voting for inappropriate candidates. One of the central premises is that it is easier to bamboozle the public over a single figure, than it is to bamboozle them over 538 men in the absence of political parties (which were not supposed to exist in the U.S.).
The 538 electors were be expected to be more insightful than the public electing them and not as easily swayed by a poor candidate as the public would be.
In practice political parties killed off a crucial part of the checks and balances here. Because the electors are now affiliated with one party or the other and publish their vote ahead of time, the judicious wisdom with which electors were supposed to use in selecting a president has been removed from the equation. Now you have a system that is effectively the popular vote, but some people's votes count for more than other people's votes.
Slashdot Mirror
An attorney locally in a city council meeting was reduced to throwing chairs at a shooter to try to defend himself after the attacker killed two police officers guarding the room *and took their guns* for use against the room's occupants.
And Dick Cheney legally shot a man, and then got him to apologize for standing in the way of Dick's shotgun. Anecdotes are fun.
An interesting idea to think about when people say "Arming everyone would make everyone safer because the criminals would be scared". Well, who wouldn't be? The Surgeon General estimates that at any point in time 20% of Americans are suffering from a diagnosable mental condition. Do you really want 60 million people with mental problems armed and ready to kill at the drop of a hat?
If you say no, then you're going against the intent of the constitution, if you say yes, well it's a blood bath waiting to happen.
Actually, from what I hear, the CRIA holds on to all of the money, "in trust" to pay for bribes to politicians to raise the levy.
Um, no. The European Union has produced the world's wealthiest nation, Luxembourg (per Capita) or the EU (Gross). Your economy is on the brink of a yawning chasm, and your status as Biggest superpower is clearly in danger. All because you Americans seemed to think you could elect a moron to head your country and not pay the consequences.
Our belief in the existence of justice, love, and fairness are irrational? I don't follow you on that. The belief that perfect versions of these exist? Potentially that could be irrational, but that's usually bordering on the religious when it's not explicitly religious. However, striving to be as just, as loving, as fair as possible is still a worthwhile and rational effort. Because these are qualities we'd prefer in others and thus it's rational to exhibit the qualities we'd like other to have.
The belief in karma, is in fact, just a different religion. The belief in the perfection of people is, of course, irrational and more foolish than belief in the divine. We have ample proof that people are not perfect.
Either I don't understand what you are trying to say, or it's wrong. Trusting in other people isn't irrational, it's a calculated risk even if the risk is undertaken subconsciously.
Of course, maybe you're saying that people in love aren't rational and that we approve of love. But love's an emotion that's acted upon, not an irrational belief that is the basis for building your entire life. The people who build their entire life on the basis of a belief in love, are most commonly referred to as stalkers.
Religions believe irration beliefs are desireable and encourage their proliferation.
Outside of religion we consider irrational beliefs to be bad.
No, he's right. Faith in a supernatural being does eventually lead to irrational choices, sometimes the irrational choice will pay off, that gets called a miracle and is used to demonstrate that the supernatural exists, when the irrational choice doesn't, it is generally ignored or trivialized.
The problem is that faith in the existence of one or more beings of which there is no proof and can be no proof is well, farsical. Furthermore belief that you know what these beings whom you can never encounter want you to do for a reward which may or may not exist is ludicrous. This fundamental magical faith is the evil at the heart of most religion, it is this belief that allows good men to knowingly do evil. It's because Religion makes the mistake of believing in the messager instead of the message.
People believe in Jesus. Jesus heals. Jesus saves. Jesus will transform your life. They believe in God. They believe that there is only one God and Mohammed is his prophet. However, these beliefs don't mean anything in themselves. The trouble is these beliefs are the basis of moral and ethical systems. However, a supernatural base for a moral or ethical system makes the system mutable beyond what is generally considered rational ethics by secular thinkers. The mysterious origins allow any ethical statement to be held true no matter how unethical it would be without the magical origin. This is particularly true in monotheistic religion where things are good because God said they were. God says killing Jews is good? Well then it must be because there is only one God and his word is truth. God says it's evil to shave? Well then it must be so. God says putting cheese on a hamburger is sacrilege? Well then it must not be eaten.
Secularism requires a slightly more rigorous proof that something is good or evil. But for religions, especially established religions, the fact that something was said a long time ago, is proof enough of it's truthyness.
I don't think it's hard to see at all. Right now they're competing for who gets the driver's seat and who gets shotgun.
It's from Kenzer Co (http://www.kenzerco.com/), they licensed the 1st Edition rules to make a real 3rd Edition of D&D. It still has some short comings, but the system is pretty good and fixes a lot of the rules problems in different ways than 3rd Edition does.
It's a good system for gamers who don't want to take the game too seriously.
