This particular game is not a football game, it's a soccer game.
Outside of America the term "Football" means a game played with a round ball and your feet that Americans prefer to call soccer. Why Americans call their rugby like game played with a rugby ball that rarely involves playing with the feet "football" is a mystery, but they do, much to the confusion of Americans who overhear foreigners discussing "Football" and don't recognize the team names.
And it is this very thing the Electoral college is designed to prevent. Face it, we are stuck with two major parties with the system we have and I suspect that we are much better off this way.
Or actually the LACK of the Donald's access to his Twitter feed for that last month...
Think about it. Every time he got into a Twitter war at 3AM over some foolishness that irked him, it got out of hand and he fell in the polls. So that last month where he stopped being stupid on Twitter is what cost Clinton the election.... Well, that and the fact that she had some serious flaws to overcome....
So, the next election cycle we make all the candidates debate on Twitter. Either side can initiate a debate on a question by posting it with a given tag. Points are given for the wittiest come back with difficulty points for quick responses before they can be fully vetted and focus grouped, as well as a bonus given for the time of day. All responses MUST be posted by the candidate themselves and they must personally craft every answer without outside help.... It will be a blast, trust me, and Trump will LOOSE BIGLY for sure.
The founders' developed this system and we should keep it as it is because I believe it is there for a reason.
We have inverted (and I believe perverted) the founder's view of a group of STATES in control of a central Federal government. It was not intended to be this way, where the Federal government controls everything and cedes it's power to the states when and where it wants. We started down this path when we started electing Senators instead of letting the states appoint them and it has to stop. The Federal government is SUPPOSED to be limited and as small as possible, with the power left to the STATES and the people. Making the election of a president just a counting of all the nation's votes takes away power from the states, much like the election of Senators did.
Now if your state wants to proportion your Electors, so be it. How ever you decide this in your state is up to the voters there. So go lobby your state to get the rules changed if you want. Personally, I'm for leaving it alone.
Besides, the number of elections which this system produces which are contrary to the popular vote are pretty limited anyway... Yes, they seem to be too frequent these days, but only because we are nearly evenly split between two parties and a lot of folks choose not to participate. I dare say I don't believe that this situation is going to be maintained forever, in fact I see it shifting in some ways already. Nothing stays this close for very long in politics.
Sate laws are a separate issue and unrelated to the electoral college.
Now that right there is where you fail to understand the founder's intent. The United STATES is intended to be a group of STATES, where the will of the STATES decides the majority of issues. The Role of the Federal government is clearly LIMITED in deference to the states and the people. So the electoral college is NOT unrelated to states rights, but ESTABLISHES (in part) a state's rights and power over the Federal government.
We have inverted (and in my view perverted) the original intent of our constitution by building this huge Federal government and eliminating the Electoral College would further the damage done by having Senators elected instead of appointed by the states. I don't think our founders would be happy with what we have done.
Wishful thinking, the democrats are NOT taking the Senate back w/o a miracle. I'm not sure who will be president, but about who controls the Senate I have no doubt. Yes, it will be close in some states, but unless you think all the republican votes that got pealed off for the Greed Party at the presidential level somehow decided to vote democratic on the down ballot, there is no way, unless all the polling I'm seeing is wrong and slanted to the republicans.
First, I don't know who's going to win, I only know it will be razor close...Closer than Al Gore's loss if the polling is anywhere near reality.
Second, your partisanship is showing if you don't realize #1.
Third, Trump is not an idiot, nor is he stupid, he is just a bigger than life persona that refuses to couch his language in politically correct terms. He is thus readily misunderstood (both willingly and mistakenly) by those who don't like his positions. Yes, he's not smooth, polished and well spoken, but brash, common and not politically correct. But don't be fooled, this very thing you hate about him, is key to at least part of his success. Also, don't fool yourself into thinking he's somehow stupid, he's not.
