It may not be strictly accurate, but he has a point.
The electoral college tips the scales such that voters in less populous states have disproportionately large influence. Recall that a state's number of electoral votes is the sum of the number of its senators and congresspeople. Each state has two senators, and congressional districts are drawn so as to represent roughly equal population.
I live in Oregon, with five congressional districts and seven electoral votes. Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming have five congressional districts between them, meaning their total population is very roughly equivalent to Oregon's.
These five states have fifteen electoral votes; more than twice as many as Oregon. Each citizen's vote in those states is in some sense worth two in Oregon.
So if he's talking about influence per voter, as opposed to strictly electoral votes, he's bang-on.
(By the way, if you count the Great Lakes as coastline, then your observation has no exceptions at all. This is probably a sensible thing to do, since the St. Lawrence Seaway makes the Great Lakes accessible to ocean-going ships.)
I wonder if these models could be extended back to show how the senate has changed from session-to-session, and also to show how influential a Senator has been over their entire career?
Good stuff. I hope this stuff is more widespread for 2006.
What's worse is that if a Democrat-controlled legislature and administration tried it, the other guys would claim that it was a political power grab. (And not without reason, either.)
But the EC is not responsible for the whole of Republican success. It only affects the Presidency, abuses of which (in theory) should still be checked by the other branches. The Senate and the House are our own damn fault.
Even if the amendment to abolish the electoral college passes in the legislature, I'd be shocked if enough states ratified it. The electoral college guarantees that small states have a disproportionately large effect on the outcome of the presidential race. There are 17 states (plus DC) with five or less electoral votes. Abolishing the EC would reduce their influence on the Presidential outcome by approximately half. You can probably count on all of those 17 states declining to ratify this amendment. Seven more states have seven or less EC votes, and will be only slightly more favorable to this idea.
An amendment needs 34 (or is it 33?) states for ratification. You do the math.:-)
It'll never get that far, though. Most of those small states are "red", and I seriously doubt a Republican Congress will dilute their influence.
You know, ever since I read "Islands in the Net" I suspected that Sterling was building a guerilla army somewhere in Africa. I had no notion he might go the WMD route, though.
I wonder if the rest of the article is as poorly researched as this:
"Every line of code is hand-audited and, as the site claims, there hasn't been a hole in the default install in over seven years. Striking a balance in hardware support somewhere between FreeBSD and NetBSD, OpenBSD runs on very few platforms and even then only in single-processor mode. [...]
OpenBSD is updated every three or four months [...]
It is dead obvious from the OpenBSD.org website that they claim one remote hole in the default install, that they are including SMP support in the version shipping week after next, and the release schedule has been every six months for many years.
This doesn't give me a lot of warm fuzzies about the accuracy of the rest of the article.
(I *know* that pop growth is *negative* in US, China, Japan, Britian, and parts of Africa, but Earth average is positive still)
It's a pity that you didn't take the time to research this before spouting off. It's a good argument, but your numbers are way off. As another poster said, the population is well over 6 billion, and I'm pretty sure most every region you cite still has growing population... but the growth rates are falling and negative population growth is predicted.
Anyway, don't believe me. Here's a research tool for next time.
You are so right about the bagpipe music. I got a CD of Pipe and Drum Band Champions that I used to play when I was doing heavy drafting. It was brilliant at getting me in The Zone.
The funny thing is, my co-workers wanted to know what I was playing in my headphones that worked so well for me. They even started borrowing it.
That's not the way he sounded when he debated Ann Richards in the Texas governor's race. He was apparently smooth, fluent, and he kicked her ass. I heard a clip, and it doesn't sound like the same guy.
It doesn't really matter what the US Congress or FAA has to say about this. If they put reasonable regulations in place, that's great... everyone wins. If they put unreasonably restictive regulations on space tourism, the launch sites will simply move to a place with more friendly regulation. Maybe they'll end up flying out of Bolivia. So what?
Virgin Galactic is talking about flights that cost $200,000 per passenger. Each passenger is buying a three day excursion including training and whatnot. Most would-be tourists will have to spend a least a day getting to Mojave and back.
If they're looking at $200,000 and five days for the ride of a lifetime, the added time and expense of travelling to a country with a more reasonable regulatory environment is not very burdensome.
Hopefully this will be sufficient incentive for the FAA and Congress to impose only reasonable regulations.
