I think you way overestimate how many "progressive" Democrat voters there are. There is a huge block that would be turned off by Hillary running, much much larger. An awful lot of it is sexist, of course, but that does not mean the reasons can be ignored.
I actually suspect you know this. You are doing exactly what I am saying, you want a dream situation where the Republicans would win easily in 2008. This dream becomes so powerful that you start making up totally insane Democratic strategies so that you can believe it will happen.
As I said before this is exactly like the draft. With the draft the Democrats have this dream way of making the Republicans plummet in popular opinion, where the Republicans conciously do the stupidest thing possible for their cause. They will come up with elaborate illogical scenarios where the Republicans will approve a draft. That won't happen any more than Hillary running. If things went absolutly terrible in Iraq the Republicans have several other options: they can turn it back into a shooting war, they still have many troops (hundreds of thousands) they could add, they could even be much more violent and bomb despite it killing many civilians, or they could say "hey the liberals were right" and withdraw and let a horrible civil war happen there. All of these options, bad as they are, are preferrable to starting the draft.
I think you missed my point. Whether you are for or against the war, I think you could agree that war opponents whould feel that starting the draft would be the greatest thing possible that could happen to help turn people against the war. Thus the Republicans doing it is a dream situation for their opponents. It is a fantasy where the enemy consciously does the worst thing possible for their cause and it WILL NOT HAPPEN. I think the Republicans would prefer to give up on Iraq, say it was a mistake, and evacuate, than to start a draft. The draft is that unlikely.
I also feel that "Hillary running" is a similar dream by Republicans. They know things may be very bad for them in 2008 and they thus escape into just as much of a fantasy, where they imagine the Democrats picking the worst possible candidate (in terms of chances of winning) so they can believe they could win.
I've always said that "Hillary running for president" is a wet dream by Republicans, it's exactly the same as this draft thing: Republicans restarting the draft is a wet dream for Democrats.
Neither is going to happen. Get out of your fantasy land.
I'm not sure what you have been reading, but NOT ONCE have I seen this mentioned anywhere without it clearly being stated that Democrats are behind the bill, unless you count unsubstatiated email.
Really, despite how old Unix is, old timers certainly remember Unix very fondly as a huge breath of fresh air: a fast, SIMPLE, complete, powerful, and SIMPLE (!!!!) operating system. The rules for file names were trivial with only the characters '/' and nul having meaning. There were no "file types" or various character encodings. You used the SAME calls to write files as to draw on the screen or punch a paper tape or read a mag tape! You could name a file anywhere in the system with a single string! You wrote a newline to a file by adding a single byte using the same call you used to write letters! And hundreds of other things that seem painfully obvious today, but at the time, compared to what else existed, this was absolutely amazing.
CP/M is mostly based on RSX-11M and RSTS/E from Dec, vastly more complex and painful systems to program. Windows is, despite all claims to the contrary, mostly based on CP/M. That is where drive letters and case-independent filenames and lack of names for devices comes from. Windows is based also on VMS, but VMS is the best-known source of record-based files where the program to copy one file to another was bigger than the entire operating system! This was jettisoned for Windows, but the bad taste remains...
It sure is too bad nothing better has become popular. I had huge hopes for Plan-9. But a good deal of Linux's success can be based on absolute disgust that Microsoft would bring back the horrors of pre-Unix operating systems that we had all hoped were dead and gone. So any hate for Linux is being directed many times more at Windows.
Notice that a lot of calls take an "fd" as the first argument. This is the "object", and the call is the "method".
In fact Unix is far, far ahead of many other systems even today in being truly object-oriented. OO to be useful requires a "common base class", meaning the same method is useful on more than one type of object. In Unix a vast number (for the time) of different objects could be controlled with the read, write, and ioctl methods.
Contrast this to current systems like COM or Corba where the main claim for OO is that it uses C++ syntax: it is much less likely that you can take an arbitrary object and reuse it with code written for a different object. Your code to update the display object cannot be used to write to the file object. In Unix, back in 1970, the code to update the display *could* be used to write to a file!
