Do you realize just how many potential mandatory voters don't file taxes every year?
Let's say, just for fun, that it's 20%. An absurdly high estimate. Even if we also pretend that we don't have any information about them, it's still sufficient to make mandatory voting effective.
Of course, we do know who they are, so it's a silly non-point.
Mandatory voting would require the authorities to find them and, and this is the truly larger point CHARGE THEM WITH A CRIME.
It requires that we mail a letter, possibly a follow up or two. We already know who voted and who is eligible to vote, so it's not like any further investigation is required.
You can believe that power would be wielded honorably, but you'd quickly be proven wrong.
We have lots of things with mandatory participation now and we've managed to get along just fine. Somehow, the Soviet-style enforcement squads have not appeared.
I'd like to see more voter participation. It's important. Even if enforcement is weak or non-existant, it should still be enough to increase voter turn-out rates significantly. (Believe it or not, people don't actually want to break the law, even when there are no consequences. Not everyone is a paranoid anti-government conspiracy theorist.)
On the problem mentioned in the summary, publicly-funded elections would be a much more effective solution. Our political leaders should be beholden to their constituents, not to their contributors.
Bzzzt. Wrong. Voted in every national level election since 1988.
Good, then you know that we have a record of who voted. Congratulations, you're almost there!
Those the vote would be known, those that don't vote would need to be looked into, investigated, or dare I say, spied upon.
How so? We know who voted and who did not. We also know who is eligible to vote and who is not. No spying, investigation, etc. would be necessary. We already have all the necessary data.
The government can't know who didn't vote without keeping meticulous records
They do that already. It's why I pay my taxes instead of ignoring them.
they'd need to be far more thorough than that in their tracking and monitoring
They already are!
Sure, they'll miss a small minority of people who fell off-grid, but who the hell cares? I suspect that existing records will cover well-above 99.9% Do you think it would be completely ineffective if it wasn't 100% perfect?
You're clearly a bit paranoid, so I hope this didn't disturb you too much.
Not really. It becomes difficult to find good apps, as they're lost in the flood of terrible apps. The number of so-called "zombie apps" on iOS was over 75% sometime last year. It's become a crap-shoot for both users and developers.
I'd like to see specialty stores, preferably curated by communities. Great apps are far less likely to get lost, and crap apps are far less likely find a home there at all.
Apple adds something like 60,000 apps per month, which easily explains the sever quality control issues and persistent discoverability problems. Smaller, community driven, specialty stores won't have that problem . Besides, competition is always good for consumers.
What I'm advocating here is a plurality of stores, not a single store, preferably community driven.
We've tried the walled-garden approach. Both users and developers suffered. It didn't work, but that doesn't mean there isn't value in curation or in having a known, trusted, vendor. That's why I'd like to see more stores, with specialized interest. Crap app developers can still have their wal-mart style marketplaces, we'll just have other, better, options.
You're a iOS users, so you're well-aware of how much absolute crap has found it's way in to the App Store. That's not to criticize Apple, there's crap in every OS's store, Google, Microsoft, BlackBerry, Amazon, even Mozilla have "curated" marketplaces full of garbage -- and the cream rarely seems to float to the top.
We've tried the monolithic do-everything marketplace. All we got was the great app-count war and more fart-apps than I can reasonably estimate. What I'd like to see is a lot of smaller, preferably community-driven, stores. If I have a special interest in waffles, I could use the Waffle Aficionado's store to find a small selection of highly-recommended waffle apps. If I like candy-themed match-three games, I could use the Triple Candy Club's store to fuel my addiction.
An open platform, supporting a variety of marketplaces, would be a huge win for the consumer. This is possible on Android, if you change a setting, BB is a bit more locked down, as you need to have your apps signed and connected to your computer even after switching to developer mode, but it's still a possibility. It's obviously seamless on FirefoxOS (like it used to be on BB). Vendors can even distribute their apps directly from their website.
So why aren't we doing this? There are already alternative app stores for Android, why haven't we seen any specialty stores?
Performance is better over all, which is what matters most. The UI change is what bothers most people, so they can use one of several free tools to replace it. I've adapted and no longer care that things are different.
Though I've found that I use the search feature in windows 7 a lot more than I did prior to my exposure to windows 8. It's surprisingly convenient.
