Patents usually start out with one very broad claim and then each claim after that narrows the original claim down until (supposedly) the whole thing covers just the new invention and nothing else. The result is that when you look at individual claims then it may look like they cover prior art - but this does not matter so long as the prior art is excluded by other claims. So if you really want to tell whether there is any prior art which is covered then you have to consider all of the claims taken together.
Personally I had trouble understanding the claims one at a time. I have no clue as to what is actually covered here, and so far I have not heard from anyone else who has a clear idea, so it is a little early to judge whether there might be prior art problems.
Just because company/group A manages to publish their implementation of the "right way" first, all subsequent efforts must do things the "wrong way"?
No, they can all do it the right way, but they have to be able to prove that they did not find out what the right way was by looking at the original.
One way for this to work would be to have one group of people look at the original code, figure out how it works, and then explain that (at some suitably abstract level), to another group that actually writes the code.
If you turn out code that looks the same, and does the same thing, and you admit that you have seen the original code, then you will be found guilty of copying the original code. It is up to you to ensure that you have proof that your code was actually developed by you.
Terms should be negotiated before the sale, as a part of a the sale.
Damn straight. It has been illegal for a *long* time to put one price on the shelf and then try to charge a different price at the register, precisely because store owners used to use this kind of tactic to rip customers off. The law needs to catch up and do the same for dishonest practices like deliberately giving people them impression that they are buying something and then informing them later that they just paid for a severely limited license.
People should be able to tell what they are getting before they even walk up to the register.
There is a difference between what you can do with code (i.e. the uses you can make of it) and what you can stop others from doing with it (i.e. the conditions you can put into the license you relaese it under). So for example when you say...
Somewhat helped along by inheriting a GPL'd codebase, and discovering that now I have NO options as to how to handle its future....you are somewhat mis-describing the situation. You can do anything you like with GPL'd code. What you are not free to change at will is the license, and the license itself has nothing to do with what you can do, but rather controls what other people are allowed to do.
Your contrast of group freedom with individual freedom is also misleading. The GPL protects individual freedom by ensuring that everyone has the freedom to use code in any way they like - but also that no one has the ability to take that freedom away from anyone else. Again the aim is not just any sort of freedom, but a freedom that cannot be taken away.
Sometimes I wonder if the GPL doesn't boil down to "if *you* get something, then *I* want it too!!"
You might be right about a lot of the people who support the GPL, but the guys who actually write GPL'd code probably hope that they will not wake up one day and find that they are not allowed to use software that is built on their work.
Why is it that every religous movement hates it's heretics more than the heathens?
Probably because they think that a lie which falls close to the truth is more believable, and hence more of a threat, than a lie which falls far from the truth, and is less believable. Of course it does get anoying when when they mistake reasonable differences of opinion for lies.
BSD is more free; at first glance and every glance. That somebody can pervert that freedom is one of the costs of being free. Us BSD'ers are not the enemy -- look further up the list not further down.
Personally I don't have a problem with the BSD license (in fact I don't have a problem with people who retain all of the rights granted by current copyright law), but I think your claim that the BSD license "is more free" than the GPL is mistaken. There is a long tradition in political theory (roughly speaking the Republican tradition represented best by guys like Cicero, Machiavelli (the divine M. of the Discourses not the diabolical M. of The Prince), and Locke) of regarding liberty as more than just an immediate lack of constraints on action, but as a kind of security agaisnt future constraints on action. This understanding of liberty is what gave rise to theories of limited constitutional government - the concern was not simply to let people do whatever they wanted to do, but also to ensure that such freedom of action would not later be taken away. Whether he knows it or not Stallman's ideas about liberty owe a lot to this Republican tradition. The constraints in the GPL are not constraints on what you can do with GPL'd software, but rather checks against future infringements on this freedom of action. You can compare these constraints with the 1st amendment of the US constitution. Although the 1st amendment is a rule that specifies things that cannot be done - and hence at first glance may look like a limit on freedom - it is in fact a rule that establishes the kind of secure freedom which really deserves the name of liberty.
Freedom that can be taken away at a moments notice does not deserve the name of liberty. The GPL guys are not the only people who think so. About 2000 years worth of Republican political philosopher's agree with them.
You are right that their demise is not just around the corner, but nVidia does have only a limited time to respond.