Yeah, my neighbors to the north have the right idea. I also liked the initiative here in Oregon to make all state legislative elections nonpartisan, but that didn't make the ballot.
If this works, maybe I should sue the state to stop financing primary elections. Why should all the taxpayers registered as independents finance any party's nomination process?
I'm all for making sure elections are fair, of course... but shouldn't the state at least bill the parties for the costs?
Yeah, but if you shut off the ignition, it engages the steering wheel lock, so you won't be able to turn the wheel anymore, even if you have assist.
Not in my 1997 Subaru, purchased in the US. I can turn the key off, and the steering wheel does not lock. "Off" is not the same key positon as "Lock".
Incidentally, I cannot lock the wheel and remove the key unless the automatic transmission is shifted to "park", and the headlights will not turn on if the ignition switch is not set to "Accessory or "On". These are slightly annoying safety features that have prevented more trouble for me than they have caused.
Same thing happened to me once. But I wasn't in France at the time.
I was driving my dad's red 1971 Datsun pickup on my way to work. (My brother had rolled it a couple times, but it was a Datsun so of course it still ran as good as ever.) A light ahead changed to yellow, and, being about 20 years old at the time, I did what came naturally: I floored it.
Not that flooring a '71 Datsun 1600cc engine had much of an immediate effect. But I did start accellerating, and I made it through the light whilst it was still yellow. Sweeeet. I let off the gas.
The engine continued to rev up.
"Oh, shit," said I. I was up to about 50MPH (in a 45 zone) and accelerating. The next light was about 400 yards away and red, with cars backed up waiting in every lane going my way. It was familiar territory, so I knew the light wouldn't be green before I got there.
I started to panic. I dropped the clutch, and the engine started to wind up. I had no tachometer, but I knew that sucker was gonna tear itself apart if I let it go on like that. I shoved into high gear (4, no overdrive) and engaged the clutch again. Naturally this was a slightly wrenching experience; the RPMs dropped and the vehicle lurched towards the firey doom ahead. In full panic now, I dropped the clutch again with the same result as before. I re-engaged the clutch.
I thought "I am going to die in about ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Oh yeah, the switch."
I turned the engine off and pulled over. Heh. Silly me.
Turns out that the throttle pedal itself was jammed. There was a little mushroom-shaped backstop attached to the firewall, and when I had floored it I had shoved the perdal sideways a bit, and gotten it stuck behind the backstop.
The moral of the story? Panic is not helpful, even the simplest devices can fail, and every powered device needs a kill switch.
It's quite a bit harder for a baby to interact with it's environment if it's dead than if it's on its back.
As other posters have pointed out, this isn't a crackpot recommendation: "In 1992, the AAP recommended putting babies on their backs to sleep to prevent SIDS. As a result, SIDS cases have since decreased by 50 percent." Weigh this reduction in death rates against what you're trying to avoid: "Head flattening is primarily a cosmetic concern, physicians agree."
Check your priorities, mate.
In any case, pretty soon the baby will be able to roll over on its own and the whole issue will be beyond your control.
I was trapped on an airplane when I saw Dante's Peak. (Flying into Seattle, no less.) That is, with the possible exception of Reefer Madness, the worst movie I have ever seen. I was about ready to pull a DB Cooper just to get away from it, but mercifully the nice lady from British Airways clubbed me unconscious.
This term has never been translated by Muslims to mean holy war. Instead, it means to struggle or exert oneself to his or her utmost potential. In Islam, there are two levels of jihad. The greater jihad most often refers to the inner struggle against evil within oneself with the goal of self-improvement for the betterment of one's community and the world as a whole. The lesser jihad refers to the struggle on the battlefield in self-defense if Muslims have been attacked and their right to practice their faith has been aggressively taken away. " Fight in the cause of God against those who fight you, but do not transgress limits. God does not love the transgressors" (Qur'an 2:190). This is an unequivocal statement that only self-defense makes war permissible for Muslims and the goals of war cannot be worldly gain.
Mind you, I agree that a war against "terrorism" is impossible to win, and that addressing injustice in Iraq without addressing injustices we ourselves perpetrate is not going to be especially effective.
But please, don't use that bad definition of jihad, and don't claim that the Islamic world has declared war on us. It's not nearly that simple.
Large portions of the patriot act were written by people that had a D beside their name.
