I'm confused. I think we were talking about general elections, but you are talking about the *primaries* now? There were something like 15 Democrats in the running when this all started over a year ago. The odds of the one winning having been your favorite at the start, despite whatever your best efforts may have been, are thus a smidgen under 7%.
My guy at the start was Richardson. His politics are in roughly the right place, he had tons of foriegn policy experiance, and I figured having him as the headliner might tie hispanics (the ethnicity of this country's future) to the party for a generation or more. However, none of that matters a bit if the Republicans can walk all over him in the general, and he turned out to be a very inferior campaigner.
What we got out of the primary deathmach deathmarch was the strongest, most inspiring campaigner of the lot, with much more practical campaign experience than he would have otherwise had, and most of the unfair attacks against him already "old news". So all and all, I can't really complain.
However, we were talking about the *general* election, not the primary. If you live in Indiana, it could be argued that your support matters a lot more than my (presumed red) Oklahoma support. Indiana is currently one of the "swing" states. With some volunteer work, you could really make a difference. Personally.
I guarantee you the right-wing evangelical churches and wingnut homes are going to pour voluntters into their local GOP headquarters across this nation in the last week of the campaign, giving everything they have into the republican get-out-the-vote efforts. They will work with the dedication of the True Believers. Quite a few more will go into places where the uneducated or powerless hang out and try to trick or intimidate them into not voting.
If your only counter to that is to sit on your butt until election day, then go cast your one vote and hope magic happens, then you deserve to lose.
In the subject, you name Bush. In your post, you name "your government"
Guess what, they are not one and the same. Bush has issued 12 vetoes during 8 years. 4 of those vetoes were overridden.
All 12 vetos were handed down after the Democrats took control of Congress in 2006. Bush is the only president *ever* to go 6 years without issuing a veto. Why is that? Because before then Congress was his bitch. The fact is that from 2000 to 2006 (particularly after 9/11/2001) the US government was essentially a wholly-owned subsidary of the Bush administration.
Even now the remaining Republicans are only "independent" of him in minor cosmetic ways (mostly centered around their desire to be re-elected somehow). They may not be able to push their agenda very well anymore, but there are still more than enough of them to stop anyone else from doing so. I suppose paralysis is an improvement over continuing to dig our gigantic hole deeper, but it's not much of one.
I was tempted to mod this up because it's an interesting point I'd like to see more discussion on. A very good argument can be made that semi-perpetual monopolies represented by our current copyright regime badly violate conservative princpiles.
However, I do have to disagree with most of what you actually wrote. If you are defining writers and performers as "liberals" here, then the old copyright laws we had up until the 70's were just fine for them. They got a few decades to live off of the last success until they could produce more of their art. That's all an artist really needs.
The people pushing things to their current rediculous levels, and profiting greatly by it, are mostly the likes of Viacom (Sony), Disney, Universal (NBC (GE)), etc. Big companies, aka: Republican sponsors. If you look at who in Congress now has actually been pushing these bills the hardest, you see names like Bono and Hatch. If you want to call those two republicans "liberals", I'm not real sure what that term means anymore.
BTW: Here's a direct quote from Mary Bono, on the floor of the US congress:
Actually, Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution.... As you know, there is also [then-MPAA president] Jack Valenti's proposal for term to last forever less one day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress.[
All sorts of species evolve in spite of any particular start or length of reproductive capacity.
Quite. Perhaps the average age of human fathers has shortened a few years. However, mice live only about 4 weeks on average. I guess they have quit evolving too then? Good thing our ancestors weren't creatures of this sort, or we would have never evolved at all, huh?
Perhaps he just didn't want to waste bytes insulting our intelligence. Its pretty obvious he was a Democrat. A Republican would have no motivation whatsoever to do such a thing.
The Democrats controlled cogress that year too. They had a 2 to one majority in both houses. It's fair to say that the Civil Rights Act could *not* have passed without democratic leadership and support. Perhaps some Republicans (from their now defunct liberal wing) helped, but they were not the drivers.
Also of note, in the election of 1964 every state voted Democratic except the Republican candidate's home state, and the 5 states of the deep south. Save for when native sons Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were running, those 5 southern states have not voted for a Democrat since. Probably won't this year either, although Georgia's an outside shot.
It's only wrong if you are doing it with a political agenda.