This year's performance card is next year's value card, so it is not just a question of whether they will be able to produce a competitive performance card within a reasonable time. They need to produce a value card that is about as good as the Radeon 9700 within about a year ( a year and a half might be good enough). If nVidia is still playing catch-up a year from now then they are doomed.
Re:The AntiChrist is smiling...
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Cashless Society
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· Score: 1
I just hope that Amex plans to offer a Platinum version of their Mark of the Beast.
I hope that the EU does adopt some pretty severe structural remedies, but I have to say that it is pretty unlikely for political reasons.
For the most part the US and EU have had a practice of letting each other determine anti-trust policies with respect to their own corporations. In other words if two US companies want to merge, and US anti-trust regulators think its OK, then EU regulators give it a pass as well. This doesn't always happen - the EU did sink a big US merger a while back - but it usually happens for one very good reason. The US and the EU do not want to get involved in any kind of tit-for-tat trade war over this kind of stuff.
That does not mean that the EU will let MS off the hook. It just means that whatever remedies are handed down are likely to be on the less severe side (pay some fines, promise not to do it again) rather than the more severe side (break up etc).
Re:How much is on my smart card?
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Cashless Society
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· Score: 2, Insightful
So, unless there is a "killer app" - like the parking meter - or universal acceptance (eliminating the need to also carry cash) I don't think it'll take over.
Great point. The only place I have seen something like this take off is Hong Kong, where the killer app is public transportation.
Once everyone uses them then your argument about always having cash turns around. If you have to carry one of these cards anyway then why not start using it, rather than messing arond with coins and such. Also most vendors actually prefer not to deal with cash (added risk and expense - unlike you they actually have to pay for cash handling services) so once all or most of their customers have these cards they have a strong incentive to start accepting them.
Sorry, no, as you represented it, it does not get them what they want, it -- in your words -- "breaks the system" and elects their least favorite candiate.
No, as I described it the system breaks and no candidate is elected. Not with the Condorcet system anyway. I assumed that the result would be a new election with a different system....in the election methods mailing list , where people debate the differences between all these different systems day in and day out...
You are looking at a self selected population. People who debate this stuff day in and day out are typically people who do not like the current system. If you take a look the stuff writen by people who do political theory and rational choice theory for a living then you will find quite a few who think that a plurality system is often better (although - as should be obvious by now - "better" depends on the particular circumstances).
In particular, the need to capture the moderate vote under a plurality system tends to drive parties towards centrist policies. This is quite different from simply having a tendency to elect moderate candidates, or even compromise candidates. The effect is not seen at the polls but rather in the ways that political debate within parties, and in the public sphere, is shaped. If you look at the way that politics plays out in countries that have a plurality system you typically find a stable situation in which there are two parties who have similar sets of policies that diverge on a small number of issues. Some people - typically people who hold extreme political views - think that this is a flaw because extreme views tend to get excluded. Lots of people - typically people who do political theory and worry about stuff like whether political debate will tend towards reasonable conclusions - think that this is a merit of the plurality system.
I think you have to make very contrived examples to break such a system.
No, problems arise very easily. Any time that the arbitrary scale created from ranked preference diverges from the actual scale of weighted preference - which is almost all of the time - there is a potential for silly results.
By its nature, it has less information to work on than ranking.
Oddly enough more information does not always lead to better decisions. This is true in cases of individual choice and in cases of collective choice. In this case the way that ranks are used distorts the added information so much that there is no particular reason to think that it would help to make for better choices.
Trying to assess weighted preferences is very hard because there would be powerful incentives for voters to misrepresent their strength of preference. Actually the only reliable way to get information about preferences is to set up a market and see what people are willing to pay for certain outcomes. As it happens this is pretty much how the US electoral system already works.
Lets try this again. There is no system of voting that reveals public preference. See the link I gave above for the proof.
Your system fails to represent strength of preference and is subject to strategic voting.
The first example (and the other one that I gave for the Aussie) shows how the focus on rank leads to problems. Nader is not "more centrist" he is just "middle ranked". There is a world of difference between the two.
The second example shows that voters will deliberately misrepresent their preferences, and in this case make sure that the system does not work. No irrationality involved. It just turns out to be the best way for them to get what they want.
You are saying that there were more people who prefered Nader to Gore?