You seem quite confused. The whole point of utf-8 is that things like -i and -w DO work. -i will still ignore case of Ascii characters. -w will still treat space and tab as white-space, and there are very good reasons to not assign "whitespace" meaning to any non-Ascii characters, so it really works perfectly.
Any encoding that is not in bytes would break grep completely, so it would be worse. Any encoding where Ascii letters do not represent themselves would break -i and -w completely, so this is better.
I mean really, I challenge you to suggest anything that would be better than utf-8!
You are right that might work. It would be STV/IRV and apparently that is a pretty good system (IRV has problems when there is only one seat to fill but when there are multiples it apparently is a good idea, though the math gets much too complicated).
For some budget item it may be that there is a maximum budget, and thus a larger number of small items could be approved than big items. So the number of "seats" is variable. I'm not sure what happens to the voting system then, but I suspect STV would still work as well, since you vote the same no matter how many seats there are. Ie you keep taking winners out of the pool until the budget is filled.
No, in my first example 49% of the voters, and more than 3/4 of the Democrats, prefer BOTH the Greens and the Democrats over the Republicans. Only a small fraction preferred the Republicans over the Greens.
It should be obvious in this example that if the Greens did not run and everybody who voted Green first instead voted for their second choice, that the Democrats would win by 65% to 35%. The fact that the addition of the Green makes them lose is obvious proof that something is wrong with this system.
No, in my example 96% of the democrats preferred Green over Democrats. The fact that the third slot *had* to be filled with a Republican does not mean they "opted for Republicans to be their second choice". In fact for 96% of the Democrats, the Republicans were their LAST choice!
It should be obvious that in my example, 51% of the voters preferred the democrats over the republicans. Any scheme where this means the republicans win is flawed by definition.
Okay anyway here is one where the Republicans are a rather small minority and still win. In addition all possible arrangements are shown except I assumme Greens always vote Republicans last (this is realistic and changing it would make the example even more lopsided by increasing the republican win margin):
And the Republicans win. But in this example people prefer Democrats over Republicans 66% to 34%!
Once again, I very much think these sorts of percentages are quite realistic. My previous one was more realistic, in this one I vastly underestimate Republican support to show that the minority can win. Now also we all know this won't happen in real life. In this example the Democrat votors would well know that voting Green first will make Republicans win, and will insincerely vote a much higher D,G,R percentage, and yes the Democrats will win. But this way underestimates the support for Greens and requires people to vote strategically, which is exactly the same problem as the current system!
Now I know that the arguments against IRV are being put up by Libertarians, but I feel the arguments are legitimate. They tend to show how this will help Libertarians in their examples, but reversing them to the more popular and familiar Greens I though would make the arguments more convincing.
DesScorp writes "The Washington State offices of the Bush campaign were burglarized, and computers with sensitive campaign data were stolen. The computers belonged the executive director and officer in charge of the 'get out the vote' campaign; one was set to be delivered to another office within the state. The staff says that secret strategy information and voting data are on the computers, and ironically, they're comparing it to Watergate. The staff blames Democratic Party activists intent on stealing the information. Of course, they deny this."
I would believe this if the chip came with a printed version of the private key. It does not, there are several private keys that the owner of the computer does not know, thus the owner cannot make a program "trusted" no matter how much they want to.
Also, this is the industry that decided it was worth saving $1 to have the CPU do all the processing for the modem or the sound card. There is no way they would be interested in adding a processor that does encryption if they did not have a deeper purpose.
If they would make a chip where the user can change the public/private key, then I would believe this. But as long as there is a secret that the end user is not allowed to know, it is obvious that the purpose of this chip is DRM.
He was almost certainly blasted to bits and buried in a collapesed cave by a missile. Unfortunately there is no way for anybody to conclusively show this, his remains will never be found or identified. His closest followers probably know with some more certainty (because they have not received any communications from him) but they can't be absolutely sure, and besides they sure are not going to announce it.
