But it doesn't fit nicely with my scenario, for the same reason I don't like it:
To cast an optimal vote under approval voting, you have to carefully study the polls and figure out how to cast a "strategic" vote.
Let me see if I can turn my scenario into an example (especially considering my correction to the Clinton ranking of Tsongas supporters).
Assume, for starters, that each voter "approves" of his favorite candidate and "disapproves" of the bottom four. Then under approval voting we have the following vote tallies:
18 approve of Tsongas 12 approve of Clinton 10 approve of Brown 9 approve of Kerry 6 approve of Harkin
So, Tsongas wins.
But wait! Everybody else hates Tsongas, so perhaps people who see the polls a week before the election will start approving of more candidates. Perhaps the non-Tsongas supporters will all approve of their two favorite candidates instead. Then we would have:
18 votes for Tsongas 26 votes for Clinton 21 votes for Brown 9 votes for Kerrey 18 votes for Harkin
But wait, why would the Tsongas supporters let that happen? They hate Clinton! So, they see the polls the next day, and decide to approve of their top two candidates two. That brings Kerrey up to 27 votes and puts him in the lead.
So what happens when the next day's polls come out? The 10 wily supporters don't like Kerrey, and would want to at least see their third place choice in the White House, so if they're smart they'll start approving of their third place choice too. That brings Harkin up to 28 votes and puts him (the Condorcet winner) in the lead, in a stable situation.
But man, what mental gymnastics everybody would have to make to get there!
I should point out that if all you want is an approval vote, you could cast one in a complete Condorcet system, by simply casting a "tie" vote ranking all your approved candidates in first place and not voting for anyone else.
I typed that in wrong; the first group of 18 voters should prefer Tsongas to Kerrey to Harkin to Brown to Clinton; I accidentally gave Clinton too much of the vote. Oh, well, it won't be the first time that's happened...;-)
There are lots of other reasons to want a more accurate voting method:
Third parties in the US don't just fail to represent their constituents' opinions in Washington, they can actually cause a reduction in representation of those opinions as well. Even counting the number of Nader voters who would have voted for Bush or not at all in a 2-party system, it seems clear from exit polls that Gore would have won if the last election had been a one on one race. Plurality voting requires you to "throw your vote away", i.e. forgo your ability to express a preference between the two leading candidates, if you want to vote for a minority candidate. The most popular minority candidate is almost guaranteed to take away votes that would otherwise have gone to the major candidate that most closely reflects the minority's views.
Third candidates don't have to be third party candidates. More moderate or more widely appealing candidates from the major parties would be benefitted as well. The winner of the last election might have been John McCain, for instance, if the Republicans could have fielded more than one candidate in the final election without splitting their own voters.
Polls on elections reflect the system of elections, and so the feedback which the major parties get is automatically subject to the constraint that issues which both parties have similar viewpoints on don't affect the poll. Unless an issue becomes a point of contention between the Democratic and Republican candidate, it can't affect the final vote, so it doesn't get discussed. Some of the public apathy towards intellectual property issues and the public domain may be a result of this, for example.
Any more than you have to think about fluid dynamics before you step on an aircraft.
You just have to remember: "Rank the candidates you know and have opinions about, in order of preference". If you'd only heard of Bush, Gore, and Nader in the last presidential election, you might vote for those three in that order, and then Browne and all the other candidates would be automatically put into a tie for last place.
If you happen to be a trained chicken, you can vote for just one candidate, and it simply works as "I prefer this guy to everyone else", without requiring you to specify what you think of everyone else relative to each other. Condorcet voting would give you the opportunity to express a more complicated vote, but wouldn't make it a requirement.
Here's a fun example from John Allen Paulos' excellent book A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper:
55 voters are voting in a primary between 5 candidates.
18 of them prefer Tsongas to Kerrey to Clinton to Harkin to Brown 12 of them prefer Clinton to Harkin to Kerrey to Brown to Tsongas 10 of them prefer Brown to Clinton to Harkin to Kerrey to Tsongas 9 of them prefer Kerrey to Brown to Harkin to Clinton to Tsongas 4 of them prefer Harkin to Clinton to Kerrey to Brown to Tsongas 2 of them prefer Harkin to Brown to Kerrey to Clinton to Tsongas
Who should win?