Hard to say. A lot of Republicans really did hate Clinton a lot, and Gore by asociation, so the assumption is plausible. In any case it doesn't matter. The example was just supposed to show that your system does not reveal the public preference any more reliably than the current system. If Republicans had hated Gore more than Nader then your system would have elected a minority candidate.
This is assuming that people, instead of voting in a way that will advance their interests...
You are assuming that people will vote in a way that exactly reveals their preferences. I was pointing out that this is often not rational. In the second example the Bush voters misrepresent their preferences because they expect to *win* the second election (assuming it is a largest share system the second time around) not because they are motivated by spite.
This is just a variation on the example that I used in another message. There are plenty of other cases where the instant run-off system fails. This is just one.
Suppose there are 15 voters, and three candidates.
6 like Simon, but think that Pauline is only slightly better than pond scum, and that John is pond scum.
5 like John, half-way like Simon, and think that Pauline is pond scum.
4 like Pauline, but think that John is only slightly better than pond scum, and that Simon is pond scum.
Under your system John wins and the result is a government that 10 out of 15 voters think is hard to distinguish from pond scum. Under a largest share system Simon wins and the result is a government that only 4 out of 15 voters regard as being indistinguishable from pond scum. The other 11 either like or half-way like it. Looks like your system fails quite badly in this case.
The fundamental problem with all such systems is that they only take into acount preference order and fail to take into acount preference strength.
Please give an example because I am missing how that could happen.
15 voters, one for Nader, 7 for Bush, 7 for Gore.
Nader voters vote Nader, Gore, Bush Gore voters vote Gore, Nader, Bush Bush voters vote Bush, Nader, Gore.
Nader wins Nader vs Gore (8 votes to 7) Nader wins Nader vs Bush (8 votes to 7)
Nader wins the election.
If all voters have perfect information then this is only stable if Bush voters actually prefer Nader to Gore, but note that even if they regard Nader as almost as bad as Gore, and Gore voters regard Nader as almost as bad Bush then you still get this result.
If voters have imperfect information then all sorts of crazy things can happen depending on how much voters know about each other's preferences.
Here is an even more pertinent example.
15 voters, 2 Nader, 6 Gore, 7 Bush.
The Nader voters prefer (Nader>Gore>Bush). The Gore voters prefer (Gore>Nader>Bush). The Bush voters prefer (Bush>Gore>Nader).
Suppose that we expect the Nader and Gore voters to vote their preferences. What will the Bush voters do? If they vote their preferences then Gore will win so they will vote Bush, Nader, Gore, and break the system - because they know that if a new election is held under a largest share system then they will win. Given that the Bush voters would try to break the system, can we expect the Gore and Nader voters to vote their preferences?
Regardless of whether it is possible or not to have a "perfect" system...
Perfect has nothing (or very little) to do with it. Even under a Condorcet system the possibility of strateigic voting means that the results will not be any more useful than they are under the current system.People will sometime vote for the guy that they like best, and sometimes against the guy who has the best chance of beating the guy they like best, and so on. In fact the system you propose could easily have handed the election to Nader.
Although a better solution would be for voters to rank their choices...
Depends on what you do with second and third rankings.
Suppose for example that 34% of the populace ranks Bush 1st, while Nader and Gore get 33% each. Now it might be true that nader and Gore get a larger share of the 2nd votes, while Bush gets a larger share of the 3rd votes, but depending on how you weigh the 2nd votes, Bush might still win.
To save you the time of trying to dream up a voting system that really would reveal the public's preference amongst multiple candidates I will just tell you now that an impossibility theorem has already been proven. You can find a nice explanation of it here:
I think that this is exactly why the practice was ruled permissible.
Your vote cannot be sold (that is actually illegal) or exchanged for anything that has economic value (equivalent to sale) so legally it has no economic value. Hence if you swap a vote for a vote then you are swaping one thing with no economic value for another thing with no economic value, which in turn means that the exchange does not count as a sale of any sort.
For the same reason an agreement to swap votes cannot count as a contract. If a vote has no economic value then it cannot count as consideration, and without consideration there is no contract.
So vote swaping is permissible precisely because it is entirely unenforceable. If the act were anything more than empty talk then it would be illegal.
We spend billions of dollars on military, defense and yes the , the space program.
Without those billions spent on the military do you really think that the US would still have billions to spend on everything else? Just consider what those billions have bought for the US - cheaper oil, capitalist economies in dozens of countries (including Japan, S Korea, and Taiwan - three of the US's largest trading partners), free movement of goods on the seas, and the list goes on.
