My guess is that D-VHS won't take hold in the consumer arena. It's more fragile than DVD, less portable, and (it seems) less capable of extras like multiple audio tracks or subtitles. Where I think it will take hold, however, is quite possibly the last place the corporations want it: anime fansubbing.
Think about it. Currently, most fansubbers print their master tapes to S-VHS, because of the better quality. If D-VHS has even better quality than DVD but costs less (and this will certainly cost less than mastering to DVD), then it's an ideal format for making masters. From there, very high-quality copies can be made to VHS, making for better copies for the fans, and D-VHS copies can be made with no degradation for distributors.
Rather ironic, isn't it? The corporations are trying to stop fair-use copying, but in the process they're only making the job easier for fansubbers (which are only arguably legal anyway).
Note that I'm not trying to knock fansubbers. I have fansubs myself, and I support their cause. Even most corporations see them as a double-edged sword (though generally beneficial, which is why they are tolerated as long as they don't actually infringe on a corporation's turf). But still, this seems very ironic somehow. ----------
The Constitution didn't prevent blacks or women from voting. That was done by the states. If you look at the relevant amendments, they don't actually grant that right either; instead they forbid the states from taking it away.
In fact, most of the rights "granted" in the Constitution are worded that way. It's something I consider that to be very important. Looking at Canada's own Charter of Rights, we see a different set of wording: rather than guaranteeing the mentioned rights, it merely grants them. I consider this disturbing, because anything that is "granted" can be taken away, whereas something that is guaranteed cannot.
This is also, in the end, why I prefer the GPL over similar licenses. It's a mindset that freedom which isn't guaranteed is not freedom at all. I'm sure I'll get flamed for it, but there's nothing I can do about that. ----------
Seriously, it's tempting. These hypocritical bookburners are no better than the people they claim to be fighting against, if these are the tactics they want to use.
The problem here isn't that Yahoo isn't selling this stuff anymore. The problem is that they were forced to stop selling it by a third party which ought to have no jurisdiction anyway, solely because of this group's own ideals. The precedent is dangerous.
Or, to put it another way, I have the right to speak or not speak as I please. I do not have the right to silence another for no better reason than my own paranoia, however. But this is what happened here. ----------
This is very bad news for Mac users. For quite some time now, 3Dfx has been the only one putting out a combination of decent cards, drivers, and support for Macs at a reasonable price (ATI skimps on drivers, Matrox skimps on support, Formac is way too expensive even with the neato 3D glasses, etc). There are rumors of NVidia supporting Macs, but those have been around for nearly two years and nothing has surfaced from them (plus there have been announcements by NVidia about their commitment to a single-platform environment).
So to say the least, I'm very dismayed by this one. Here's hoping NVidia will finally deliver the support they've been promising. If not, the future of 3D on the Mac looks rather bleak.
Besides which, while NVidia was known for delivering excellent framerates, the renderer itself is also known for having the worst quality of The Big Three if taken on a frame-by-frame basis (ATI tends to come first, which may be part of -if not most of- the reason for the framerate problems their cards tend to have).
Which is worse, breathing radioactive dust, or drinking radioactive water? Both suck, of course. But most of the same potential problems still apply (plants grow in air, kids play in air, etc.)
So, given that the same hazards apply, consider that radioactive material in the air spreads much more quickly, and over a much wider area, than radioactive material in the water.
Neither solution is ideal, of course. But I'll take the one that is more easily contained, thank you very much. ----------
As the article pointed out, Thompson and Fraunhoefer should know by now whether or not Vorbis infringes. The fact that they only "think" it "probably does" indicates they're just FUDding.
And if Vorbis does in fact infringe on one patent or another, it's nothing more than a sign that the patent was too broad in the first place. Honestly, this is the trouble with software patents; they don't protect the actual work (which is the code); they only stifle competition when applied to the context of software. Then again, this makes sense, as software is a written work and not a device (which is precisely why it shouldn't be patented; it falls into a completely different category of IP, where only copyright ought to apply). ----------
I don't think a kernel ORB would be bloat. If anything, it could lead to a [em]de-[/em]bloating of the kernel, because it would allow us to remove things that really don't belong in the kernel. You know, things like khttpd and that sort of thing (I'm sorry, but a Web server is no more an integral part of the OS than a Web browser).