Point a five year old at Eliza sometime and see how long they maintain interest.
Point an adult at it and Weizenbaum will tell you how disturbed it make him feel to see adults attribute real intelligence to a computer program.
Hey, let's face it -- chatter bots haven't exactly advance much farther beyond Eliza.
that would suck compared to what they are trying to do - have a more intelligent conversation.
I should probably point out that this is a toy. They're not out to produce some advanced AI program; they want to make a slightly improved talking doll to sell to young girls.
Remember: the only reason Siri needs to talk to the server is to avoid a short training session. That bit is all about voice recognition. On the chatter-bot side, more computing power isn't going to net you any significant gains. It's still just as bad as it's always been. Just ask Siri.
Right now, not if you want to make it work at all well and not be terrible, plus about 10x more expensive than it will be
I think you underestimate the state of modern technology, or the computing power necessary for speech recognition software suitable to the task. While I'm not familiar with the internals of the toy, I suspect there exists a micro-controller capable of adequately meeting that need already on-board. Ditch the wifi and you'll even save a bit of money.
Like I said before, reduce the vocabulary and you can skip the training step. After that, something like this was well-withing the capabilities of my old 66mhz IBM Aptiva with 8mb of RAM. If a training step can be integrated in to play, even better.
Not if you understand the technology, because you know that in order to do the first, it ALSO has to do the second.
Why can't it happen locally? We've had "learning" chatter bots and local voice recognition for ages. Worst comes to worst, have the kid read the doll a story for the training portion and you're good to go.
Really, I don't see why we couldn't even cram the whole thing on the doll. With a suitably restricted vocabulary, you wouldn't even need a training portion.
WTF are you talking about? Barbie dolls have been subject to (rather harsh) criticism as long as they've existed.
But, kids love the damn things and most parents don't care enough about those issues, even if they agree that they're serious, to let that influence their purchase. It's really easy to say "it's just a doll" when your kids is clamoring for one, a relative buys one for her, she's bombarded by Barbie ads on the television, etc.
Truth be told, this isn't about Barbie so much as the countless toys and media that send the same message. Barbie gets the most attention as she's been the go-to example since your parents were children. There are dolls now that make Barbie look practically wholesome, after all. But that doesn't mean there isn't a serious problem.
but a good estimate is that they're B cup or smaller.
Only if you assume she's extraordinarily tall and anorexic. On average, she's got 3.5" waste and a 5" bust. At 11.5" tall, that's pretty top-heavy! Now, this is after the much-publicized downsizing her upper-body received sometime during the age of Netscape. Let's be honest about this.
But we're just picking on a popular example. Mattel has a number of dolls that make Barbie look positively wholesome, even through the eyes of the hairiest radical feminist your imagination can conjure.
How, pray tell, would you show those things in a doll? Do you think microscope-toting Barbie would sell well?
Why wouldn't it? Do girls have some aversion to microscopes? Now that you mention it, a barbie themed microscope wouldn't be a bad idea. There are a number of companies already that sell microscopes and telescopes designed to appeal to girls. You'll have a hard time, unfortunately, finding them at the local brick-and-mortar.
That you would even ask such a question is troubling. The very idea that enough girls would want anything to do with microscopes for such a toy to be economically viable seems impossible for you to imagine. That's the entire problem. We have this odd cultural belief that things like microscopes are for boys and that any girl interested in things like microscopes is deviant (or going through a phase or whatever).
Kids are sensitive to that. Imagine taking a girl to a toy store and seeing here develop interest in a display microscope. What will she do when she finds that the only microscopes for sale are marketed toward boys, with no 'gender-neutral' or 'for girls' options? (Note: This is the most plausible scenario.) What message do you think that sends to her? How does that change her understanding of how microscopes and other scientific equipment relate to gender? Do you think this is a good thing or a bad thing for girls? Society in general?
They won't support Android, either, or at least they historically haven't done so.
Are you sure? Every Android thing I've connected to my TV, for years, has supported Amazon Instant, my old Visio CoStar, Roku, even my Blu-ray player.
As far as I can tell, they've supported a wide variety of Android devices from smart tv's to streaming boxes longer than the service has been called "Amazon Instant".