You don't even need any wacky marxist theories about exploitation to see that US military spending pays a huge economic return to the US. The US does very well out of free trade, but just as the British Empire did in the 19th century, the US needs a large military to make sure that trade remains free.
We spend zero on national healthcare or educating our masses (student loans are at an all time high)
US government spending per capita (Federal, State, and local) on healthcare and education is higher than almost any other country in the world (the exceptions are mostly oil economies). Figures for this are often reported in % of GDP which makes US spending look low compared to some other developed nations, but the US has one of the largest per capita GDP's so if you look at the dollar amounts spent then the US is well out in front.
What the US gets for its money is variable. US education is pretty average at the primary and secondary levels, but stellar at the tertiary level (if you manage to find a top ten list of schools in any particular field then you will typically find that 5-8 of them are in the US). US healthcare is the best in the world bar none - although it is unevenly available. As proof observe that Americans don't exercise and eat a poor diet but still have one of the longest average lifespans in the world. Good healthcare - not healthy living - is the cause of that long lifespan.
Why not first educate and build a healthy population instead?
Most Americans are unhealthy and ignorant by choice. Why not give them something to aspire to - then they might actually take advantage of the vast sums of money that are already thrown into healthcare and education.
Whoever wrote the code in question (probably a number of people in this case - so any one of them) still holds the copyright and is in a position to sue. Depending on the laws of the country where the suit is brought it might be possible for someone to sue on their behalf even without permission to do so, and in any case the copyright holder can authorise someone to sue on their behalf.
Depending on the merits of the case they might not need any money to get the ball rolling. Lots of lawyers are quite happy to work for contingiency fees.
Try to imagine a history text in which all of the names have been replaced with labels like "person x". Putting names to the people who made history is important for all sorts of reasons. Here are some of them:
(1) Reading history would be tedious if it ceased to be about particular individuals.
(2) Historians need to know identities so that they can make connections. Was CM a woman, poor, rich, a prolific scientist, or someone who had one good idea? What else did CM do in life? We will not know until we identify the person.
(3) Honouring the dead may not serve a useful purpose but it is the right thing to do. What sort of person goes through life thinking "gee its nice that I enjoy all these benefits produced by people in the past, but I really couldn't give toss about the people who produced them, and certainly won't waste my time even trying to remember their names, let alone anything else about them". If you have children do you want them to remember that they had parents, and never mind who they were, or do you want them to remember you?
These arguments about who invented what might seem tedious, but they arise because we value the people who have contributed to the world that we live in. The day we stop having arguments like this is the day we stop carring about those people.
The step was made for a surprisingly mundane reason. It had nothing to do with the USPTO suddenly seeing the light and realising that it was crazy to allow patents on raw data. Instead it happened because the patent office was recieving too many applications and did not have the time or money to examine them all. The changes in policy are designed to cut the numbers down, and push up the fees collected on the applications that do go through.
You can find a fairly good summary of the situations here (pages 5-6):
While I cannot profess to have read the article or the bill, I wonder suspiciously what might be behind this.
I just had a quick look over the bill (you can find the text here: http://feingold.senate.gov/rcbill.pdf) and while there were some passages that seem to back up your suspicions, I could not see any specific measures that would actually have the result or reviving the Fairness Doctrine.
Here is the bit that looks most suspicious:
(7) There is a substantial public interest in promoting the values embraced by the first amendment to the Constitution, and the public interest, convenience, and necessity, by increasing the presence of independently-owned and locally-produced content on radio. (8) There is a substantial public interest in promoting the value embraced by the first amendment to the Constitution by strengthening the diversity of voices provided through media such as radio.
However, this stuff appears in the sections that identify the aims of the bill, not in the sections that actually amend existing laws. Some of the new measures in the Bill do require that the FCC revisit old regulations and formulate new ones. The specific identification of a "diversity of voices" with the "public interest" might be an attempt to push the FCC towards reviving the Fairness Doctrine in these new regulations.
I doubt that. I assume that the French, due to the nature of their language, have a very clear conceptual boundry between gender with reguard to language, and a person's physical gender.
Your assumption turns out to be wrong. Take a look here for an example:
http://abc.net.au/rn/arts/ling/stories/lf980919. ht m
Slashdot Mirror
You are right. Thanks for the correction.