In addition, it would allow for a much more robust and powerful way of extending the kernel. This is a Good Thing, because the componentized architecture makes sure that this can be done without introducing instability. This is less of an issue in an Open-Source kernel than it is in a closed-source one, of course, but it's still an important advantage that should not be overlooked.
ORBit itself has the advantage of being small. This is a big thing, since it minimizes size bloat. Its performance is also pretty good (though it could use some improvement), and would get faster in kernelspace. This is also a Good Thing. However, there's the distinct problem that it needs better testing for security issues; something of this complexity can't be allowed into the kernel until it's rock solid for obvious reasons.
But overall, I say go for it. The potential benefits of CORBA in the kernel are simply too great to ignore. ----------
So any parents who aren't perfect are lazy and selfish?
No. Not parents who aren't perfect. Parents who don't make the effort. Because you can do the things I was talking about. No exceptions; it is always possible. It's not always easy; in some cases it may involve making sacrifices. But that is not important, because doing this kind of thing is a parent's primary responsibility, more important than anything else. And it is always possible; if you make an honest effort, you will succeed. ----------
I mean, this software literally can't tell the Mona Lisa apart from the goatse.cx guy. It's just another tool of the bookburners.
But that said, I know of two things which are quite perfect for filtering Internet access and keeping kids away from inappropriate sites. Any revisions of Mom 1.0 and Dad 1.0 are shown to be 100% effective, when properly deployed. When they must be taken offline for short periods, Sitter 1.0 and Teacher 1.0 also work; they aren't quite as effective (in particular, Teacher 1.0 is designed for groups, and generally isn't as good at each individual child as a result) but should suffice for short periods of time.
The major problems with Mom 1.0 and Dad 1.0 is a bug in the built-in Sentience(tm) system. This causes some versions of these programs to trigger a mode which has been dubbed "lazy mode" (or alternately "selfish"), in which they refuse to fulfill their primary function (educating and raising children), and as a result lose all effectiveness. This is a problem that needs to be worked out, though the exact method of how to do this is up to debate. ----------
If the FBI can get a warrant to bug a specific person's keyboard, I've got no problem. It's no different from any other kind of search.
What bothers me is that the FBI doesn't seem to want to have to bother with warrants. They want to be able to just tap at will (as evidenced by previous attempts at laws to get the ability to search without a warrant), and that's just plain wrong. They've forgotten that there are more important aspects to the law than enforcing it; the law is there to protect the people from others... including law enforcement. ----------
How is an influx of loanwords from other languages "destroying" Spanish? This happens all the time in other languages, and no one complains of them being "destroyed" on account of this, with the notable exception of French.
English, in parrticular, seems to thrive on loanwords. Last I checked, it had over 40,000 from Japanese alone. Why is this the case? I don't know; perhaps it has to do with the diversity and melding of cultures in the US. Several other languages, such as Japanese, also readily accept loanwords, and we don't hear people crying out that loanwords are destroying their languages.
The fact is, languages evolve over time, be that for good or for ill. Linguists have estimated that the longest any language has been able to survive without significant changes is roughly a thousand years or so. If you aren't willing to accept this, either you'll be branded as an arrogant, pretentious jerk (which you are, if you do this) or you'll find yourself left behind as the language changes around you. ----------
While you are correct, consider: a candidate who can concentrate on campaigning heavily in fifteen cities will do so, because the likelihood of garnering votes will be greater.
Remember, it only took four cities to turn the popular vote from Bush to Gore (all of them in California, and these four carried so much power they turned the whole state, which had actually voted mostly Republican otherwise). With fifteen, all but the closest elections -even closer than this one was- would be completely wrapped up with even a fairly small percentage majority (also note that the urban areas did tend to go heavily towards one candidate or the other, usually Gore, this time around).
This is the beauty of the Electoral College. It is true that many comparatively small groups of people can turn an election under the current system. This is good, because it ensures that you have to please them all to have any mathematically reasonable chance of winning, rather than just concentrating on fifteen small areas.
