If there are only two choices, Condorcet and Approval and IRV are the same as normal single-vote. Most votes in congress are two choices (approve or disapprove this law) so this does not matter.
No, if there are 10 candidates and 200 million voters, there should be exactly 2000 million votes. A yes or a no for each of the candidates from each voter. Basically there is a "yes" and "no" circle and you should fill one in. Of course lots of ballots will be screwed up, but I don't see this as being any worse than the current system.
Good to see somebody who kind of agrees with me. I mean I dislike the Bush administration as much as anybody, but I really don't see what's wrong with this guy getting some assistance in putting together a good presentation for western powers and media. The Bush administration has some pretty good speechwriters and I see no reason why they can't be made available to him. Compared to many other things America is spending money on over there, this is probably an enormously cost-effective expenditure in getting a stable government there!
Not quite, because the number of electors per state is N+2, where N is (supposedly) the population multiplied by a constant. Thus in a state with a smaller population, each person gets a slightly more powerful vote even if the electors are distributed proportionally. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is another matter.
I do agree tha proportionally distributing the electors, and even allowing fractional distributions, would be a good thing. The previous election could have changed completely with only a few thousand votes changing in Florida (such a small number that it was way below the noise so in fact it really is impossible to tell who won and Gore is just as legitimate of a "winner" as Bush, no matter what anybody says). Under a fractional proportional elector system this could not happen. This would be an enormous improvement, even if it is still possible (but much harder) for the winner to not win the popular vote.
Microsoft does not allow OEM's to sell machines with Windows where the default browser is not IE. That is locking a customer in (an OEM is a customer, you know...).
However I never use the file-browsing capabilities, and am often annoyed when it decides to show files instead of the index.html file in the directory I try to go to.
It does appear that file manipulation and web browsing are totally different things, and both Microsoft and KDE and several hundred other people (including me) who thought they could be integrated were wrong.
This was on display in the "Emerging Technologies" display at Siggraph in August 2004 in Los Angeles. The display was quite popular, though I did not try it. But a lot of people should have more to say about it than I have seen here so far...
You know, I think that would work. Anybody using a telescope to aim a laser would be in for a rude suprise!
A corner refelctor is three mirrors arranged as a corner of a cube. Any light beam reflects off all three surfaces and exactly back in the direction it came from. They are used in the laser refelctors left by Apollo on the moon. Also the plastic reflectors on car rear lights are cast to have many small corner reflectors by making the inside surface out of cubes. Another large-scale example is a radar reflector such as used on sailboats, it is three intersecting planes of metal and thus 8 corner reflectors of the proper scale for radar waves.
Flat tax with progressive rates
on
The Jobs Crunch
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· Score: 1
Interesting that you proposed a flat tax with progressive rates. That is the first time I have seen that.
I cannot figure out why so many people seem to think "getting rid of deductions" and "same percentage for everybody" are equivalent and cannot be seperated. It sure seems to me that you could eliminate all deductions and then still tax the money people make at different percentages depending on how much there is. Conversely you could keep all the complicated deductions you have right now and tax everybody the same percentage of what is left. It just seems to me the concepts are unrelated.
Without arguing for or against any style of tax, can anybody explain why so many on both sides of the argument seem to think that "no deductions" and "same percentage for everybody" are equivalent and you cannot get one without the other?
Huh? There are going to be some years under Hussein where more were killed than the 10,000 or whatever number is claimed for 2003. When he gassed the Kurds that was 3000 or something in one day.
I think analysis like this is interesting and can be used as an argument by either side.
Several scientists (not just right-wing loonies, but actual ones who believe in global warming) have stated that the pressure system funnelling the hurricanes is unrelated to global warming.
Like a lot of that story, things are taken out of context. I also believed this was some Bush slip-of-the-tongue util I saw the actual post here. He really was referring to Clinton, and unless he expects Clinton to be re-elected after him, Clinton is a predecessor!
If it's legal if copyrighted, it's legal under GPL
on
Open Source Licensing
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· Score: 3, Informative
The main thing managers have to somehow learn is "if it is legal to do something with copyrighted code, it is legal to do it under the GPL".
GPL is a set of exceptions to standard copyright law. It says "if you do this, you can violate the copyright on this code".