Seriously? That clown? I thought he'd be in jail by now, you know, for the identity theft and fraud.
More to the point, Randi's silly little nonsense challenge doesn't "prove" anything about the claims made by any group. That you could believe such ridiculous nonsense tells me more about Randi's followers than it does the homeopathic hucksters.
If you need an analogy: Randi is to science what faith-healers are to medicine. If you care about science, as many of Randi's flock claim, you should distance yourself as much as you can.
What I really don't get is why people reject the idea that the mind can heal.
I find that particularly odd, considering how many of them already believe that the mind can harm health.
the rejection of the role of the mind in the process of health and its automatic denigration is itself unscientific.
Of course. Though you need to keep in mind that you're not dealing with scientists, but with "science cheerleaders" -- people with no scientific education fighting against... something... with as much vigor as they can muster.
Fortunately for us, they're just a noisy minority. They'll die out just like the logical positivists, for the same reasons.
At first I was a little freaked out about not having 'silent mode' but now I've just gotten used to interruptions
You had me thrown there. That would be horrible! Why would you just accept that?
Anyhow... I'd say 'FYI' here but this benefits the people near you more: You can still disable all notifications by sliding the notification mode to “none”. There's also an app called "SoundHUD" that will quiet your chatty phone.
From what you're saying, you may want to take a look at Blackberry. Windows Phone isn't exactly big on contrast, but could be worth a look. FirefoxOS, naturally, would be a good fit thanks to Haida, though if you're technically inclined you could always customize Gaia to suite your tastes.
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Congratulations, you've missed the point!
It wasn't easy, I'm sure, but you've done it. You even managed some outrage. It's rather impressive, really.
I don't blame them. After the first episode, it was pretty clear it wasn't going to be an informative show about science.
Do you realize just how many potential mandatory voters don't file taxes every year?
Let's say, just for fun, that it's 20%. An absurdly high estimate. Even if we also pretend that we don't have any information about them, it's still sufficient to make mandatory voting effective.
Of course, we do know who they are, so it's a silly non-point.
Mandatory voting would require the authorities to find them and, and this is the truly larger point CHARGE THEM WITH A CRIME.
It requires that we mail a letter, possibly a follow up or two. We already know who voted and who is eligible to vote, so it's not like any further investigation is required.
You can believe that power would be wielded honorably, but you'd quickly be proven wrong.
We have lots of things with mandatory participation now and we've managed to get along just fine. Somehow, the Soviet-style enforcement squads have not appeared.
I'd like to see more voter participation. It's important. Even if enforcement is weak or non-existant, it should still be enough to increase voter turn-out rates significantly. (Believe it or not, people don't actually want to break the law, even when there are no consequences. Not everyone is a paranoid anti-government conspiracy theorist.)
On the problem mentioned in the summary, publicly-funded elections would be a much more effective solution. Our political leaders should be beholden to their constituents, not to their contributors.
Bzzzt. Wrong. Voted in every national level election since 1988.
Good, then you know that we have a record of who voted. Congratulations, you're almost there!
Those the vote would be known, those that don't vote would need to be looked into, investigated, or dare I say, spied upon.
How so? We know who voted and who did not. We also know who is eligible to vote and who is not. No spying, investigation, etc. would be necessary. We already have all the necessary data.
The government can't know who didn't vote without keeping meticulous records
They do that already. It's why I pay my taxes instead of ignoring them.
they'd need to be far more thorough than that in their tracking and monitoring
They already are!
Sure, they'll miss a small minority of people who fell off-grid, but who the hell cares? I suspect that existing records will cover well-above 99.9% Do you think it would be completely ineffective if it wasn't 100% perfect?
You're clearly a bit paranoid, so I hope this didn't disturb you too much.
I'm going to guess that you've never actually voted.
If you had, you'd know the answer.
Not really. It becomes difficult to find good apps, as they're lost in the flood of terrible apps. The number of so-called "zombie apps" on iOS was over 75% sometime last year. It's become a crap-shoot for both users and developers.
I'd like to see specialty stores, preferably curated by communities. Great apps are far less likely to get lost, and crap apps are far less likely find a home there at all.