Well, you aren't allowed (by law) to steer registrants to any particular party or candidate. There's a slot for party, but all we can do is ask which they want, and list them the options. We aren't even allowed to talk about politics in general or wear partisan clothing. It would also be illegal (and immoral!) to chuck out applications for a party we don't like or refuse to complete one for partisan reasons. If it gets filled out, we will turn it in with the rest.
That being said, I most certianly *am* doing it with a political agenda. We picked a housing project for a reason. I think the entire afternoon we had 1 indepedent register, and *no* republicans. All the rest were democrats. If anyone has a problem with that, I'm sorry but I don't. Feel free to go to polo matches and Chamber of Commerce meetings and register anyone you can there if you don't like it.
How on earth is it "underhanded" to help underprivileged people exercise their right to vote?
I spent my Saturday doing it, and felt pretty damn good afterwards for someone who, by right-wing ideology, is doing something morally wrong. I helped a lady born in 1925 who can't talk or get around much anymore (but who had political news on the TV) fill out an absentee ballot application. If it weren't for me, she would not be voting this year. I helped another lady born in 1923 fill out her first ever voter registraition! I had a guy invite me into his (incredibly modest rent-controlled) home, sit down next to his open bible while we filled out his form, and tell me dead serious that he felt God sent me there that day to get him registered. I wouldn't nessecarily agree, but who knows? Perhaps.
As the saying goes, if this is what being wrong feels like, I don't want to be Right.
Ah, I didn't read the downmodded GP. I see what you are saying now.
I'd say more likely he sees his favorite "team" losing, and can't accept the idea that it might be because they *deserve* to loose, and not because the other "team" is cheating somehow.
anything the tax payers pay for should be owned by the taxpayers and controlled by taxpayers as far as can be deemed appropriate.
Usually anything developed under DoD contract will be owned by the DoD. The nice thing about this is that it means if you are working on a DoD contract, you can ask for the sources to any other relevant DoD program that might help you in your development.
That's only the theory of course. The reality is that anything under someone else's bailiwick is going to require navigating a bueracracy that often would make Daedalus hang his head in shame. Plus some code is also classified. But the biggest problem is that for code to do you any good, you have to know it exists, and not many DoD organizations promote their sources this way.
Still, I think this should be the model for any company paying for development of software. It is simply unacceptable to pay for someone else to create themselves "property", which they can then refuse to give you (or improve for you) some day.
Are you telling me that in the US, if people don't do this "registration" thing a month in advance and they show up the day of the election, they won't be allowed to vote in some states? Huh?
Yup. Most states, actually.
Not only that, but even if you do bother to go out of your way to register to vote, you can get purged from the rolls for any number of reasons. Congress passed a law to limit this a few years back. Election boards now aren't allowed to purge non-felons unless they haven't voted in 8 years *and* don't respond to a notice sent to their registered address. This was clearly intended as a baseline to limit abuses, but my own state took that law as a suggestion, and wrote its own laws to *require* counties to do purges in just that way once a year.
Of course poorer folk move way more often than rich people, which means it takes a lot more work (and knowldege of the laws) for them to keep themselves registered. This has the net effect amplifying the political power of the rich. To see this in action, check out this article from my local paper. Note the highlighted areas where the county kicked over three thousand voters off the rolls in the last two years are the poorer black and hispanic areas of the city. These areas aren't losing people either, just voters.
Here in Oklahoma your registration application must be postmarked by this Friday to be elegible for the general election on Nov 4. If you live in Oklahoma, you can check your voter registration records with the state here, and download and print out a registration application here.
For other states, I'd suggest getting information by visting this site. Google also has a nice site set up, but it doesn't seem to have my state's polling information loaded yet. Perhaps you will have better luck. There's a new Will.i.am youtube video promoting it too. I'd link it, but I'm at work. Search youtube for "5 Friends" and you should find it easily.
If everyone involved was being "foolish" on a massive scale, perhaps we should look at the possibility that the rules (or lack therof) of the game they were playing was encouraging foolish behavior, no?
The real root cause of all this was the blind rush to deregulation that congress has engaged in over the last 30 years. A game with no rules isn't any fun for anyone.
Technically that was against the *county* government.
I believe the last armed revolt against the Federal government was the Green Corn Rebellion in 1917. It happened in that old reliable hotbed of left-wing activity, Oklahoma.