Patents usually start out with one very broad claim and then each claim after that narrows the original claim down until (supposedly) the whole thing covers just the new invention and nothing else. The result is that when you look at individual claims then it may look like they cover prior art - but this does not matter so long as the prior art is excluded by other claims. So if you really want to tell whether there is any prior art which is covered then you have to consider all of the claims taken together.
Personally I had trouble understanding the claims one at a time. I have no clue as to what is actually covered here, and so far I have not heard from anyone else who has a clear idea, so it is a little early to judge whether there might be prior art problems.
Just because company/group A manages to publish their implementation of the "right way" first, all subsequent efforts must do things the "wrong way"?
No, they can all do it the right way, but they have to be able to prove that they did not find out what the right way was by looking at the original.
One way for this to work would be to have one group of people look at the original code, figure out how it works, and then explain that (at some suitably abstract level), to another group that actually writes the code.
If you turn out code that looks the same, and does the same thing, and you admit that you have seen the original code, then you will be found guilty of copying the original code. It is up to you to ensure that you have proof that your code was actually developed by you.
Terms should be negotiated before the sale, as a part of a the sale.
Damn straight. It has been illegal for a *long* time to put one price on the shelf and then try to charge a different price at the register, precisely because store owners used to use this kind of tactic to rip customers off. The law needs to catch up and do the same for dishonest practices like deliberately giving people them impression that they are buying something and then informing them later that they just paid for a severely limited license.
People should be able to tell what they are getting before they even walk up to the register.
There is a difference between what you can do with code (i.e. the uses you can make of it) and what you can stop others from doing with it (i.e. the conditions you can put into the license you relaese it under). So for example when you say...
...you are somewhat mis-describing the situation. You can do anything you like with GPL'd code. What you are not free to change at will is the license, and the license itself has nothing to do with what you can do, but rather controls what other people are allowed to do.
Somewhat helped along by inheriting a GPL'd codebase, and discovering that now I have NO options as to how to handle its future.
Your contrast of group freedom with individual freedom is also misleading. The GPL protects individual freedom by ensuring that everyone has the freedom to use code in any way they like - but also that no one has the ability to take that freedom away from anyone else. Again the aim is not just any sort of freedom, but a freedom that cannot be taken away.
Sometimes I wonder if the GPL doesn't boil down to "if *you* get something, then *I* want it too!!"
You might be right about a lot of the people who support the GPL, but the guys who actually write GPL'd code probably hope that they will not wake up one day and find that they are not allowed to use software that is built on their work.
Why is it that every religous movement hates it's heretics more than the heathens?
Probably because they think that a lie which falls close to the truth is more believable, and hence more of a threat, than a lie which falls far from the truth, and is less believable. Of course it does get anoying when when they mistake reasonable differences of opinion for lies.
BSD is more free; at first glance and every glance. That somebody can pervert that freedom is one of the costs of being free. Us BSD'ers are not the enemy -- look further up the list not further down.
Personally I don't have a problem with the BSD license (in fact I don't have a problem with people who retain all of the rights granted by current copyright law), but I think your claim that the BSD license "is more free" than the GPL is mistaken. There is a long tradition in political theory (roughly speaking the Republican tradition represented best by guys like Cicero, Machiavelli (the divine M. of the Discourses not the diabolical M. of The Prince), and Locke) of regarding liberty as more than just an immediate lack of constraints on action, but as a kind of security agaisnt future constraints on action. This understanding of liberty is what gave rise to theories of limited constitutional government - the concern was not simply to let people do whatever they wanted to do, but also to ensure that such freedom of action would not later be taken away. Whether he knows it or not Stallman's ideas about liberty owe a lot to this Republican tradition. The constraints in the GPL are not constraints on what you can do with GPL'd software, but rather checks against future infringements on this freedom of action. You can compare these constraints with the 1st amendment of the US constitution. Although the 1st amendment is a rule that specifies things that cannot be done - and hence at first glance may look like a limit on freedom - it is in fact a rule that establishes the kind of secure freedom which really deserves the name of liberty.
Freedom that can be taken away at a moments notice does not deserve the name of liberty. The GPL guys are not the only people who think so. About 2000 years worth of Republican political philosopher's agree with them.
You are right that their demise is not just around the corner, but nVidia does have only a limited time to respond.