It is amazing how few PHB's understand this. If you put a piece of code in that says "Copyright me, all rights reserved" they have not problem, and say "we'll replace that or ask for permission before we distribute". But put some GPL code in, or even link to an LGPL library, and they get all nervous and scared that somehow they will lose the entire company! That is just incredibly stupid, it is in fact safer than plain copyright, by definition!
It does look like Bush is going to win the election, but debates can only help Kerry. Almost everyone agrees Kerry will win and gain some support, though I don't know of anybody who thinks it will be enough gain to win the election (anybody I know who believes this also thinks Kerry could win the election now, which is really pretty unlikely).
The fact that the Bush camp agreed to the debates without a lot of bullshit indicates that they are pretty confident that they are going to win and can handle the loss there. It also indicates that perhaps they will change their campaign to a more good-will one.
Personally I think the best thing Bush could do is to denounce the "Swift Boat" group. This would win him a huge block of votes who don't like the negative campaigns (and they would not lose any Swift Boat supporters, since who else would they vote for?), and right now Kerry is seriously hurting for being tied to false accusations as well, and this would differentiate Bush a huge amount. It would also be of serious benifit to everybody as it may cut down on the influence of negative campaigning next election. As a Kerry supporter I can honestly say that a move like this would swing my vote.
In a lot of ways it is good that the election is not going to be close. That means the electronic voting machines cannot throw it, and hopefully we can get rid of those things before the next one. If this was close those machines would tie this up in court forever and it would be a worse disaster than the "wrong" person being electied (whoever you think is wrong).
Somebody (ONE person) who dislikes Bush faked up these documents. In fact that person has been identified, it is certainly this Burkett guy, unless he was duped by somebody else. CBS leaped on this and showed themselves to be complete idiots by not doubting the authenticity of it. That is stupid but not criminal.
This requires no planning or conspiracy by Kerry and the DNC (or Bush and the RNC, an equally silly opposing conspiracy theory being pushed). I think my theory is about 10 million times more likely than any of the drivel being posted here by loons on every side.
My opinion: CBS will and should take full blame for being idiots. They probably will, nobody is going to trust anything they claim for a long time. This is not a criminal punishment, it is a punishment in public opinion.
If the forger can be found, and it can be shown that they actively tried to push the letters as authentic (rather than as an internal thing that was not intended to be real) then they are liable for libel against George Bush. Not against anybody else. Trying to say they libeled some more sympathetic target is stupid, it is patently obvious that the target of the memos was George Bush.
"Seeing the source code" does not taint you. Only if you sign an NDA are you "tainted". You are not even tainted if you see the source code without permission (though that means that either somebody who signed the NDA is guilty of violating it, or you are guilty of breaking and entering or industrial espionage)
It is true that if you copy the code you are doing a copyright violation. This is because copyright is defined by US law as existing without signing any contract. But just seeing the source code and learning ideas from it does not violate any normal US law.
If what you were saying was true, then Steven King must have never read anybody else's horror novel, as that would "taint" him and make it impossible for him to write his own.
This is also why looking at GPL code does not "taint" you and prevent you from working on closed-source. Microsoft hires thousands of programmers who have looked at GPL code at least once, so they know this big piece of FUD is false, but they continue to spout it.
Maybe you are making a joke, but I'm quite certain the Libertarians would say that spamming is legal and that market forces would develop technological measures to stop it.
Your description sounds accurate. What I was actually trying to point out was that at least two of the original posters, who seem to know a lot about nuclear weapons, seemed unaware of the negative public perception.
I have to agree that when I heard the "kills people but saves cities" I kind of doubted it because the "city" would be so highly radioactive that it would be useless, and that people were misjudging the purpose of the bomb. I'm trying to remember the general feeling then, I think it was generally acknoledged that these would be used to attack enemy military facilities, not actual cities, though certainly there was a perception that they would be used on military stuff in the middle of cities. For instance it sounded just plausable enough that this would be used to irradiate an underground bunker under the palace in the middle of the city, and who cared what happened to everybody else in the city? Probably a scenario dreamed up by anti-nuke people, but still just plausable enough to make these into a public-relations disaster.
