Even six-round Rijndael, while theoretically "broken", is completely uncrackable with any known algorithm on today's hardware. IIRC it takes over 10^28 (ie 2^90) operations to crack. That's a savings of only 10^11 (2^38) over brute force. Say you're the NSA, and can afford today 10^6 computers each running at 10^12 operations per second. With your boxes all improving at moore's law, it'll be 15 years before you crack your first key; then 2 keys the in the following year.
Sorry about the email (most email programs accept it, but web-based email sites usually complain. To make it work drop the +slashdot.) I'm glad I broke my word and came back (I was bored, my work computer is crashed).
Approval fails several criteria. Strict approval violates pareto, because if everybody votes the same three candidates there is no way to tell which is actually preferred. It violates independence of irrelevant options. Say you have a vote between A,B, and C. C's supporters, a radical minority, approve only C, who comes in last, and A wins. If C were eliminated, they would have approved B, handing B the election. Approval must violate at least one criterion - just because it willfully ignores certain aspects of voter's true internal rankings does not make it immune from Arrow's theorem. At least now I understand why you state the theorem as you do; but I think your statement is very wrong.
Again, picking nits. As are you. Your ideal ideological continua are not always how things work. If Gore is the "center" candidate between Bush and Nader, then nobody should vote him last. But believe me, I know plenty of people who would do just that. Ability to gain first-place support and avoid elimination is actually a positive attribute in a politician. And as I said last time, your worst fear is that voters will vote tactically to elect exactly the person that approval would have elected anyway - hardly the end of the world. If you'll just acknowledge that IRV is superior to what we have today (unlike, admittedly, Borda), I'll shake on it and leave.
In this latest round you said "we" and "they" a few times, referring to some unspecified group of electoral reformers vs CVD. If your "we" has any presence in Washington state, I'd love to hear about it.
Yes, any condorcet-compliant method is in the abstract superior to IRV and approval. Black, Hansen, standard Condorcet. Unfortunately, these all more or less take computers to count and paragraphs to explain. They're open to fears of vote fraud, justified or not. That leaves us with IRV and approval. I see situations for both - as I've said, any "senatorial" body should be approval. I similarly think that given a number of aspects of human nature (many of which I've mentioned) IRV is better for executives.
But I would vote for the horrible tactical nightmare of Borda just to break the two-party stranglehold on American politics. Once we'd broken free, I'd have confidence that our representatives could enact true campaign finance reform as well as amending Borda to Hansen.
Hmm... I've just proven that RWE chooses from the smith set of condorcet winners. RWE is harder than IRV to explain, but just as easy to count (and because of greater stability, harder to defraud). Do you have any good explanations of RWE? (Should be called Instant Runoffs Without Elimination or if you hate "instant", Virtual Runoffs Without Elimination).
Email me. Nobody else is listening. I'd happily respond.
In fact I am very curious what your evidence is that Australian voters commonly vote tactically under IRV. I've never heard my Australian friends and family talk about that, and it seems counterintuitive. For a tactical vote to be useful, the three criteria are: I like A over B; I know that without my tactical vote, B is likely to be eliminated before A; and yet I know B has a better chance of winning than A. The only case that satisfies these criteria is when B is an acceptable compromise candidate and EXACTLY THE CANDIDATE THAT WOULD BE ELECTED BY APPROVAL. Also, my motivation to vote tactically is at worst proportional to how informed I am about the strength of the candidates - ie, I know what I'm doing. In approval, I'm more likely to mis-vote (in this case, not tactically, but by setting my approval standard too high or too low) the less informed and engaged I am in the system, the less I believe that compromise works. Thus, the current positive-feedback apathy cycle.
Also, IRV (as any ranking system) gives more information about people's preferences. Remember, voting is not only a way to pick a winner; it is a way to register opinions (thus all the talk of "mandates").
Has approval ever stood up to constitutional challenges? It seems to me more constitutionally questionable...
How would you feel about an "instant approval system":
1. voters rank candidates
2. first choices are counted
3. Majority(s)? Halt: highest wins.
4. all ballots choosing last place candidate are recounted as approval ballots with one more approval vote than they had before. (Continue to increment the numbers of approval votes if new votes are for already eliminated candidates)
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until there's a majority.
As to arrow's criteria: Approval fails (theoretically) the very first criterion: getting the correct ranking when everybody agrees (but are ignorant of the degree to which they agree). This criterion is arguably the very most important. In practice, this means that it is more vulnerable to fundraising disparities: if candidate A has strong support but low exposure and views similar to candidate B, IRV has a better chance of putting A over B than approval because in approval there's still a plurality-like "go with the flow, don't throw away your vote by voting only A" argument.
I'm picking nits. Honestly, I think you are too.
I WON'T READ THIS THREAD AGAIN. In all probability, NEITHER WILL ANYONE ELSE. Respond only via email.
1. please drop the ad-hominem; anonymity is legit but actually I have provided plenty of personal information and most geeks could probably find out where "homunculus" lives. Click on my name and you can send me email.
2. I didn't mean to start a flame war between IRV, Condorcet, Approval, et al. To me, any of these systems are so immeasurably better than the US status quo that the differences are immaterial. My reading of the political situation in my state is that IRV is the only one of these with a good chance of being adopted in the next few years, so I support IRV. If everyone only supports their own pet version we'll get nowhere.
3. How did I misquote Arrow? I stated the whole theorem in layman's terms, you just stated the "message". Arrow's theorem makes no moral statements about which of his conditions are more or less desirable or about whether there are other desirable qualities of voting systems; he just says you can't have it all.
4. IRV isn't as different from approval as you suggest. Remember, you don't have to rank everyone; if you only "approve" of 2 candidates, only rank those two. But don't be so factional about this: The problems with approval, IRV, or condorcet arise only in pathological situations, whereas the problems with the current situation are a matter of course.
I like IRV because, of the easily-explicable options, it gives the least emphasis on voting tactics. I rank nader, bush, gore, as 99, 2, 1 but would "approve" the first two for tactical reasons. Enough people like me and approval voting could easily elect a candidate that the majority dislikes. Approval voting also fails in the case of extreme factionalism. If we used approval voting to choose a voting system for the US, and everybody (as you apparently would) voted only for their favorite system because of nitpicking flaws in other systems, we'd effectively be using plurality voting (and we'd probably end up electing plurality voting).