This year's performance card is next year's value card, so it is not just a question of whether they will be able to produce a competitive performance card within a reasonable time. They need to produce a value card that is about as good as the Radeon 9700 within about a year ( a year and a half might be good enough). If nVidia is still playing catch-up a year from now then they are doomed.
I just hope that Amex plans to offer a Platinum version of their Mark of the Beast.
I hope that the EU does adopt some pretty severe structural remedies, but I have to say that it is pretty unlikely for political reasons.
For the most part the US and EU have had a practice of letting each other determine anti-trust policies with respect to their own corporations. In other words if two US companies want to merge, and US anti-trust regulators think its OK, then EU regulators give it a pass as well. This doesn't always happen - the EU did sink a big US merger a while back - but it usually happens for one very good reason. The US and the EU do not want to get involved in any kind of tit-for-tat trade war over this kind of stuff.
That does not mean that the EU will let MS off the hook. It just means that whatever remedies are handed down are likely to be on the less severe side (pay some fines, promise not to do it again) rather than the more severe side (break up etc).
So, unless there is a "killer app" - like the parking meter - or universal acceptance (eliminating the need to also carry cash) I don't think it'll take over.
Great point. The only place I have seen something like this take off is Hong Kong, where the killer app is public transportation.
Once everyone uses them then your argument about always having cash turns around. If you have to carry one of these cards anyway then why not start using it, rather than messing arond with coins and such. Also most vendors actually prefer not to deal with cash (added risk and expense - unlike you they actually have to pay for cash handling services) so once all or most of their customers have these cards they have a strong incentive to start accepting them.
Sorry, no, as you represented it, it does not get them what they want, it -- in your words -- "breaks the system" and elects their least favorite candiate.
...in the election methods mailing list , where people debate the differences between all these different systems day in and day out...
No, as I described it the system breaks and no candidate is elected. Not with the Condorcet system anyway. I assumed that the result would be a new election with a different system.
You are looking at a self selected population. People who debate this stuff day in and day out are typically people who do not like the current system. If you take a look the stuff writen by people who do political theory and rational choice theory for a living then you will find quite a few who think that a plurality system is often better (although - as should be obvious by now - "better" depends on the particular circumstances).
In particular, the need to capture the moderate vote under a plurality system tends to drive parties towards centrist policies. This is quite different from simply having a tendency to elect moderate candidates, or even compromise candidates. The effect is not seen at the polls but rather in the ways that political debate within parties, and in the public sphere, is shaped. If you look at the way that politics plays out in countries that have a plurality system you typically find a stable situation in which there are two parties who have similar sets of policies that diverge on a small number of issues. Some people - typically people who hold extreme political views - think that this is a flaw because extreme views tend to get excluded. Lots of people - typically people who do political theory and worry about stuff like whether political debate will tend towards reasonable conclusions - think that this is a merit of the plurality system.
I think you have to make very contrived examples to break such a system.
No, problems arise very easily. Any time that the arbitrary scale created from ranked preference diverges from the actual scale of weighted preference - which is almost all of the time - there is a potential for silly results.
By its nature, it has less information to work on than ranking.
Oddly enough more information does not always lead to better decisions. This is true in cases of individual choice and in cases of collective choice. In this case the way that ranks are used distorts the added information so much that there is no particular reason to think that it would help to make for better choices.
Trying to assess weighted preferences is very hard because there would be powerful incentives for voters to misrepresent their strength of preference. Actually the only reliable way to get information about preferences is to set up a market and see what people are willing to pay for certain outcomes. As it happens this is pretty much how the US electoral system already works.
Lets try this again. There is no system of voting that reveals public preference. See the link I gave above for the proof.
Your system fails to represent strength of preference and is subject to strategic voting.
The first example (and the other one that I gave for the Aussie) shows how the focus on rank leads to problems. Nader is not "more centrist" he is just "middle ranked". There is a world of difference between the two.
The second example shows that voters will deliberately misrepresent their preferences, and in this case make sure that the system does not work. No irrationality involved. It just turns out to be the best way for them to get what they want.
You are saying that there were more people who prefered Nader to Gore?
Hard to say. A lot of Republicans really did hate Clinton a lot, and Gore by asociation, so the assumption is plausible. In any case it doesn't matter. The example was just supposed to show that your system does not reveal the public preference any more reliably than the current system. If Republicans had hated Gore more than Nader then your system would have elected a minority candidate.
