The EC may have the power to vote as they please, but suggesting they should follow the populist vote ignores the other purpose of the EC which is to regulate the power of the larger states to hold the union together.
That was the purpose of the senate, not the EC. The purpose of the EC is to elect the president. If you think the EC should be forced to obey the will of the people every time, then you are arguing (regardless of whether you know or accept it) for radical, federal-level reform of how we elect the president.
Either you think the EC needs fixing (although we might disagree on the specifics) or you think it's fine as-is. You don't get to have this both ways.
Are you paying any attention whatsoever to the main topic here?
The popular vote is irrelevant when the rules of the election said it was irrelevant.
Right, and here is how the situation currently stands, as per those very rules: No one has been elected president yet. Electors from 21 states are free to change their votes with no penalty whatsoever, and electors from the other 29 states are free to change their votes with no federal penalities whatsoever (some state level penalties may apply for electors from these states, but the votes themselves will remain legal and valid.)
Rules are rules. If Trump supporters are allowed to handwave away concerns about the popular vote, then Hillary supporters should be able to handwave away concerns about the electors changing their votes.
You mean will the electors vote as the will of their State and the laws thereof, or will they ignore it and go with the trendy feelings of Hillary voters?
A quick check reveals that twenty-one states have no such laws, nor would any federal law be broken if some electors from the other twenty-nine states changed their votes. The *action* of voting for someone else might break local law, but the vote itself would remain legal and valid.
The question is, do you support the electoral college system, or do you support some form of reform? The chest thumping Trump supporters thus far want to scoff at anyone who at all implies the electoral college might be a tad unfair or irrational or antiquated, but now that the topic of faithless electors has been raised I think I can sense a few tiny seeds of hypocrisy here.
If you want to change how we elect the president, you're free to join us in campaigning for a change. But we're not going to let you pretend that the EC is a perfect institution only when it leads to your favored candidate being elected.
I'm not rejecting the possibility; appeals to the popular vote in this context are still idiotic and not worth addressing.
Well the whole point of my post was that if this dismissive attitude can be wielded against people who care about the popular vote, then it should be wielded with no less hesitation against people who care about the electors not revolting. You shouldn't be able to have it both ways; either our electoral college system is open to debate and talk of reform or it isn't.
Yes, that's one of the compelling arguments against it. If there were actually a creditable threat to have an elector revolt, I'm unsure how I'd feel about it. The damage and chaos of such a thing would be... significant. Four years of Trump in many ways seems preferable, though I can't quite get over the long-lived danger they pose to the SCOTUS.
But put that all aside--I still say the argument needs to be made to call out the hypocrites who with vigorous handwaving try to imply the current electoral college system is fine and dandy as it is, and anyone who is concerned with the popular vote is ignorant or apathetic to non-city dwellers. I would like to see the feet of these folks held to the fire for a bit... you're fine with how the electoral college operates, are you? Are you really?
Interestingly, Hillary's ENTIRE "popular vote" win can be ascribed to her lead in votes in Los Angeles County. Basically you're arguing that a single municipal region should dictate the election of the President. If you discount Los Angeles County, Trump carries a majority of total votes summed across all other counties in the nation.
I didn't argue that at all. As I clearly said, from a legal standpoint the popular vote is irrelevant here... it's just an interesting coincidence.
Now, personally I do tend to think that geography should not matter. The "OMG only big city votes should count?!" argument is a rather pathetic attempt to conceal the fact that you're plainly arguing that one rural vote should count more than city vote (and indeed the summary here says that Wyoming votes count 4x those of Michigan.) I'm fine with all states getting two senators each, but giving them that much extra clout in POTUS elections seems a bit much.
The real issue, as I've articulated elsewhere, is whether people like are really ok with our electoral college functioning as it was designed to.
Offering the pay fines for electors who break the law.
Not federal law, and not all states have laws requiring electors to honor the vote they're pledged to. There's also no law against offering to pay someone else's fines, to my knowledge.
The simple fact of the matter is the electoral college was designed to allow electors to ignore the will of the people if they felt strongly enough... it's just an interesting coincidence that they wouldn't actually be ignoring the will of the people after all in this election.
Don't like it? Then you should support the reform of the electoral college. But what you can't do, and what reasonable people shouldn't allow people like you to get away with, is laud the electoral college system ("that's how it's supposed to work, we're a nation of states not a nation of individuals, blah blah oversimplified cliches blah") and handwave away the popular vote as irrelevant, and then turn around and imply that it would be breaking or rigging the system if the electors voted differently.
No, sorry, but our federal POTUS election system was explicitly designed (some state laws notwithstanding) to allow the electors to vote however they choose to. So, if that happens (and I don't delude myself into think it's likely, but anything is possible)... would you accept the result of the election? Or is the electoral college system only fair when it gives your favorite side a boost?
Except what is being proposed here isn't a change. The electoral college would be operating exactly as it has in the past, as it was designed to be able to, and indeed as it was intended: giving the electors the ability to prevent a moronic populist from ascending to the presidency is arguably precisely the entire point of the electoral college. The fact that Hillary won the popular vote by millions is just a happy coincidence.