Finally, underestimating ones adversary is a common cause of failing to prevail. You may not like Trump, but underestimate him at your peril. His "country bumpkin" persona may not appeal to you, but nearly half of this country will be voting for him. Best you and yours not forget that. Apparently he has a lot of appeal, enough to draw the nomination for president, and enough to make the other side's candidate struggle to best him to the bitter end.
Truly, both candidates are flawed in their own ways. We all need to realize that we've been witnessing a "scorched earth" political practice now for multiple decades, where both sides are guilty (to varying degrees) of playing identify politics, pitting one group of Americans verses another in a no holes barred effort to get just one more vote, worthy of a WWE (or what ever they call it now) prize fight. We've been having "the most important election of our lives" about every 4 years for the last two presidents. Eventually this won't work anymore, just like pumping adrenaline into a cardiac arrest patient.
You know, it would be refreshing if folks could just understand all of what Trump is saying for what it is.. Politics...
You may consider yourself smart because you can see how technically stupid what he's saying is, but let's not forget the other major candidate's stupidity either "Wipe it? You mean with a cloth?" when she clearly knew better. Surely there is plenty of duplicity to go around here. Trump is just saying stuff that he thinks appeals to folks who might be willing to vote for him, and you have to admit that for the FBI this was pretty fast. At this point, with the election nearly here and the obviously narrow margins by which this race will be decided, you say what you need to, and Clinton (and her campaigners) are doing this too.
Trump may not be all that clued in on technology or how a review of 650K E-mail's may have actually taken place in such a short time, but for not being a career politician he's obviously a very quick study. Just think, it was less than a month ago he was doing 3AM twitter wars about stupid stuff and now he's going to win or loose by the skin of his teeth. Not bad...Well Better than I expected anyway...
Which is why Bush went to court to stop the recounts... And Why the courts eventually agreed and rightly put a stop to all the foolishness... AND why they have electronic voting machines now.
Legally, Bush got FL's electors the moment FL's Secretary of State state certified the results, which was days before the courts got involved and the media frenzy hit full stride with their under vote, over vote, and dimpled chad stupidity. What amazed me was how many courts let the garbage continue, despite the clear meaning and intention of the law which all parties agreed to before the first vote was cast which showed Bush as the winner.
Where I like the way you think, I'm not ready to start rigging things to either parties advantage. Besides, as there is a huge influx of displaced liberals moving to Texas for work from places like CA which bring the same tax and spend mindset that displaced them in the first place, there is no need to rig things. They are making up more and more of the voters so, unless something drastic happens, Texas will be a swing state eventually.
Eventually they will kill this golden egg laying goose too and we will all have to move on to states that are not bankrupt...
True, but Bush/Gore vote count in FL aside, how many elections are really that close? MOST elections don't even require counting the absentee ballots to know who won. As much as some would like to cast our election vote counting processes in to doubt, there really isn't an issue.
Vote fraud still needs to be looked for and dealt with strictly when found, regardless of if it affected the outcome, but those who trot out voter fraud as a reason somebody won or lost really don't have a case in the vast majority of the cases.
I'm not as concerned, but hey, I live in Texas where the outcome of the election is rarely in doubt and where there is little to be gained by doing this.. However..
I seriously doubt that this kind of "hacking" would be a serious problem in all but the most corrupt areas, and even then, it is pretty much a given that it would be hard to get away with it. First you need to have the firmware that does what you want. How do you get a viable bit of firmware that is altered to your wishes? You are going to need access to the source code, or somebody who can alter and build you what you want. Second, you are going to need to get physical access to the machines which are set up and running long enough to flash new firmware undetected. And Third, everybody involved will need to keep their mouths shut. Fourth, you are going to have to switch enough votes to make a difference, without going too far so it's obvious somebody tampered with the results and usually election results are not THAT close.
Now, I don't think that it is impossible for the government organizations that count votes (usually the county election commission) to be corrupted enough that they'd want to throw an election one way or another, or that a precinct or two might not have election judges from both sides that would willingly look the other way while the rules are broken, but I really cannot imagine too many situations (short of Al Gore's multiple recounts thing) where it would be a wide spread problem or throw an election.