If you vote for a 3rd party candidate (or for anyone but your state's winner), it doesn't really matter to you whether your vote gets thrown away at the state level or at the nationwide level. The point is to throw away as few votes as possible. In an election for a single executive position like president, that means that the winner should have some level of majority support.
There are websites and web pages that point out the valid public interests served by the electoral college system. My own point is simpler: at worst, the electoral college only distorts the popular will by a few percentage points. Anyone with more than 52% of the vote is pretty much guaranteed a win, and the cases where a majority candidate loses are extremely rare. Therefore, fighting something written into the federal constitution seems to me to be quixotic.
But our current system routinely throws away the votes of anyone who votes for a minor party. This is at least 7 percent every single election and would be much higher if people voted their conscience. Instant Runoff Voting (IRV, the system used by ICANN) has the power to change this. It is also a viable political issue (local issues in Vermont, Washington, and New Mexico have put it into the realm of feasibility in these states; and once one state switches it could become a trend).
[technical note: if, due to IRV, a "minor" party candidate took a single state, that state's electors would see that their candidate had lost nationwide and vote their state's second choice among the stronger candidates. There are a few minor legal changes necessary to facilitate this process.]
In summary: this questioner's concern for proportionality is important for legislatures a non-starter for executive positions like the presidency. They should either fight for IRV on the presidential scene, or move to state or local politics and fight for proportionally representative legislative bodies (many, many countries do this, and it would be a huge step forward. Americans who argue against proportional legislatures as deadlock-prone are usually confused and really arguing against parliamentary selection of the executive.)
Despite the trolls, Instant Runoff Voting (IRV, aka Preferential Voting) is generally considered far superior to plurality winner-take-all. In the US, there is no constitutional problem with IRV (in fact, it has been endorsed in a consenting opinion by the Supreme Court, and by figures as diverse as Ralph Nader and Rush Limbaugh).
Due to a recent supreme court decision which invalidated blanket primary systems, the state of WA is revamping its primary system. Instant runoffs, due to their ability to collapse multiple virtual runoffs into a single round, are a cheaper replacement for primaries. It is very possible that the many groups interested in better democracy in WA (the Grange, the League of Women Voters, and the minor parties) will use the citizen interest in this issue to run IRV as a state initiative. If you're interested in this issue, contact me via email (it's not even obscured; leave the cookie in, please, even though I can handle it with or without).
ObOnTopic:
Anyone interested in voting systems should know about Arrow'sTheorem, which states that there are no "perfect" ; voting systems. The only way to have a group of people preferentially rank a group of options so
1) new options will fit neatly into the ranking without mixing things up;
2) if everybody agrees on a ranking that ranking is chosen;
and 3) new voters who prefer A to B never cause B to win over A
is to have a dictatorship (ignore all voters except one). My personal choice of "ideal" system is to elect executives via borda selection among the condorcet-winning group. And then a house selected by proportional representation and a senate by approval voting. Hey, a boy can dream.
...making a real-life 3D display or making some kind of working VR setup? Note that anything on the 3d display will be "ghostly" - I don't want to be looking through the front of whatever object and seeing the backside of it too. Whereas a single 2d screen that can send different images to your 2 eyes, and that can sense where your head is (and also tell when you move the screen itself) is probably much cheaper.
When my Palm III (to take a nice cache-less example) wants to read a word from RAM it asks for the address and then waits (I think) 3 clock cycles. If it read it any sooner, the memory chip might not be ready yet - the 0's don't change to 1's in a nice ideal square wave, they relax there exponentially, and if the processor reads something that's halfway from 0 to 1 who knows what it will think.
Why 3 clock cycles? Because that's the worst case - if I have a relatively crappy RAM chip, and my battery is close to dead, and it happens to be a really hot day, that's how long it will take. But what if my processor watched the voltage carefully enough to know when the memory was ready? After all, if the voltage reaches 1 after two clock cycles, you know that's where it's supposed to be.
And once you start thinking that way, why do you need a clock at all? You ask the memory for a value, and wait only long enough until it's ready; ask the addition ciruitry to add that number to register n, and wait only long enough until it's ready; ask the pipeline for your next instruction, etc. If async were a factory, instead of having some fixed-speed conveyer belt running through it, you just have individuals handing each other tasks, and a very careful setup so nobody starts to do anything until all the materials they need arrive at their station.
This obviously takes some high-level wizardry to design. Instead of just doing the next step on the next digital tick of the clock, each part of the chip must make sophisticated analog judgements about when its input is ready and when it's possibly still just a glitch. But what you get is a chip that overclocks itself to exactly its own limits. You'd sell computers rated to "greater than xxx Mhz" instead of just "xxx Mhz", and cooling your computer would give you immediate speed improvements.
Probably the first use for async is for extremely low power devices. If you just have a teeny little solar cell which delivers fluctuating power (or a heat-engine running off of daily temperature differences or body heat, or whatever), well, the chip will take as much power as it gets and just operate slower when the power drops. I am sure your sci-fi imagination can come up with possible applications.
Async does have major promise, especially for low-power. However, if you just sprinkle magic async dust over an existing chip design, you get a processor that is only as fast as its poorest transistor. Transmeta, which has a fraction of the transistors (and a head start on the software which could adapt more intelligently to the vagiaries of a clockless chip), would benefit far more from this transition than traditional x86 designs.
In effect, you have parallel advances. There's fabrication technology, where the big guys have the advantage, but that's just a matter of money. There's sync/async, which hasn't been opened up yet. And there's software, where Transmeta does indeed have a head start of 5 years... minus however long intel/AMD have been running secret initiatives to do Transmeta-like tricks in software.
AMD or Intel just has to take their translation hardware and write code that does the same thing (if they wanted to do it).
Not the same thing. Hardware does one thing, fast; software can be more flexible. Transmeta's does lots of things that hardware cannot - branch probability marking, incremental compilation, etc.
Re:Businesses don't corrupt politicians...
