While it's possible that there are forms of life Not As We Know It, speculations on that are even fuzzier than guesstimates on the likelihood of known types of life elsewhere. At least with the latter, we can come up with a reasonably firm idea of what conditions are required. /.
The Drake equation is calcualted by multiplying seven terms together. 3 of those may be obtained from reasonable sources in astrophysics and planetary formation research (albeit they are continually changing as we learn more!). The other 5 terms are picked essentially at random, and therefore have no meaningful value.
And it evidently uses non-standard rules for addition, too.... /.
You're thinking of Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity, but you seem to have gotten a few details mixed up with Robert L. Forward's Dragon's Egg (Mesklin in Mission of Gravity was a super-Jovian planet which rotated so fast that it was extremely flattened at the poles; the setting of Dragon's Egg was a neutron star). /.
Re:It's a great Pagan holiday fscked up by Christi
on
Gifts For Geeks
·
· Score: 5
We celebrated this Holy Day tens of thousands of years before the Christians came along.
What, did you think Bill Gates invented "embrace and extend"? /.
Every other commercial medium (TV, Radio, even US mail) produces huge amounts of unsolicited advertisements. Anyone ever complain to the USPS about the gigantic volume of junk mail that shows up in your mail every day? Anyone ever tried to "unsubscribe" from junk mail in your regular mail? I'd bet 99% of people haven't.
Why do people bother to trot out these tired old false analogies? I don't pay to receive any of this crap; I do pay to receive spam.
In addition to supporting the medium, there should be some rules about what kind of content is allowable in these emails.
Out of the question, and your attempt to hitch your pet cause onto the unrelated issue of spam puts you on the borderline of trolldom.
The second issue is that this mob rules mentality that most anti-spammers seem to have screws up other legitimate uses of email.
Classic blame-the-victim fallacy. The spammers, not the people resisting their parasitic attacks on the system, are to blame for the climate of suspicion which currently prevails against legitimate (i.e. subscribed) bulk e-mail (particularly given that spammers attempt to disguise their garbage as "Information You Requested").
The "Newsletters" that many sites send out seem to fall into a gray area that threatens to eliminate this otherwise useful feature.
Newsletters for which an explicit subscription request has been filed are in a white area. "Newsletters" for which no such subscription request has been are in a black area. There is no gray area. /.
Large bureaucratic machines always lead to corruption and inefficiency, because they decouple the incentives to get a good performance review from the incentives to actually do your job well. In a competitive market economy with free exchange of information, this can only go so far before a company's reputation catches up to it. In a managed economy with suppression of anti-government speech, the death spiral can sink to lower levels -- nobody is going to start competing with the People's tractor factory, and nobody is going to make its management listen to the truth. /.
This is precisely why any attempt to build surveillance capability "into the infrastructure" should be firmly rejected. The cops can do surveillance on a case-by-case basis -- but it requires them to do actual work and puts them at some risk of being caught if they do it illegally, both of which serve as checks against fishing expeditions.
If the DNC offices at the Watergate could have been bugged by pushing a button in the White House while G. Gordon Liddy took a nap at home, we probably would not know about it to this day.... /.
As far as recounts go, I'm imagining a time when we have computer voting booths everywhere (we've got them where I live already) and "recount" means, "do another query with these computers". There'd be some kind of secure protocol by which they could all put the results together a few minutes after the polls close.
This relies heavily on absolute accuracy -- no system malfunctions, no hacking the system even in one precinct, and Ghu forbid any general backsliding in the technological infrastructure -- is . That can't be helped under some circumstances (when the two leading candidates are within a razor-thin margin of each other, in a winner-take-all system), but greatly expanding the number of situations where the election must rely on such accuracy (see earlier post) strikes me as reckless.
I don't see why you can't do a runoff system with the states proportionally dividing their electoral votes. It would be like an optimized version of the following:
State X asks all its voters to vote for their honest top choice, assuring them that if that person does not win, and the election does not become a foregone conclusion, they will be able to change their vote.
The state's votes are distributed proportionally, rounding off where necessary.
The electoral vote is tallied. If one candidate has a majority, that's that - because no runoff would change anything.
If not, each state drops off the candidate that received the least votes in that state. The votes that went for that candidate spill over to the second choices marked on those ballots. The results are again tallied and the proportional votes from each state redecided. The electoral vote is again tallied.
Repeat until somebody has a majority of the electoral vote.