You hear that, all you people pro-electoral college people? The very core of the electoral college absolutely gives them the electors the right (barring state law requirements) and the duty to jump ship based on the needs of the country. Don't like it? Then you should support electoral college reform.
I personally think there are some fairly compelling arguments against this actually happening, but this needs to be said loudly and clearly for all of you smug pro-EC nutters who don't understand what it is what you're actually arguing for: You don't get to dismissively wave away appeals to the popular vote as irrelevant whilst simultaneously rejecting any possibility that the electors might execute their own judgment. Either you are for some form of electoral college reform, or you are completely fine with the possibility that they may yet choose to elect someone other than Donald J. Trump for President.
Given that AI, particularly the sort of radically game-changing stuff we're likely to care about, is almost certainly going to be formed through self-modification and testing, it's hard to see how massively increased CPU power isn't going to make this easier. Also, I mentioned flash memory for a reason; storage should fall in price along with processing power. Being able to predict what humans do or say next (in text, audio or video) seems crucial here. This isn't about Deep Blue so much as Watson. Neither is recognizable as what we mean by "real" AI but the latter obviously appears to be headed in the right direction... for example, when it got a question wrong (by misunderstanding the sort of answer the category was looking for), it paid attention to the answers the human contestants were giving and quickly adapted so that it could give the correct answers for that category as well. And, as I recall, it accomplished that in part through massive trial and error and examination of large of text it had ripped from the internet. Being able to predict human behavior (first developing useful abstractions used to quantify said behavior) seems like a doable goal in principle and is a plausible path to general AI, but it requires a hell of a lot of processing power, particularly if we're talking about analyzing/predicting emotions from audio and video files instead of merely text.
If you doubt the importances of this approach, note that our own intelligences were bootstrapped from an existing animal intelligence built around 3d navigation and instinctual emotional recognition.
If it cost $400 billion to achieve AI someone would spend that.
"If computing was in any way useful, Congress would have given Babbage millions of dollars to build his Analytical Engine." (But they didn't. Instead, it was over a hundred years before governments got serious about computing.)
There are other significant advantages in having a supercomputer orders of magnitude more powerful than what we have today, even without general AI. Not every problem is massively parallelizeable, but many are.
I do have to wonder about the motivations behind posts like these, or the minds of anyone who is swayed by them. Your anti-wind factoids in particular are comical.
Apple doesn't have to release most of the source they have released, because it's either their code to begin with (e.g. Objective-C runtime), or licensed such that they have no such obligation (e.g. BSD, MIT). Therefore, the vast majority of code they released is code they didn't have to release. That makes them into the "Good" Guys for the sake of this discussion.
They're as much good guys as Microsoft are good guys for releasing parts of.NET under permissive licenses. There are sound business reasons for doing so, even though neither company is much of a fan about the open source way of doing things (either permissive or GPL.) In Apple's case, it was also probably a deliberate image-building decision back when they were much more niche / underdog than they are today.
It's not a bad thing that they're releasing open source stuff, but let's not kid ourselves about their motives for releasing the Obj-C runtime or the overall importance of the Darwin codebase in the grand scheme of things (meh).
I had similar ideas the other day. The real problem here is that you eventually hit a power wall as you continue to deploy new stuff en masse. Nevertheless, at least certain types of computing could constitute flexible demand, so you might want to power them with any extra generation you have at the moment.
It's also worth noting this doesn't prevent an explosion of dirt-cheap flash memory from happening at some point which has its own set of interesting implications. Particularly if high quality video sensors also fall in price...
I had similar ideas the other day. The real problem here is that you eventually hit a power wall as you continue to deploy new stuff en masse.
That's why I explicitly mentioned superfluous power plants. There was just a story the other day about coal plants closing. Well... keep one online. How many flops can a single, large coal plant going full-tilt give you? I bet it's a lot. I bet the bottleneck, from a super-project perspective (not necessarily home user), isn't going to be the electricity.
The problem is that microchip foundries and dies are massive investments. Still, for a major world government, sinking $10 billion into a foundry wouldn't be an issue, especially since silicon looks to be bottoming out.
Yes, but it's a problem that will *eventually* go away. The per-unit costs are just way too small, and the potential upside is way too large for it to not happen in our lifetimes[1]. A $10 billion cost is on the order of the LHC, but unlike the LHC such a project would offer massive ongoing practical benefits in addition to theoretical research potential.
1. [waiting for the "I'm 73, you insensitive clod!" remark]
It's strange how little people talk about the fact that we're approaching the end of this little plateau in the first silicon revolution. I'm sure this supercomputer is fast and all, but compared to what's economically feasible once the barriers are removed?
The second silicon revolution will be marked by price freefall as soon as enough patents expire and enough high-output[1] factories can come on-line. Eventually (at the most, perhaps a few decades from now), a major world government will realize that if they buy their own factories, keep 'em cranking out single board machines and flash memory at full speed 24/7 and if need be use some superfluous power plant that was about to be decommissioned... they could build a supercomputer the likes of which the world has never seen. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than myself could do some back of the napkin estimates here about what should be possible?