Now I'm no fan of Bush and I'm going to vote for Kerry, but the administration did a fine and awesome job of punishing those responsible for the 9/11 attacks. They were well aware that a successful attack with modern firepower would not leave any proof of the success and open them to criticism, but they did it anyway. Bush may well have been forced to delay his Iraq plans in order to get the job done, the fact that he did so does show a commitment to the real "war on terror".
That's insane. Kerry getting assasinated would backfire on the Bush campaign immensely. It would either show that the right wing is murdering, or if it was pinned on somebody else it would show that the "enemies of America" were more worried about Kerry and would prefer Bush in office. There is no way they would consider it, not including any questions of morals, which they do have a bit of...
Here is a simpler example with even more dramatic results. Lets say the Democrats have instead a tiny majority. But lets also say that a huge majority of them actually prefer the Green candidate. However there is a small subset that completely distrusts the Greens:
49% R,D,G 48% G,D,R
3% D,R,G
Dems are eliminated, now it is:
52% R,G 48% D,R
And the Republicans win, despite the fact that the majority would prefer the democrats win.
Again this won't happen because Democrats would realize they have to insincerely vote D,G,R instead of G,D,R. But in this case almost half (23 of that 48%) of those votors must vote insincerely in order to get a desirable outcome of the election.
Now under the current system of single vote, with the above preferences, almost ALL the G votors (47 of the 48%) would have to vote insincerely in order to prevent a Republican win. This may very well be the situation we are in today. So certainly IRV is much better than the current system. However it does seem we can do better.
Cordocent (sp?) in this situation would elect the Democrat. Insincere voting will not make a difference.
Approval voting requires some guesses. Lets assume Republicans hate both Greens and Democrats, and Democrats hate Republicans. Then the votes would be:
49% R 48% G+D
3% D
And the Democrats would win here as well, with no insincere voting.
No the example is not bogus. I'll reverse it to the Green+Democrat+Republican sample because it is more clear that Republicans would not vote Green. Lets say a fraction less than 2/3 of the population prefers Democrat over Republican, a huge margin (I'm not trying to be realistic, just to demonstrate a point). But more than half of these like Green the best. The other half is unsure if they prefer Green or Republicans.
Votes are:
35% R,D,G 33% G,D,R 16% D,G,R 16% D,R,G
The Democrats get the least number of #1 votes and are eliminated. Now the votes are:
51% R,G (35+16) 49% G,R (33+16)
The Republicans win, despite the fact that a huge majority don't want them to win.
Now this would not happen, because Democrats would be aware that it could happen (or would be told it) and a huge majority of people who would have voted G,D,R will instead insincerely vote D,G,R. Voting for Green first would be a spoiler, just like it is now. This is not good, and I agree with the authors of the article.
It is currently about 100 times easier to buy a "no OS" machine than a "Linux" machine. Go try it if you doubt me. Also you get more bang for the buck with no-OS because there is no limits on the hardware for Linux compatability and nobody has to install the system (I paid extra for network cards and Nvidia graphics boards and other stuff, so my Linux machine was more expensive).
Anybody who buys the Linux machine with the intention of installing pirated Windows is a loon, when there is a much better deal available in a no-os machine. But telling the truth would mess up Microsofts carefully plannned FUD attack against Linux. Microsoft, you are truly the lowest of the low in this piece of carefully designed bullshit.
I've paid for 2 copies of Windows I have never used, Microsoft, because I could not get a machine without it. I'd like my damn money back before you start these crocodile tears. (my newer machines are no-OS, however).
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I think you way overestimate how many "progressive" Democrat voters there are. There is a huge block that would be turned off by Hillary running, much much larger. An awful lot of it is sexist, of course, but that does not mean the reasons can be ignored.
I actually suspect you know this. You are doing exactly what I am saying, you want a dream situation where the Republicans would win easily in 2008. This dream becomes so powerful that you start making up totally insane Democratic strategies so that you can believe it will happen.