Under our current plurality, "winner-take-all" system, Tsongas would win because he had the most first place votes.
If a single runoff election was held between the top two candidates, Clinton would win the runoff by a landslide.
If instant runoff was used, dropping the candidates from the running one at a time depending on who had the fewest first place votes, then Brown would end up winning.
If a Borda count was used, giving each candidate 5 points for a 1st place vote, 4 points for 2nd place, etc., then Kerrey would win.
Finally, if Condorcet voting was used, Harkin would win, since he would win a one-on-one election against any of the other candidates.
Who do you think should win, and why?
This, by the way, fails to illustrate why I think we need Condorcet voting: not because it's criteria necessarily produces the best candidate, since in an election like the above it isn't clear by any means who is the "best". The appeal of Condorcet voting is that in all but the most degenerate cases (e.g. where most people prefer A to B, most people prefer B to C, and most people prefer C to A) Condorcet removes any incentive to make the election even worse by not "throwing your vote away"; in every other method mentioned, there are voters who can improve the outcome of the election (according to their own preferences) by voting something other than their own honest rankings. There's a nice discussion of Condorcet voting and the criteria like this that it meets on electionmethods.org.
And if it is done with three candidates all of whom are fairly popular, it gives you just as much incentive to "spoil" your vote as plurality does. An explanation of circumstances in which this can occur (as well as a lot of other good information about voting systems and in particular Condorcet voting) is at electionmethods.org.
I don't know about you, but after the first few levels in Deus Ex I started running into more and more places where it just seemed impossible to complete a mission without whacking a guard or two (or twenty). The storyline stayed engrossing right up to the game's end, but (at least for a player with just my skill level) the ability for peaceful resolution faded fast.
I've got an emailed reply to one of my slashdot posts in January 1998, even though I don't have a user password email until September. I suspect September is just when Rob made permanent user accounts possible, so you may have been reading the site before then.
Red Hat isn't crippling KDE, they are wrapping it in their own interface to be consistent with Gnome. All the KDE functionality will still be there, just wrapped up in the Kwrap desktop that Red Hat installs.
You'll still be able to use all your favorite programs, there will just be a new, Kwrappy look to them. Every Qt program on your hard drive will have this new look, so that your computer screenshots will all look like Kwrap.
I can understand why Bero might have wanted this to be a more limited change, but what would the point have been? If only some of the KDE programs were given a new look, would people say that Red Hat's desktop was only a piece of Kwrap? No, Red Hat chose to make sure their new distribution was full of Kwrap.
If you've got a MathML enabled browser (and it's associated fonts) installed, take a look at Rice University's Connexions Project. I worked there when it was getting started a couple years ago, and it was already being used as the "textbook" in a few electrical engineering classes. I think it's still mostly electrical engineering and math content, but the means of presenting that content (single-concept "modules" which professors can tie together and expand into courses navigated via a Mozilla sidebar panel) is pretty neat.
Whose algorithm now forms the core of (or more often, an anonymously-distributed module for) every Linux program capable of playing encrypted DVDs. Nobody seemed to care then.
* Developers who scream at UI People "I don't believe any of that cognitive psychology crap. That's what you want, that's not what I want!" * Users who do the same.
Don't you just hate people who won't listen to you when you tell them what they should want?
I would scream it from the rooftops if I felt it would do any good: CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM!
It would do harm, not good. There are two types of campaign finance reform:
1. Reform where the only limits are on financial donations to political campaigns, and donors can still purchase advertising for candidates or issues themselves. This could be called, "ineffectual reform", or even "counterproductive reform" if it's effect is simply to shut out the voice of people who could previously have pooled their efforts in lobbying groups but who are not wealthy enough to buy a single advertisement.
2. Reform where people are restricted as to what amount or what venues of political speech they can purchase with their own money. This is called "unconstitutional reform", and moreover will simply ensure that elections get decided by the news media instead of by political organizations and other industries.
I'm a Democrat, but if McCain had been on the ballot I would have voted for him in a heartbeat.