The only states that matter in a winner take all system are "battleground states". If we switched to popular vote, Alaska, the plains and Hawaii would still be ignored, but at least then the rest of the population would actually have a say
The problem is we can't "switch" systems as easy as say switching cola brands. Our system is written into the Constitution, which was made devilishly hard to amend (again, so there'd be no easy way for Northern states to ever gang up and vote away slavery).
However, we can get about %50 of the way there with no constitutional change. States get a number of delagates equivalent to their congressional representation, and its up to states how they select their own delagates. So what a couple of states (Maine and Nebraska) do is only select the delegates corresponding to the two senators as statewide winner-take-all. The delegates corresponding to the state's House of Representatives go to the candidate who won that House district.
Sadly, these are both small states, so the most a loser in either state can really hope for is 1 elector. It'd be interesting to see how things would change if New York, California, Florida, and Texas did this. The biggest drawback I see is that district gerrymandering would become even more important to the national parties. The other issue is that it doesn't help the 8 states with only three EVs at all. Still, they're already getting more EV's per voter than anyone else, so I don't think they should complain.:-)
Turing was not a programmer. If the list had been of famous computer scientists (or possibly even mathematicians) then he'd have been in there for sure.
That's arguably true in a very narrow sense. However, he invented the modern concept of an algorithm, and showed how to implement them with simple machines. Most of us would call implementing an algorithm on machines "programming". However, these were always theoretical implementations. You could argue it either way I suppose, but if Ada Lovelace belongs on there, Alan Turing does as well.
So you came up with a different list than the wikipedia entry, and somehow yours is more authoritative?
My list isn't entirely different, its a subset. I wasn't trying to come up with a new list, just make the one he used better. I don't believe I tried to sell it as "authoratative" either. That's what YMMV is there for. You could probably do exactly what I did and come up with a similar but different subset. Your list would almost certianly be better than the original too.
The reasons I gave for leaving people off actually apply to everyone you mentioned. For example, I only know Bill Joy's name because of Sun. Perhaps you are different, but I suspect some of the names I know you don't, and the effect would even out.
A special note about Jay Miner: it actually did pain me to not throw him on there. He's on my personal heroes list right under Alan Turing (how in the Hell is he not on that page?) However, then it wouldn't have been a subset. As you correctly pointed out, I'm not exactly proving anything by just throwing up a list made up entirely out of my own head. Perhaps the correct way to solve that problem is to add what we consider the "missing names" to the original wiki page, no?
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I'm confused. I think we were talking about general elections, but you are talking about the *primaries* now? There were something like 15 Democrats in the running when this all started over a year ago. The odds of the one winning having been your favorite at the start, despite whatever your best efforts may have been, are thus a smidgen under 7%.
My guy at the start was Richardson. His politics are in roughly the right place, he had tons of foriegn policy experiance, and I figured having him as the headliner might tie hispanics (the ethnicity of this country's future) to the party for a generation or more. However, none of that matters a bit if the Republicans can walk all over him in the general, and he turned out to be a very inferior campaigner.
What we got out of the primary deathmach deathmarch was the strongest, most inspiring campaigner of the lot, with much more practical campaign experience than he would have otherwise had, and most of the unfair attacks against him already "old news". So all and all, I can't really complain.
However, we were talking about the *general* election, not the primary. If you live in Indiana, it could be argued that your support matters a lot more than my (presumed red) Oklahoma support. Indiana is currently one of the "swing" states. With some volunteer work, you could really make a difference. Personally.
What should I have done, other than vote for other candidates and encourage friends and family members to do the same?
Well, would you like a list?
I guarantee you the right-wing evangelical churches and wingnut homes are going to pour voluntters into their local GOP headquarters across this nation in the last week of the campaign, giving everything they have into the republican get-out-the-vote efforts. They will work with the dedication of the True Believers. Quite a few more will go into places where the uneducated or powerless hang out and try to trick or intimidate them into not voting.
If your only counter to that is to sit on your butt until election day, then go cast your one vote and hope magic happens, then you deserve to lose.
In the subject, you name Bush.
In your post, you name "your government"
Guess what, they are not one and the same.
Bush has issued 12 vetoes during 8 years.
4 of those vetoes were overridden.
All 12 vetos were handed down after the Democrats took control of Congress in 2006. Bush is the only president *ever* to go 6 years without issuing a veto. Why is that? Because before then Congress was his bitch. The fact is that from 2000 to 2006 (particularly after 9/11/2001) the US government was essentially a wholly-owned subsidary of the Bush administration.