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A Letter from 2020
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· Score: 2
Politicians corrupt themselves, and businesses just coronate the most corrupt.
Email me if you want to continue this discussion.
Suffice it to say that I disagree with almost everything you said and find the illogical extremes of your faith in progress laughable, and can back it up with an argument on purely logical, nonideological grounds.
Except when you say that corporations often act in the public interest (employing people, lobbying for H1B visas). Yes, corporations do a huge amount of good, and versus the current situation more H1B's is good. Yet their interests (more H1B's) are not identical to the public interest (more green cards). Even when the two lie in the same direction, it's important not to forget that, as your earlier statement that "H1B's are all that corporations can acheive" clearly did.
Likewise, you can't put a gun to the entire countries head to tell them to produce at the level of modern day US
Who said anything about asking them to produce? I may be misinterpreting, but this sentence seriously makes me worry that you are no longer even able to distinguish between increased GNP and improved human rights.
Please do tell.
I was held in jail in DC for 5 days after crossing police lines april 17th. My own experience is a very complicated, multifaceted issue and there's not space to discuss it here. The (IMO indisputable) fact that the US has political prisoners was off-topic; my main point was that I have first-hand experience of how much of a positive difference active outside scrutiny can make to the treatment of those in custody. (Also, the jail authorities, who were under a court-order and threats of economic sanctions due to abuses in the late 80's, were much more responsive to such outside pressure than the US Marshals, who personally threatened to beat me up.)
What have your attentive eyes done for the Chinese thus far?
From amnesty: "the serious deterioration in human rights called into question the authorities' sincerity in signing key human rights conventions in the previous two years. It also represented a serious setback for the policy of dialogue on human rights pursued by some governments."
It seems to me that the level of public scrutiny in the US was higher in 97-98 than in 99, and that that's correlated with the setbacks amnesty noted. It also seems to me obvious that without the "hook" of the yearly congressional debate the US media will report on China's human rights moves even less. I do not advocate long term trade sanctions; however I think that short-term (with absolute time-limits no longer than 6 months), minor sanctions for serious human rights backsliding (as opposed to continuing situations) are a promising tool which has not been tried. PNTR makes that impossible.
If it were my choice I'd give them all green cards. However, it's not my choice. Nor is it these corporations' choice.
Poor, poor corporations: political realities force them into taking indentured servants.
C'mon, now. I might accept the argument that green cards are politically unrealistic, that H1B's are all we can ask for. But I don't think it's any slander on corporations to say that they're in it for the money. Unless citizens stand up for what's right, any corporation in existence would rather allow H1B visas (or, in some parallel universe where citizens' sense of what's right has degraded even further, outright slavery) than green cards. That's what corporations do; that's their job; and that's why it's our job to hold their feet to the fire.
[T]here is a rational belief that as China moves into the 21st century, the government and the people will have to change. Dictatorships don't foster productivity, nor does socialism.
I'm going to assume, perhaps unfairly, that you're a standard ESR type of techno-libertarian; that's certainly consistent with your post. If so, you value your right to bear arms. Because you want to shoot jack-booted federal agents? No, because you want them to know you could if they did something bad enough. Same principle with PNTR with China. They have a demonstrated contempt for human rights. A yearly ritual which focuses attention on their record is a concrete protection for their dissidents.
The invisible hand may or may not be good for human rights; as someone who's been a political prisoner right here in the US, I'd rather rely on attentive eyes.
In short, protectionism has been proven to be economically damaging for all.
H1B visas are protectionist. If I quit my job, I don't get thrown out of the country; why should that be the situation for my co-worker? Increase green cards for skilled workers, don't shackle them with H1B visas.
The efficiencies of the space elevator are from two sources. First, conventional chemical rockets are not energetically efficient. But there are many near-future improvements on that score, ion drives and the like. More fundamentally, the problem with any rocket is that you have to carry around your reaction mass (the stuff that goes down equal-and-opposite to you going up). If you can somehow push off of the earth and/or harvest your reaction mass from whereever you happen to be, you can get almost as much efficiency without this obscene amount of infrastructure.
Push off the earth: that would be a rail gun. The only problem is, if you're accelerating sattelites up the side of a mountain to supersonic speeds, it gets pretty loud. Local people (not to mention birds and animals) complain. The noise is the primary reason that ideas for a Hawaiian orbital railgun don't fly very far. The problem isn't technical, it's social, and so it's much harder. Tyranny is the only easy answer, because there are plenty of people who wouldn't tolerate incessant sonic booms for any amount of money or government carrots, and that's their right.
The other half of the answer is space elevator(s) in space. Huge cables are much easier to build when they don't have to deal with the atmosphere or be geosynchronous overall. You grab the bottom, run up to the top, and let go. Wait a minute, you say; now the cable itself is your reaction mass, so why doesn't the cable's orbit decay? Because you're pushing against the earth's magnetic field with currents through your cable.
The advantage to liquid nitrogen as a fuel is that the process of creating it could potentially actually remove CO2 from the air, even if you're burning carbon fuels for the energy. Since you use the smoke from your burning as the feedstock (not pure nitrogen), you create dry ice (solid C02) as well as liquid air. You could then take the purified CO2 and hide it somewhere - inject it in old oil wells, put it in your airtight biodomes to fertilize your hemp crop, poison deep-ocean fish with it. All of these ideas, of course, are pretty blue-sky, no pun intended.
Since you're taking the nitrogen from the air to start with, there's no "negative consequences" from releasing that nitrogen. And besides, nitrogen is already 4/5 of the atmosphere and relatively inert.
(BTW I got my one negative "offtopic" karma point for mentioning this technology in an alternative energy discussion about 7 months ago. This ain't new.)
I think they're still at the level of one operation on two qubits (AFAIK) which nobody really counts as QC. (NMR was there ~15 years ago.) But NMR is vacuum tubes - the only way to do things now, but destined to die quickly when the next thing comes around. The next thing may or may not be quantum dots, that's just a guess, but I'll wager lots that the first 1K quantum computer will not be a bulk system of nuclear spins coupled through chemical bonds. If it has even one of those 3 attributes I'd be surprised.