As an interesting aside, the power supply, display and input devices will end up becoming the most expensive parts of most consumer electronics, but I think the more interesting question is what the hell are they going to do with all of that computing power once the price floors give way? Protein folding, cryptography... and general AI.
1. The "high output" bit being the kicker. I know very little of the details of chip lithography, so maybe there are hangups here I'm unaware of.
If your Maemo device was pretty crappy then either the UI changed a lot over the years or the slow hardware in 2005 was a limiting factor. The N900 was amazing, easily a much better UX than Android or iPhone despite (or perhaps even because of) having a resistive touchscreen.
Nonsense. Major BSD UNIX vendors were actively working with upstream sources for BSD-licensed programs back in the '80s.
We appear to have differing definitions of "major" and "corporate-sponsored". Also, if I recall correctly, the precise legal status of BSDs still wasn't settled in the 1980s.
And then there's the one that the FSF spent a decade shouting about, where they forced NeXT to release the source for their Objective-C compiler code in GCC
Although I do think Obj-C is a bit underrated, I've a hard time giving much of a crap. What's your alternate history here? Apple was always going to end up completely dominating Obj-C development.
Meanwhile, I've been using *WRT firmware for a decade and it's great stuff. Linksys did not want to release that firmware; they were forced to.
I've come across several companies that will hoard their changes to GPL'd projects that they use internally (which they're allowed to do, as they're not distributing it) because they're afraid of legal repercussions, but at the same time will push all of their changes to BSD-licensed projects upstream.
Translation: Morons exist and/or fearmongering about the GPL exists.
Maemo devices predated the first iPhone. It was obvious that Nokia was preparing to put Maemo on a phone (they were putting it on phone-sized "pocket computers", basically), but things were holding it back like price and battery life. Along came Apple, with their RDF and their loyal fans, and lo and behold everyone was willing to accept high prices and crappy battery life, but by the time the N900 came out it was too late.
The iPhone 1 was highly overpriced and under-speced. No MMS (at the time the ONLY way for most people to send/receive pictures), no 3G (?!) but forced data plan (!!). It was a gamble to make people think that Apple had done something incredibly innovative, when in reality they just rushed something half-assed to market, slapped a ridiculous price tag on it, blitzed the marketing and crossed their fingers that their brand name would carry the day. And it did. But it wasn't at all daring from a design point of view; the writing was on the wall. The basic icon grid UI and fullscreen app approach was in common use pretty much everywhere; all Apple did was add some power-hungry glitter to it. (And their glitter wasn't nearly as nice as the N900's.)
Also worth remembering iOS's app marketplace was a locked down piece of shit until competition from Android forced them to open it up.
It's also worth noting that, prior to the iPhone release, Android's UI was a BB clone. Google had to completely redo it to match the iPhone.
You say that like it was a good thing.
I've used an N900 and let me tell you, Maemo's UI kicked the crap out of both Android and iOS even on a resistive screen. (A quality resistive screen is actually quite nice to use, being much more precise than the capacitive touchscreens of the day as well as more durable, the only downside being that zooming is a little slower due to it being one-finger) And Maemo predated the iPhone 1. Shame on Nokia for hesitating putting Maemo on an actual phone, although on the flip side I suspect that people would not have forgiven Nokia for the horrible battery life if Apple hadn't done it first. (People forget about the days when reviewers would complain if you didn't get 5+ days of standby time without recharging.)
That's true only within a narrow range of topics, particularly certain (not all) cultural/immigration issues.
Conservatives are often hopeless idealists in myriad other ways: starry-eyed versions of nationalism, faith in the 'free' market, religious beliefs and related issues (abstinence only contraception, voluntary repression of homosexuality, etc.), etc.
It is a well known fact that reality has a strong liberal bias.
Correct... although I think it was more correct 10 years ago than it is today. This is particularly evident with issues requiring nuance. With broad brush strokes and in the big picture, liberals still completely blow conservatives away (at least in this country), but I've noticed that they are becoming less and less able or willing to delve into more detailed rational analysis. The obvious examples generally involve calling out the overeager progressives (/ SJWs) on their statistical fabrications, but it's not limited to that.
For example, in the past three days I've had two people around here foe me for daring to point out things like the fact that Trump did not "admit" to sexually assaulting anyone, but rather was babbling about being a magnet for beautiful women and said that they "let you" do things with them. They don't continue the debate past a post or two; they just shut up and foe me. That let is a very common word with a perfectly agreed-on definition does not appear to matter to these people:
"They didn't really let him; they were coerced! He was in a position of power!"
"Well, that may well be, but there's no indication of that on the tape. I'm definitely not claiming he's innocent; I'm just saying that he didn't admit to what you (and the New York Times, for crying out loud) are claiming he admitted to. He was clearly engaged in some over the top macho bragging that women were *that into him* that he didn't have to 'wait' for a bunch of tedious flirting or courting. He wasn't bragging about not waiting for any form of express or implied consent; that's ridiculous. The whole context of this cringingly bad boasting is that they know who he is and exhibit attraction to his wealth."
"But he apologized! Why would he apologize if he wasn't talking about grabbing pussy without permission?!"
"Uh, well, he was running as a *Republican* and he was caught red-handed talking extremely crudely about extramarital sex. Maybe that might have something to do with it?"