Don't know how accurate they are, but according to that show: the CIA already had pictures and knew where the sub was from 10 years earlier. It sank in the 1950's in the same month as an American sub the Scorpion (the accidents were unrelated). It had one missle on it (I may have missed what happened to the others, the graphic indicated it could hold 3). In the late 1950's an American sub was sent out there to locate it and photograph it and succeeded.
When Nixon was elected he was told about the sub and authorized raising it. The Glomar Explorer lifted the entire sub, but then the lifting contraption broke and 2/3 of the sub fell back to the floor. They got the front third and recovered six bodies (which they buried at sea in a russian-style ceremony), and they recoverd some code information (though I doubt codes from 1950's were much use in 1974!).
The Russians completely covered up the fact that they lost the sub, and the Americans did not say they had found it, so when the story about the Glomar Explorer leaked out, it was also the first anybody had heard about the sub sinking!
The neutron bomb of the 80's would have created plenty of fallout and radioactivity; the point was it created less blast damage and so didn't sound as bad (the fallout was sort-of ignored).
If "not sound as bad" was the intent, it sure failed at that. Whether it was a good idea or not, the neutron bomb was a public relations disaster, with it's apparent design to "kill people and leave buildings undamaged". Pointing out this became one of the favorite lines of those opposed to nuclear arms.
I'm suprised people here who obviously know a lot about these weapons seem totally unaware of the public perception of the neutron bomb.
Actually it might annoy users if their running iChat suddenly quits. They probably understand that if it says "hit this button to reboot" that they should finish their iChat conversation and then hit the button.
I would think a "hit this button to quit iChat" may be confusing to beginner users so that solution is out.
Obvoiusly a way to seamlessly quit the current iChat and start a new one would be ideal, but I'm not sure if it is worth the time it would take to develop such a solution.
The second quote is clearly labelled as from a spokeswoman for the Kerry campaign. It is her job to spin things to sound as good for Kerry as possible. It is also the article writer's job to clearly label where the quote came from so the reader can take this into consideration. It seems like everybody is doing exactly what they should do here, I don't understand your complaint.
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If there are only two choices, Condorcet and Approval and IRV are the same as normal single-vote. Most votes in congress are two choices (approve or disapprove this law) so this does not matter.
No, if there are 10 candidates and 200 million voters, there should be exactly 2000 million votes. A yes or a no for each of the candidates from each voter. Basically there is a "yes" and "no" circle and you should fill one in. Of course lots of ballots will be screwed up, but I don't see this as being any worse than the current system.
Good to see somebody who kind of agrees with me. I mean I dislike the Bush administration as much as anybody, but I really don't see what's wrong with this guy getting some assistance in putting together a good presentation for western powers and media. The Bush administration has some pretty good speechwriters and I see no reason why they can't be made available to him. Compared to many other things America is spending money on over there, this is probably an enormously cost-effective expenditure in getting a stable government there!
Not quite, because the number of electors per state is N+2, where N is (supposedly) the population multiplied by a constant. Thus in a state with a smaller population, each person gets a slightly more powerful vote even if the electors are distributed proportionally. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is another matter.
I do agree tha proportionally distributing the electors, and even allowing fractional distributions, would be a good thing. The previous election could have changed completely with only a few thousand votes changing in Florida (such a small number that it was way below the noise so in fact it really is impossible to tell who won and Gore is just as legitimate of a "winner" as Bush, no matter what anybody says). Under a fractional proportional elector system this could not happen. This would be an enormous improvement, even if it is still possible (but much harder) for the winner to not win the popular vote.
My god! Microsoft and the terrorists are working together! Look where they stashed that space needle!
Microsoft does not allow OEM's to sell machines with Windows where the default browser is not IE. That is locking a customer in (an OEM is a customer, you know...).
I use it all the time as a web browser.
However I never use the file-browsing capabilities, and am often annoyed when it decides to show files instead of the index.html file in the directory I try to go to.
It does appear that file manipulation and web browsing are totally different things, and both Microsoft and KDE and several hundred other people (including me) who thought they could be integrated were wrong.
This was on display in the "Emerging Technologies" display at Siggraph in August 2004 in Los Angeles. The display was quite popular, though I did not try it. But a lot of people should have more to say about it than I have seen here so far...
