I don't have population figures for the various states to hand, so I have made the assumption that congressional districts contain equal numbers of people. I think for the purposes of this argument this assumption holds up.
Each state (I have also excluded DC) has the following number of electoral votes, and n-2 "population units". I have only listed the 11 biggest states.
CA 54
NY 33
TX 32
FL 25
PA 23
IL 22
OH 21
NJ 15
NC 14
VA 13
GA 13
Add in WV (5) to give us a majority.
That's 270 electoral votes, and 246 ( == 270 - (2 * 12)) pop-units. The population of the country is 438, so these twelve states are 246/438 or 56% of the population (my math was a little fuzzy before). 51% of 56% is 28.6%, or the %age of the popular vote required to win all those states.
The 39 states not listed above (but including WV) thus have 44% of the population and 273 electoral votes. You only need 22.4% of the popular vote to get 51% in each of these states.
The 50% disenfranchisement statement was probably a mistake.
You said:
such that a vote from North Dakota counts as much as a vote from California
but under the electoral college system, a vote from North Dakota counts as much as two point nine votes from California.
You rightly claim that someone only taking 100% of the vote in the 10 largest states would win in a direct election, but miss the entire point that this is 50% of the people in the country. And should some intransigent individuals in one of those ten states vote for the other candidate, depriving our "big-state" candidate of his majority, then votes in the small states are equally as important as their colleagues in the big states. A single voter in a small state can affect the outome of the election, even if the rest of the state votes for the other candidate.
That's 5 million for Bush and 4 million for Gore, so Bush wins. But only the people in State A actually wanted him; the other three states voted unanimously against them. But because A's population is so large, it unfairly controls the election. B, C, and D have no real voice. This is hardly "the will of the people" that the Constitution mandates be put into office.
is not fair, so you add an electoral college to get:
Bush won the popular vote in A, so he grabs those seven. Because he only won one state, that's all he gets. But Gore, having won three states, gets 3+3+4=10 votes, and takes the election.
Now the "will of the 4 million people" has triumphed over the "will of the 5 million people" and that is supposed to be better?
I did the math again this morning. If you take the 39 smallest states you can win in the electoral college with 20% of the popular vote. If you take the 12 largest states you can win in the electoral college with 30% of the popular vote. The electoral college disenfranchises 50% of the population.
This'll probably drop off the face of/., given there are already some 700 posts, but here's my opinion anyway.
Gore should keep campaigning.
If Gore takes Oregon, and Bush takes Florida, they will have 267 and 271 votes respectively. I am willing to bet that given a month of strong campaigning (and an appropriate amount of subtle bribery), Gore can persuade 3 of those Republican electors to switch on the basis of his win in the popular vote.
In fact, the electoral college makes it so you can win with 31% of the popular vote, even if someone else gets the other 69%. You have to get 51% in each of the 11 biggest states (plus 1 state with 5 votes, e.g. WV) and 0% elsewhere.
In your situation, it looks to me like the candidate with 31% is the winner regardless. It's been a long time (1984?) since a president got over 50% of the popular vote. No single, non-transferable voting scheme for direct election would have 50% as a requirement for winning.
Spam costs me money. It costs me time and bandwidth, it costs my ISP bandwidth and disk space.
I'm absolutely for free speech, but I draw the line at being forced to accept collect calls from anyone with something to sell.
If I sign my business up with a cheap hosting company, and I end up with the same IP address as goatse.cx, I can expect to get blocked by censorware. If I think my customers are the kind of people who use censorware, then I have to find a different host.
I personally think MAPS is the right way to go. You're free to use it, or not, or use your own list. The spammers can keep making their collect calls, but now I don't have to pick up the phone.
I am reminded of the story that Edgar Allen Poe died from voting. He found a candidate that was buying drinks for people who would vote for him, then voted 26 times. Unlike Dubya, he didn't then go driving.
I *really*, *really* hope Pat Buchanan is not celebrating victory on Wednesday. Although perhaps his campaign strategy really is to suck fewer votes from Bush than Nader is from Gore - he's doing really well there. Also he's probably going to drop below 5% of the vote, so there'll be no federal money for Ventura to run in 2004.
I laughed at his "auction" commercial, though. And I really want to know what exactly he'd do to stop people withdrawing their support from the Boy Scouts.