One advantage of using computers in the voting process itself is that they may make "instant run-off" style elections (aka preferential voting, aka australian-style) more user-friendly. The only coherent objection to these is that they might confuse some voters. With a computer holding your hand during the process (then printing out a hard-copy which you hand-carry to the ballot box to prevent fraud), this objection would evaporate.
(instant runoffs work like this: instead of just picking one person to vote for, you rank candidates in order of preference. For the "first ballot", only first choice votes are counted. But if nobody gets an absolute majority, a instant simulated runoff election is held. The lowest vote-getter is removed from the "ballot" and everyone who voted for that person is counted as voting for their second choice. This process continues until one candidate gets an absolute majority.
That way, you could vote for 1.Nader 2.Buchanan 3.Bush 4.Gore (or whatever) and be confident that your vote wasn't "thrown away" because if the vote came down to Bush and Gore you'd be counted voting for the frat boy. This would make 3rd parties more viable, and give even minority parties a strong negotiating stance ("Hey, Gore: change your platform to not fund Star Wars or the Columbian military, or we'll throw our second-choice votes to Bush en masse as a protest").
(of course, with the electoral college, things get complicated. But there is a unique, stable way to map in-state virtual run-offs among N candidates into binding directives on state electors for N ballots, and that's actually good, because the conversion could proceed state-by-state.)
This "quantum computer" is actually a vial full of mole quantities of different quantum computers. You poke at them with radio waves to program them and then use an NMR to read the results, which are a vote by all of the molecules.
That's fine, as long as 10^23 votes is enough to overwhelm any errors. But for a serious number of qubits, the unavoidable chance of quantum bitflip in each atom means that eventually less than one of those 10^23 molecules is in the correct starting state. Perhaps you can solve this by quantum error correction - the algorithms aren't worked out yet - but that multiplies the number of bits needed for a given problem by a factor of (provably) 2 or (probably) 3. Then you have the problem that any operation can only involve closely neighboring bits; to add register A to register C requires huge numbers of operations to shuffle with register B. Finally, to read or write to any given bit, you need a unique frequency to address that bit. With hundreds of bits, only a few can possibly have frequencies that stand out enough. These problems, combined, add one or more factors of N to the resources necessary; it's still polynomial, but...
Quantum dots - single particles, NOT entire atoms, confined electrically to a single quantum state - are more hopeful. Because they can be physically rearranged or put in more complex configurations and still physically addressed on an individual basis, the problems above go away or become more manageable.
Goal: change the world
Action: Refuse to censor. Get fired. Contact the media.
Side effect: poverty
Goal: protect the kiddies, unless they're persistent
Action: Get commercial censorware. Allow users to disable it with a password. Post flyer saying "NO PORN! If you want a password and have read our policy, email me your name. If cyberpatrol is blocking something you think it shouldn't be, email peacefire.org.". Then make a few spot checks of the log for the most frequent users.
Side effect: you give money to the bad guys.
Goal: Do what you can do on your own to make pr0n a nuisance
Action: block jpeg's and realmedia. Allow access with a login, as above
side effect: lots of pages will look cheesy without the login. Hate speech and textual porn will get through, but you probably won't get caught for that..gif porn will get through but most people looking for this will give up quickly because it's too much of a nuisance so you probably won't get caught here either.
What is with that chart of "loss due to piracy"? Note the source: Business Software Alliance. These numbers come from multiplying an estimate of the number of pirated copies of software by the price of that software. Of course, if all those people could not pirate software, only a fraction of them would actually buy it.
Not only is this chart a lie, but it adds nothing to the article. Does the fact that someone estimates that software piracy was low in 1996 have anything to do with abandonware? No. The whole chart, with its kitschy hardware-store font, is just there to give your brain a rest from reading. The c|net reporter wants a technical-looking visual, and the BSA is right there in his rolodex, ready to provide. It is essentially free advertising for the idea that software piracy is bad for the economy.
I happen to agree that software piracy is immoral. But I hate it that the BSA gets to be the Respectable Source that, by inclusion in every story remotely regarding piracy, sets the terms of the debate. So here are a few platitudes on the other side:
- morality and economy are not the same thing (unless you decide they are, in which case I pity you).
- a certain amount of software piracy is good for the economy and even good for the software industry. Whether we have more or less than that amount is debatable.
Excerpt from my Comments to patent office
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Protesting DMCA
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· Score: 1
It's a cheap shot to just copy this here, so I'm giving up my +1 bonus. But I think the dangers I cite here are real. DMCA puts *absolute control* of the media experience in the hands of copyright owners - as Jerry Mander pointed out with regard to TV, that's bad for the rest of us. It doesn't have to get to the point of somebody getting sued for finding a lie in a fake documentary for this to be scary.
Time-Warner, in their pro-DMCA comments (comment 43) offers a metaphor for the status of fair-use under the proposed DMCA. "A fair-use defense might allow a user to quote a passage from a book but it does not follow that the user is allowed to break into a bookstore and steal the book." This is, of course, true, but it has no bearing on the issue. We don't need a DMCA to make software or video piracy illegal any more than we need it to make breaking into bookstores illegal.
A more apt metaphor would be that the DMCA would make it illegal for the owner of a book to use scissors to clip a piece from that book. If you have an oversize book that in itself doesn't fit into a copy machine, how else would you acheive the kind of fair use protected by law? Even worse, this protection could prevent legitimate enjoyment of the work - a blind user might be unable to feed the book into her automated reading device without cutting it, or a fan might be unable to tape a favorite page to the wall of his room. It may sound as if I'm stretching the metaphor, but all of these activities have a direct analogue in the digital domain.
In the end, this is about much more than illicit copying. It is about who controls the experience. Imagine a video system designed to disable the "fast forward" button during the initial previews. If I, as owner of a video, am legally prohibited from circumventing such a system, I have lost my fundamental right to control my experience of something I own. If the medium is the message, this sends a very powerful message. The ultimate abuse that would be possible once the content providers could disable certain VCR buttons would be fake documentary footage with the pause button disabled. Anyone who found the stillframe where the shadows came out wrong would be liable for having circumvented the access protections.