I live near an urban area. Either way; candidates will listen to what I have to say. But I would far prefer that candidates had to listen to everyone, and not just me. That is why the Electoral College works. ----------
With the EC, the state's right to their electoral votes trumps the citizen's rights to elect a president directly. As I had thought I pointed out earlier, the "right to elect a president directly" does not exist. Nowhere in the Constitution does it ever state that popular votes for a President even have to be held. According the the Constitution, each state's legislature decides how its electors are picked; by tradition they have all chosen to do this with a popular vote but this is not actually necessary (the only law regarding this is that the rules must be set before the election, and once set they cannot be changed once the election starts, at least not in such a way that the election in progress would be affected by said changes). "The Presidential election" as we know it is actually 51 statewide elections (plus a citywide one in DC); the winner traditionally gets all the electoral votes from that state, except in Maine and Nebraska.
Lastly, every other race in america is won or lost by the popular vote. So why not the president as well?
I'm not certain I understand this one. As far as I can tell, you mean one of two things: either that the popular vote has always agreed with the electoral vote, or that all other elected officials are done by popular vote.
If you mean that all other presidential elections have had the popular and electoral tallies in agreement, you're wrong. This is not the first, or even the second, time that this has happened; it's the fourth. Granted, it's the first time in over a hundred years, but that means little. And in none of those cases was there ever such a controversy as this.
If you're saying that other officials are elected by popular vote, that's not important. There are many ways to hold elections, and in the end no one way that is truly right and fair all of the time, not even popular vote (which is particularly unfair in the case of a nation where voters are heavily concentrated in certain small areas, such as ours). Besides which, the President was never intended to be elected by the people. In fact, the President and Vice President aren't even intended to run together; they're chosen separately, though again tradition holds that they run together.
There are some very interesting quirks in this. All of the following, though extremely unlikely, are all mathematically possible outcomes for this election:
Bush is elected President, with Lieberman as the Vice President. This one is actually a possibility, because the Texas electors (remember Bush and Cheney won in this state) may not actually be allowed to vote for both of them since they're both from Texas.
Nader is elected President, with Gore as Vice President (a Presidential candidate can end up being elected the VP; in fact originally the person who came in second in the electoral college was the one to become the VP).
Cheney is elected President, with Bush as Vice President (all running mates are technically Presidential candidates as well).
The goatse.cx guy is elected President (electors don't have to vote for anyone on the ballot).
No, the system's not perfect. But I maintain my assertion that it's the fairest one out there that I've seen. ----------
Pardon? I think the electoral college is crap because it explicitly works against the principle of "one man, one vote" Actually, I don't think it does.
Consider: if you take a direct-popular vote, then realistically speaking, no more than fifteen US cities will decide every single election from now on.
A candidate could well say "I support bulldozing the entire nation except for <insert major urban areas here> to create parking lots for <insert aforementioned urban areas>." Even if every single person not in those areas votes against this, if the people of those cities vote for it (a likely situation, given the terrible parking in most major urban areas), then the votes of those in rural areas were for nothing.
Now, there's one other thing: the President was never meant to be chosen by the people. Nor, actually, was the Senate. The people get their fair representation in the House (where things are not quite proportional, since all the states have at least one representative, but no one disuputes this). The states (because keep in mind that each state is also its own entity) get their fair representation in the Senate (one state, two senators who oversee matters of the state as a whole). The office of the Presidency was created such that it would be chosen by the states; it's a rather interesting constitutional fluke but it's actually quite constitutional for a state to not hold popular elections for the President at all; only tradition dictates that they do). This is how each state is assured its voice in choosing the symbolic head. Also note that this is important in the case of the Vice President, who has voting power in the Senate just as a Senator does (but in the case of the VP, that power exists only in the case of a tie). This is why it's important for the states to choose: this is the arbiter for ties in the body which represents them.
Note that the Constitution was later amended to support the direct election of Senators (they were originally appointed by state legislatures).
The people get their representation. That's what the House is for: a body where everything is based on population (though note that in small states where there is only one representative, the people who voted against him/her get no voice at all: is this fair?) The states get their representation: this is the Senate and the Presidency. And the federal government itself gets its representation: this is the Supreme Court (or would you rather that the Supreme Court justices be forced to descend into politics, rather than being able to focus on upholding the Constitution and justice overall?)