I agree with a lot of what he says, and then he rambles off on some natural law tangent. At least he hasn't gone quite as far as those who want to reduce crime by yogic flying.
As for Bush, his intransigence on the doomed war on drugs is really starting to get to me.
You last used cocaine 28 years ago. Are you:
a) still in jail; or
b) running for president.
Discuss the effect that your race and your father's net worth had on your answer.
The fingerprints analogy is bad. Real world fingerprints aren't timestamped, so the police have no idea whether you were there before, during or after the break-in, hust that you were there.
If someone at the FBI had done the five minutes research that this evil criminal did, they would know better what they were looking for, and would not be confiscating the computer of someone who dared to connect to a privately owned but publicly accessible DNS server.
The yelling about how there is no democracy and corporations control the whole process is coming from a few leftists who can't accept the possibility that the majority of voters don't share their views
The majority of eligible voters won't be voting. That's not democracy by any stretch of the imagination.
I read the New Republic article you linked to (thanks). I don't give a lot of credence to an article that regards quotes from other authors as damning Ralph Nader's character just because they were published in the same edition of a magazine.
I know the inability to fast forward through commercials would piss me off if I owned a DVD player. Can you chain it though a Tivo and get around it that way? Or is that circumvention?
I have been told (by the parent of a three year old) that the Tigger Movie DVD has 12 minutes of trailers and commercials at the beginning. This is similar to various Disney videos we own. I have dismantled the cassette and removed the offending sections of these tapes. The unfortunate 3 year old with the DVD has no such recourse.
It's door handles versus door locks. The little latch connected to the handle controls access by keeping the door closed. It is illegal (trespass) to circumvent this access control. The lock effectively controls access by requiring you to have tools, knowledge, large hammers or some combination thereof to gain entry. That too is illegal, but it has now become breaking and entering.
And where are you going to find the money to sue Intel?
Unfortunately, in the US today prior art does not stop you getting a patent. Instead, you have to file a lawsuit challenging the patent first, then bring the prior art as evidence, and hope the judge agrees with you.
Iain Banks is a sick writer. I cannot think of any other author so inventively grim. The Wasp Factory and Song of Stone are just incredibly depressing.
Iain M. Banks is a sick writer. He has created one of the great future civilisations (Galactic Empire? pulease!), which he describes as "a fucking utopia", and yet within it, he manages to set stories every bit as fucked up as the Wasp Factory and Song of Stone.
I love his writing, but I try and make a point of never reading two of his novels back to back, lest I be tempted to orphan my children.
I make a car. The fuel tank explodes at 46 miles per hour. However, there is a licence in the glove compartment (which you agree to by buying the car) that says I am not liable for any damage caused by driving at 46mph, nor may you tell anyone that your car exploded. If someone else sees your car exploding, and writes about it, that's a violation of your licence, too.
It is your job to reassemble the car, but I can recommend some extremely expensive mechanics who just happen to work for me.
</metaphor>
Yes, the licence is odious. But the product is also inferior. I'm not voting for Nader, but this falls under the "keep it legal to embarass big companies" umbrella.
Perhaps if people in the US really did hate the [unearned] rich like those sensible people in Europe do, we wouldn't be faced with the prospect of another Bush presidency.
I see a lot of comments here along the lines of "copyright trumps free speech" and so on. I have to disagree, specifically in this case, but in general when publication is in the public interest.
After all, do you want a situation where the Pentagon could have stopped the NYT from publishing the Pentagon Papers just by pointing out they were copyrighted?
Slashdot Mirror
Bush did very well in his home state of Texas with the Hispanic vote.
:-)
I wasn't aware they could tell your ethnicity from a ballot paper
Even though I am not a Bush supporter, it is obvious that it would be unfair to suddenly overturn his election based on raw popular number.
I agree 100% (popular & electoral)
--
I don't have population figures for the various states to hand, so I have made the assumption that congressional districts contain equal numbers of people. I think for the purposes of this argument this assumption holds up.
Each state (I have also excluded DC) has the following number of electoral votes, and n-2 "population units". I have only listed the 11 biggest states.
CA 54
NY 33
TX 32
FL 25
PA 23
IL 22
OH 21
NJ 15
NC 14
VA 13
GA 13
Add in WV (5) to give us a majority.