This is assuming that people, instead of voting in a way that will advance their interests...
You are assuming that people will vote in a way that exactly reveals their preferences. I was pointing out that this is often not rational. In the second example the Bush voters misrepresent their preferences because they expect to *win* the second election (assuming it is a largest share system the second time around) not because they are motivated by spite.
This is just a variation on the example that I used in another message. There are plenty of other cases where the instant run-off system fails. This is just one.
Suppose there are 15 voters, and three candidates.
6 like Simon, but think that Pauline is only slightly better than pond scum, and that John is pond scum.
5 like John, half-way like Simon, and think that Pauline is pond scum.
4 like Pauline, but think that John is only slightly better than pond scum, and that Simon is pond scum.
Under your system John wins and the result is a government that 10 out of 15 voters think is hard to distinguish from pond scum. Under a largest share system Simon wins and the result is a government that only 4 out of 15 voters regard as being indistinguishable from pond scum. The other 11 either like or half-way like it. Looks like your system fails quite badly in this case.
The fundamental problem with all such systems is that they only take into acount preference order and fail to take into acount preference strength.
Please give an example because I am missing how that could happen.
15 voters, one for Nader, 7 for Bush, 7 for Gore.
Nader voters vote Nader, Gore, Bush
Gore voters vote Gore, Nader, Bush
Bush voters vote Bush, Nader, Gore.
Nader wins Nader vs Gore (8 votes to 7)
Nader wins Nader vs Bush (8 votes to 7)
Nader wins the election.
If all voters have perfect information then this is only stable if Bush voters actually prefer Nader to Gore, but note that even if they regard Nader as almost as bad as Gore, and Gore voters regard Nader as almost as bad Bush then you still get this result.
If voters have imperfect information then all sorts of crazy things can happen depending on how much voters know about each other's preferences.
Here is an even more pertinent example.
15 voters, 2 Nader, 6 Gore, 7 Bush.
The Nader voters prefer (Nader>Gore>Bush).
The Gore voters prefer (Gore>Nader>Bush).
The Bush voters prefer (Bush>Gore>Nader).
Suppose that we expect the Nader and Gore voters to vote their preferences. What will the Bush voters do? If they vote their preferences then Gore will win so they will vote Bush, Nader, Gore, and break the system - because they know that if a new election is held under a largest share system then they will win. Given that the Bush voters would try to break the system, can we expect the Gore and Nader voters to vote their preferences?
Regardless of whether it is possible or not to have a "perfect" system...
Perfect has nothing (or very little) to do with it. Even under a Condorcet system the possibility of strateigic voting means that the results will not be any more useful than they are under the current system.People will sometime vote for the guy that they like best, and sometimes against the guy who has the best chance of beating the guy they like best, and so on. In fact the system you propose could easily have handed the election to Nader.
Although a better solution would be for voters to rank their choices...
Depends on what you do with second and third rankings.
Suppose for example that 34% of the populace ranks Bush 1st, while Nader and Gore get 33% each. Now it might be true that nader and Gore get a larger share of the 2nd votes, while Bush gets a larger share of the 3rd votes, but depending on how you weigh the 2nd votes, Bush might still win.
To save you the time of trying to dream up a voting system that really would reveal the public's preference amongst multiple candidates I will just tell you now that an impossibility theorem has already been proven. You can find a nice explanation of it here:
http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/arrow.htm
I think that this is exactly why the practice was ruled permissible.
Your vote cannot be sold (that is actually illegal) or exchanged for anything that has economic value (equivalent to sale) so legally it has no economic value. Hence if you swap a vote for a vote then you are swaping one thing with no economic value for another thing with no economic value, which in turn means that the exchange does not count as a sale of any sort.
For the same reason an agreement to swap votes cannot count as a contract. If a vote has no economic value then it cannot count as consideration, and without consideration there is no contract.
So vote swaping is permissible precisely because it is entirely unenforceable. If the act were anything more than empty talk then it would be illegal.
We spend billions of dollars on military, defense and yes the , the space program.
Without those billions spent on the military do you really think that the US would still have billions to spend on everything else? Just consider what those billions have bought for the US - cheaper oil, capitalist economies in dozens of countries (including Japan, S Korea, and Taiwan - three of the US's largest trading partners), free movement of goods on the seas, and the list goes on.