That's what checks and balances are for. The people are not the be-all and end-all of power, nor should they be: 99.95% of the people, very nearly all Slashdotters, and probably 99.99% of people who haven't studied law -noting that I haven't either-)don't have the knowledge or training it takes to run a country in any kind of effective manner. That is why we have elections. But sometimes mistakes are made here: that is why proportional representation is checked by nonproportional means as well (such as the Presidency itself; is it fair that we have only one President?); neither is powerful enough to overpower the other, so all must agree before a law is passed. It's not perfect, but it's more effective and, in the end, fairer, than any other system I've seen. ----------
This is no different from the existing terms. In fact, it's worse. Now M$ can force you to pay an arbitrary fee, and the program (and thus access to your data) won't work if you don't continue to pay. In other words, they blackmail you with your own data, and worst of all this is actually legal.
This, more than anything, only proves that Microsoft must be stopped. They're advocating the very monstrosity they basically created: a model where you don't even own the software you buy. In the end, this is going to result in one of two things. In the most optimistic outcome, people finally realize what Microsoft is doing, and they abandon it. More likely, however, is that more corporations -and not just in the software industry- will adopt this model, and in the end we all become little more than a sort of slave class, except that instead of being forced to give them endless labor, we're forced to give them endless cash for something we've already bought and paid for. ----------
This guy hits it right on the head. It's not about protecting the children; it's all about burning books. That;s what the people who make this are after, and it's even more true of their target market.
Maybe you'll convince me otherwise when Cyber Patrol stops blocking Google and starts blocking goatse.cx (and yes, it's true; CP blocks Google intermittently, but lets goatse.cx through without even a warning). ----------
Mainly because their manufacturing process sucks. Chips faster than 500 MHz do exist, however:
Motorola can't churn them out at halfway-decent yields.
IBM can turn them out well, but thanks to some truly twisted licensing deal with Motorola, they're not allowed to sell them until Motorola gets a decent process.
That's the short version of things, anyway. ----------
...and it's -potentially- a workable business model for GPL'd software.
Consider: Under the GPL, you really can't sell software the way it is typically sold now. You simply can't sell permission to use software that's freely licensed for everyone's use; that just makes no sense.
But the Open-Source model does have two rather serious flaws. First, overall development times tend to be slow, even though individual bugfix and security issue times are very fast. Second, Open-Source software "naturally" evolves, but this means there's no reliable way to control that evolution. We've seen both of these flaws illustrated to dramatic effect with Mozilla, with its very long development time and bloa^H^H^H^Hfeatureset that practically rivals Emacs.
However, those two flaws allow serious money to be made in consulting. In the case of development times, a consultant being paid to work full-time on a piece of software will generally get the job done much more quickly than ten people working in their spare time. We've seen this with Perl6 development. In the case of feature development, it allows a company to ensure that the features they need are incorporated into existing software. This is something we haven't really seen yet, but it can easily be extrapolated from the first possibility.
In the end, it's like using FedEx as opposed to the standard mail systems. Standard mail tends to be much cheaper, but FedEx will get there faster, and it's more reliable. If this model works for sending packages, why wouldn't it work for software? ----------
You're using a web browser, aren't you? There exists no browser that exists that supports any set of standards perfectly. Hence, you are supporting software which does not fully support standards.
Only because there is no browser that supports them perfectly yet. But it can be done. Mozilla is so close to doing just that, that it's painful to see Netscape's marketroids release the incomplete version.
You're right. Gecko is the closest thing out there to 100% standards-compliance. But unlike most other things in this world, perfection is possible when you're implementing standards. And when perfection is an attainable goal, nothing less is good enough. ----------
Anything less than 100% shouldn't be tolerated when it comes to standards support; that's what standards are all about. I don't care if it's 99% compliant; IE5.5/Windows is supposedly 99% compliant too. That's not good enough when 100% is possible. ----------
It was close. So close. Another month, maybe two at most, to fix the most glaring standards-compliance and stability bugs. That's all it would have taken.
But no, they had to hand the project over to the marketers. So in the end, we get a Mozilla nightly plus a zillion ads foisted on us in every aspect of the interface. An interface which breaks every single standard known to man (it doesn't even get Windows quite right.