OK, here's why:
The catch is in the line "The electoral vote is tallied". A state's EV allocation system, whatever it is, only tallies the electoral votes from that state, obviously. Since no one state determines the outcome of the election, it is impossible for the allocation in any one state to determine whether a candidate has a majority.
As an example of the problems this produces, suppose that Senator Bedfellow does well enough in the rest of the country to draw 268 EV. However, he doesn't play well in California, drawing only 4% of the vote. Under a straight proportional division, he gets 2 of California's electoral votes (and the election). Under your attempt to combine instant runoff with proportional division, he doesn't.
Attempting to get around this problem by having each state base its runoff system on the national outcome would work about as well as a rule requiring both cars at an intersection to come to a complete stop and wait until the other has passed.
/.
Pass a law requiring states to split their votes proportionally.
The problem with proportional division is that it forces recounts if the vote tally is near any of the possible cusp points (e.g. do California's 54 electoral votes divide as 29DEM / 22REP / 3GRN / 1LIB, or 30/22/2/1, or 28/22/3/1, or 29/21/2/2, or...?) A by-district system (one EV for winning each Congressional district, two EV for the most votes in the state) avoids that problem.
Finally, a runoff system. At the voting booth, a voter selects his/her first, second, third, and fourth choice.
This concept works better in conjunction with a winner-take-all (either by state or by district) than in conjunction with some sort of proportional division. With proportional division, if your first-choice candidate wins 1 EV in a large state (which can be 1/108th of the vote in California, if fractions over half are rounded up), then your second choice would never come into play even though your first choice has no hope of victory. /.
I think the states should be further subdivided into their counties in a similar manner as the country is divided.
I'd favor a system of one electoral vote for each Congressional district, with two for the overall state winner. Attempts at proportional division across the whole state would set recounts at dozens of different cusps (e.g. for a state with 25 EV, there would need to be a recount if the total came near any boundary between:
REP 13 DEM 12 GRN 0 LIB 0
REP 12 DEM 11 GRN 1 LIB 1
REP 12 DEM 10 GRN 2 LIB 1
* Voting cards failed to fit properly in the slots of some voting machines in Osceola County, giving 300 votes to the Libertarian candidate (where only 100 Libertarian voters are registered). Misaligned card machines have long been a source of errors.
The Risks folks can strike this one off the list. It turns out that this one is a legitimate vote bump, not a tech glitch:
I was watching NBC Nightly News this evening. Brokaw and crew detailed the grievances about Palm Beach County and all of those poor old people who just must have accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan. Then we heard that the Democrats also have their eye on Osceola County!
It seems that the Democrats are suspicious about the number of votes that Libertarian Harry Browne got in Osceola. You see, there are only 120 or so registered Libertarians in Osceola County, but Harry Browne got 309 votes there. The Democrats
feel that if there's only 120 registered Libertarians and Harry Browne gets 309 votes... why, hell. There must be voter fraud! These people aren't just going to decide to vote for Harry Browne on their own!
Well, guess what. It wasn't voter fraud. It was me. No false modesty here. It was Neal Boortz.
You see, I'm broadcast on 580-WDBO in Orlando. WDBO goes blasting into neighboring Osceola County and it's two largest cities, Kissimmee and St. Cloud. I've been on that station for quite some time now talking up the Libertarian position. Last Saturday Royal, Belinda and I traveled to Orlando to do a special two-hour election show. Believe me, I talked up Harry Browne and the Libertarian Party through a good part of those two hours.
So - to my pals in the Democratic Party. You can drop Osceola County from your list of counties with potential voter fraud. I'll take the full blame. Concentrate on those poor old folks in Palm Beach County who just can't seem to read a ballot.
From the fact that we haven't heard much of this one in the last few days, I presume that the Democrats no longer consider this a possible snafu which might be resolved in Gore's favor. /.
don't link to the page that also invalidates your spin
The Constitution of the United States is not "my spin".
States still have the right to deny those liberties for matters of state security.
The basis for this assertion seems to be missing from my copy of the Constitution. It must be in one of those mysterious clauses that can only be read with the aid of the magic Penumbral Emanation Spectacles. /.
On the paper would be a machine readable version of the vote, like a bar code and a human readable version.
Only one version, human-readable (but in a simple font adapted to be machine-readable as well). Otherwise, I could be cheated by a hacked machine that prints "Harry Browne" in the human-readable characters (so I don't know that anything's amiss) and "Al Gore" in the machine-readable characters (so the tabulation machines credit the vote to him). /.