It seems that minor quibbles like these are conversation-enders with a lot of people these days, even if you include (as I try to remember to do so) a bunch disclaimers about how you're a liberal/leftist, can't stand Trump, didn't vote for him, and acknowledge that he may well have assaulted one or more of the women who accused him. It's fairly astonishing. And worrying. The echo chambers are being reinforced and the heretics cast out... hmm. I confess I was rather looking forward to seeing this kind of self-destruction on the right in this country. This is less fun to behold.
I guess the bottom line is I'm not sure reality will always have a liberal bias. Don't count on it. Don't take it for granted. I say that partially because we need to constantly strive to stay in touch with the world as it really is, but also I simply don't think the left needs more smugness right now.
No, a choice has been given where no choice existed before. Go try to modify and redistribute non-Darwin bits of OS X (assuming you can find the source) if you don't believe me. Copyright law being what it is, the default is zero freedom. If the GPL FORCES people to do stuff (or if it's "viral", though you haven't mentioned that word yet), how would you characterize proprietary code? Surely, the verbs and adjectives there must be much more dire.
Apple has for example been dumping GPL for BSD (etc) licensed software
Because it gives them an easy kill switch, or other flexible control down the road. Likewise, the only reason Google prefers Apache is so they (and their OEM partners) retain the ability to easily break compatibility and enhance lock-in in arbitrary ways. This isn't theoretical. Their licensees have done it already, repeatedly. The further balkanization of Android / Linux is a good thing, is it? The world needs more piddling, shitty, mutually incompatible walled gardens, does it?
Further, I do not think of BSD-based OS X and iOS as having been particularly good things for humanity[1]. I definitely don't think that 90s Microsoft was good for humanity, when they reportedly fixed their buggy network stack using BSD code. If I'm working on an open source project, I think it's very reasonable to insist that my work is not used to unilaterally screw people over by large for-profit entities looking to build their own private lock-in walled gardens on the backs of volunteer coders.
"Choice has been taken away!" --> Yes yes, your 'choice' to do assholish stuff with code someone else wrote has been taken away. I'm heartbroken for you.
1. I don't particularly want to debate this point into the ground (done so recently) if you're an Apple enthusiast, but for the iOS at least it is worth noting Android and WebOS and Maemo/Meego and Angstrom family distros and even OpenMoko were all the verge of bringing touchscreen awesomeness to phones, and Apple was forced to copy some of their best features moreso than the other way around.
Yeah, I've made that point too elsewhere. I haven't looked in depth at the stats... it could well be that's where the story should be centered--lack of enthusiasm (turnout), particularly among younger voters. My conversations with my friends and family, particularly the three females I know who voted for Trump (all of whom were Obama supporters), currently have me more interested in the actual swing voters in this election. But maybe I shouldn't dwell so heavily on this point until I've looked at some exit polls closer.
Still, my points basically hold regardless if we're talking about lack of enthusiasm or people swinging Trump. Fear can motivate people to the polls, actual rational "hey look at what's going to happen to laws XYZ" fear, not endless whinging about character flaws.
No one forces you to use GPL code that other people have written.
I never understood why people consider this "the freedom to take away freedom" (or the related problems often termed "tolerance of intolerance") argument to be compelling. "Boo hoo, this society is so repressive! I'm not allowed to punch random people in the face!" It's entirely reasonable to insist that people who want to use open sourced software for their own ends not change the license. There are multiple real-life examples showing us of how this can go badly for permissive and multiple real-life examples of how GPL enforcement can lead to very worthy projects appearing.
Major corporate-sponsored permissive-licensed OSS didn't even take off until years after the GPL had established itself, as a reaction to the GPL. Google doesn't Apache license Android userland stuff out of the goodness of their hearts or because they think permissive freedom is "real" freedom. They did it and do it because the GPL was already well established in the Linux ecosystem and they really didn't want to see any competing GPL projects emerge.
The anti-GPL / pro-permissive position is, for the most part, completely disconnected with reality.
I agree they were there and not hidden, but no, they didn't swing this election. It's getting old saying this, but I personally know at least three liberal females who voted for Obama twice and voted for Trump this election. I don't agree with their reasons, but it's obvious enough to me that one of the reasons why they did this (and none of them liked Trump's personality, obviously) is because they did not hear enough good, policy-centered criticisms of Trump. The criticisms were sort of there, they weren't nonexistent, but they were conflated with and utterly drowned out by a tsunami of white noise (a term I'm using advisedly.)
Trump wasn't proposing any anti-woman legislation beyond his anti-abortion stuff which, while very worrying[1], apparently simply isn't a top concern for a lot of people. Trump wasn't proposing any anti-black stuff that I'm aware of beyond some bombastic pro-police statements that are unlikely to spawn much legislation of consequence[2]. Trump wasn't proposing any anti-Latino measures for people who were citizens. The measures he were proposing against Latino non-citizens are a mixture of dumb, cruel, and maybe-could-be-somewhat-reasonable-if-modified, but anyone who was paying attention realized that just as actual racists use "immigration reform" as a proxy to avoid talking about racism, people who don't want to get in a debate on immigration reform use "racism" as an excuse not to, and in this country it does appear that the latter group of people is a bigger than the former.