At least the speed issues are more or less resolved. But all the same, I'm sticking to Mozilla for now. NS6 should be treated as an unfinished project, because frankly it is. ----------
"Bigger edges for Bush..."
on
eLection '04
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· Score: 2
Actually, Palm Beach had no edge for Bush; Gore won that county. He also won all of the counies he's demanding recounts in.
Just an observation of a very odd phenomenon. ----------
Slashdot Mirror
My guess is that D-VHS won't take hold in the consumer arena. It's more fragile than DVD, less portable, and (it seems) less capable of extras like multiple audio tracks or subtitles. Where I think it will take hold, however, is quite possibly the last place the corporations want it: anime fansubbing.
Think about it. Currently, most fansubbers print their master tapes to S-VHS, because of the better quality. If D-VHS has even better quality than DVD but costs less (and this will certainly cost less than mastering to DVD), then it's an ideal format for making masters. From there, very high-quality copies can be made to VHS, making for better copies for the fans, and D-VHS copies can be made with no degradation for distributors.
Rather ironic, isn't it? The corporations are trying to stop fair-use copying, but in the process they're only making the job easier for fansubbers (which are only arguably legal anyway).
Note that I'm not trying to knock fansubbers. I have fansubs myself, and I support their cause. Even most corporations see them as a double-edged sword (though generally beneficial, which is why they are tolerated as long as they don't actually infringe on a corporation's turf). But still, this seems very ironic somehow.
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The Constitution didn't prevent blacks or women from voting. That was done by the states. If you look at the relevant amendments, they don't actually grant that right either; instead they forbid the states from taking it away.
In fact, most of the rights "granted" in the Constitution are worded that way. It's something I consider that to be very important. Looking at Canada's own Charter of Rights, we see a different set of wording: rather than guaranteeing the mentioned rights, it merely grants them. I consider this disturbing, because anything that is "granted" can be taken away, whereas something that is guaranteed cannot.
This is also, in the end, why I prefer the GPL over similar licenses. It's a mindset that freedom which isn't guaranteed is not freedom at all. I'm sure I'll get flamed for it, but there's nothing I can do about that.
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Seriously, it's tempting. These hypocritical bookburners are no better than the people they claim to be fighting against, if these are the tactics they want to use.
The problem here isn't that Yahoo isn't selling this stuff anymore. The problem is that they were forced to stop selling it by a third party which ought to have no jurisdiction anyway, solely because of this group's own ideals. The precedent is dangerous.
Or, to put it another way, I have the right to speak or not speak as I please. I do not have the right to silence another for no better reason than my own paranoia, however. But this is what happened here.
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This is very bad news for Mac users. For quite some time now, 3Dfx has been the only one putting out a combination of decent cards, drivers, and support for Macs at a reasonable price (ATI skimps on drivers, Matrox skimps on support, Formac is way too expensive even with the neato 3D glasses, etc). There are rumors of NVidia supporting Macs, but those have been around for nearly two years and nothing has surfaced from them (plus there have been announcements by NVidia about their commitment to a single-platform environment).
So to say the least, I'm very dismayed by this one. Here's hoping NVidia will finally deliver the support they've been promising. If not, the future of 3D on the Mac looks rather bleak.
Besides which, while NVidia was known for delivering excellent framerates, the renderer itself is also known for having the worst quality of The Big Three if taken on a frame-by-frame basis (ATI tends to come first, which may be part of -if not most of- the reason for the framerate problems their cards tend to have).
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Which is worse, breathing radioactive dust, or drinking radioactive water?
Both suck, of course. But most of the same potential problems still apply (plants grow in air, kids play in air, etc.)
So, given that the same hazards apply, consider that radioactive material in the air spreads much more quickly, and over a much wider area, than radioactive material in the water.
Neither solution is ideal, of course. But I'll take the one that is more easily contained, thank you very much.
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As the article pointed out, Thompson and Fraunhoefer should know by now whether or not Vorbis infringes. The fact that they only "think" it "probably does" indicates they're just FUDding.
And if Vorbis does in fact infringe on one patent or another, it's nothing more than a sign that the patent was too broad in the first place. Honestly, this is the trouble with software patents; they don't protect the actual work (which is the code); they only stifle competition when applied to the context of software. Then again, this makes sense, as software is a written work and not a device (which is precisely why it shouldn't be patented; it falls into a completely different category of IP, where only copyright ought to apply).