So, let's be vigilant and by all means do what we can for security here, including encryption and cryptographic signing of everything to ensure the integrity of the vote, but let's not go off the deep end with claiming that election machines are rigged in mass numbers or that the small amounts of voter fraud we do see are all that material to most of our elections.
Sure, string those few facts together and draw your conclusions.. But logically there are issues here....
The climate is a complex system with a lot of things interacting in ways we don't understand. How can I say this? Because we haven't yet developed models which have been validated by observation. Clearly this system is way more complicated and the interactions between the various components is beyond our ability to understand, and our lack of accurate models proves this. So, is global warming happening? Perhaps, but certainly it isn't happening at the rates scientists where projecting just 10 years ago. I guess it's still happening, but it has not been nearly the problem that some projected...
So the *real* question should really be "Is global warming necessarily bad?" On that question I'm not so sure we know. The projections where for massive and huge hurricanes, wide spread damage from severe weather, none of which seem to be happening right now. Maybe it's just an anomaly, but we are in a historical low for hurricanes right now, along with most severe weather events.
The *real* problem here for either side of this debate is the huge time frames involved here. To have *any* reasonable assurance we know what's going on, we first need models that match our historical data THEN give us accurate forecasts that will take multiple decades to prove. The short term noise in climate data is just too large to be making accurate predictions about what's going to happen a decade from now.
So, the *honest* scientific thinker is going to admit that although the data looks suspicious, we really don't know what the future will tell us. My guess is we will continue to be surprised, that we don't really have all this figured out, and that all this "The sky is falling" stuff in nonsense at best and damaging at worst.
If you develop it all yourself and keep it private, you will be golden, transferring it to somebody else or using it on somebody else's car is not so good.
But, but... We were only off by 6.25%.... Tune in next week and based on this "new data" we will be able to perfect our models and more confidently estimate how wrong we really are....
Convert them to BitCoin mining operations and PROFIT! Yea.....
Oh, wait....
Sarcasm aside... As the fine article points out, hacking someone else's device, regardless of the reason, is not a legal activity. And as my mother always said "two wrongs don't make a right" applies here. Where this is an interesting thought experiment, unless you can get the legal authorities to approve this kind of activity, let's not develop this idea too far. Perhaps you'd get by with a way to remove the affliction and reboot the device, they are likely to never find you, it would be all to easy to get your hat color misinterpreted should ISP's start monitoring this kind of thing.
Perhaps it's time to put some legal safeguards in place for users to force device manufacturers into having liability when they ship stuff with gaping holes like this. But I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for Congress to draft and pass anything reasonable in this regard and I loath that they would likely make a bloody mess of things if they even tried. Maybe some kind of regulation on ISP's to monitor and deal with such garbage coming from their networks? Again, I wouldn't trust Congress to write that law either.
I own a 2014 model... Less than 40k miles. Basically, I can turn my car in, and walk away with $30. According to them anyway... No restitution for sales tax and fee's paid when I bought it, no restitution for my lost time and the anguish of having to go to a car dealership and buy something else. Hell, I'm not sure they're even going to cover the sales tax to turn it in. I've moved states since buying it, and I think this state will want to collect taxes on the buyback...
So sue them...
Seriously, get a lawyer, find a group of owners and sue....Class action lawsuits can pay of big, well if you are a lawyer they can... Good luck!
Slashdot Mirror
"Hillary Clinton said we could do it"
Case dismissed.
But she deleted the E-mail that said so using bleach bit..... FBI investigating.... Or not...
This particular game is not a football game, it's a soccer game.
Outside of America the term "Football" means a game played with a round ball and your feet that Americans prefer to call soccer. Why Americans call their rugby like game played with a rugby ball that rarely involves playing with the feet "football" is a mystery, but they do, much to the confusion of Americans who overhear foreigners discussing "Football" and don't recognize the team names.
I saw it on the INTERNET! It is absolutely true!