That's 270 electoral votes, and 246 ( == 270 - (2 * 12)) pop-units. The population of the country is 438, so these twelve states are 246/438 or 56% of the population (my math was a little fuzzy before). 51% of 56% is 28.6%, or the %age of the popular vote required to win all those states.
The 39 states not listed above (but including WV) thus have 44% of the population and 273 electoral votes. You only need 22.4% of the popular vote to get 51% in each of these states.
--
The 50% disenfranchisement statement was probably a mistake.
You said:
such that a vote from North Dakota counts as much as a vote from California
but under the electoral college system, a vote from North Dakota counts as much as two point nine votes from California.
You rightly claim that someone only taking 100% of the vote in the 10 largest states would win in a direct election, but miss the entire point that this is 50% of the people in the country. And should some intransigent individuals in one of those ten states vote for the other candidate, depriving our "big-state" candidate of his majority, then votes in the small states are equally as important as their colleagues in the big states. A single voter in a small state can affect the outome of the election, even if the rest of the state votes for the other candidate.
--
You say:
That's 5 million for Bush and 4 million for Gore, so Bush wins. But only the people in State A actually wanted him; the other three states voted unanimously against them. But because A's population is so large, it unfairly controls the election. B, C, and D have no real voice. This is hardly "the will of the people" that the Constitution mandates be put into office.
is not fair, so you add an electoral college to get:
Bush won the popular vote in A, so he grabs those seven. Because he only won one state, that's all he gets. But Gore, having won three states, gets 3+3+4=10 votes, and takes the election.
Now the "will of the 4 million people" has triumphed over the "will of the 5 million people" and that is supposed to be better?
I did the math again this morning. If you take the 39 smallest states you can win in the electoral college with 20% of the popular vote. If you take the 12 largest states you can win in the electoral college with 30% of the popular vote. The electoral college disenfranchises 50% of the population.
--
This'll probably drop off the face of /., given there are already some 700 posts, but here's my opinion anyway.
Gore should keep campaigning.
If Gore takes Oregon, and Bush takes Florida, they will have 267 and 271 votes respectively. I am willing to bet that given a month of strong campaigning (and an appropriate amount of subtle bribery), Gore can persuade 3 of those Republican electors to switch on the basis of his win in the popular vote.
This isn't over until after it's over.
--
In fact, the electoral college makes it so you can win with 31% of the popular vote, even if someone else gets the other 69%. You have to get 51% in each of the 11 biggest states (plus 1 state with 5 votes, e.g. WV) and 0% elsewhere.
In your situation, it looks to me like the candidate with 31% is the winner regardless. It's been a long time (1984?) since a president got over 50% of the popular vote. No single, non-transferable voting scheme for direct election would have 50% as a requirement for winning.
--
Spam costs me money. It costs me time and bandwidth, it costs my ISP bandwidth and disk space.
I'm absolutely for free speech, but I draw the line at being forced to accept collect calls from anyone with something to sell.
If I sign my business up with a cheap hosting company, and I end up with the same IP address as goatse.cx, I can expect to get blocked by censorware. If I think my customers are the kind of people who use censorware, then I have to find a different host.
I personally think MAPS is the right way to go. You're free to use it, or not, or use your own list. The spammers can keep making their collect calls, but now I don't have to pick up the phone.
--
ppanon ; is right. You are wrong.
The same effect can be observed with IE4 under Embedded NT. Much faster [application] load than under regular NT.
--
Post early and post often.
I am reminded of the story that Edgar Allen Poe died from voting. He found a candidate that was buying drinks for people who would vote for him, then voted 26 times. Unlike Dubya, he didn't then go driving.
--
I *really*, *really* hope Pat Buchanan is not celebrating victory on Wednesday. Although perhaps his campaign strategy really is to suck fewer votes from Bush than Nader is from Gore - he's doing really well there. Also he's probably going to drop below 5% of the vote, so there'll be no federal money for Ventura to run in 2004.
I laughed at his "auction" commercial, though. And I really want to know what exactly he'd do to stop people withdrawing their support from the Boy Scouts.
--
I DoS-ed a colleague's OmniSky by pinging him about 10 times a second with a 1k packet.