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I don't think a kernel ORB would be bloat. If anything, it could lead to a [em]de-[/em]bloating of the kernel, because it would allow us to remove things that really don't belong in the kernel. You know, things like khttpd and that sort of thing (I'm sorry, but a Web server is no more an integral part of the OS than a Web browser).
In addition, it would allow for a much more robust and powerful way of extending the kernel. This is a Good Thing, because the componentized architecture makes sure that this can be done without introducing instability. This is less of an issue in an Open-Source kernel than it is in a closed-source one, of course, but it's still an important advantage that should not be overlooked.
ORBit itself has the advantage of being small. This is a big thing, since it minimizes size bloat. Its performance is also pretty good (though it could use some improvement), and would get faster in kernelspace. This is also a Good Thing. However, there's the distinct problem that it needs better testing for security issues; something of this complexity can't be allowed into the kernel until it's rock solid for obvious reasons.
But overall, I say go for it. The potential benefits of CORBA in the kernel are simply too great to ignore.
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So any parents who aren't perfect are lazy and selfish?
No. Not parents who aren't perfect. Parents who don't make the effort. Because you can do the things I was talking about. No exceptions; it is always possible. It's not always easy; in some cases it may involve making sacrifices. But that is not important, because doing this kind of thing is a parent's primary responsibility, more important than anything else. And it is always possible; if you make an honest effort, you will succeed.
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I mean, this software literally can't tell the Mona Lisa apart from the goatse.cx guy. It's just another tool of the bookburners.
But that said, I know of two things which are quite perfect for filtering Internet access and keeping kids away from inappropriate sites. Any revisions of Mom 1.0 and Dad 1.0 are shown to be 100% effective, when properly deployed. When they must be taken offline for short periods, Sitter 1.0 and Teacher 1.0 also work; they aren't quite as effective (in particular, Teacher 1.0 is designed for groups, and generally isn't as good at each individual child as a result) but should suffice for short periods of time.
The major problems with Mom 1.0 and Dad 1.0 is a bug in the built-in Sentience(tm) system. This causes some versions of these programs to trigger a mode which has been dubbed "lazy mode" (or alternately "selfish"), in which they refuse to fulfill their primary function (educating and raising children), and as a result lose all effectiveness. This is a problem that needs to be worked out, though the exact method of how to do this is up to debate.
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If the FBI can get a warrant to bug a specific person's keyboard, I've got no problem. It's no different from any other kind of search.
What bothers me is that the FBI doesn't seem to want to have to bother with warrants. They want to be able to just tap at will (as evidenced by previous attempts at laws to get the ability to search without a warrant), and that's just plain wrong. They've forgotten that there are more important aspects to the law than enforcing it; the law is there to protect the people from others... including law enforcement.
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How is an influx of loanwords from other languages "destroying" Spanish? This happens all the time in other languages, and no one complains of them being "destroyed" on account of this, with the notable exception of French.
English, in parrticular, seems to thrive on loanwords. Last I checked, it had over 40,000 from Japanese alone. Why is this the case? I don't know; perhaps it has to do with the diversity and melding of cultures in the US. Several other languages, such as Japanese, also readily accept loanwords, and we don't hear people crying out that loanwords are destroying their languages.
The fact is, languages evolve over time, be that for good or for ill. Linguists have estimated that the longest any language has been able to survive without significant changes is roughly a thousand years or so. If you aren't willing to accept this, either you'll be branded as an arrogant, pretentious jerk (which you are, if you do this) or you'll find yourself left behind as the language changes around you.
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While you are correct, consider: a candidate who can concentrate on campaigning heavily in fifteen cities will do so, because the likelihood of garnering votes will be greater.
Remember, it only took four cities to turn the popular vote from Bush to Gore (all of them in California, and these four carried so much power they turned the whole state, which had actually voted mostly Republican otherwise). With fifteen, all but the closest elections -even closer than this one was- would be completely wrapped up with even a fairly small percentage majority (also note that the urban areas did tend to go heavily towards one candidate or the other, usually Gore, this time around).
This is the beauty of the Electoral College. It is true that many comparatively small groups of people can turn an election under the current system. This is good, because it ensures that you have to please them all to have any mathematically reasonable chance of winning, rather than just concentrating on fifteen small areas.