Gullible people from all sides swallow their own brand of KoolAid every day off the internet. What has the world come to?
Ah, well, that pesky 1st amendment be damned, there should be a law!!
Sarc Off
And it is this very thing the Electoral college is designed to prevent. Face it, we are stuck with two major parties with the system we have and I suspect that we are much better off this way.
Or actually the LACK of the Donald's access to his Twitter feed for that last month...
Think about it. Every time he got into a Twitter war at 3AM over some foolishness that irked him, it got out of hand and he fell in the polls. So that last month where he stopped being stupid on Twitter is what cost Clinton the election.... Well, that and the fact that she had some serious flaws to overcome....
So, the next election cycle we make all the candidates debate on Twitter. Either side can initiate a debate on a question by posting it with a given tag. Points are given for the wittiest come back with difficulty points for quick responses before they can be fully vetted and focus grouped, as well as a bonus given for the time of day. All responses MUST be posted by the candidate themselves and they must personally craft every answer without outside help.... It will be a blast, trust me, and Trump will LOOSE BIGLY for sure.
The problem wasn't Facebook... It was Twitter...
sarc off
The founders' developed this system and we should keep it as it is because I believe it is there for a reason.
We have inverted (and I believe perverted) the founder's view of a group of STATES in control of a central Federal government. It was not intended to be this way, where the Federal government controls everything and cedes it's power to the states when and where it wants. We started down this path when we started electing Senators instead of letting the states appoint them and it has to stop. The Federal government is SUPPOSED to be limited and as small as possible, with the power left to the STATES and the people. Making the election of a president just a counting of all the nation's votes takes away power from the states, much like the election of Senators did.
Now if your state wants to proportion your Electors, so be it. How ever you decide this in your state is up to the voters there. So go lobby your state to get the rules changed if you want. Personally, I'm for leaving it alone.
Besides, the number of elections which this system produces which are contrary to the popular vote are pretty limited anyway... Yes, they seem to be too frequent these days, but only because we are nearly evenly split between two parties and a lot of folks choose not to participate. I dare say I don't believe that this situation is going to be maintained forever, in fact I see it shifting in some ways already. Nothing stays this close for very long in politics.
Sate laws are a separate issue and unrelated to the electoral college.
Now that right there is where you fail to understand the founder's intent. The United STATES is intended to be a group of STATES, where the will of the STATES decides the majority of issues. The Role of the Federal government is clearly LIMITED in deference to the states and the people. So the electoral college is NOT unrelated to states rights, but ESTABLISHES (in part) a state's rights and power over the Federal government.
We have inverted (and in my view perverted) the original intent of our constitution by building this huge Federal government and eliminating the Electoral College would further the damage done by having Senators elected instead of appointed by the states. I don't think our founders would be happy with what we have done.
Boy was I wrong.... I never imagined Trump would have won by these kinds of margins, given the pre election polls...
Schwing!
And a miss!
Wishful thinking, the democrats are NOT taking the Senate back w/o a miracle. I'm not sure who will be president, but about who controls the Senate I have no doubt. Yes, it will be close in some states, but unless you think all the republican votes that got pealed off for the Greed Party at the presidential level somehow decided to vote democratic on the down ballot, there is no way, unless all the polling I'm seeing is wrong and slanted to the republicans.
First, I don't know who's going to win, I only know it will be razor close...Closer than Al Gore's loss if the polling is anywhere near reality.
Second, your partisanship is showing if you don't realize #1.
Third, Trump is not an idiot, nor is he stupid, he is just a bigger than life persona that refuses to couch his language in politically correct terms. He is thus readily misunderstood (both willingly and mistakenly) by those who don't like his positions. Yes, he's not smooth, polished and well spoken, but brash, common and not politically correct. But don't be fooled, this very thing you hate about him, is key to at least part of his success. Also, don't fool yourself into thinking he's somehow stupid, he's not.