Slashdot Mirror
It's easy. Just have the CIA sell some more crack. And have corporate-sponsored courtrooms.
"Guilty - the choice of a new generation"
Even six-round Rijndael, while theoretically "broken", is completely uncrackable with any known algorithm on today's hardware. IIRC it takes over 10^28 (ie 2^90) operations to crack. That's a savings of only 10^11 (2^38) over brute force. Say you're the NSA, and can afford today 10^6 computers each running at 10^12 operations per second. With your boxes all improving at moore's law, it'll be 15 years before you crack your first key; then 2 keys the in the following year.
Sorry about the email (most email programs accept it, but web-based email sites usually complain. To make it work drop the +slashdot.) I'm glad I broke my word and came back (I was bored, my work computer is crashed).
Approval fails several criteria. Strict approval violates pareto, because if everybody votes the same three candidates there is no way to tell which is actually preferred. It violates independence of irrelevant options. Say you have a vote between A,B, and C. C's supporters, a radical minority, approve only C, who comes in last, and A wins. If C were eliminated, they would have approved B, handing B the election. Approval must violate at least one criterion - just because it willfully ignores certain aspects of voter's true internal rankings does not make it immune from Arrow's theorem. At least now I understand why you state the theorem as you do; but I think your statement is very wrong.
Again, picking nits. As are you. Your ideal ideological continua are not always how things work. If Gore is the "center" candidate between Bush and Nader, then nobody should vote him last. But believe me, I know plenty of people who would do just that. Ability to gain first-place support and avoid elimination is actually a positive attribute in a politician. And as I said last time, your worst fear is that voters will vote tactically to elect exactly the person that approval would have elected anyway - hardly the end of the world. If you'll just acknowledge that IRV is superior to what we have today (unlike, admittedly, Borda), I'll shake on it and leave.
In this latest round you said "we" and "they" a few times, referring to some unspecified group of electoral reformers vs CVD. If your "we" has any presence in Washington state, I'd love to hear about it.
Yes, any condorcet-compliant method is in the abstract superior to IRV and approval. Black, Hansen, standard Condorcet. Unfortunately, these all more or less take computers to count and paragraphs to explain. They're open to fears of vote fraud, justified or not. That leaves us with IRV and approval. I see situations for both - as I've said, any "senatorial" body should be approval. I similarly think that given a number of aspects of human nature (many of which I've mentioned) IRV is better for executives.
But I would vote for the horrible tactical nightmare of Borda just to break the two-party stranglehold on American politics. Once we'd broken free, I'd have confidence that our representatives could enact true campaign finance reform as well as amending Borda to Hansen.
Hmm... I've just proven that RWE chooses from the smith set of condorcet winners. RWE is harder than IRV to explain, but just as easy to count (and because of greater stability, harder to defraud). Do you have any good explanations of RWE? (Should be called Instant Runoffs Without Elimination or if you hate "instant", Virtual Runoffs Without Elimination).
Email me. Nobody else is listening. I'd happily respond.
In fact I am very curious what your evidence is that Australian voters commonly vote tactically under IRV. I've never heard my Australian friends and family talk about that, and it seems counterintuitive. For a tactical vote to be useful, the three criteria are: I like A over B; I know that without my tactical vote, B is likely to be eliminated before A; and yet I know B has a better chance of winning than A. The only case that satisfies these criteria is when B is an acceptable compromise candidate and EXACTLY THE CANDIDATE THAT WOULD BE ELECTED BY APPROVAL. Also, my motivation to vote tactically is at worst proportional to how informed I am about the strength of the candidates - ie, I know what I'm doing. In approval, I'm more likely to mis-vote (in this case, not tactically, but by setting my approval standard too high or too low) the less informed and engaged I am in the system, the less I believe that compromise works. Thus, the current positive-feedback apathy cycle.
Also, IRV (as any ranking system) gives more information about people's preferences. Remember, voting is not only a way to pick a winner; it is a way to register opinions (thus all the talk of "mandates").
Has approval ever stood up to constitutional challenges? It seems to me more constitutionally questionable...
How would you feel about an "instant approval system":
1. voters rank candidates
2. first choices are counted
3. Majority(s)? Halt: highest wins.
4. all ballots choosing last place candidate are recounted as approval ballots with one more approval vote than they had before. (Continue to increment the numbers of approval votes if new votes are for already eliminated candidates)
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until there's a majority.
As to arrow's criteria: Approval fails (theoretically) the very first criterion: getting the correct ranking when everybody agrees (but are ignorant of the degree to which they agree). This criterion is arguably the very most important. In practice, this means that it is more vulnerable to fundraising disparities: if candidate A has strong support but low exposure and views similar to candidate B, IRV has a better chance of putting A over B than approval because in approval there's still a plurality-like "go with the flow, don't throw away your vote by voting only A" argument.
I'm picking nits. Honestly, I think you are too.
I WON'T READ THIS THREAD AGAIN. In all probability, NEITHER WILL ANYONE ELSE. Respond only via email.
Quick response:
1. please drop the ad-hominem; anonymity is legit but actually I have provided plenty of personal information and most geeks could probably find out where "homunculus" lives. Click on my name and you can send me email.
2. I didn't mean to start a flame war between IRV, Condorcet, Approval, et al. To me, any of these systems are so immeasurably better than the US status quo that the differences are immaterial. My reading of the political situation in my state is that IRV is the only one of these with a good chance of being adopted in the next few years, so I support IRV. If everyone only supports their own pet version we'll get nowhere.
3. How did I misquote Arrow? I stated the whole theorem in layman's terms, you just stated the "message". Arrow's theorem makes no moral statements about which of his conditions are more or less desirable or about whether there are other desirable qualities of voting systems; he just says you can't have it all.
4. IRV isn't as different from approval as you suggest. Remember, you don't have to rank everyone; if you only "approve" of 2 candidates, only rank those two. But don't be so factional about this: The problems with approval, IRV, or condorcet arise only in pathological situations, whereas the problems with the current situation are a matter of course.