Apple adds something like 60,000 apps per month, which easily explains the sever quality control issues and persistent discoverability problems. Smaller, community driven, specialty stores won't have that problem
.
Besides, competition is always good for consumers.
See the problem?
Indeed I do.
What I'm advocating here is a plurality of stores, not a single store, preferably community driven.
We've tried the walled-garden approach. Both users and developers suffered. It didn't work, but that doesn't mean there isn't value in curation or in having a known, trusted, vendor. That's why I'd like to see more stores, with specialized interest. Crap app developers can still have their wal-mart style marketplaces, we'll just have other, better, options.
But that's the wrong approach.
You're a iOS users, so you're well-aware of how much absolute crap has found it's way in to the App Store. That's not to criticize Apple, there's crap in every OS's store, Google, Microsoft, BlackBerry, Amazon, even Mozilla have "curated" marketplaces full of garbage -- and the cream rarely seems to float to the top.
We've tried the monolithic do-everything marketplace. All we got was the great app-count war and more fart-apps than I can reasonably estimate. What I'd like to see is a lot of smaller, preferably community-driven, stores. If I have a special interest in waffles, I could use the Waffle Aficionado's store to find a small selection of highly-recommended waffle apps. If I like candy-themed match-three games, I could use the Triple Candy Club's store to fuel my addiction.
An open platform, supporting a variety of marketplaces, would be a huge win for the consumer. This is possible on Android, if you change a setting, BB is a bit more locked down, as you need to have your apps signed and connected to your computer even after switching to developer mode, but it's still a possibility. It's obviously seamless on FirefoxOS (like it used to be on BB). Vendors can even distribute their apps directly from their website.
So why aren't we doing this? There are already alternative app stores for Android, why haven't we seen any specialty stores?
I'm not sure what you find funny.
Performance is better over all, which is what matters most. The UI change is what bothers most people, so they can use one of several free tools to replace it. I've adapted and no longer care that things are different.
Though I've found that I use the search feature in windows 7 a lot more than I did prior to my exposure to windows 8. It's surprisingly convenient.
It's better than 7, so I don't have any complaints. It takes 5 minutes to get your start menu back, if that's what's bothering you.
Point a five year old at Eliza sometime and see how long they maintain interest.
Point an adult at it and Weizenbaum will tell you how disturbed it make him feel to see adults attribute real intelligence to a computer program.
Hey, let's face it -- chatter bots haven't exactly advance much farther beyond Eliza.
that would suck compared to what they are trying to do - have a more intelligent conversation.
I should probably point out that this is a toy. They're not out to produce some advanced AI program; they want to make a slightly improved talking doll to sell to young girls.
Remember: the only reason Siri needs to talk to the server is to avoid a short training session. That bit is all about voice recognition. On the chatter-bot side, more computing power isn't going to net you any significant gains. It's still just as bad as it's always been. Just ask Siri.
Right now, not if you want to make it work at all well and not be terrible, plus about 10x more expensive than it will be
I think you underestimate the state of modern technology, or the computing power necessary for speech recognition software suitable to the task. While I'm not familiar with the internals of the toy, I suspect there exists a micro-controller capable of adequately meeting that need already on-board. Ditch the wifi and you'll even save a bit of money.
Like I said before, reduce the vocabulary and you can skip the training step. After that, something like this was well-withing the capabilities of my old 66mhz IBM Aptiva with 8mb of RAM. If a training step can be integrated in to play, even better.
Not if you understand the technology, because you know that in order to do the first, it ALSO has to do the second.
Why can't it happen locally? We've had "learning" chatter bots and local voice recognition for ages. Worst comes to worst, have the kid read the doll a story for the training portion and you're good to go.
Really, I don't see why we couldn't even cram the whole thing on the doll. With a suitably restricted vocabulary, you wouldn't even need a training portion.
That doesn't explain the comic book.
Do girls just naturally need a vacuous form of entertainment?
WTF are you talking about? Barbie dolls have been subject to (rather harsh) criticism as long as they've existed.
But, kids love the damn things and most parents don't care enough about those issues, even if they agree that they're serious, to let that influence their purchase. It's really easy to say "it's just a doll" when your kids is clamoring for one, a relative buys one for her, she's bombarded by Barbie ads on the television, etc.