The neo-nazis alone did not and could not have swung this election on their own. The failure of the left is right there to see, plain as day. I really hope you people can wake up and see what's going on before 2018 (let alone 2020).
1. SCOTUS stuff in general is why I very early on wrote off any possibility of supporting Trump, even if he swung centrist on the other issues.
2. More important is the implied absence of much-needed indictment and prosecution reform, but that's far too subtle a nuance for the mainstream media to bother with. (Not even the BLM people can manage it, as they'd much rather wail because people won't admit the full extent of racism as they see it instead of pursuing actual solutions that will reduce racist outcomes.)
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The EC may have the power to vote as they please, but suggesting they should follow the populist vote ignores the other purpose of the EC which is to regulate the power of the larger states to hold the union together.
That was the purpose of the senate, not the EC. The purpose of the EC is to elect the president. If you think the EC should be forced to obey the will of the people every time, then you are arguing (regardless of whether you know or accept it) for radical, federal-level reform of how we elect the president.
Either you think the EC needs fixing (although we might disagree on the specifics) or you think it's fine as-is. You don't get to have this both ways.
The popular vote is irrelevant when the rules of the election said it was irrelevant.
Right, and here is how the situation currently stands, as per those very rules: No one has been elected president yet. Electors from 21 states are free to change their votes with no penalty whatsoever, and electors from the other 29 states are free to change their votes with no federal penalities whatsoever (some state level penalties may apply for electors from these states, but the votes themselves will remain legal and valid.)
Rules are rules. If Trump supporters are allowed to handwave away concerns about the popular vote, then Hillary supporters should be able to handwave away concerns about the electors changing their votes.
You mean will the electors vote as the will of their State and the laws thereof, or will they ignore it and go with the trendy feelings of Hillary voters?
A quick check reveals that twenty-one states have no such laws, nor would any federal law be broken if some electors from the other twenty-nine states changed their votes. The *action* of voting for someone else might break local law, but the vote itself would remain legal and valid.
The question is, do you support the electoral college system, or do you support some form of reform? The chest thumping Trump supporters thus far want to scoff at anyone who at all implies the electoral college might be a tad unfair or irrational or antiquated, but now that the topic of faithless electors has been raised I think I can sense a few tiny seeds of hypocrisy here.
If you want to change how we elect the president, you're free to join us in campaigning for a change. But we're not going to let you pretend that the EC is a perfect institution only when it leads to your favored candidate being elected.
I'm not rejecting the possibility; appeals to the popular vote in this context are still idiotic and not worth addressing.
Well the whole point of my post was that if this dismissive attitude can be wielded against people who care about the popular vote, then it should be wielded with no less hesitation against people who care about the electors not revolting. You shouldn't be able to have it both ways; either our electoral college system is open to debate and talk of reform or it isn't.
Yes, that's one of the compelling arguments against it. If there were actually a creditable threat to have an elector revolt, I'm unsure how I'd feel about it. The damage and chaos of such a thing would be... significant. Four years of Trump in many ways seems preferable, though I can't quite get over the long-lived danger they pose to the SCOTUS.
But put that all aside--I still say the argument needs to be made to call out the hypocrites who with vigorous handwaving try to imply the current electoral college system is fine and dandy as it is, and anyone who is concerned with the popular vote is ignorant or apathetic to non-city dwellers. I would like to see the feet of these folks held to the fire for a bit... you're fine with how the electoral college operates, are you? Are you really?
Interestingly, Hillary's ENTIRE "popular vote" win can be ascribed to her lead in votes in Los Angeles County. Basically you're arguing that a single municipal region should dictate the election of the President. If you discount Los Angeles County, Trump carries a majority of total votes summed across all other counties in the nation.
I didn't argue that at all. As I clearly said, from a legal standpoint the popular vote is irrelevant here... it's just an interesting coincidence.
Now, personally I do tend to think that geography should not matter. The "OMG only big city votes should count?!" argument is a rather pathetic attempt to conceal the fact that you're plainly arguing that one rural vote should count more than city vote (and indeed the summary here says that Wyoming votes count 4x those of Michigan.) I'm fine with all states getting two senators each, but giving them that much extra clout in POTUS elections seems a bit much.
Offering the pay fines for electors who break the law.
Not federal law, and not all states have laws requiring electors to honor the vote they're pledged to. There's also no law against offering to pay someone else's fines, to my knowledge.
The simple fact of the matter is the electoral college was designed to allow electors to ignore the will of the people if they felt strongly enough... it's just an interesting coincidence that they wouldn't actually be ignoring the will of the people after all in this election.
Don't like it? Then you should support the reform of the electoral college. But what you can't do, and what reasonable people shouldn't allow people like you to get away with, is laud the electoral college system ("that's how it's supposed to work, we're a nation of states not a nation of individuals, blah blah oversimplified cliches blah") and handwave away the popular vote as irrelevant, and then turn around and imply that it would be breaking or rigging the system if the electors voted differently.