Even now the remaining Republicans are only "independent" of him in minor cosmetic ways (mostly centered around their desire to be re-elected somehow). They may not be able to push their agenda very well anymore, but there are still more than enough of them to stop anyone else from doing so. I suppose paralysis is an improvement over continuing to dig our gigantic hole deeper, but it's not much of one.
Can't stop to talk more, the weather's heating up and we're all off to the beach now, then maybe a barbeque later
Don't forget to check your shoes with a stick first.
I was tempted to mod this up because it's an interesting point I'd like to see more discussion on. A very good argument can be made that semi-perpetual monopolies represented by our current copyright regime badly violate conservative princpiles.
However, I do have to disagree with most of what you actually wrote. If you are defining writers and performers as "liberals" here, then the old copyright laws we had up until the 70's were just fine for them. They got a few decades to live off of the last success until they could produce more of their art. That's all an artist really needs.
The people pushing things to their current rediculous levels, and profiting greatly by it, are mostly the likes of Viacom (Sony), Disney, Universal (NBC (GE)), etc. Big companies, aka: Republican sponsors. If you look at who in Congress now has actually been pushing these bills the hardest, you see names like Bono and Hatch. If you want to call those two republicans "liberals", I'm not real sure what that term means anymore.
BTW: Here's a direct quote from Mary Bono, on the floor of the US congress:
Quite. Perhaps the average age of human fathers has shortened a few years. However, mice live only about 4 weeks on average. I guess they have quit evolving too then? Good thing our ancestors weren't creatures of this sort, or we would have never evolved at all, huh?
What an idiot.
Perhaps he just didn't want to waste bytes insulting our intelligence. Its pretty obvious he was a Democrat. A Republican would have no motivation whatsoever to do such a thing.
The Democrats controlled cogress that year too. They had a 2 to one majority in both houses. It's fair to say that the Civil Rights Act could *not* have passed without democratic leadership and support. Perhaps some Republicans (from their now defunct liberal wing) helped, but they were not the drivers.
Also of note, in the election of 1964 every state voted Democratic except the Republican candidate's home state, and the 5 states of the deep south. Save for when native sons Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were running, those 5 southern states have not voted for a Democrat since. Probably won't this year either, although Georgia's an outside shot.
Well, you aren't allowed (by law) to steer registrants to any particular party or candidate. There's a slot for party, but all we can do is ask which they want, and list them the options. We aren't even allowed to talk about politics in general or wear partisan clothing. It would also be illegal (and immoral!) to chuck out applications for a party we don't like or refuse to complete one for partisan reasons. If it gets filled out, we will turn it in with the rest.
That being said, I most certianly *am* doing it with a political agenda. We picked a housing project for a reason. I think the entire afternoon we had 1 indepedent register, and *no* republicans. All the rest were democrats. If anyone has a problem with that, I'm sorry but I don't. Feel free to go to polo matches and Chamber of Commerce meetings and register anyone you can there if you don't like it.
I spent my Saturday doing it, and felt pretty damn good afterwards for someone who, by right-wing ideology, is doing something morally wrong. I helped a lady born in 1925 who can't talk or get around much anymore (but who had political news on the TV) fill out an absentee ballot application. If it weren't for me, she would not be voting this year. I helped another lady born in 1923 fill out her first ever voter registraition! I had a guy invite me into his (incredibly modest rent-controlled) home, sit down next to his open bible while we filled out his form, and tell me dead serious that he felt God sent me there that day to get him registered. I wouldn't nessecarily agree, but who knows? Perhaps.
As the saying goes, if this is what being wrong feels like, I don't want to be Right.
Ah, I didn't read the downmodded GP. I see what you are saying now.
I'd say more likely he sees his favorite "team" losing, and can't accept the idea that it might be because they *deserve* to loose, and not because the other "team" is cheating somehow.
Surely you didn't mean this to look as racist as it came out...
Usually anything developed under DoD contract will be owned by the DoD. The nice thing about this is that it means if you are working on a DoD contract, you can ask for the sources to any other relevant DoD program that might help you in your development.
That's only the theory of course. The reality is that anything under someone else's bailiwick is going to require navigating a bueracracy that often would make Daedalus hang his head in shame. Plus some code is also classified. But the biggest problem is that for code to do you any good, you have to know it exists, and not many DoD organizations promote their sources this way.