Truth be told, this isn't about Barbie so much as the countless toys and media that send the same message. Barbie gets the most attention as she's been the go-to example since your parents were children. There are dolls now that make Barbie look practically wholesome, after all. But that doesn't mean there isn't a serious problem.
but a good estimate is that they're B cup or smaller.
Only if you assume she's extraordinarily tall and anorexic. On average, she's got 3.5" waste and a 5" bust. At 11.5" tall, that's pretty top-heavy! Now, this is after the much-publicized downsizing her upper-body received sometime during the age of Netscape. Let's be honest about this.
But we're just picking on a popular example. Mattel has a number of dolls that make Barbie look positively wholesome, even through the eyes of the hairiest radical feminist your imagination can conjure.
How, pray tell, would you show those things in a doll? Do you think microscope-toting Barbie would sell well?
Why wouldn't it? Do girls have some aversion to microscopes? Now that you mention it, a barbie themed microscope wouldn't be a bad idea. There are a number of companies already that sell microscopes and telescopes designed to appeal to girls. You'll have a hard time, unfortunately, finding them at the local brick-and-mortar.
That you would even ask such a question is troubling. The very idea that enough girls would want anything to do with microscopes for such a toy to be economically viable seems impossible for you to imagine. That's the entire problem. We have this odd cultural belief that things like microscopes are for boys and that any girl interested in things like microscopes is deviant (or going through a phase or whatever).
Kids are sensitive to that. Imagine taking a girl to a toy store and seeing here develop interest in a display microscope. What will she do when she finds that the only microscopes for sale are marketed toward boys, with no 'gender-neutral' or 'for girls' options? (Note: This is the most plausible scenario.) What message do you think that sends to her? How does that change her understanding of how microscopes and other scientific equipment relate to gender? Do you think this is a good thing or a bad thing for girls? Society in general?
It's a stupid meme now.
I'm still waiting for Mail Pouch Tobacco barns to make an appearance...
Would you rather they bring up the Lisa?
They won't support Android, either, or at least they historically haven't done so.
Are you sure? Every Android thing I've connected to my TV, for years, has supported Amazon Instant, my old Visio CoStar, Roku, even my Blu-ray player.
As far as I can tell, they've supported a wide variety of Android devices from smart tv's to streaming boxes longer than the service has been called "Amazon Instant".
As it happens, it works even when people know they're receiving a placebo. Weird, isn't it?
Even stranger, there are measurable physiological effects. It's not just patients reporting on their subjective experience.
You *can* prove that a treatment is ineffective
Not really. All you can do is fail to find an effect, which is why you don't see papers claiming that they've "proven" X was ineffective.
This is pretty basic stuff that I'd expect a high-schooler to be able to explain.
Seriously? That clown? I thought he'd be in jail by now, you know, for the identity theft and fraud.
More to the point, Randi's silly little nonsense challenge doesn't "prove" anything about the claims made by any group. That you could believe such ridiculous nonsense tells me more about Randi's followers than it does the homeopathic hucksters.
If you need an analogy: Randi is to science what faith-healers are to medicine. If you care about science, as many of Randi's flock claim, you should distance yourself as much as you can.
What I really don't get is why people reject the idea that the mind can heal.
I find that particularly odd, considering how many of them already believe that the mind can harm health.
the rejection of the role of the mind in the process of health and its automatic denigration is itself unscientific.
Of course. Though you need to keep in mind that you're not dealing with scientists, but with "science cheerleaders" -- people with no scientific education fighting against ... something ... with as much vigor as they can muster.
Fortunately for us, they're just a noisy minority. They'll die out just like the logical positivists, for the same reasons.
At first I was a little freaked out about not having 'silent mode' but now I've just gotten used to interruptions
You had me thrown there. That would be horrible! Why would you just accept that?
Anyhow ... I'd say 'FYI' here but this benefits the people near you more: You can still disable all notifications by sliding the notification mode to “none”. There's also an app called "SoundHUD" that will quiet your chatty phone.
From what you're saying, you may want to take a look at Blackberry. Windows Phone isn't exactly big on contrast, but could be worth a look. FirefoxOS, naturally, would be a good fit thanks to Haida, though if you're technically inclined you could always customize Gaia to suite your tastes.