The need for a more solid foundation for the protection of freedmen as well as white citizens was recognized, and the result was a significant new proposal--the Fourteenth Amendment. A chief exponent of the amendment, Sen. Jacob M. Howard (R., Mich.), referred to "the personal rights guaranteed and secured by the first eight amendments of the Constitution; such as freedom of speech and of the press;... the right to keep and bear arms...." Adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment was necessary because presently these rights were not guaranteed against state legislation. "The great object of the first section of this amendment is, therefore, to restrain the power of the States and compel them at all times to respect these great fundamental guarantees."
One copy of the receipt should go into a lockbox inside the machine, just like the magnetic stripe cards. Another could go to the voter, who can immediately notify the staff if the machine "made a mistake" and their vote needs to be invalidated and they must vote again, but this brings up the possiblity of fraudulent receipts and probably should not occur. To guard against this, any action triggered by a voter receipt would have to start with insertion of the receipt into a reader which would match the receipt against the ones stored in the voting machines. This is the most uncertain aspect of this system, other than the unavoidable issues of voter coercion, and unlikely issues like massive conspiracies.
I don't think that issuing voter receipts is a good idea, precisely because of the coercion issue. Even if the receipt merely contained an ID number for the vote, someone could use it to verify that he voted "correctly".
IMO, providing a printout for final review behind a window (which could be marked VOID if the voter rejected it and started over, or dropped into the verification lockbox if the voter accepted it and entered the vote) is sufficient. /.
You forgot a step: the booth prints out a sheet listing your choices, which you then slip into a slot on a fireproof safe
Actually, it would be prudent to have a printout card listing the voter's choices drop into place behind a window (look but don't touch). If the voter confirms the vote, it drops into the locked ballot box. If the voter rejects the vote, it is marked "VOID" and dropped into the locked reject box (or maybe all dropped into the same box, if the VOID marker is sufficiently reliable and indelible), and the machine allows the voter to enter new choices.
That provides a printed confirmation as a double-check against machine error (or corrupted programming). The cards can be counted automatically or manually if the machine tally is called into question.
/.
Re:Computerized Voting Leaves No Paper Trail
on
eLection '04
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· Score: 2
I'd have a paper backup created at the voting booth:
1. Voter enters a selection for each ballot item.
2. Voter presses "PRINT" button.
3. Paper card is printed (in a simple font which is easily read by humans and machines) and dropped behind a window where the voter can review it but not touch or mark it. The "VOTE" and "REJECT" buttons are now activated.
4. Voter presses either "VOTE" button to enter the vote and drop the card into the locked ballot box or the "REJECT" button to reset the machine to step 1, mark the card as void, and drop it into the locked reject box.
The locked boxes would be held, and recounted (by machine) if the computer count is challenged. /.
The ballot isn't the best UI I've seen, but the picture shows that it's unambiguous. The only way to mismark it is if you're legally blind (in which case you should have an election official assist you) or aren't paying attention (in which case you quite frankly have no business at the polls). /.
Physicist Alan Natapoff studied the system and published a 1996 paper outlining why, mathematically, the Electoral College actually gives MORE power to the individual voter at the local level.
The Electoral College does not give more overall power to individual voters; it redistributes the individual voters' power. If you cast a Presidential vote in Florida, the election just might hang on your decision -- if you cast a Presidential vote in Massachusettes... well, I hope you had a pleasant little walk on your way to the polling place because that's all you got out of it.
That's not to say that the Electoral College is a bad idea. It does serve a useful function in impelling candidates to address a wide range of regions rather than just piling up huge vote counts in one local bloc. /.
Maybe the original poster "feared" who contributed to Browne's campaign...
Check it out here
OK. A list of donations in the four-digit range ($2,000 to $8,300)... and some fine print:
METHODOLOGY: The organizations listed here came from two sources: either they were the sponsor of a PAC that donated to the member, or they were listed as individual donor's employer.
Well, since Browne's total PAC contributions are a whopping $0.00, that leaves "listed as individual donor's employer". The notion that Browne is somehow in thrall to IBM or Microsoft because people who happen to work for those companies gave him a total of $15,125 (out of $1,811,826 in individual contributions) is sillier than any of the campaign rhetoric I've heard, and that's saying somthing. /.
Here's why I disagree: if government is to step in, then that means that society wants it, right? But if society really wants it, then society can fix it itself.
The catch is that the government would have to get out of the way of society's efforts to fix the problem. How about old-fashioned outlawry (i.e. the protection of the law no longer applies) for spamming? (That is, if you can prove that X spammed you, turning X's box into a $2K doorstop is legally treated as self-defense, not cracking.)