I live near an urban area. Either way; candidates will listen to what I have to say. But I would far prefer that candidates had to listen to everyone, and not just me. That is why the Electoral College works.
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As I had thought I pointed out earlier, the "right to elect a president directly" does not exist. Nowhere in the Constitution does it ever state that popular votes for a President even have to be held. According the the Constitution, each state's legislature decides how its electors are picked; by tradition they have all chosen to do this with a popular vote but this is not actually necessary (the only law regarding this is that the rules must be set before the election, and once set they cannot be changed once the election starts, at least not in such a way that the election in progress would be affected by said changes). "The Presidential election" as we know it is actually 51 statewide elections (plus a citywide one in DC); the winner traditionally gets all the electoral votes from that state, except in Maine and Nebraska.
Lastly, every other race in america is won or lost by the popular vote. So why not the president as well?
I'm not certain I understand this one. As far as I can tell, you mean one of two things: either that the popular vote has always agreed with the electoral vote, or that all other elected officials are done by popular vote.
If you mean that all other presidential elections have had the popular and electoral tallies in agreement, you're wrong. This is not the first, or even the second, time that this has happened; it's the fourth. Granted, it's the first time in over a hundred years, but that means little. And in none of those cases was there ever such a controversy as this.
If you're saying that other officials are elected by popular vote, that's not important. There are many ways to hold elections, and in the end no one way that is truly right and fair all of the time, not even popular vote (which is particularly unfair in the case of a nation where voters are heavily concentrated in certain small areas, such as ours). Besides which, the President was never intended to be elected by the people. In fact, the President and Vice President aren't even intended to run together; they're chosen separately, though again tradition holds that they run together.
There are some very interesting quirks in this. All of the following, though extremely unlikely, are all mathematically possible outcomes for this election:
No, the system's not perfect. But I maintain my assertion that it's the fairest one out there that I've seen.
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Pardon? I think the electoral college is crap because it explicitly works against the principle of "one man, one vote"
Actually, I don't think it does.
Consider: if you take a direct-popular vote, then realistically speaking, no more than fifteen US cities will decide every single election from now on.
A candidate could well say "I support bulldozing the entire nation except for <insert major urban areas here> to create parking lots for <insert aforementioned urban areas>." Even if every single person not in those areas votes against this, if the people of those cities vote for it (a likely situation, given the terrible parking in most major urban areas), then the votes of those in rural areas were for nothing.
Now, there's one other thing: the President was never meant to be chosen by the people. Nor, actually, was the Senate. The people get their fair representation in the House (where things are not quite proportional, since all the states have at least one representative, but no one disuputes this). The states (because keep in mind that each state is also its own entity) get their fair representation in the Senate (one state, two senators who oversee matters of the state as a whole). The office of the Presidency was created such that it would be chosen by the states; it's a rather interesting constitutional fluke but it's actually quite constitutional for a state to not hold popular elections for the President at all; only tradition dictates that they do). This is how each state is assured its voice in choosing the symbolic head. Also note that this is important in the case of the Vice President, who has voting power in the Senate just as a Senator does (but in the case of the VP, that power exists only in the case of a tie). This is why it's important for the states to choose: this is the arbiter for ties in the body which represents them.
Note that the Constitution was later amended to support the direct election of Senators (they were originally appointed by state legislatures).
The people get their representation. That's what the House is for: a body where everything is based on population (though note that in small states where there is only one representative, the people who voted against him/her get no voice at all: is this fair?) The states get their representation: this is the Senate and the Presidency. And the federal government itself gets its representation: this is the Supreme Court (or would you rather that the Supreme Court justices be forced to descend into politics, rather than being able to focus on upholding the Constitution and justice overall?)
That's what checks and balances are for. The people are not the be-all and end-all of power, nor should they be: 99.95% of the people, very nearly all Slashdotters, and probably 99.99% of people who haven't studied law -noting that I haven't either-)don't have the knowledge or training it takes to run a country in any kind of effective manner. That is why we have elections. But sometimes mistakes are made here: that is why proportional representation is checked by nonproportional means as well (such as the Presidency itself; is it fair that we have only one President?); neither is powerful enough to overpower the other, so all must agree before a law is passed. It's not perfect, but it's more effective and, in the end, fairer, than any other system I've seen.