Well, according to this, "Assistant attorney general, Viet D. Dinh, was the chief architect of the act." While he might count, I think you intended to imply party affiliation, not middle initial.:-)
The bill was introduced first in the House. The sponsor was Sensenbrenner, and the only cosponsor Oxley, both Republicans. Note that this 342 page bill was introduced on 10/23/2001, and passed by the House at 11:03 AM the next day.
It was received in the Senate that same day (the 24th) and passed without amendment the next day. I listed the wrong roll-call vote in another post... the UPA passed 98-1 with Feingold (D-WI) dissenting and Landrieu (D-LA) not voting. (Note that the Senate office building was attacked by anthrax on 10/15/2001, only 10 days before this vote.)
It was signed the next day, 10/26/2001, by the President and became law.
It seems to me that, although the list of Senatorial co-sponsors included many Democrats, none of the Senatorial co-sponsors appear to have had any effect whatsoever on the language of the bill. The House sponsor and cosponsor, neither of which are Democrats, are presumably the ones ultimately responsible for the bill's language.
So... which guys with a "D" next to their name helped write it, exactly? As I see it, most of Congress didn't have time to read it, let alone help write it.
Please remind me of all the Dems that voted against the patriot act.
See the House roll call vote here. Sixty-two Dems voted against it, as did one independent and three Republicans. Nine representatives did not vote; five GOP and 4 Dems.
Ninety-six Senators voted for it. Feingold (D-Wis) was the lone dissenter. Domenici, Helms, and Thurmond (GOP) did not vote. Note also that the three previous roll call votes were on motions tabling amendments that Feingold had offered to soften the UPA.
About 29% of Democrats in the House voted against it, while about 1% of the Republicans did the same. But when it comes to the UPA, there's plenty of blame to spread around. (Including my own rep, alas. It's a pity the guy running against her is scarier still.)
Slashdot Mirror
It may not be strictly accurate, but he has a point.
The electoral college tips the scales such that voters in less populous states have disproportionately large influence. Recall that a state's number of electoral votes is the sum of the number of its senators and congresspeople. Each state has two senators, and congressional districts are drawn so as to represent roughly equal population.
I live in Oregon, with five congressional districts and seven electoral votes. Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming have five congressional districts between them, meaning their total population is very roughly equivalent to Oregon's.
These five states have fifteen electoral votes; more than twice as many as Oregon. Each citizen's vote in those states is in some sense worth two in Oregon.
So if he's talking about influence per voter, as opposed to strictly electoral votes, he's bang-on.
(By the way, if you count the Great Lakes as coastline, then your observation has no exceptions at all. This is probably a sensible thing to do, since the St. Lawrence Seaway makes the Great Lakes accessible to ocean-going ships.)
Every year a new young person learns that making any statement about the president and death gets him/her a visit from the secret service.
Exactly! And that's why I have been careful not to refer to the name Tecumseh in an online forum for several year...
Oh, crap.
I wonder if these models could be extended back to show how the senate has changed from session-to-session, and also to show how influential a Senator has been over their entire career?
Good stuff. I hope this stuff is more widespread for 2006.
I'll see their Schwartzenegger and raise them an Albright.
What's worse is that if a Democrat-controlled legislature and administration tried it, the other guys would claim that it was a political power grab. (And not without reason, either.)
But the EC is not responsible for the whole of Republican success. It only affects the Presidency, abuses of which (in theory) should still be checked by the other branches. The Senate and the House are our own damn fault.
Even if the amendment to abolish the electoral college passes in the legislature, I'd be shocked if enough states ratified it. The electoral college guarantees that small states have a disproportionately large effect on the outcome of the presidential race. There are 17 states (plus DC) with five or less electoral votes. Abolishing the EC would reduce their influence on the Presidential outcome by approximately half. You can probably count on all of those 17 states declining to ratify this amendment. Seven more states have seven or less EC votes, and will be only slightly more favorable to this idea.
:-)
An amendment needs 34 (or is it 33?) states for ratification. You do the math.
It'll never get that far, though. Most of those small states are "red", and I seriously doubt a Republican Congress will dilute their influence.
You know, ever since I read "Islands in the Net" I suspected that Sterling was building a guerilla army somewhere in Africa. I had no notion he might go the WMD route, though.
Note that we apparently don't have to wait long for BSD to be gone.
I wonder if the rest of the article is as poorly researched as this:
"Every line of code is hand-audited and, as the site claims, there hasn't been a hole in the default install in over seven years. Striking a balance in hardware support somewhere between FreeBSD and NetBSD, OpenBSD runs on very few platforms and even then only in single-processor mode. [...]