As I said before this is exactly like the draft. With the draft the Democrats have this dream way of making the Republicans plummet in popular opinion, where the Republicans conciously do the stupidest thing possible for their cause. They will come up with elaborate illogical scenarios where the Republicans will approve a draft. That won't happen any more than Hillary running. If things went absolutly terrible in Iraq the Republicans have several other options: they can turn it back into a shooting war, they still have many troops (hundreds of thousands) they could add, they could even be much more violent and bomb despite it killing many civilians, or they could say "hey the liberals were right" and withdraw and let a horrible civil war happen there. All of these options, bad as they are, are preferrable to starting the draft.
I think you missed my point. Whether you are for or against the war, I think you could agree that war opponents whould feel that starting the draft would be the greatest thing possible that could happen to help turn people against the war. Thus the Republicans doing it is a dream situation for their opponents. It is a fantasy where the enemy consciously does the worst thing possible for their cause and it WILL NOT HAPPEN. I think the Republicans would prefer to give up on Iraq, say it was a mistake, and evacuate, than to start a draft. The draft is that unlikely.
I also feel that "Hillary running" is a similar dream by Republicans. They know things may be very bad for them in 2008 and they thus escape into just as much of a fantasy, where they imagine the Democrats picking the worst possible candidate (in terms of chances of winning) so they can believe they could win.
I'm sorry, can you post a link to a CBS story that does not say that Democrats are the ones behind the bill?
Huh? 40,000 is a pretty small increase. No draft needed for that.
I've always said that "Hillary running for president" is a wet dream by Republicans, it's exactly the same as this draft thing: Republicans restarting the draft is a wet dream for Democrats.
Neither is going to happen. Get out of your fantasy land.
I'm not sure what you have been reading, but NOT ONCE have I seen this mentioned anywhere without it clearly being stated that Democrats are behind the bill, unless you count unsubstatiated email.
Really, despite how old Unix is, old timers certainly remember Unix very fondly as a huge breath of fresh air: a fast, SIMPLE, complete, powerful, and SIMPLE (!!!!) operating system. The rules for file names were trivial with only the characters '/' and nul having meaning. There were no "file types" or various character encodings. You used the SAME calls to write files as to draw on the screen or punch a paper tape or read a mag tape! You could name a file anywhere in the system with a single string! You wrote a newline to a file by adding a single byte using the same call you used to write letters! And hundreds of other things that seem painfully obvious today, but at the time, compared to what else existed, this was absolutely amazing.
CP/M is mostly based on RSX-11M and RSTS/E from Dec, vastly more complex and painful systems to program. Windows is, despite all claims to the contrary, mostly based on CP/M. That is where drive letters and case-independent filenames and lack of names for devices comes from. Windows is based also on VMS, but VMS is the best-known source of record-based files where the program to copy one file to another was bigger than the entire operating system! This was jettisoned for Windows, but the bad taste remains...
It sure is too bad nothing better has become popular. I had huge hopes for Plan-9. But a good deal of Linux's success can be based on absolute disgust that Microsoft would bring back the horrors of pre-Unix operating systems that we had all hoped were dead and gone. So any hate for Linux is being directed many times more at Windows.
Notice that a lot of calls take an "fd" as the first argument. This is the "object", and the call is the "method".
In fact Unix is far, far ahead of many other systems even today in being truly object-oriented. OO to be useful requires a "common base class", meaning the same method is useful on more than one type of object. In Unix a vast number (for the time) of different objects could be controlled with the read, write, and ioctl methods.
Contrast this to current systems like COM or Corba where the main claim for OO is that it uses C++ syntax: it is much less likely that you can take an arbitrary object and reuse it with code written for a different object. Your code to update the display object cannot be used to write to the file object. In Unix, back in 1970, the code to update the display *could* be used to write to a file!
You seem quite confused. The whole point of utf-8 is that things like -i and -w DO work. -i will still ignore case of Ascii characters. -w will still treat space and tab as white-space, and there are very good reasons to not assign "whitespace" meaning to any non-Ascii characters, so it really works perfectly.