You know, I think that would work. Anybody using a telescope to aim a laser would be in for a rude suprise!
A corner refelctor is three mirrors arranged as a corner of a cube. Any light beam reflects off all three surfaces and exactly back in the direction it came from. They are used in the laser refelctors left by Apollo on the moon. Also the plastic reflectors on car rear lights are cast to have many small corner reflectors by making the inside surface out of cubes. Another large-scale example is a radar reflector such as used on sailboats, it is three intersecting planes of metal and thus 8 corner reflectors of the proper scale for radar waves.
Interesting that you proposed a flat tax with progressive rates. That is the first time I have seen that.
I cannot figure out why so many people seem to think "getting rid of deductions" and "same percentage for everybody" are equivalent and cannot be seperated. It sure seems to me that you could eliminate all deductions and then still tax the money people make at different percentages depending on how much there is. Conversely you could keep all the complicated deductions you have right now and tax everybody the same percentage of what is left. It just seems to me the concepts are unrelated.
Without arguing for or against any style of tax, can anybody explain why so many on both sides of the argument seem to think that "no deductions" and "same percentage for everybody" are equivalent and you cannot get one without the other?
Huh? There are going to be some years under Hussein where more were killed than the 10,000 or whatever number is claimed for 2003. When he gassed the Kurds that was 3000 or something in one day.
I think analysis like this is interesting and can be used as an argument by either side.
Several scientists (not just right-wing loonies, but actual ones who believe in global warming) have stated that the pressure system funnelling the hurricanes is unrelated to global warming.
Like a lot of that story, things are taken out of context. I also believed this was some Bush slip-of-the-tongue util I saw the actual post here. He really was referring to Clinton, and unless he expects Clinton to be re-elected after him, Clinton is a predecessor!
The main thing managers have to somehow learn is "if it is legal to do something with copyrighted code, it is legal to do it under the GPL".
GPL is a set of exceptions to standard copyright law. It says "if you do this, you can violate the copyright on this code".
It is amazing how few PHB's understand this. If you put a piece of code in that says "Copyright me, all rights reserved" they have not problem, and say "we'll replace that or ask for permission before we distribute". But put some GPL code in, or even link to an LGPL library, and they get all nervous and scared that somehow they will lose the entire company! That is just incredibly stupid, it is in fact safer than plain copyright, by definition!
Aha! That's why nobody murders or robs anybody else. It's that heavy penalty! Thanks for explaining it, mr Bear!
It does look like Bush is going to win the election, but debates can only help Kerry. Almost everyone agrees Kerry will win and gain some support, though I don't know of anybody who thinks it will be enough gain to win the election (anybody I know who believes this also thinks Kerry could win the election now, which is really pretty unlikely).
The fact that the Bush camp agreed to the debates without a lot of bullshit indicates that they are pretty confident that they are going to win and can handle the loss there. It also indicates that perhaps they will change their campaign to a more good-will one.
Personally I think the best thing Bush could do is to denounce the "Swift Boat" group. This would win him a huge block of votes who don't like the negative campaigns (and they would not lose any Swift Boat supporters, since who else would they vote for?), and right now Kerry is seriously hurting for being tied to false accusations as well, and this would differentiate Bush a huge amount. It would also be of serious benifit to everybody as it may cut down on the influence of negative campaigning next election. As a Kerry supporter I can honestly say that a move like this would swing my vote.
In a lot of ways it is good that the election is not going to be close. That means the electronic voting machines cannot throw it, and hopefully we can get rid of those things before the next one. If this was close those machines would tie this up in court forever and it would be a worse disaster than the "wrong" person being electied (whoever you think is wrong).
Let's instead try a logical explanation:
Somebody (ONE person) who dislikes Bush faked up these documents. In fact that person has been identified, it is certainly this Burkett guy, unless he was duped by somebody else. CBS leaped on this and showed themselves to be complete idiots by not doubting the authenticity of it. That is stupid but not criminal.
This requires no planning or conspiracy by Kerry and the DNC (or Bush and the RNC, an equally silly opposing conspiracy theory being pushed). I think my theory is about 10 million times more likely than any of the drivel being posted here by loons on every side.