No, sorry, but our federal POTUS election system was explicitly designed (some state laws notwithstanding) to allow the electors to vote however they choose to. So, if that happens (and I don't delude myself into think it's likely, but anything is possible)... would you accept the result of the election? Or is the electoral college system only fair when it gives your favorite side a boost?
Except what is being proposed here isn't a change. The electoral college would be operating exactly as it has in the past, as it was designed to be able to, and indeed as it was intended: giving the electors the ability to prevent a moronic populist from ascending to the presidency is arguably precisely the entire point of the electoral college. The fact that Hillary won the popular vote by millions is just a happy coincidence.
You hear that, all you people pro-electoral college people? The very core of the electoral college absolutely gives them the electors the right (barring state law requirements) and the duty to jump ship based on the needs of the country. Don't like it? Then you should support electoral college reform.
I personally think there are some fairly compelling arguments against this actually happening, but this needs to be said loudly and clearly for all of you smug pro-EC nutters who don't understand what it is what you're actually arguing for: You don't get to dismissively wave away appeals to the popular vote as irrelevant whilst simultaneously rejecting any possibility that the electors might execute their own judgment. Either you are for some form of electoral college reform, or you are completely fine with the possibility that they may yet choose to elect someone other than Donald J. Trump for President.
If you doubt the importances of this approach, note that our own intelligences were bootstrapped from an existing animal intelligence built around 3d navigation and instinctual emotional recognition.
If it cost $400 billion to achieve AI someone would spend that.
"If computing was in any way useful, Congress would have given Babbage millions of dollars to build his Analytical Engine." (But they didn't. Instead, it was over a hundred years before governments got serious about computing.)
There are other significant advantages in having a supercomputer orders of magnitude more powerful than what we have today, even without general AI. Not every problem is massively parallelizeable, but many are.
Thats not why Japanese is hard to lip read. Its hard because of the way people move their mouths while speaking.
I just assumed the animation companies were cheapskates.
I do have to wonder about the motivations behind posts like these, or the minds of anyone who is swayed by them. Your anti-wind factoids in particular are comical.
Apple doesn't have to release most of the source they have released, because it's either their code to begin with (e.g. Objective-C runtime), or licensed such that they have no such obligation (e.g. BSD, MIT). Therefore, the vast majority of code they released is code they didn't have to release. That makes them into the "Good" Guys for the sake of this discussion.
They're as much good guys as Microsoft are good guys for releasing parts of .NET under permissive licenses. There are sound business reasons for doing so, even though neither company is much of a fan about the open source way of doing things (either permissive or GPL.) In Apple's case, it was also probably a deliberate image-building decision back when they were much more niche / underdog than they are today.
It's not a bad thing that they're releasing open source stuff, but let's not kid ourselves about their motives for releasing the Obj-C runtime or the overall importance of the Darwin codebase in the grand scheme of things (meh).
I had similar ideas the other day. The real problem here is that you eventually hit a power wall as you continue to deploy new stuff en masse. Nevertheless, at least certain types of computing could constitute flexible demand, so you might want to power them with any extra generation you have at the moment.
It's also worth noting this doesn't prevent an explosion of dirt-cheap flash memory from happening at some point which has its own set of interesting implications. Particularly if high quality video sensors also fall in price...
I had similar ideas the other day. The real problem here is that you eventually hit a power wall as you continue to deploy new stuff en masse.
That's why I explicitly mentioned superfluous power plants. There was just a story the other day about coal plants closing. Well... keep one online. How many flops can a single, large coal plant going full-tilt give you? I bet it's a lot. I bet the bottleneck, from a super-project perspective (not necessarily home user), isn't going to be the electricity.
The problem is that microchip foundries and dies are massive investments. Still, for a major world government, sinking $10 billion into a foundry wouldn't be an issue, especially since silicon looks to be bottoming out.
Yes, but it's a problem that will *eventually* go away. The per-unit costs are just way too small, and the potential upside is way too large for it to not happen in our lifetimes[1]. A $10 billion cost is on the order of the LHC, but unlike the LHC such a project would offer massive ongoing practical benefits in addition to theoretical research potential.
1. [waiting for the "I'm 73, you insensitive clod!" remark]
It's strange how little people talk about the fact that we're approaching the end of this little plateau in the first silicon revolution. I'm sure this supercomputer is fast and all, but compared to what's economically feasible once the barriers are removed?
The second silicon revolution will be marked by price freefall as soon as enough patents expire and enough high-output[1] factories can come on-line. Eventually (at the most, perhaps a few decades from now), a major world government will realize that if they buy their own factories, keep 'em cranking out single board machines and flash memory at full speed 24/7 and if need be use some superfluous power plant that was about to be decommissioned... they could build a supercomputer the likes of which the world has never seen. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than myself could do some back of the napkin estimates here about what should be possible?
As an interesting aside, the power supply, display and input devices will end up becoming the most expensive parts of most consumer electronics, but I think the more interesting question is what the hell are they going to do with all of that computing power once the price floors give way? Protein folding, cryptography... and general AI.
1. The "high output" bit being the kicker. I know very little of the details of chip lithography, so maybe there are hangups here I'm unaware of.