I like IRV because, of the easily-explicable options, it gives the least emphasis on voting tactics. I rank nader, bush, gore, as 99, 2, 1 but would "approve" the first two for tactical reasons. Enough people like me and approval voting could easily elect a candidate that the majority dislikes. Approval voting also fails in the case of extreme factionalism. If we used approval voting to choose a voting system for the US, and everybody (as you apparently would) voted only for their favorite system because of nitpicking flaws in other systems, we'd effectively be using plurality voting (and we'd probably end up electing plurality voting).
If you vote for a 3rd party candidate (or for anyone but your state's winner), it doesn't really matter to you whether your vote gets thrown away at the state level or at the nationwide level. The point is to throw away as few votes as possible. In an election for a single executive position like president, that means that the winner should have some level of majority support.
There are websites and web pages that point out the valid public interests served by the electoral college system. My own point is simpler: at worst, the electoral college only distorts the popular will by a few percentage points. Anyone with more than 52% of the vote is pretty much guaranteed a win, and the cases where a majority candidate loses are extremely rare. Therefore, fighting something written into the federal constitution seems to me to be quixotic.
But our current system routinely throws away the votes of anyone who votes for a minor party. This is at least 7 percent every single election and would be much higher if people voted their conscience. Instant Runoff Voting (IRV, the system used by ICANN) has the power to change this. It is also a viable political issue (local issues in Vermont, Washington, and New Mexico have put it into the realm of feasibility in these states; and once one state switches it could become a trend).
[technical note: if, due to IRV, a "minor" party candidate took a single state, that state's electors would see that their candidate had lost nationwide and vote their state's second choice among the stronger candidates. There are a few minor legal changes necessary to facilitate this process.]
In summary: this questioner's concern for proportionality is important for legislatures a non-starter for executive positions like the presidency. They should either fight for IRV on the presidential scene, or move to state or local politics and fight for proportionally representative legislative bodies (many, many countries do this, and it would be a huge step forward. Americans who argue against proportional legislatures as deadlock-prone are usually confused and really arguing against parliamentary selection of the executive.)
Despite the trolls, Instant Runoff Voting (IRV, aka Preferential Voting) is generally considered far superior to plurality winner-take-all. In the US, there is no constitutional problem with IRV (in fact, it has been endorsed in a consenting opinion by the Supreme Court, and by figures as diverse as Ralph Nader and Rush Limbaugh).
Due to a recent supreme court decision which invalidated blanket primary systems, the state of WA is revamping its primary system. Instant runoffs, due to their ability to collapse multiple virtual runoffs into a single round, are a cheaper replacement for primaries. It is very possible that the many groups interested in better democracy in WA (the Grange, the League of Women Voters, and the minor parties) will use the citizen interest in this issue to run IRV as a state initiative. If you're interested in this issue, contact me via email (it's not even obscured; leave the cookie in, please, even though I can handle it with or without).
ObOnTopic:
Anyone interested in voting systems should know about Arrow's Theorem, which states that there are no "perfect" ; voting systems. The only way to have a group of people preferentially rank a group of options so
1) new options will fit neatly into the ranking without mixing things up;
2) if everybody agrees on a ranking that ranking is chosen;
and 3) new voters who prefer A to B never cause B to win over A
is to have a dictatorship (ignore all voters except one). My personal choice of "ideal" system is to elect executives via borda selection among the condorcet-winning group. And then a house selected by proportional representation and a senate by approval voting. Hey, a boy can dream.
still, double is over the top.
...making a real-life 3D display or making some kind of working VR setup? Note that anything on the 3d display will be "ghostly" - I don't want to be looking through the front of whatever object and seeing the backside of it too. Whereas a single 2d screen that can send different images to your 2 eyes, and that can sense where your head is (and also tell when you move the screen itself) is probably much cheaper.
When my Palm III (to take a nice cache-less example) wants to read a word from RAM it asks for the address and then waits (I think) 3 clock cycles. If it read it any sooner, the memory chip might not be ready yet - the 0's don't change to 1's in a nice ideal square wave, they relax there exponentially, and if the processor reads something that's halfway from 0 to 1 who knows what it will think.
Why 3 clock cycles? Because that's the worst case - if I have a relatively crappy RAM chip, and my battery is close to dead, and it happens to be a really hot day, that's how long it will take. But what if my processor watched the voltage carefully enough to know when the memory was ready? After all, if the voltage reaches 1 after two clock cycles, you know that's where it's supposed to be.
And once you start thinking that way, why do you need a clock at all? You ask the memory for a value, and wait only long enough until it's ready; ask the addition ciruitry to add that number to register n, and wait only long enough until it's ready; ask the pipeline for your next instruction, etc. If async were a factory, instead of having some fixed-speed conveyer belt running through it, you just have individuals handing each other tasks, and a very careful setup so nobody starts to do anything until all the materials they need arrive at their station.
This obviously takes some high-level wizardry to design. Instead of just doing the next step on the next digital tick of the clock, each part of the chip must make sophisticated analog judgements about when its input is ready and when it's possibly still just a glitch. But what you get is a chip that overclocks itself to exactly its own limits. You'd sell computers rated to "greater than xxx Mhz" instead of just "xxx Mhz", and cooling your computer would give you immediate speed improvements.
Probably the first use for async is for extremely low power devices. If you just have a teeny little solar cell which delivers fluctuating power (or a heat-engine running off of daily temperature differences or body heat, or whatever), well, the chip will take as much power as it gets and just operate slower when the power drops. I am sure your sci-fi imagination can come up with possible applications.
Async does have major promise, especially for low-power. However, if you just sprinkle magic async dust over an existing chip design, you get a processor that is only as fast as its poorest transistor. Transmeta, which has a fraction of the transistors (and a head start on the software which could adapt more intelligently to the vagiaries of a clockless chip), would benefit far more from this transition than traditional x86 designs.
In effect, you have parallel advances. There's fabrication technology, where the big guys have the advantage, but that's just a matter of money. There's sync/async, which hasn't been opened up yet. And there's software, where Transmeta does indeed have a head start of 5 years... minus however long intel/AMD have been running secret initiatives to do Transmeta-like tricks in software.