My opinion: CBS will and should take full blame for being idiots. They probably will, nobody is going to trust anything they claim for a long time. This is not a criminal punishment, it is a punishment in public opinion.
If the forger can be found, and it can be shown that they actively tried to push the letters as authentic (rather than as an internal thing that was not intended to be real) then they are liable for libel against George Bush. Not against anybody else. Trying to say they libeled some more sympathetic target is stupid, it is patently obvious that the target of the memos was George Bush.
"Seeing the source code" does not taint you. Only if you sign an NDA are you "tainted". You are not even tainted if you see the source code without permission (though that means that either somebody who signed the NDA is guilty of violating it, or you are guilty of breaking and entering or industrial espionage)
It is true that if you copy the code you are doing a copyright violation. This is because copyright is defined by US law as existing without signing any contract. But just seeing the source code and learning ideas from it does not violate any normal US law.
If what you were saying was true, then Steven King must have never read anybody else's horror novel, as that would "taint" him and make it impossible for him to write his own.
This is also why looking at GPL code does not "taint" you and prevent you from working on closed-source. Microsoft hires thousands of programmers who have looked at GPL code at least once, so they know this big piece of FUD is false, but they continue to spout it.
Maybe you are making a joke, but I'm quite certain the Libertarians would say that spamming is legal and that market forces would develop technological measures to stop it.
Your description sounds accurate. What I was actually trying to point out was that at least two of the original posters, who seem to know a lot about nuclear weapons, seemed unaware of the negative public perception.
I have to agree that when I heard the "kills people but saves cities" I kind of doubted it because the "city" would be so highly radioactive that it would be useless, and that people were misjudging the purpose of the bomb. I'm trying to remember the general feeling then, I think it was generally acknoledged that these would be used to attack enemy military facilities, not actual cities, though certainly there was a perception that they would be used on military stuff in the middle of cities. For instance it sounded just plausable enough that this would be used to irradiate an underground bunker under the palace in the middle of the city, and who cared what happened to everybody else in the city? Probably a scenario dreamed up by anti-nuke people, but still just plausable enough to make these into a public-relations disaster.
Don't know how accurate they are, but according to that show: the CIA already had pictures and knew where the sub was from 10 years earlier. It sank in the 1950's in the same month as an American sub the Scorpion (the accidents were unrelated). It had one missle on it (I may have missed what happened to the others, the graphic indicated it could hold 3). In the late 1950's an American sub was sent out there to locate it and photograph it and succeeded.
When Nixon was elected he was told about the sub and authorized raising it. The Glomar Explorer lifted the entire sub, but then the lifting contraption broke and 2/3 of the sub fell back to the floor. They got the front third and recovered six bodies (which they buried at sea in a russian-style ceremony), and they recoverd some code information (though I doubt codes from 1950's were much use in 1974!).
The Russians completely covered up the fact that they lost the sub, and the Americans did not say they had found it, so when the story about the Glomar Explorer leaked out, it was also the first anybody had heard about the sub sinking!
The neutron bomb of the 80's would have created plenty of fallout and radioactivity; the point was it created less blast damage and so didn't sound as bad (the fallout was sort-of ignored).
If "not sound as bad" was the intent, it sure failed at that. Whether it was a good idea or not, the neutron bomb was a public relations disaster, with it's apparent design to "kill people and leave buildings undamaged". Pointing out this became one of the favorite lines of those opposed to nuclear arms.
I'm suprised people here who obviously know a lot about these weapons seem totally unaware of the public perception of the neutron bomb.
Actually it might annoy users if their running iChat suddenly quits. They probably understand that if it says "hit this button to reboot" that they should finish their iChat conversation and then hit the button.
I would think a "hit this button to quit iChat" may be confusing to beginner users so that solution is out.
Obvoiusly a way to seamlessly quit the current iChat and start a new one would be ideal, but I'm not sure if it is worth the time it would take to develop such a solution.
The second quote is clearly labelled as from a spokeswoman for the Kerry campaign. It is her job to spin things to sound as good for Kerry as possible. It is also the article writer's job to clearly label where the quote came from so the reader can take this into consideration. It seems like everybody is doing exactly what they should do here, I don't understand your complaint.
Both Bush and Kerry refused to clearly state whether they think Flash is good or bad.