If your Maemo device was pretty crappy then either the UI changed a lot over the years or the slow hardware in 2005 was a limiting factor. The N900 was amazing, easily a much better UX than Android or iPhone despite (or perhaps even because of) having a resistive touchscreen.
Nonsense. Major BSD UNIX vendors were actively working with upstream sources for BSD-licensed programs back in the '80s.
We appear to have differing definitions of "major" and "corporate-sponsored". Also, if I recall correctly, the precise legal status of BSDs still wasn't settled in the 1980s.
And then there's the one that the FSF spent a decade shouting about, where they forced NeXT to release the source for their Objective-C compiler code in GCC
Although I do think Obj-C is a bit underrated, I've a hard time giving much of a crap. What's your alternate history here? Apple was always going to end up completely dominating Obj-C development.
Meanwhile, I've been using *WRT firmware for a decade and it's great stuff. Linksys did not want to release that firmware; they were forced to.
I've come across several companies that will hoard their changes to GPL'd projects that they use internally (which they're allowed to do, as they're not distributing it) because they're afraid of legal repercussions, but at the same time will push all of their changes to BSD-licensed projects upstream.
Translation: Morons exist and/or fearmongering about the GPL exists.
The iPhone 1 was highly overpriced and under-speced. No MMS (at the time the ONLY way for most people to send/receive pictures), no 3G (?!) but forced data plan (!!). It was a gamble to make people think that Apple had done something incredibly innovative, when in reality they just rushed something half-assed to market, slapped a ridiculous price tag on it, blitzed the marketing and crossed their fingers that their brand name would carry the day. And it did. But it wasn't at all daring from a design point of view; the writing was on the wall. The basic icon grid UI and fullscreen app approach was in common use pretty much everywhere; all Apple did was add some power-hungry glitter to it. (And their glitter wasn't nearly as nice as the N900's.)
Also worth remembering iOS's app marketplace was a locked down piece of shit until competition from Android forced them to open it up.
It's also worth noting that, prior to the iPhone release, Android's UI was a BB clone. Google had to completely redo it to match the iPhone.
You say that like it was a good thing.
I've used an N900 and let me tell you, Maemo's UI kicked the crap out of both Android and iOS even on a resistive screen. (A quality resistive screen is actually quite nice to use, being much more precise than the capacitive touchscreens of the day as well as more durable, the only downside being that zooming is a little slower due to it being one-finger) And Maemo predated the iPhone 1. Shame on Nokia for hesitating putting Maemo on an actual phone, although on the flip side I suspect that people would not have forgiven Nokia for the horrible battery life if Apple hadn't done it first. (People forget about the days when reviewers would complain if you didn't get 5+ days of standby time without recharging.)
That's true only within a narrow range of topics, particularly certain (not all) cultural/immigration issues.
Conservatives are often hopeless idealists in myriad other ways: starry-eyed versions of nationalism, faith in the 'free' market, religious beliefs and related issues (abstinence only contraception, voluntary repression of homosexuality, etc.), etc.
It is a well known fact that reality has a strong liberal bias.
Correct... although I think it was more correct 10 years ago than it is today. This is particularly evident with issues requiring nuance. With broad brush strokes and in the big picture, liberals still completely blow conservatives away (at least in this country), but I've noticed that they are becoming less and less able or willing to delve into more detailed rational analysis. The obvious examples generally involve calling out the overeager progressives (/ SJWs) on their statistical fabrications, but it's not limited to that.
For example, in the past three days I've had two people around here foe me for daring to point out things like the fact that Trump did not "admit" to sexually assaulting anyone, but rather was babbling about being a magnet for beautiful women and said that they "let you" do things with them. They don't continue the debate past a post or two; they just shut up and foe me. That let is a very common word with a perfectly agreed-on definition does not appear to matter to these people:
"They didn't really let him; they were coerced! He was in a position of power!"
"Well, that may well be, but there's no indication of that on the tape. I'm definitely not claiming he's innocent; I'm just saying that he didn't admit to what you (and the New York Times, for crying out loud) are claiming he admitted to. He was clearly engaged in some over the top macho bragging that women were *that into him* that he didn't have to 'wait' for a bunch of tedious flirting or courting. He wasn't bragging about not waiting for any form of express or implied consent; that's ridiculous. The whole context of this cringingly bad boasting is that they know who he is and exhibit attraction to his wealth."
"But he apologized! Why would he apologize if he wasn't talking about grabbing pussy without permission?!"
"Uh, well, he was running as a *Republican* and he was caught red-handed talking extremely crudely about extramarital sex. Maybe that might have something to do with it?"
It seems that minor quibbles like these are conversation-enders with a lot of people these days, even if you include (as I try to remember to do so) a bunch disclaimers about how you're a liberal/leftist, can't stand Trump, didn't vote for him, and acknowledge that he may well have assaulted one or more of the women who accused him. It's fairly astonishing. And worrying. The echo chambers are being reinforced and the heretics cast out... hmm. I confess I was rather looking forward to seeing this kind of self-destruction on the right in this country. This is less fun to behold.
I guess the bottom line is I'm not sure reality will always have a liberal bias. Don't count on it. Don't take it for granted. I say that partially because we need to constantly strive to stay in touch with the world as it really is, but also I simply don't think the left needs more smugness right now.