It has nothing to do with learning the system. Second edition was better than 3rd Edition in many ways. I prefer the older system, not because it's older and more familiar but because the flavour of the rules changed in too many ways for 3rd Edition. Some people prefer 3rd Edition and that's fine.
I hate prestige classes, I loathe 3rd Edition clerics, I can't stand the 4 combats a day design, I find the super high magic level of standard 3rd Edition to be sickening. The class books that came out after 3rd Edition released were literally tripe. The books had formatting errors, not to mention the complete and utter rubbish that was actually in them. Class spell lists are the lazy editors way of padding out books. They're garbage for any significantly expandable system.
I found the skills were broken in a different way than 2nd Edition, the combat system was different and more tactical, which is both good and bad. The Attack of Opportunity stuff was neat but messy. Overall, the system was much more open to abuse by munchkins, power gamers and "roleplayers". But overall, I found it less fun than 2nd Edition had been.
3rd Edition dumped many of my favourite parts on 2nd Edition, and added garbage to fill up the space.
I'm slightly more hopeful about 4th Edition, not that it matters. It sounds like the designers are taking to heart that worst issues of 3rd Edition are almost all centered on terrible back end rules. I just wish they'd put back spell spheres for clerics and spell schools for mages. Spell lists are a terribly cumbersome way to handle expanding your classes. You have to update every class in every book that adds new spells and you have to list spells from every expansion in every book that adds a new class. That's simply not maintainable.
Frankly, I already felt that way about 3rd Edition. It was the first big step towards Computer RPGs. Personally 4th Edition looks like they're at least fixing the basic mechanics of the game so they work instead of the utter brokeness of 3rd Edition.
Of course, the real problem with 3rd Edition was that Hasbro rushed the game out a year ahead of time to cash in on the upgrade cycle.
Those answers are completely irrelevant to the questions, it's exactly like his staff cut and pasted the answers to different questions to make up this "interview".
And don't forget forcing people to throw away liquds not purchased in the Airport drives sales up at the airport and during the flight.
I don't think Microsoft is terribly great place to put your faith. Microsoft prospers because of it's monopolies and pretty much only because of it's monopolies. My experience is that the smart people do not generally go to Microsoft. In fact, it was the incompetent, lazy and phony people from my University days who ended up as MS employees.
And if that's any indication of their hiring practices in general it's no wonder Vista was late and utter garbage.
Are you kidding? Writing in complaints just proves you watched their show. They're more likely to think it indicates success and continue it in the future. The only thing you can do to protest this is not watch Fox News and encourage your friends & family to not watch it. If their actual ratings go down then they'll try something different.
They've already gone to court before to defend their right to lie to their audience, mere complaints about their lies aren't going to budge them.
Sadly, that's wrong. Conservatives are people who don't want things to change, or if they must, want gradual changes over time. Liberals are people who want to use the government to guarantee personal freedoms and equality of opportunity. They are generally attempting to work for equality and personal liberty. You're thinking of Libertarians who are against any government interference (for good or bad) in the lives of the people, excepting, of course laws against fraud and theft. To a libertarian, stupid people who starve death have earned their fate, the government has no right to interefere in what is, by thier definition, justice.
Now, the people who are pushing for censorship belong to none of those groups. They are most likely statists, the opposite of libertarians. They believe that the government has not only the right, but the duty to interfere in the lives of it's people. Liberals will often fall somewhere between libertarian and statist because they believe in positive interferance and may fall differently depending on how much intervention each believes is necessary and/or desireable.
So while liberals believe in programs such as government sponsored health care, education, and welfare because properly implemented those programs increase the prosperity of the poorest members of a nation, and thus make the nation more egalitarian. It is not typical for them to believe in the censorship, with the notable exception of hate speech which is seen as a way of decreasing the liberty and prosperty of the targetted people.
No we're talking about an anarchist government here. There's no cops anymore, only people who decide to use force to make their own rules. You speed down what used to be a highway and accidentally hit a girl who runs onto the road while you're doing 60 over the broken remains of an old road. She's killed instantly and you loose control of your car and skid out. Her father, stricken more with rage than grief, shoots you while you're still trying to get your bearings and the wipeout. He shoots you 15 times while her mother cries over their daughter's body. Eventually they haul your out of your car and leave it rot by the road. After stripping you of everything valuable. Nobody cares*. It's just another day in United States of Anarchy.
* That not entirely true: The hobo who takes your clothes and boots cares as does the one who shoots and eats the vulture that was chewing on your intestines a few days later. Eventually, some children play with your bleached bones.
Anarchy's not a pretty place, it doesn't last long because real people want assurances that they won't be killed tomorrow because somebody feels like killing them for fun. Invariably, people group together for mutual protection and when those groups get large enough they have to work out rules to govern themselves and another government is born out of anarchy.