You don't even need any wacky marxist theories about exploitation to see that US military spending pays a huge economic return to the US. The US does very well out of free trade, but just as the British Empire did in the 19th century, the US needs a large military to make sure that trade remains free.
We spend zero on national healthcare or educating our masses (student loans are at an all time high)
US government spending per capita (Federal, State, and local) on healthcare and education is higher than almost any other country in the world (the exceptions are mostly oil economies). Figures for this are often reported in % of GDP which makes US spending look low compared to some other developed nations, but the US has one of the largest per capita GDP's so if you look at the dollar amounts spent then the US is well out in front.
What the US gets for its money is variable. US education is pretty average at the primary and secondary levels, but stellar at the tertiary level (if you manage to find a top ten list of schools in any particular field then you will typically find that 5-8 of them are in the US). US healthcare is the best in the world bar none - although it is unevenly available. As proof observe that Americans don't exercise and eat a poor diet but still have one of the longest average lifespans in the world. Good healthcare - not healthy living - is the cause of that long lifespan.
Why not first educate and build a healthy population instead?
Most Americans are unhealthy and ignorant by choice. Why not give them something to aspire to - then they might actually take advantage of the vast sums of money that are already thrown into healthcare and education.
Whoever wrote the code in question (probably a number of people in this case - so any one of them) still holds the copyright and is in a position to sue. Depending on the laws of the country where the suit is brought it might be possible for someone to sue on their behalf even without permission to do so, and in any case the copyright holder can authorise someone to sue on their behalf.
Depending on the merits of the case they might not need any money to get the ball rolling. Lots of lawyers are quite happy to work for contingiency fees.
BTW IANAL
Try to imagine a history text in which all of the names have been replaced with labels like "person x". Putting names to the people who made history is important for all sorts of reasons. Here are some of them:
(1) Reading history would be tedious if it ceased to be about particular individuals.
(2) Historians need to know identities so that they can make connections. Was CM a woman, poor, rich, a prolific scientist, or someone who had one good idea? What else did CM do in life? We will not know until we identify the person.
(3) Honouring the dead may not serve a useful purpose but it is the right thing to do. What sort of person goes through life thinking "gee its nice that I enjoy all these benefits produced by people in the past, but I really couldn't give toss about the people who produced them, and certainly won't waste my time even trying to remember their names, let alone anything else about them". If you have children do you want them to remember that they had parents, and never mind who they were, or do you want them to remember you?
These arguments about who invented what might seem tedious, but they arise because we value the people who have contributed to the world that we live in. The day we stop having arguments like this is the day we stop carring about those people.
The step was made for a surprisingly mundane reason. It had nothing to do with the USPTO suddenly seeing the light and realising that it was crazy to allow patents on raw data. Instead it happened because the patent office was recieving too many applications and did not have the time or money to examine them all. The changes in policy are designed to cut the numbers down, and push up the fees collected on the applications that do go through.
0 22 602.pdf
You can find a fairly good summary of the situations here (pages 5-6):
http://www.iipi.org/newsroom/speeches/Boston%20
While I cannot profess to have read the article or the bill, I wonder suspiciously what might be behind this.
I just had a quick look over the bill (you can find the text here: http://feingold.senate.gov/rcbill.pdf) and while there were some passages that seem to back up your suspicions, I could not see any specific measures that would actually have the result or reviving the Fairness Doctrine.
Here is the bit that looks most suspicious:
(7) There is a substantial public interest in promoting the values embraced by the first amendment to the Constitution, and the public interest, convenience, and necessity, by increasing the presence of independently-owned and locally-produced content on radio.
(8) There is a substantial public interest in promoting the value embraced by the first amendment to the Constitution by strengthening the diversity of voices provided through media such as radio.
However, this stuff appears in the sections that identify the aims of the bill, not in the sections that actually amend existing laws. Some of the new measures in the Bill do require that the FCC revisit old regulations and formulate new ones. The specific identification of a "diversity of voices" with the "public interest" might be an attempt to push the FCC towards reviving the Fairness Doctrine in these new regulations.
I doubt that. I assume that the French, due to the nature of their language, have a very clear conceptual boundry between gender with reguard to language, and a person's physical gender.
. ht m
Your assumption turns out to be wrong. Take a look here for an example:
http://abc.net.au/rn/arts/ling/stories/lf980919