Finally, underestimating ones adversary is a common cause of failing to prevail. You may not like Trump, but underestimate him at your peril. His "country bumpkin" persona may not appeal to you, but nearly half of this country will be voting for him. Best you and yours not forget that. Apparently he has a lot of appeal, enough to draw the nomination for president, and enough to make the other side's candidate struggle to best him to the bitter end.
Truly, both candidates are flawed in their own ways. We all need to realize that we've been witnessing a "scorched earth" political practice now for multiple decades, where both sides are guilty (to varying degrees) of playing identify politics, pitting one group of Americans verses another in a no holes barred effort to get just one more vote, worthy of a WWE (or what ever they call it now) prize fight. We've been having "the most important election of our lives" about every 4 years for the last two presidents. Eventually this won't work anymore, just like pumping adrenaline into a cardiac arrest patient.
You know, it would be refreshing if folks could just understand all of what Trump is saying for what it is.. Politics... You may consider yourself smart because you can see how technically stupid what he's saying is, but let's not forget the other major candidate's stupidity either "Wipe it? You mean with a cloth?" when she clearly knew better. Surely there is plenty of duplicity to go around here. Trump is just saying stuff that he thinks appeals to folks who might be willing to vote for him, and you have to admit that for the FBI this was pretty fast. At this point, with the election nearly here and the obviously narrow margins by which this race will be decided, you say what you need to, and Clinton (and her campaigners) are doing this too.
Trump may not be all that clued in on technology or how a review of 650K E-mail's may have actually taken place in such a short time, but for not being a career politician he's obviously a very quick study. Just think, it was less than a month ago he was doing 3AM twitter wars about stupid stuff and now he's going to win or loose by the skin of his teeth. Not bad...Well Better than I expected anyway...
Which is why Bush went to court to stop the recounts... And Why the courts eventually agreed and rightly put a stop to all the foolishness... AND why they have electronic voting machines now.
Legally, Bush got FL's electors the moment FL's Secretary of State state certified the results, which was days before the courts got involved and the media frenzy hit full stride with their under vote, over vote, and dimpled chad stupidity. What amazed me was how many courts let the garbage continue, despite the clear meaning and intention of the law which all parties agreed to before the first vote was cast which showed Bush as the winner.
Where I like the way you think, I'm not ready to start rigging things to either parties advantage. Besides, as there is a huge influx of displaced liberals moving to Texas for work from places like CA which bring the same tax and spend mindset that displaced them in the first place, there is no need to rig things. They are making up more and more of the voters so, unless something drastic happens, Texas will be a swing state eventually.
Eventually they will kill this golden egg laying goose too and we will all have to move on to states that are not bankrupt...
True, but Bush/Gore vote count in FL aside, how many elections are really that close? MOST elections don't even require counting the absentee ballots to know who won. As much as some would like to cast our election vote counting processes in to doubt, there really isn't an issue.
Vote fraud still needs to be looked for and dealt with strictly when found, regardless of if it affected the outcome, but those who trot out voter fraud as a reason somebody won or lost really don't have a case in the vast majority of the cases.
I'm not as concerned, but hey, I live in Texas where the outcome of the election is rarely in doubt and where there is little to be gained by doing this.. However..
I seriously doubt that this kind of "hacking" would be a serious problem in all but the most corrupt areas, and even then, it is pretty much a given that it would be hard to get away with it. First you need to have the firmware that does what you want. How do you get a viable bit of firmware that is altered to your wishes? You are going to need access to the source code, or somebody who can alter and build you what you want. Second, you are going to need to get physical access to the machines which are set up and running long enough to flash new firmware undetected. And Third, everybody involved will need to keep their mouths shut. Fourth, you are going to have to switch enough votes to make a difference, without going too far so it's obvious somebody tampered with the results and usually election results are not THAT close.
Now, I don't think that it is impossible for the government organizations that count votes (usually the county election commission) to be corrupted enough that they'd want to throw an election one way or another, or that a precinct or two might not have election judges from both sides that would willingly look the other way while the rules are broken, but I really cannot imagine too many situations (short of Al Gore's multiple recounts thing) where it would be a wide spread problem or throw an election.