Actually it won't. Truly obnoxious speech continues until something is done about it or the speakers die. The majority of the truly obnoxious speech isn't actually motivated by desire to have people listen. They don't change the message to make it more palatable. It's motivated by dementia and obsession. If nobody's listening they just shout it louder, because after all, it's so obviously true that if only people would listen then they too could understand "the truth".
Truly obnocious speech will generally lose out in a society committed to truth, but in a society committed to freedom it will continue forever.
Is there anybody who doesn't look good compared to Bush Jr.?
In the words of the Comic Book Guy:
"Worst. President. Ever."
It's simple, you make it policy to delete it because then you don't have to turn it over during discovery for a lawsuit, and it's not obstruction because you had the policy to delete them before the lawsuit began.
Mostly, it's to limit fishing expeditions and the limit the cost of turning over that information. If you archive everything than you have 2 choices: Give the person who wants to sue you everything, or have people go and find the specific emails that the person suing you is asking for. It's much cheaper if you can tell them "Sorry, that's more than 3 months ago, we routinely delete that information".
I don't think it's clear that there's been fraud. It's clear there is a problem with the results. It could be a malfunction of some sort since it is split along counting methods. We don't know who could have tampered with the results or when they could have done it.
I think the problem might be worse than you think. The message that Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich are sending out, doesn't match what the media thinks it's audience wants to hear (or in some cases, should hear based on their own political agenda), thus they don't carry the message. This is a logical consequence of consolidated media ownership. Ironically, that's something that Ron Paul would probably make worse by getting rid of the minimally effective rules against it.
Remember the news is just another show that has to bring in the ratings.
It's corruption. Simply put, it's usually the people who are in charge who benefit from the corruption, so they don't take steps to fix it. When they're out of power they can't take steps to fix it.
It's mind boggling that any U.S. citizen would accept an Election Commissioner who is also the head of a political parties election campaign. This is a blatant conflict of interest. Yet we see this time and again in the States where the person in charge of the election also has a stake in the outcome.
Americans, however, seem to be ok with cheating, as long as the cheating favours their particular interests. It's not just the mechanics of the elections, however, that are allowed to be corrupted. The actual day-to-day business of Congress is incredibly open to corruption. New laws are bundled with unrelated laws to bribe other congressmen to vote for the bill, or unpopular laws are attached to popular laws to manipulate the votes. Add in the fact that congressman are continually working on their re-election campaign and you can easily scare them into voting stupid but "popular" laws because they a) don't have the time to understand the laws they're passing abd b) don't want to look back to their consitutents by voting against the America Loves Puppies Act even though there's a rider that allows the government to torture political prisoners attached to it. They're more afraid of the media running the headline "Congressman Smith Hates Puppies" than they are of the media running "Congress legalizes torture".
The systems need to be refactored to bring back sanity to the process.
The "unconstitutional" part of the budget is a large part of what made the U.S. extraordinarily rich in the 20th century. That tax money which is "sucked" away helped to create an unprecidented wealthy middle class which helps to drive investment.
I'm sorry but whenever I see Libertarian policies, I need only look at third world nations to see how those policies have played out in the real world. Those countries which have made no effort to help their poor are themselves poor.
There were no riots because the media told people that the election was fair and a landslide for Bush. Hell, the exit polling company went so far as to tamper with the results of the exit polls for fear that they would upset people with their obvious evidence of electoral fraud.
So no, they didn't flaunt it in the faces of the people. I think there would have been riots if Bush had won because 10 of Kerry's electors had voted for Bush instead. In fact, if that had been the case, I expect Bush would be already be rotting in his grave.
That is an inevitable consequence of the First Past the Post voting system, and will always occur in a well contested election, regardless of the quality of the candidates. It is possible to have a system where the person elected at least has the potential to have a majority of support.
There was an article about Range Voting not too long ago...
Well, the current system is neither a popular vote nor the electoral college as it's supposed to work. Simply put you aren't supposed to vote for the President. You're supposed to elect a group of electors who will, in turn, elect a president and vice-president.
The idea, of course, is that normal people are too unreliable to vote directly for the president. They would be easily fooled into voting for inappropriate candidates. One of the central premises is that it is easier to bamboozle the public over a single figure, than it is to bamboozle them over 538 men in the absence of political parties (which were not supposed to exist in the U.S.).
The 538 electors were be expected to be more insightful than the public electing them and not as easily swayed by a poor candidate as the public would be.
In practice political parties killed off a crucial part of the checks and balances here. Because the electors are now affiliated with one party or the other and publish their vote ahead of time, the judicious wisdom with which electors were supposed to use in selecting a president has been removed from the equation.
Now you have a system that is effectively the popular vote, but some people's votes count for more than other people's votes.