OpenBSD is updated every three or four months [...]
It is dead obvious from the OpenBSD.org website that they claim one remote hole in the default install, that they are including SMP support in the version shipping week after next, and the release schedule has been every six months for many years.
This doesn't give me a lot of warm fuzzies about the accuracy of the rest of the article.
(I *know* that pop growth is *negative* in US, China, Japan, Britian, and parts of Africa, but Earth average is positive still)
It's a pity that you didn't take the time to research this before spouting off. It's a good argument, but your numbers are way off. As another poster said, the population is well over 6 billion, and I'm pretty sure most every region you cite still has growing population... but the growth rates are falling and negative population growth is predicted.
Anyway, don't believe me. Here's a research tool for next time.
You are so right about the bagpipe music. I got a CD of Pipe and Drum Band Champions that I used to play when I was doing heavy drafting. It was brilliant at getting me in The Zone.
The funny thing is, my co-workers wanted to know what I was playing in my headphones that worked so well for me. They even started borrowing it.
Try also Peter Gabriel's "Passion".
PS: No, I'm not scottish.
That's not the way he sounded when he debated Ann Richards in the Texas governor's race. He was apparently smooth, fluent, and he kicked her ass. I heard a clip, and it doesn't sound like the same guy.
Maybe that pretzel did lasting damage?
It doesn't really matter what the US Congress or FAA has to say about this. If they put reasonable regulations in place, that's great... everyone wins. If they put unreasonably restictive regulations on space tourism, the launch sites will simply move to a place with more friendly regulation. Maybe they'll end up flying out of Bolivia. So what?
Virgin Galactic is talking about flights that cost $200,000 per passenger. Each passenger is buying a three day excursion including training and whatnot. Most would-be tourists will have to spend a least a day getting to Mojave and back.
If they're looking at $200,000 and five days for the ride of a lifetime, the added time and expense of travelling to a country with a more reasonable regulatory environment is not very burdensome.
Hopefully this will be sufficient incentive for the FAA and Congress to impose only reasonable regulations.
Receptor patterning opens the door for a variety of new patenting possibilities...
That's like patenting a musical chord.
Yeah, my neighbors to the north have the right idea. I also liked the initiative here in Oregon to make all state legislative elections nonpartisan, but that didn't make the ballot.
If this works, maybe I should sue the state to stop financing primary elections. Why should all the taxpayers registered as independents finance any party's nomination process?
I'm all for making sure elections are fair, of course... but shouldn't the state at least bill the parties for the costs?
Personally, given the choice between a fiery death and blowing the engine up, I'd choose blowing the engine up every time.
:-)
See, that's why it's important not to panic.
A very rational choice, and one that I certainly agree with. But I was young, stupid, and caught very much off-guard.
Once I got my wits about me, I realized that avoiding both bad outcomes was really easy.
Yeah, but if you shut off the ignition, it engages the steering wheel lock, so you won't be able to turn the wheel anymore, even if you have assist.
Not in my 1997 Subaru, purchased in the US. I can turn the key off, and the steering wheel does not lock. "Off" is not the same key positon as "Lock".
Incidentally, I cannot lock the wheel and remove the key unless the automatic transmission is shifted to "park", and the headlights will not turn on if the ignition switch is not set to "Accessory or "On". These are slightly annoying safety features that have prevented more trouble for me than they have caused.
Same thing happened to me once. But I wasn't in France at the time.
I was driving my dad's red 1971 Datsun pickup on my way to work. (My brother had rolled it a couple times, but it was a Datsun so of course it still ran as good as ever.) A light ahead changed to yellow, and, being about 20 years old at the time, I did what came naturally: I floored it.
Not that flooring a '71 Datsun 1600cc engine had much of an immediate effect. But I did start accellerating, and I made it through the light whilst it was still yellow. Sweeeet. I let off the gas.
The engine continued to rev up.
"Oh, shit," said I. I was up to about 50MPH (in a 45 zone) and accelerating. The next light was about 400 yards away and red, with cars backed up waiting in every lane going my way. It was familiar territory, so I knew the light wouldn't be green before I got there.
I started to panic. I dropped the clutch, and the engine started to wind up. I had no tachometer, but I knew that sucker was gonna tear itself apart if I let it go on like that. I shoved into high gear (4, no overdrive) and engaged the clutch again. Naturally this was a slightly wrenching experience; the RPMs dropped and the vehicle lurched towards the firey doom ahead. In full panic now, I dropped the clutch again with the same result as before. I re-engaged the clutch.