/.
Slashdot Mirror
While it's possible that there are forms of life Not As We Know It, speculations on that are even fuzzier than guesstimates on the likelihood of known types of life elsewhere. At least with the latter, we can come up with a reasonably firm idea of what conditions are required.
/.
And it evidently uses non-standard rules for addition, too....
/.
You're thinking of Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity, but you seem to have gotten a few details mixed up with Robert L. Forward's Dragon's Egg (Mesklin in Mission of Gravity was a super-Jovian planet which rotated so fast that it was extremely flattened at the poles; the setting of Dragon's Egg was a neutron star).
/.
What, did you think Bill Gates invented "embrace and extend"?
/.
Why do people bother to trot out these tired old false analogies? I don't pay to receive any of this crap; I do pay to receive spam.
In addition to supporting the medium, there should be some rules about what kind of content is allowable in these emails.
Out of the question, and your attempt to hitch your pet cause onto the unrelated issue of spam puts you on the borderline of trolldom.
The second issue is that this mob rules mentality that most anti-spammers seem to have screws up other legitimate uses of email.
Classic blame-the-victim fallacy. The spammers, not the people resisting their parasitic attacks on the system, are to blame for the climate of suspicion which currently prevails against legitimate (i.e. subscribed) bulk e-mail (particularly given that spammers attempt to disguise their garbage as "Information You Requested").
The "Newsletters" that many sites send out seem to fall into a gray area that threatens to eliminate this otherwise useful feature.
Newsletters for which an explicit subscription request has been filed are in a white area. "Newsletters" for which no such subscription request has been are in a black area. There is no gray area.
/.
Oh, piffle. Give e-mail spammers 5-20 of hard labor cleaning up landfills and planting new trees, and both problems are solved. :-)
/.
Large bureaucratic machines always lead to corruption and inefficiency, because they decouple the incentives to get a good performance review from the incentives to actually do your job well. In a competitive market economy with free exchange of information, this can only go so far before a company's reputation catches up to it. In a managed economy with suppression of anti-government speech, the death spiral can sink to lower levels -- nobody is going to start competing with the People's tractor factory, and nobody is going to make its management listen to the truth.
/.
If the DNC offices at the Watergate could have been bugged by pushing a button in the White House while G. Gordon Liddy took a nap at home, we probably would not know about it to this day....
/.
Wow! That's two degrees per day!!
/.
This relies heavily on absolute accuracy -- no system malfunctions, no hacking the system even in one precinct, and Ghu forbid any general backsliding in the technological infrastructure -- is . That can't be helped under some circumstances (when the two leading candidates are within a razor-thin margin of each other, in a winner-take-all system), but greatly expanding the number of situations where the election must rely on such accuracy (see earlier post) strikes me as reckless.
I don't see why you can't do a runoff system with the states proportionally dividing their electoral votes. It would be like an optimized version of the following:
State X asks all its voters to vote for their honest top choice, assuring them that if that person does not win, and the election does not become a foregone conclusion, they will be able to change their vote.
The state's votes are distributed proportionally, rounding off where necessary.
The electoral vote is tallied. If one candidate has a majority, that's that - because no runoff would change anything.
If not, each state drops off the candidate that received the least votes in that state. The votes that went for that candidate spill over to the second choices marked on those ballots. The results are again tallied and the proportional votes from each state redecided. The electoral vote is again tallied.
Repeat until somebody has a majority of the electoral vote.
OK, here's why:
The catch is in the line "The electoral vote is tallied". A state's EV allocation system, whatever it is, only tallies the electoral votes from that state, obviously. Since no one state determines the outcome of the election, it is impossible for the allocation in any one state to determine whether a candidate has a majority.
As an example of the problems this produces, suppose that Senator Bedfellow does well enough in the rest of the country to draw 268 EV. However, he doesn't play well in California, drawing only 4% of the vote. Under a straight proportional division, he gets 2 of California's electoral votes (and the election). Under your attempt to combine instant runoff with proportional division, he doesn't.
Attempting to get around this problem by having each state base its runoff system on the national outcome would work about as well as a rule requiring both cars at an intersection to come to a complete stop and wait until the other has passed.
/.
The problem with proportional division is that it forces recounts if the vote tally is near any of the possible cusp points (e.g. do California's 54 electoral votes divide as 29DEM / 22REP / 3GRN / 1LIB, or 30/22/2/1, or 28/22/3/1, or 29/21/2/2, or...?) A by-district system (one EV for winning each Congressional district, two EV for the most votes in the state) avoids that problem.