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Sounds exactly like bundles, except that you can't double-click on the folder to open the app (it sounds like you have to dig into the hierarchy).
Cool system, regardless. I just see Bundles as a further refinement of it.
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This is no different from the existing terms. In fact, it's worse. Now M$ can force you to pay an arbitrary fee, and the program (and thus access to your data) won't work if you don't continue to pay. In other words, they blackmail you with your own data, and worst of all this is actually legal.
This, more than anything, only proves that Microsoft must be stopped. They're advocating the very monstrosity they basically created: a model where you don't even own the software you buy. In the end, this is going to result in one of two things. In the most optimistic outcome, people finally realize what Microsoft is doing, and they abandon it. More likely, however, is that more corporations -and not just in the software industry- will adopt this model, and in the end we all become little more than a sort of slave class, except that instead of being forced to give them endless labor, we're forced to give them endless cash for something we've already bought and paid for.
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This guy hits it right on the head. It's not about protecting the children; it's all about burning books. That;s what the people who make this are after, and it's even more true of their target market.
Maybe you'll convince me otherwise when Cyber Patrol stops blocking Google and starts blocking goatse.cx (and yes, it's true; CP blocks Google intermittently, but lets goatse.cx through without even a warning).
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That's the short version of things, anyway.
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...and it's -potentially- a workable business model for GPL'd software.
Consider: Under the GPL, you really can't sell software the way it is typically sold now. You simply can't sell permission to use software that's freely licensed for everyone's use; that just makes no sense.
But the Open-Source model does have two rather serious flaws. First, overall development times tend to be slow, even though individual bugfix and security issue times are very fast. Second, Open-Source software "naturally" evolves, but this means there's no reliable way to control that evolution. We've seen both of these flaws illustrated to dramatic effect with Mozilla, with its very long development time and bloa^H^H^H^Hfeatureset that practically rivals Emacs.
However, those two flaws allow serious money to be made in consulting. In the case of development times, a consultant being paid to work full-time on a piece of software will generally get the job done much more quickly than ten people working in their spare time. We've seen this with Perl6 development. In the case of feature development, it allows a company to ensure that the features they need are incorporated into existing software. This is something we haven't really seen yet, but it can easily be extrapolated from the first possibility.
In the end, it's like using FedEx as opposed to the standard mail systems. Standard mail tends to be much cheaper, but FedEx will get there faster, and it's more reliable. If this model works for sending packages, why wouldn't it work for software?
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Come on, people We all know real coders obfuscate Python.
Either that or they deobfuscate J.
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Still more a technological curiosity than a valid product. But interesting.
Of course, according to the article it still can't distinguish the Mona Lisa from the goatse.cx guy. Back to the drawing board, folks...
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You're using a web browser, aren't you? There exists no browser that exists that supports any set of standards perfectly. Hence, you are supporting software which does not fully support standards.
Only because there is no browser that supports them perfectly yet. But it can be done. Mozilla is so close to doing just that, that it's painful to see Netscape's marketroids release the incomplete version.
You're right. Gecko is the closest thing out there to 100% standards-compliance. But unlike most other things in this world, perfection is possible when you're implementing standards. And when perfection is an attainable goal, nothing less is good enough.
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There are three degrees of standards-compliance.
Zero, mediocre, and perfect.
Anything less than 100% shouldn't be tolerated when it comes to standards support; that's what standards are all about. I don't care if it's 99% compliant; IE5.5/Windows is supposedly 99% compliant too. That's not good enough when 100% is possible.
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Netscape wasn't ready yet.
It was close. So close. Another month, maybe two at most, to fix the most glaring standards-compliance and stability bugs. That's all it would have taken.
But no, they had to hand the project over to the marketers. So in the end, we get a Mozilla nightly plus a zillion ads foisted on us in every aspect of the interface. An interface which breaks every single standard known to man (it doesn't even get Windows quite right.
At least the speed issues are more or less resolved. But all the same, I'm sticking to Mozilla for now. NS6 should be treated as an unfinished project, because frankly it is.
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Actually, Palm Beach had no edge for Bush; Gore won that county. He also won all of the counies he's demanding recounts in.
Just an observation of a very odd phenomenon.
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