There is no choice, that has been taken away.
No, a choice has been given where no choice existed before. Go try to modify and redistribute non-Darwin bits of OS X (assuming you can find the source) if you don't believe me. Copyright law being what it is, the default is zero freedom. If the GPL FORCES people to do stuff (or if it's "viral", though you haven't mentioned that word yet), how would you characterize proprietary code? Surely, the verbs and adjectives there must be much more dire.
Apple has for example been dumping GPL for BSD (etc) licensed software
Because it gives them an easy kill switch, or other flexible control down the road. Likewise, the only reason Google prefers Apache is so they (and their OEM partners) retain the ability to easily break compatibility and enhance lock-in in arbitrary ways. This isn't theoretical. Their licensees have done it already, repeatedly. The further balkanization of Android / Linux is a good thing, is it? The world needs more piddling, shitty, mutually incompatible walled gardens, does it?
Further, I do not think of BSD-based OS X and iOS as having been particularly good things for humanity[1]. I definitely don't think that 90s Microsoft was good for humanity, when they reportedly fixed their buggy network stack using BSD code. If I'm working on an open source project, I think it's very reasonable to insist that my work is not used to unilaterally screw people over by large for-profit entities looking to build their own private lock-in walled gardens on the backs of volunteer coders.
"Choice has been taken away!" --> Yes yes, your 'choice' to do assholish stuff with code someone else wrote has been taken away. I'm heartbroken for you.
1. I don't particularly want to debate this point into the ground (done so recently) if you're an Apple enthusiast, but for the iOS at least it is worth noting Android and WebOS and Maemo/Meego and Angstrom family distros and even OpenMoko were all the verge of bringing touchscreen awesomeness to phones, and Apple was forced to copy some of their best features moreso than the other way around.
Yeah, I've made that point too elsewhere. I haven't looked in depth at the stats... it could well be that's where the story should be centered--lack of enthusiasm (turnout), particularly among younger voters. My conversations with my friends and family, particularly the three females I know who voted for Trump (all of whom were Obama supporters), currently have me more interested in the actual swing voters in this election. But maybe I shouldn't dwell so heavily on this point until I've looked at some exit polls closer.
Still, my points basically hold regardless if we're talking about lack of enthusiasm or people swinging Trump. Fear can motivate people to the polls, actual rational "hey look at what's going to happen to laws XYZ" fear, not endless whinging about character flaws.
No one forces you to use GPL code that other people have written.
I never understood why people consider this "the freedom to take away freedom" (or the related problems often termed "tolerance of intolerance") argument to be compelling. "Boo hoo, this society is so repressive! I'm not allowed to punch random people in the face!" It's entirely reasonable to insist that people who want to use open sourced software for their own ends not change the license. There are multiple real-life examples showing us of how this can go badly for permissive and multiple real-life examples of how GPL enforcement can lead to very worthy projects appearing.
Major corporate-sponsored permissive-licensed OSS didn't even take off until years after the GPL had established itself, as a reaction to the GPL. Google doesn't Apache license Android userland stuff out of the goodness of their hearts or because they think permissive freedom is "real" freedom. They did it and do it because the GPL was already well established in the Linux ecosystem and they really didn't want to see any competing GPL projects emerge.
The anti-GPL / pro-permissive position is, for the most part, completely disconnected with reality.
I agree they were there and not hidden, but no, they didn't swing this election. It's getting old saying this, but I personally know at least three liberal females who voted for Obama twice and voted for Trump this election. I don't agree with their reasons, but it's obvious enough to me that one of the reasons why they did this (and none of them liked Trump's personality, obviously) is because they did not hear enough good, policy-centered criticisms of Trump. The criticisms were sort of there, they weren't nonexistent, but they were conflated with and utterly drowned out by a tsunami of white noise (a term I'm using advisedly.)
Trump wasn't proposing any anti-woman legislation beyond his anti-abortion stuff which, while very worrying[1], apparently simply isn't a top concern for a lot of people. Trump wasn't proposing any anti-black stuff that I'm aware of beyond some bombastic pro-police statements that are unlikely to spawn much legislation of consequence[2]. Trump wasn't proposing any anti-Latino measures for people who were citizens. The measures he were proposing against Latino non-citizens are a mixture of dumb, cruel, and maybe-could-be-somewhat-reasonable-if-modified, but anyone who was paying attention realized that just as actual racists use "immigration reform" as a proxy to avoid talking about racism, people who don't want to get in a debate on immigration reform use "racism" as an excuse not to, and in this country it does appear that the latter group of people is a bigger than the former.
The neo-nazis alone did not and could not have swung this election on their own. The failure of the left is right there to see, plain as day. I really hope you people can wake up and see what's going on before 2018 (let alone 2020).
1. SCOTUS stuff in general is why I very early on wrote off any possibility of supporting Trump, even if he swung centrist on the other issues.
2. More important is the implied absence of much-needed indictment and prosecution reform, but that's far too subtle a nuance for the mainstream media to bother with. (Not even the BLM people can manage it, as they'd much rather wail because people won't admit the full extent of racism as they see it instead of pursuing actual solutions that will reduce racist outcomes.)