In that case, I suggest screaming for a different kind of reform, election method reform. Plurality voting is designed to force all voters to pick between two parties, and so ensures that the most important factor in an election is the party apparatus and it's funding. Anyone succeeding in the Democrat or Republican ranks has already been "bought", so if you want candidates who haven't to be electable then we need a fairer way to run elections.
What are the 1,000,000+ active duty soldiers in the U.S. (and whichever of their commanding officers were on bases unassailable by your three man teams) doing while your plan is being executed?
There are games out there that slip a little social thought into the plotline; Deus Ex's prescient consideration of "How much will people tolerate in the name of fighting terrorism?" is the first thing that comes to my mind.
But what is the political commentary of "New York Defender" and "War on Terrorism" supposed to be? "Terrorism bad!"? "We need a system of powerful anti-aircraft lasers mounted outside all major cities!"? "Man, it'll be great to beat the crap out of bin Laden!"?
Of course, times have changed, and I doubt anything like this will be ever be used in the atmosphere except in dire circumstances (Footfall, Deep Impact).
They said in Deep Impact that the Orion ship was assembled in orbit (although it looked like a close enough orbit to create hell with EMP, at least).
They also didn't talk about Orion propulsion at all, which was just horribly disappointing. Yes, it was a long movie, but couldn't they have spared 60 seconds to show us the astronaut's reactions to riding a nuclear arsenal? It could have been made part of the plot, too: "We've used up all our bombs that we tried to destroy the comet with, but we still have a ton of bombs that were intended to decelerate us when we returned to Earth..."
Slashdot Mirror
That should say "two candidates too" and "10 wily Brown supporters"
But it doesn't fit nicely with my scenario, for the same reason I don't like it:
To cast an optimal vote under approval voting, you have to carefully study the polls and figure out how to cast a "strategic" vote.
Let me see if I can turn my scenario into an example (especially considering my correction to the Clinton ranking of Tsongas supporters).
Assume, for starters, that each voter "approves" of his favorite candidate and "disapproves" of the bottom four. Then under approval voting we have the following vote tallies:
18 approve of Tsongas
12 approve of Clinton
10 approve of Brown
9 approve of Kerry
6 approve of Harkin
So, Tsongas wins.
But wait! Everybody else hates Tsongas, so perhaps people who see the polls a week before the election will start approving of more candidates. Perhaps the non-Tsongas supporters will all approve of their two favorite candidates instead. Then we would have:
18 votes for Tsongas
26 votes for Clinton
21 votes for Brown
9 votes for Kerrey
18 votes for Harkin
But wait, why would the Tsongas supporters let that happen? They hate Clinton! So, they see the polls the next day, and decide to approve of their top two candidates two. That brings Kerrey up to 27 votes and puts him in the lead.
So what happens when the next day's polls come out? The 10 wily supporters don't like Kerrey, and would want to at least see their third place choice in the White House, so if they're smart they'll start approving of their third place choice too. That brings Harkin up to 28 votes and puts him (the Condorcet winner) in the lead, in a stable situation.
But man, what mental gymnastics everybody would have to make to get there!
I should point out that if all you want is an approval vote, you could cast one in a complete Condorcet system, by simply casting a "tie" vote ranking all your approved candidates in first place and not voting for anyone else.
How do they count the votes in Finland?
I typed that in wrong; the first group of 18 voters should prefer Tsongas to Kerrey to Harkin to Brown to Clinton; I accidentally gave Clinton too much of the vote. Oh, well, it won't be the first time that's happened... ;-)
There are lots of other reasons to want a more accurate voting method:
Third parties in the US don't just fail to represent their constituents' opinions in Washington, they can actually cause a reduction in representation of those opinions as well. Even counting the number of Nader voters who would have voted for Bush or not at all in a 2-party system, it seems clear from exit polls that Gore would have won if the last election had been a one on one race. Plurality voting requires you to "throw your vote away", i.e. forgo your ability to express a preference between the two leading candidates, if you want to vote for a minority candidate. The most popular minority candidate is almost guaranteed to take away votes that would otherwise have gone to the major candidate that most closely reflects the minority's views.