Any encoding that is not in bytes would break grep completely, so it would be worse. Any encoding where Ascii letters do not represent themselves would break -i and -w completely, so this is better.
I mean really, I challenge you to suggest anything that would be better than utf-8!
Not to mention the danger of keeping that pin anywhere near those inflatable space habitats!
You are right that might work. It would be STV/IRV and apparently that is a pretty good system (IRV has problems when there is only one seat to fill but when there are multiples it apparently is a good idea, though the math gets much too complicated).
For some budget item it may be that there is a maximum budget, and thus a larger number of small items could be approved than big items. So the number of "seats" is variable. I'm not sure what happens to the voting system then, but I suspect STV would still work as well, since you vote the same no matter how many seats there are. Ie you keep taking winners out of the pool until the budget is filled.
No, in my first example 49% of the voters, and more than 3/4 of the Democrats, prefer BOTH the Greens and the Democrats over the Republicans. Only a small fraction preferred the Republicans over the Greens.
It should be obvious in this example that if the Greens did not run and everybody who voted Green first instead voted for their second choice, that the Democrats would win by 65% to 35%. The fact that the addition of the Green makes them lose is obvious proof that something is wrong with this system.
No, in my example 96% of the democrats preferred Green over Democrats. The fact that the third slot *had* to be filled with a Republican does not mean they "opted for Republicans to be their second choice". In fact for 96% of the Democrats, the Republicans were their LAST choice!
It should be obvious that in my example, 51% of the voters preferred the democrats over the republicans. Any scheme where this means the republicans win is flawed by definition.
Okay anyway here is one where the Republicans are a rather small minority and still win. In addition all possible arrangements are shown except I assumme Greens always vote Republicans last (this is realistic and changing it would make the example even more lopsided by increasing the republican win margin):
34% R,*,* (last two don't matter)
34% G,D,R
17% D,R,G
15% D,G,R
Democrats lose. Then it is:
51% R,G (34+17)
49% G,R (34+13)
And the Republicans win. But in this example people prefer Democrats over Republicans 66% to 34%!
Once again, I very much think these sorts of percentages are quite realistic. My previous one was more realistic, in this one I vastly underestimate Republican support to show that the minority can win. Now also we all know this won't happen in real life. In this example the Democrat votors would well know that voting Green first will make Republicans win, and will insincerely vote a much higher D,G,R percentage, and yes the Democrats will win. But this way underestimates the support for Greens and requires people to vote strategically, which is exactly the same problem as the current system!
Now I know that the arguments against IRV are being put up by Libertarians, but I feel the arguments are legitimate. They tend to show how this will help Libertarians in their examples, but reversing them to the more popular and familiar Greens I though would make the arguments more convincing.
I think you don't get it.
THERE IS A "NO" CHECKMARK!!!! The voter checks "yes" or "no" on EVERY candidate.
Get it now?
You sir are a left-wing loony.
Well I suppose it's nice to know the loonies are evenly distributed.
Maybe you should click on this link: Bush Campaign Offices Burglarized
Here's the intro:
DesScorp writes "The Washington State offices of the Bush campaign were burglarized, and computers with sensitive campaign data were stolen. The computers belonged the executive director and officer in charge of the 'get out the vote' campaign; one was set to be delivered to another office within the state. The staff says that secret strategy information and voting data are on the computers, and ironically, they're comparing it to Watergate. The staff blames Democratic Party activists intent on stealing the information. Of course, they deny this."
I would believe this if the chip came with a printed version of the private key. It does not, there are several private keys that the owner of the computer does not know, thus the owner cannot make a program "trusted" no matter how much they want to.
Also, this is the industry that decided it was worth saving $1 to have the CPU do all the processing for the modem or the sound card. There is no way they would be interested in adding a processor that does encryption if they did not have a deeper purpose.
If they would make a chip where the user can change the public/private key, then I would believe this. But as long as there is a secret that the end user is not allowed to know, it is obvious that the purpose of this chip is DRM.