AMD or Intel just has to take their translation hardware and write code that does the same thing (if they wanted to do it). Not the same thing. Hardware does one thing, fast; software can be more flexible. Transmeta's does lots of things that hardware cannot - branch probability marking, incremental compilation, etc.
Politicians corrupt themselves, and businesses just coronate the most corrupt.
Email me if you want to continue this discussion.
Suffice it to say that I disagree with almost everything you said and find the illogical extremes of your faith in progress laughable, and can back it up with an argument on purely logical, nonideological grounds.
Except when you say that corporations often act in the public interest (employing people, lobbying for H1B visas). Yes, corporations do a huge amount of good, and versus the current situation more H1B's is good. Yet their interests (more H1B's) are not identical to the public interest (more green cards). Even when the two lie in the same direction, it's important not to forget that, as your earlier statement that "H1B's are all that corporations can acheive" clearly did.
Likewise, you can't put a gun to the entire countries head to tell them to produce at the level of modern day US
Who said anything about asking them to produce? I may be misinterpreting, but this sentence seriously makes me worry that you are no longer even able to distinguish between increased GNP and improved human rights.
Please do tell.
I was held in jail in DC for 5 days after crossing police lines april 17th. My own experience is a very complicated, multifaceted issue and there's not space to discuss it here. The (IMO indisputable) fact that the US has political prisoners was off-topic; my main point was that I have first-hand experience of how much of a positive difference active outside scrutiny can make to the treatment of those in custody. (Also, the jail authorities, who were under a court-order and threats of economic sanctions due to abuses in the late 80's, were much more responsive to such outside pressure than the US Marshals, who personally threatened to beat me up.)
What have your attentive eyes done for the Chinese thus far?
From amnesty: "the serious deterioration in human rights called into question the authorities' sincerity in signing key human rights conventions in the previous two years. It also represented a serious setback for the policy of dialogue on human rights pursued by some governments."
It seems to me that the level of public scrutiny in the US was higher in 97-98 than in 99, and that that's correlated with the setbacks amnesty noted. It also seems to me obvious that without the "hook" of the yearly congressional debate the US media will report on China's human rights moves even less. I do not advocate long term trade sanctions; however I think that short-term (with absolute time-limits no longer than 6 months), minor sanctions for serious human rights backsliding (as opposed to continuing situations) are a promising tool which has not been tried. PNTR makes that impossible.
If it were my choice I'd give them all green cards. However, it's not my choice. Nor is it these corporations' choice.
Poor, poor corporations: political realities force them into taking indentured servants.
C'mon, now. I might accept the argument that green cards are politically unrealistic, that H1B's are all we can ask for. But I don't think it's any slander on corporations to say that they're in it for the money. Unless citizens stand up for what's right, any corporation in existence would rather allow H1B visas (or, in some parallel universe where citizens' sense of what's right has degraded even further, outright slavery) than green cards. That's what corporations do; that's their job; and that's why it's our job to hold their feet to the fire.
[T]here is a rational belief that as China moves into the 21st century, the government and the people will have to change. Dictatorships don't foster productivity, nor does socialism.
I'm going to assume, perhaps unfairly, that you're a standard ESR type of techno-libertarian; that's certainly consistent with your post. If so, you value your right to bear arms. Because you want to shoot jack-booted federal agents? No, because you want them to know you could if they did something bad enough. Same principle with PNTR with China. They have a demonstrated contempt for human rights. A yearly ritual which focuses attention on their record is a concrete protection for their dissidents.
The invisible hand may or may not be good for human rights; as someone who's been a political prisoner right here in the US, I'd rather rely on attentive eyes.
In short, protectionism has been proven to be economically damaging for all.
H1B visas are protectionist. If I quit my job, I don't get thrown out of the country; why should that be the situation for my co-worker? Increase green cards for skilled workers, don't shackle them with H1B visas.
The efficiencies of the space elevator are from two sources. First, conventional chemical rockets are not energetically efficient. But there are many near-future improvements on that score, ion drives and the like. More fundamentally, the problem with any rocket is that you have to carry around your reaction mass (the stuff that goes down equal-and-opposite to you going up). If you can somehow push off of the earth and/or harvest your reaction mass from whereever you happen to be, you can get almost as much efficiency without this obscene amount of infrastructure.
Push off the earth: that would be a rail gun. The only problem is, if you're accelerating sattelites up the side of a mountain to supersonic speeds, it gets pretty loud. Local people (not to mention birds and animals) complain. The noise is the primary reason that ideas for a Hawaiian orbital railgun don't fly very far. The problem isn't technical, it's social, and so it's much harder. Tyranny is the only easy answer, because there are plenty of people who wouldn't tolerate incessant sonic booms for any amount of money or government carrots, and that's their right.
The other half of the answer is space elevator(s) in space. Huge cables are much easier to build when they don't have to deal with the atmosphere or be geosynchronous overall. You grab the bottom, run up to the top, and let go. Wait a minute, you say; now the cable itself is your reaction mass, so why doesn't the cable's orbit decay? Because you're pushing against the earth's magnetic field with currents through your cable.
The advantage to liquid nitrogen as a fuel is that the process of creating it could potentially actually remove CO2 from the air, even if you're burning carbon fuels for the energy. Since you use the smoke from your burning as the feedstock (not pure nitrogen), you create dry ice (solid C02) as well as liquid air. You could then take the purified CO2 and hide it somewhere - inject it in old oil wells, put it in your airtight biodomes to fertilize your hemp crop, poison deep-ocean fish with it. All of these ideas, of course, are pretty blue-sky, no pun intended.
Since you're taking the nitrogen from the air to start with, there's no "negative consequences" from releasing that nitrogen. And besides, nitrogen is already 4/5 of the atmosphere and relatively inert.
(BTW I got my one negative "offtopic" karma point for mentioning this technology in an alternative energy discussion about 7 months ago. This ain't new.)
I think they're still at the level of one operation on two qubits (AFAIK) which nobody really counts as QC. (NMR was there ~15 years ago.) But NMR is vacuum tubes - the only way to do things now, but destined to die quickly when the next thing comes around. The next thing may or may not be quantum dots, that's just a guess, but I'll wager lots that the first 1K quantum computer will not be a bulk system of nuclear spins coupled through chemical bonds. If it has even one of those 3 attributes I'd be surprised.