I thought "I am going to die in about ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Oh yeah, the switch."
I turned the engine off and pulled over. Heh. Silly me.
Turns out that the throttle pedal itself was jammed. There was a little mushroom-shaped backstop attached to the firewall, and when I had floored it I had shoved the perdal sideways a bit, and gotten it stuck behind the backstop.
The moral of the story? Panic is not helpful, even the simplest devices can fail, and every powered device needs a kill switch.
Antimatter hand grenades--- Cheap!
It's quite a bit harder for a baby to interact with it's environment if it's dead than if it's on its back.
As other posters have pointed out, this isn't a crackpot recommendation: "In 1992, the AAP recommended putting babies on their backs to sleep to prevent SIDS. As a result, SIDS cases have since decreased by 50 percent." Weigh this reduction in death rates against what you're trying to avoid: "Head flattening is primarily a cosmetic concern, physicians agree."
Check your priorities, mate.
In any case, pretty soon the baby will be able to roll over on its own and the whole issue will be beyond your control.
I was trapped on an airplane when I saw Dante's Peak. (Flying into Seattle, no less.) That is, with the possible exception of Reefer Madness, the worst movie I have ever seen. I was about ready to pull a DB Cooper just to get away from it, but mercifully the nice lady from British Airways clubbed me unconscious.
Now that's good airline service.
Jihad; look it up.
How's this?
Note especially this definition:
This term has never been translated by Muslims to mean holy war. Instead, it means to struggle or exert oneself to his or her utmost potential. In Islam, there are two levels of jihad. The greater jihad most often refers to the inner struggle against evil within oneself with the goal of self-improvement for the betterment of one's community and the world as a whole. The lesser jihad refers to the struggle on the battlefield in self-defense if Muslims have been attacked and their right to practice their faith has been aggressively taken away. " Fight in the cause of God against those who fight you, but do not transgress limits. God does not love the transgressors" (Qur'an 2:190). This is an unequivocal statement that only self-defense makes war permissible for Muslims and the goals of war cannot be worldly gain.
Mind you, I agree that a war against "terrorism" is impossible to win, and that addressing injustice in Iraq without addressing injustices we ourselves perpetrate is not going to be especially effective.
But please, don't use that bad definition of jihad, and don't claim that the Islamic world has declared war on us. It's not nearly that simple.
Large portions of the patriot act were written by people that had a D beside their name.
:-)
Well, according to this, "Assistant attorney general, Viet D. Dinh, was the chief architect of the act." While he might count, I think you intended to imply party affiliation, not middle initial.
The bill was introduced first in the House. The sponsor was Sensenbrenner, and the only cosponsor Oxley, both Republicans. Note that this 342 page bill was introduced on 10/23/2001, and passed by the House at 11:03 AM the next day.
It was received in the Senate that same day (the 24th) and passed without amendment the next day. I listed the wrong roll-call vote in another post... the UPA passed 98-1 with Feingold (D-WI) dissenting and Landrieu (D-LA) not voting. (Note that the Senate office building was attacked by anthrax on 10/15/2001, only 10 days before this vote.)
It was signed the next day, 10/26/2001, by the President and became law.
It seems to me that, although the list of Senatorial co-sponsors included many Democrats, none of the Senatorial co-sponsors appear to have had any effect whatsoever on the language of the bill. The House sponsor and cosponsor, neither of which are Democrats, are presumably the ones ultimately responsible for the bill's language.
So... which guys with a "D" next to their name helped write it, exactly? As I see it, most of Congress didn't have time to read it, let alone help write it.
Please remind me of all the Dems that voted against the patriot act.
See the House roll call vote here. Sixty-two Dems voted against it, as did one independent and three Republicans. Nine representatives did not vote; five GOP and 4 Dems.
Ninety-six Senators voted for it. Feingold (D-Wis) was the lone dissenter. Domenici, Helms, and Thurmond (GOP) did not vote. Note also that the three previous roll call votes were on motions tabling amendments that Feingold had offered to soften the UPA.
About 29% of Democrats in the House voted against it, while about 1% of the Republicans did the same. But when it comes to the UPA, there's plenty of blame to spread around. (Including my own rep, alas. It's a pity the guy running against her is scarier still.)