He was almost certainly blasted to bits and buried in a collapesed cave by a missile. Unfortunately there is no way for anybody to conclusively show this, his remains will never be found or identified. His closest followers probably know with some more certainty (because they have not received any communications from him) but they can't be absolutely sure, and besides they sure are not going to announce it.
Now I'm no fan of Bush and I'm going to vote for Kerry, but the administration did a fine and awesome job of punishing those responsible for the 9/11 attacks. They were well aware that a successful attack with modern firepower would not leave any proof of the success and open them to criticism, but they did it anyway. Bush may well have been forced to delay his Iraq plans in order to get the job done, the fact that he did so does show a commitment to the real "war on terror".
That's insane. Kerry getting assasinated would backfire on the Bush campaign immensely. It would either show that the right wing is murdering, or if it was pinned on somebody else it would show that the "enemies of America" were more worried about Kerry and would prefer Bush in office. There is no way they would consider it, not including any questions of morals, which they do have a bit of...
People also voted for Nader in states that they knew were going to Gore as well.
Here is a simpler example with even more dramatic results. Lets say the Democrats have instead a tiny majority. But lets also say that a huge majority of them actually prefer the Green candidate. However there is a small subset that completely distrusts the Greens:
49% R,D,G
48% G,D,R
3% D,R,G
Dems are eliminated, now it is:
52% R,G
48% D,R
And the Republicans win, despite the fact that the majority would prefer the democrats win.
Again this won't happen because Democrats would realize they have to insincerely vote D,G,R instead of G,D,R. But in this case almost half (23 of that 48%) of those votors must vote insincerely in order to get a desirable outcome of the election.
Now under the current system of single vote, with the above preferences, almost ALL the G votors (47 of the 48%) would have to vote insincerely in order to prevent a Republican win. This may very well be the situation we are in today. So certainly IRV is much better than the current system. However it does seem we can do better.
Cordocent (sp?) in this situation would elect the Democrat. Insincere voting will not make a difference.
Approval voting requires some guesses. Lets assume Republicans hate both Greens and Democrats, and Democrats hate Republicans. Then the votes would be:
49% R
48% G+D
3% D
And the Democrats would win here as well, with no insincere voting.
No the example is not bogus. I'll reverse it to the Green+Democrat+Republican sample because it is more clear that Republicans would not vote Green. Lets say a fraction less than 2/3 of the population prefers Democrat over Republican, a huge margin (I'm not trying to be realistic, just to demonstrate a point). But more than half of these like Green the best. The other half is unsure if they prefer Green or Republicans.
Votes are:
35% R,D,G
33% G,D,R
16% D,G,R
16% D,R,G
The Democrats get the least number of #1 votes and are eliminated. Now the votes are:
51% R,G (35+16)
49% G,R (33+16)
The Republicans win, despite the fact that a huge majority don't want them to win.
Now this would not happen, because Democrats would be aware that it could happen (or would be told it) and a huge majority of people who would have voted G,D,R will instead insincerely vote D,G,R. Voting for Green first would be a spoiler, just like it is now. This is not good, and I agree with the authors of the article.
It is currently about 100 times easier to buy a "no OS" machine than a "Linux" machine. Go try it if you doubt me. Also you get more bang for the buck with no-OS because there is no limits on the hardware for Linux compatability and nobody has to install the system (I paid extra for network cards and Nvidia graphics boards and other stuff, so my Linux machine was more expensive).
Anybody who buys the Linux machine with the intention of installing pirated Windows is a loon, when there is a much better deal available in a no-os machine. But telling the truth would mess up Microsofts carefully plannned FUD attack against Linux. Microsoft, you are truly the lowest of the low in this piece of carefully designed bullshit.
I've paid for 2 copies of Windows I have never used, Microsoft, because I could not get a machine without it. I'd like my damn money back before you start these crocodile tears. (my newer machines are no-OS, however).
That's the same as IRV, the thing that started this discussion.