Still, I think this should be the model for any company paying for development of software. It is simply unacceptable to pay for someone else to create themselves "property", which they can then refuse to give you (or improve for you) some day.
Yup. Most states, actually.
Not only that, but even if you do bother to go out of your way to register to vote, you can get purged from the rolls for any number of reasons. Congress passed a law to limit this a few years back. Election boards now aren't allowed to purge non-felons unless they haven't voted in 8 years *and* don't respond to a notice sent to their registered address. This was clearly intended as a baseline to limit abuses, but my own state took that law as a suggestion, and wrote its own laws to *require* counties to do purges in just that way once a year.
Of course poorer folk move way more often than rich people, which means it takes a lot more work (and knowldege of the laws) for them to keep themselves registered. This has the net effect amplifying the political power of the rich. To see this in action, check out this article from my local paper. Note the highlighted areas where the county kicked over three thousand voters off the rolls in the last two years are the poorer black and hispanic areas of the city. These areas aren't losing people either, just voters.
Hmmm...I wonder who George W is voting for?
Here in Oklahoma your registration application must be postmarked by this Friday to be elegible for the general election on Nov 4. If you live in Oklahoma, you can check your voter registration records with the state here, and download and print out a registration application here.
For other states, I'd suggest getting information by visting this site. Google also has a nice site set up, but it doesn't seem to have my state's polling information loaded yet. Perhaps you will have better luck. There's a new Will.i.am youtube video promoting it too. I'd link it, but I'm at work. Search youtube for "5 Friends" and you should find it easily.
If everyone involved was being "foolish" on a massive scale, perhaps we should look at the possibility that the rules (or lack therof) of the game they were playing was encouraging foolish behavior, no?
The real root cause of all this was the blind rush to deregulation that congress has engaged in over the last 30 years. A game with no rules isn't any fun for anyone.
Technically that was against the *county* government.
I believe the last armed revolt against the Federal government was the Green Corn Rebellion in 1917. It happened in that old reliable hotbed of left-wing activity, Oklahoma.
Nice logic. If I told you I was going to try to rob your house, would you just walk up to me and hand me all your money too?
Then it will sell even more to some people. You can't overestimate the depravity of humanity.
I love the new story posters. The're so cute when they still have faith in humanity.
I read TFA, but somehow I missed the part about the nth complexity binary loop.
The problem is we can't "switch" systems as easy as say switching cola brands. Our system is written into the Constitution, which was made devilishly hard to amend (again, so there'd be no easy way for Northern states to ever gang up and vote away slavery).
However, we can get about %50 of the way there with no constitutional change. States get a number of delagates equivalent to their congressional representation, and its up to states how they select their own delagates. So what a couple of states (Maine and Nebraska) do is only select the delegates corresponding to the two senators as statewide winner-take-all. The delegates corresponding to the state's House of Representatives go to the candidate who won that House district.
Sadly, these are both small states, so the most a loser in either state can really hope for is 1 elector. It'd be interesting to see how things would change if New York, California, Florida, and Texas did this. The biggest drawback I see is that district gerrymandering would become even more important to the national parties. The other issue is that it doesn't help the 8 states with only three EVs at all. Still, they're already getting more EV's per voter than anyone else, so I don't think they should complain. :-)
That's arguably true in a very narrow sense. However, he invented the modern concept of an algorithm, and showed how to implement them with simple machines. Most of us would call implementing an algorithm on machines "programming". However, these were always theoretical implementations. You could argue it either way I suppose, but if Ada Lovelace belongs on there, Alan Turing does as well.
My list isn't entirely different, its a subset. I wasn't trying to come up with a new list, just make the one he used better. I don't believe I tried to sell it as "authoratative" either. That's what YMMV is there for. You could probably do exactly what I did and come up with a similar but different subset. Your list would almost certianly be better than the original too.
The reasons I gave for leaving people off actually apply to everyone you mentioned. For example, I only know Bill Joy's name because of Sun. Perhaps you are different, but I suspect some of the names I know you don't, and the effect would even out.
A special note about Jay Miner: it actually did pain me to not throw him on there. He's on my personal heroes list right under Alan Turing (how in the Hell is he not on that page?) However, then it wouldn't have been a subset. As you correctly pointed out, I'm not exactly proving anything by just throwing up a list made up entirely out of my own head. Perhaps the correct way to solve that problem is to add what we consider the "missing names" to the original wiki page, no?