So, let's be vigilant and by all means do what we can for security here, including encryption and cryptographic signing of everything to ensure the integrity of the vote, but let's not go off the deep end with claiming that election machines are rigged in mass numbers or that the small amounts of voter fraud we do see are all that material to most of our elections.
Some of us don't have much choice, it's windows or windows... At least I can dual boot... Some cannot even do that.
Sure, string those few facts together and draw your conclusions.. But logically there are issues here....
The climate is a complex system with a lot of things interacting in ways we don't understand. How can I say this? Because we haven't yet developed models which have been validated by observation. Clearly this system is way more complicated and the interactions between the various components is beyond our ability to understand, and our lack of accurate models proves this. So, is global warming happening? Perhaps, but certainly it isn't happening at the rates scientists where projecting just 10 years ago. I guess it's still happening, but it has not been nearly the problem that some projected...
So the *real* question should really be "Is global warming necessarily bad?" On that question I'm not so sure we know. The projections where for massive and huge hurricanes, wide spread damage from severe weather, none of which seem to be happening right now. Maybe it's just an anomaly, but we are in a historical low for hurricanes right now, along with most severe weather events.
The *real* problem here for either side of this debate is the huge time frames involved here. To have *any* reasonable assurance we know what's going on, we first need models that match our historical data THEN give us accurate forecasts that will take multiple decades to prove. The short term noise in climate data is just too large to be making accurate predictions about what's going to happen a decade from now.
So, the *honest* scientific thinker is going to admit that although the data looks suspicious, we really don't know what the future will tell us. My guess is we will continue to be surprised, that we don't really have all this figured out, and that all this "The sky is falling" stuff in nonsense at best and damaging at worst.
Having never tried Windows 10, is there not a "classical" theme for it?
Search for "Classic Shell" and it will do a lot of stuff you want. Windows update keeps uninstalling and complaining about it, but it works.
If you develop it all yourself and keep it private, you will be golden, transferring it to somebody else or using it on somebody else's car is not so good.
Perhaps, but it won't be VW causing the pain... It will be the big guy EPA we call "tiny" taking advantage of you and your rabbit.
But, but... We were only off by 6.25%.... Tune in next week and based on this "new data" we will be able to perfect our models and more confidently estimate how wrong we really are....
With the election, it's all going to be over in 10 days anyway, if you listen to the candidates and realize that ONE Of them will be president elect..
Oh, wait...
You mean the sun will keep rising and setting even after November 8th? How can that be so?
Convert them to BitCoin mining operations and PROFIT! Yea.....
Oh, wait....
Sarcasm aside... As the fine article points out, hacking someone else's device, regardless of the reason, is not a legal activity. And as my mother always said "two wrongs don't make a right" applies here. Where this is an interesting thought experiment, unless you can get the legal authorities to approve this kind of activity, let's not develop this idea too far. Perhaps you'd get by with a way to remove the affliction and reboot the device, they are likely to never find you, it would be all to easy to get your hat color misinterpreted should ISP's start monitoring this kind of thing.
Perhaps it's time to put some legal safeguards in place for users to force device manufacturers into having liability when they ship stuff with gaping holes like this. But I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for Congress to draft and pass anything reasonable in this regard and I loath that they would likely make a bloody mess of things if they even tried. Maybe some kind of regulation on ISP's to monitor and deal with such garbage coming from their networks? Again, I wouldn't trust Congress to write that law either.
I own a 2014 model... Less than 40k miles. Basically, I can turn my car in, and walk away with $30. According to them anyway... No restitution for sales tax and fee's paid when I bought it, no restitution for my lost time and the anguish of having to go to a car dealership and buy something else. Hell, I'm not sure they're even going to cover the sales tax to turn it in. I've moved states since buying it, and I think this state will want to collect taxes on the buyback...
So sue them...
Seriously, get a lawyer, find a group of owners and sue....Class action lawsuits can pay of big, well if you are a lawyer they can... Good luck!