One advantage of using computers in the voting process itself is that they may make "instant run-off" style elections (aka preferential voting, aka australian-style) more user-friendly. The only coherent objection to these is that they might confuse some voters. With a computer holding your hand during the process (then printing out a hard-copy which you hand-carry to the ballot box to prevent fraud), this objection would evaporate.
(instant runoffs work like this: instead of just picking one person to vote for, you rank candidates in order of preference. For the "first ballot", only first choice votes are counted. But if nobody gets an absolute majority, a instant simulated runoff election is held. The lowest vote-getter is removed from the "ballot" and everyone who voted for that person is counted as voting for their second choice. This process continues until one candidate gets an absolute majority.
That way, you could vote for 1.Nader 2.Buchanan 3.Bush 4.Gore (or whatever) and be confident that your vote wasn't "thrown away" because if the vote came down to Bush and Gore you'd be counted voting for the frat boy. This would make 3rd parties more viable, and give even minority parties a strong negotiating stance ("Hey, Gore: change your platform to not fund Star Wars or the Columbian military, or we'll throw our second-choice votes to Bush en masse as a protest").
(of course, with the electoral college, things get complicated. But there is a unique, stable way to map in-state virtual run-offs among N candidates into binding directives on state electors for N ballots, and that's actually good, because the conversion could proceed state-by-state.)
This "quantum computer" is actually a vial full of mole quantities of different quantum computers. You poke at them with radio waves to program them and then use an NMR to read the results, which are a vote by all of the molecules.
That's fine, as long as 10^23 votes is enough to overwhelm any errors. But for a serious number of qubits, the unavoidable chance of quantum bitflip in each atom means that eventually less than one of those 10^23 molecules is in the correct starting state. Perhaps you can solve this by quantum error correction - the algorithms aren't worked out yet - but that multiplies the number of bits needed for a given problem by a factor of (provably) 2 or (probably) 3. Then you have the problem that any operation can only involve closely neighboring bits; to add register A to register C requires huge numbers of operations to shuffle with register B. Finally, to read or write to any given bit, you need a unique frequency to address that bit. With hundreds of bits, only a few can possibly have frequencies that stand out enough. These problems, combined, add one or more factors of N to the resources necessary; it's still polynomial, but...
Quantum dots - single particles, NOT entire atoms, confined electrically to a single quantum state - are more hopeful. Because they can be physically rearranged or put in more complex configurations and still physically addressed on an individual basis, the problems above go away or become more manageable.
Goal: change the world
.gif porn will get through but most people looking for this will give up quickly because it's too much of a nuisance so you probably won't get caught here either.
Action: Refuse to censor. Get fired. Contact the media.
Side effect: poverty
Goal: protect the kiddies, unless they're persistent
Action: Get commercial censorware. Allow users to disable it with a password. Post flyer saying "NO PORN! If you want a password and have read our policy, email me your name. If cyberpatrol is blocking something you think it shouldn't be, email peacefire.org.". Then make a few spot checks of the log for the most frequent users.
Side effect: you give money to the bad guys.
Goal: Do what you can do on your own to make pr0n a nuisance
Action: block jpeg's and realmedia. Allow access with a login, as above
side effect: lots of pages will look cheesy without the login. Hate speech and textual porn will get through, but you probably won't get caught for that.
What is with that chart of "loss due to piracy"? Note the source: Business Software Alliance. These numbers come from multiplying an estimate of the number of pirated copies of software by the price of that software. Of course, if all those people could not pirate software, only a fraction of them would actually buy it. Not only is this chart a lie, but it adds nothing to the article. Does the fact that someone estimates that software piracy was low in 1996 have anything to do with abandonware? No. The whole chart, with its kitschy hardware-store font, is just there to give your brain a rest from reading. The c|net reporter wants a technical-looking visual, and the BSA is right there in his rolodex, ready to provide. It is essentially free advertising for the idea that software piracy is bad for the economy. I happen to agree that software piracy is immoral. But I hate it that the BSA gets to be the Respectable Source that, by inclusion in every story remotely regarding piracy, sets the terms of the debate. So here are a few platitudes on the other side: - morality and economy are not the same thing (unless you decide they are, in which case I pity you). - a certain amount of software piracy is good for the economy and even good for the software industry. Whether we have more or less than that amount is debatable.
It's a cheap shot to just copy this here, so I'm giving up my +1 bonus. But I think the dangers I cite here are real. DMCA puts *absolute control* of the media experience in the hands of copyright owners - as Jerry Mander pointed out with regard to TV, that's bad for the rest of us. It doesn't have to get to the point of somebody getting sued for finding a lie in a fake documentary for this to be scary.
Time-Warner, in their pro-DMCA comments (comment 43) offers a metaphor for the status of fair-use under the proposed DMCA. "A fair-use defense might allow a user to quote a passage from a book but it does not follow that the user is allowed to break into a bookstore and steal the book." This is, of course, true, but it has no bearing on the issue. We don't need a DMCA to make software or video piracy illegal any more than we need it to make breaking into bookstores illegal.
A more apt metaphor would be that the DMCA would make it illegal for the owner of a book to use scissors to clip a piece from that book. If you have an oversize book that in itself doesn't fit into a copy machine, how else would you acheive the kind of fair use protected by law? Even worse, this protection could prevent legitimate enjoyment of the work - a blind user might be unable to feed the book into her automated reading device without cutting it, or a fan might be unable to tape a favorite page to the wall of his room. It may sound as if I'm stretching the metaphor, but all of these activities have a direct analogue in the digital domain.
In the end, this is about much more than illicit copying. It is about who controls the experience. Imagine a video system designed to disable the "fast forward" button during the initial previews. If I, as owner of a video, am legally prohibited from circumventing such a system, I have lost my fundamental right to control my experience of something I own. If the medium is the message, this sends a very powerful message. The ultimate abuse that would be possible once the content providers could disable certain VCR buttons would be fake documentary footage with the pause button disabled. Anyone who found the stillframe where the shadows came out wrong would be liable for having circumvented the access protections.
I stand corrected.