;-)
That'll teach the showoff (Hi, Mike)
On the offchance he was actually using it when Quova came knocking, he would have noticed a serious drop in bandwidth.
--
What really happened in 1812 (in mp3 format).
--
I agree with a lot of what he says, and then he rambles off on some natural law tangent. At least he hasn't gone quite as far as those who want to reduce crime by yogic flying.
As for Bush, his intransigence on the doomed war on drugs is really starting to get to me.
You last used cocaine 28 years ago. Are you:
a) still in jail; or
b) running for president.
Discuss the effect that your race and your father's net worth had on your answer.
--
MS Rep: We own Windows, but the EULA says if it breaks, you can't sue us.
US Customer: That sounds great! We'll take a thousand.
--
The fingerprints analogy is bad. Real world fingerprints aren't timestamped, so the police have no idea whether you were there before, during or after the break-in, hust that you were there.
If someone at the FBI had done the five minutes research that this evil criminal did, they would know better what they were looking for, and would not be confiscating the computer of someone who dared to connect to a privately owned but publicly accessible DNS server.
--
The yelling about how there is no democracy and corporations control the whole process is coming from a few leftists who can't accept the possibility that the majority of voters don't share their views
The majority of eligible voters won't be voting. That's not democracy by any stretch of the imagination.
I read the New Republic article you linked to (thanks). I don't give a lot of credence to an article that regards quotes from other authors as damning Ralph Nader's character just because they were published in the same edition of a magazine.
--
I know the inability to fast forward through commercials would piss me off if I owned a DVD player. Can you chain it though a Tivo and get around it that way? Or is that circumvention?
I have been told (by the parent of a three year old) that the Tigger Movie DVD has 12 minutes of trailers and commercials at the beginning. This is similar to various Disney videos we own. I have dismantled the cassette and removed the offending sections of these tapes. The unfortunate 3 year old with the DVD has no such recourse.
--
It's door handles versus door locks. The little latch connected to the handle controls access by keeping the door closed. It is illegal (trespass) to circumvent this access control. The lock effectively controls access by requiring you to have tools, knowledge, large hammers or some combination thereof to gain entry. That too is illegal, but it has now become breaking and entering.
--
And where are you going to find the money to sue Intel?
Unfortunately, in the US today prior art does not stop you getting a patent. Instead, you have to file a lawsuit challenging the patent first, then bring the prior art as evidence, and hope the judge agrees with you.
--
Iain Banks is a sick writer. I cannot think of any other author so inventively grim. The Wasp Factory and Song of Stone are just incredibly depressing.
Iain M. Banks is a sick writer. He has created one of the great future civilisations (Galactic Empire? pulease!), which he describes as "a fucking utopia", and yet within it, he manages to set stories every bit as fucked up as the Wasp Factory and Song of Stone.
I love his writing, but I try and make a point of never reading two of his novels back to back, lest I be tempted to orphan my children.
--
Moderation Totals:Offtopic=1, Flamebait=1, Funny=2, Total=4.
Perhaps there is no Slashdot mentality after all.
--
They have cornered the market in goldfish bowls, and will soon take over the world with their brilliant advertising campaign.
/.ers will take 200 posts to say: Yes.
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes.
To answer the question "is Novell doomed", the assembled
--
I make a car. The fuel tank explodes at 46 miles per hour. However, there is a licence in the glove compartment (which you agree to by buying the car) that says I am not liable for any damage caused by driving at 46mph, nor may you tell anyone that your car exploded. If someone else sees your car exploding, and writes about it, that's a violation of your licence, too.
It is your job to reassemble the car, but I can recommend some extremely expensive mechanics who just happen to work for me.
</metaphor>
Yes, the licence is odious. But the product is also inferior. I'm not voting for Nader, but this falls under the "keep it legal to embarass big companies" umbrella.
--
How exactly did George W. Bush earn his wealth?
Perhaps if people in the US really did hate the [unearned] rich like those sensible people in Europe do, we wouldn't be faced with the prospect of another Bush presidency.
--
I see a lot of comments here along the lines of "copyright trumps free speech" and so on. I have to disagree, specifically in this case, but in general when publication is in the public interest.
After all, do you want a situation where the Pentagon could have stopped the NYT from publishing the Pentagon Papers just by pointing out they were copyrighted?
--