Third candidates don't have to be third party candidates. More moderate or more widely appealing candidates from the major parties would be benefitted as well. The winner of the last election might have been John McCain, for instance, if the Republicans could have fielded more than one candidate in the final election without splitting their own voters.
Polls on elections reflect the system of elections, and so the feedback which the major parties get is automatically subject to the constraint that issues which both parties have similar viewpoints on don't affect the poll. Unless an issue becomes a point of contention between the Democratic and Republican candidate, it can't affect the final vote, so it doesn't get discussed. Some of the public apathy towards intellectual property issues and the public domain may be a result of this, for example.
Any more than you have to think about fluid dynamics before you step on an aircraft.
You just have to remember: "Rank the candidates you know and have opinions about, in order of preference". If you'd only heard of Bush, Gore, and Nader in the last presidential election, you might vote for those three in that order, and then Browne and all the other candidates would be automatically put into a tie for last place.
If you happen to be a trained chicken, you can vote for just one candidate, and it simply works as "I prefer this guy to everyone else", without requiring you to specify what you think of everyone else relative to each other. Condorcet voting would give you the opportunity to express a more complicated vote, but wouldn't make it a requirement.
Here's a fun example from John Allen Paulos' excellent book A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper:
55 voters are voting in a primary between 5 candidates.
18 of them prefer Tsongas to Kerrey to Clinton to Harkin to Brown
12 of them prefer Clinton to Harkin to Kerrey to Brown to Tsongas
10 of them prefer Brown to Clinton to Harkin to Kerrey to Tsongas
9 of them prefer Kerrey to Brown to Harkin to Clinton to Tsongas
4 of them prefer Harkin to Clinton to Kerrey to Brown to Tsongas
2 of them prefer Harkin to Brown to Kerrey to Clinton to Tsongas
Who should win?
Under our current plurality, "winner-take-all" system, Tsongas would win because he had the most first place votes.
If a single runoff election was held between the top two candidates, Clinton would win the runoff by a landslide.
If instant runoff was used, dropping the candidates from the running one at a time depending on who had the fewest first place votes, then Brown would end up winning.
If a Borda count was used, giving each candidate 5 points for a 1st place vote, 4 points for 2nd place, etc., then Kerrey would win.
Finally, if Condorcet voting was used, Harkin would win, since he would win a one-on-one election against any of the other candidates.
Who do you think should win, and why?
This, by the way, fails to illustrate why I think we need Condorcet voting: not because it's criteria necessarily produces the best candidate, since in an election like the above it isn't clear by any means who is the "best". The appeal of Condorcet voting is that in all but the most degenerate cases (e.g. where most people prefer A to B, most people prefer B to C, and most people prefer C to A) Condorcet removes any incentive to make the election even worse by not "throwing your vote away"; in every other method mentioned, there are voters who can improve the outcome of the election (according to their own preferences) by voting something other than their own honest rankings. There's a nice discussion of Condorcet voting and the criteria like this that it meets on electionmethods.org.
And if it is done with three candidates all of whom are fairly popular, it gives you just as much incentive to "spoil" your vote as plurality does. An explanation of circumstances in which this can occur (as well as a lot of other good information about voting systems and in particular Condorcet voting) is at electionmethods.org.
I don't know about you, but after the first few levels in Deus Ex I started running into more and more places where it just seemed impossible to complete a mission without whacking a guard or two (or twenty). The storyline stayed engrossing right up to the game's end, but (at least for a player with just my skill level) the ability for peaceful resolution faded fast.
And if you don't get sued, hey, free kids!
"Each chemical that forms your DNA" is adenine, guanine, cytosine, or thymine, and we've known the chemical structure of all those for decades.
I've got an emailed reply to one of my slashdot posts in January 1998, even though I don't have a user password email until September. I suspect September is just when Rob made permanent user accounts possible, so you may have been reading the site before then.
I think the real question is, what would Jesus do to be on Slashdot?
Convert a Perl creator, apparantly.
Red Hat isn't crippling KDE, they are wrapping it in their own interface to be consistent with Gnome. All the KDE functionality will still be there, just wrapped up in the Kwrap desktop that Red Hat installs.