Finally, a runoff system. At the voting booth, a voter selects his/her first, second, third, and fourth choice.
This concept works better in conjunction with a winner-take-all (either by state or by district) than in conjunction with some sort of proportional division. With proportional division, if your first-choice candidate wins 1 EV in a large state (which can be 1/108th of the vote in California, if fractions over half are rounded up), then your second choice would never come into play even though your first choice has no hope of victory.
/.
I'd favor a system of one electoral vote for each Congressional district, with two for the overall state winner. Attempts at proportional division across the whole state would set recounts at dozens of different cusps (e.g. for a state with 25 EV, there would need to be a recount if the total came near any boundary between:
etc ad nauseam./.
* Voting cards failed to fit properly in the slots of some voting machines in Osceola County, giving 300 votes to the Libertarian candidate (where only 100 Libertarian voters are registered). Misaligned card machines have long been a source of errors.
The Risks folks can strike this one off the list. It turns out that this one is a legitimate vote bump, not a tech glitch:
From the fact that we haven't heard much of this one in the last few days, I presume that the Democrats no longer consider this a possible snafu which might be resolved in Gore's favor./.
The Constitution of the United States is not "my spin".
States still have the right to deny those liberties for matters of state security.
The basis for this assertion seems to be missing from my copy of the Constitution. It must be in one of those mysterious clauses that can only be read with the aid of the magic Penumbral Emanation Spectacles.
/.
Only one version, human-readable (but in a simple font adapted to be machine-readable as well). Otherwise, I could be cheated by a hacked machine that prints "Harry Browne" in the human-readable characters (so I don't know that anything's amiss) and "Al Gore" in the machine-readable characters (so the tabulation machines credit the vote to him).
/.
The states can do as they please.
When will people (especially /.ers) learn to read.???
Good question. Your reading test for today is:
And, from the advanced reading excersize:/.
I don't think that issuing voter receipts is a good idea, precisely because of the coercion issue. Even if the receipt merely contained an ID number for the vote, someone could use it to verify that he voted "correctly".
IMO, providing a printout for final review behind a window (which could be marked VOID if the voter rejected it and started over, or dropped into the verification lockbox if the voter accepted it and entered the vote) is sufficient.
/.
Actually, it would be prudent to have a printout card listing the voter's choices drop into place behind a window (look but don't touch). If the voter confirms the vote, it drops into the locked ballot box. If the voter rejects the vote, it is marked "VOID" and dropped into the locked reject box (or maybe all dropped into the same box, if the VOID marker is sufficiently reliable and indelible), and the machine allows the voter to enter new choices.
That provides a printed confirmation as a double-check against machine error (or corrupted programming). The cards can be counted automatically or manually if the machine tally is called into question.
/.
/.
No "death tax" (inheritance tax).
No "marriage penalty" (normal tax rules for jointly filing couples).
Concealed carry permits nationwide.
Excellent! Too bad it's mixed in with that other bad stuff.
/.
The ballot isn't the best UI I've seen, but the picture shows that it's unambiguous. The only way to mismark it is if you're legally blind (in which case you should have an election official assist you) or aren't paying attention (in which case you quite frankly have no business at the polls).
/.
The Electoral College does not give more overall power to individual voters; it redistributes the individual voters' power. If you cast a Presidential vote in Florida, the election just might hang on your decision -- if you cast a Presidential vote in Massachusettes... well, I hope you had a pleasant little walk on your way to the polling place because that's all you got out of it.
That's not to say that the Electoral College is a bad idea. It does serve a useful function in impelling candidates to address a wide range of regions rather than just piling up huge vote counts in one local bloc.
/.
Check it out here OK. A list of donations in the four-digit range ($2,000 to $8,300)... and some fine print:
Well, since Browne's total PAC contributions are a whopping $0.00, that leaves "listed as individual donor's employer". The notion that Browne is somehow in thrall to IBM or Microsoft because people who happen to work for those companies gave him a total of $15,125 (out of $1,811,826 in individual contributions) is sillier than any of the campaign rhetoric I've heard, and that's saying somthing./.
The catch is that the government would have to get out of the way of society's efforts to fix the problem. How about old-fashioned outlawry (i.e. the protection of the law no longer applies) for spamming? (That is, if you can prove that X spammed you, turning X's box into a $2K doorstop is legally treated as self-defense, not cracking.)
/.
OK....
I can only conclude that you have a much lower fear threshold than I do./.