You'll still be able to use all your favorite programs, there will just be a new, Kwrappy look to them. Every Qt program on your hard drive will have this new look, so that your computer screenshots will all look like Kwrap.
I can understand why Bero might have wanted this to be a more limited change, but what would the point have been? If only some of the KDE programs were given a new look, would people say that Red Hat's desktop was only a piece of Kwrap? No, Red Hat chose to make sure their new distribution was full of Kwrap.
Apologies to the late Satire Wire
Can Batt copyright 2 minutes, 16.5 seconds of silence, then countersue Cage for twice the damages?
If we all stopped at the point where somebody says "It's been done before" we wouldn't have Linux, KDE or GNOME and I'd be posting to /. in IE.
You misspelled "Mosaic".
If you've got a MathML enabled browser (and it's associated fonts) installed, take a look at Rice University's Connexions Project. I worked there when it was getting started a couple years ago, and it was already being used as the "textbook" in a few electrical engineering classes. I think it's still mostly electrical engineering and math content, but the means of presenting that content (single-concept "modules" which professors can tie together and expand into courses navigated via a Mozilla sidebar panel) is pretty neat.
Whose algorithm now forms the core of (or more often, an anonymously-distributed module for) every Linux program capable of playing encrypted DVDs. Nobody seemed to care then.
That's planned for the 3.0 kernels. Those will design their own style, will not copy apple, and will become benevolent rulers of the human race.
In the mean time, we're stuck with a bunch of human-run companies writing software and occasionally imitating each other.
* Developers who scream at UI People "I don't believe any of that cognitive psychology crap. That's what you want, that's not what I want!"
* Users who do the same.
Don't you just hate people who won't listen to you when you tell them what they should want?
I would scream it from the rooftops if I felt it would do any good: CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM!
It would do harm, not good. There are two types of campaign finance reform:
1. Reform where the only limits are on financial donations to political campaigns, and donors can still purchase advertising for candidates or issues themselves. This could be called, "ineffectual reform", or even "counterproductive reform" if it's effect is simply to shut out the voice of people who could previously have pooled their efforts in lobbying groups but who are not wealthy enough to buy a single advertisement.
2. Reform where people are restricted as to what amount or what venues of political speech they can purchase with their own money. This is called "unconstitutional reform", and moreover will simply ensure that elections get decided by the news media instead of by political organizations and other industries.
I'm a Democrat, but if McCain had been on the ballot I would have voted for him in a heartbeat.
In that case, I suggest screaming for a different kind of reform, election method reform. Plurality voting is designed to force all voters to pick between two parties, and so ensures that the most important factor in an election is the party apparatus and it's funding. Anyone succeeding in the Democrat or Republican ranks has already been "bought", so if you want candidates who haven't to be electable then we need a fairer way to run elections.
What are the 1,000,000+ active duty soldiers in the U.S. (and whichever of their commanding officers were on bases unassailable by your three man teams) doing while your plan is being executed?
There are games out there that slip a little social thought into the plotline; Deus Ex's prescient consideration of "How much will people tolerate in the name of fighting terrorism?" is the first thing that comes to my mind.
But what is the political commentary of "New York Defender" and "War on Terrorism" supposed to be? "Terrorism bad!"? "We need a system of powerful anti-aircraft lasers mounted outside all major cities!"? "Man, it'll be great to beat the crap out of bin Laden!"?
The Integer Group is discrete.
Is the discovery that the Nintendo Power Pad wasn't a stupid idea, it was just ahead of it's time...
Of course, times have changed, and I doubt anything like this will be ever be used in the atmosphere except in dire circumstances (Footfall, Deep Impact).
They said in Deep Impact that the Orion ship was assembled in orbit (although it looked like a close enough orbit to create hell with EMP, at least).
They also didn't talk about Orion propulsion at all, which was just horribly disappointing. Yes, it was a long movie, but couldn't they have spared 60 seconds to show us the astronaut's reactions to riding a nuclear arsenal? It could have been made part of the plot, too: "We've used up all our bombs that we tried to destroy the comet with, but we still have a ton of bombs that were intended to decelerate us when we returned to Earth..."