I learned that the point of the electoral college was to insure that a candidate would have to win support from a wide variety of voters, and not just a numerical large group in large cities. If there were no electoral system, candidates would campaign almost exclusively in New York, Chicago, LA, and a hand full of other large cities where large numbers of people live.
Instead we have a system where a bunch of small states have an undue influence, and as such, candidates spend all their time campaigning there. I live in a big city on the west coast, I have never even seen a presidential candidate in person.
No matter the system that you set up, there is going to be an optimal way to campaign and court interest groups, that will leave someone out in the cold. Straight popular votes benefit urban voters. Electoral systems gerrymander popular votes in favor of distributed geographical groups.
Now, consider that the the country was rural and agrarian two hundred years ago, so it might have made a lot of sense to force the politicians out of big cities and distribute influence more geographically. Now that clearly isn't the case. Perhaps going to a straight popular vote makes sense in light of the fact that more people live in cities.
And for fuck sake, knock of the partisan bitching. This is a topic that should not be about Hillary vs. Donald, but rather an honest evaluation about the system we use to choose our leaders. Election reform should transcend party, we all benefit from a system that promotes the best leaders to power.
First of, Kudos to parent post for making a well thought out argument for policy that doesn't involve mindlessly demonizing the left or right in some simplistic idiotic fashion.
Your proposal seems very sound, encourage business and lower the barrier to create and compete. Tax the people who profit, not the company. However, I see two problems with your argument.
1) Corporations don't really pass on taxes to the consumers. Most taxes are on profits, not units sold, so unless you are thinking that sales tax is lion's share of tax that is paid out (it isn't), this isn't really an accurate view. A better way to describe taxes for corporations is being paid out of profits that could be returned to investors as profit or used for recapitalization. This would probably just result in the really wealth owners of corporations becoming even more wealth unless you also really cranked up the personal income tax for the wealthy and removed tax dodges. Businesses get to write off business expenses and deduct them from profits already, so removing taxes on profits isn't going to suddenly cause companies to radically change their expenditure on labor or infrastructure.
2) Corporations are used as personal piggy-banks by the very wealthy. By removing any taxes on corporate profits, you allow me as a majority interest holder in a large or wealthy corporation to keep my profits in the corp and then use the profits to acquire more companies and aggregate holdings completely tax free. And only divesting as I needed cash. It would be like being able to put your entire income into a tax free ROTH account, and only deducting money (and therefor paying taxes) when you bought groceries, but accruing wealth and interest in the interim.
If you want to do something like this, you would need to put some rules in place to keep corporations either reinvesting or divesting profits to shareholders and employees.
The fact that that Zuckerberg is Jewish makes the fact that he is being named in a German lawsuit about hate speech an holocaust denial particularly deliciously ironic.
Why would the marines need anything that isn't a ground attack aircraft or a transport? Giving the marines Apaches or a-10s make sense. Giving them transport helicopters to move troops or supplies also makes sense. But why would they need fighters? When are they working in a theater of combat that the Air force or navy isn't maintaining air superiority for them?
Let's use full context here. Banning Muslims from extremest hot spots until we can improve how we vet them. Not much different from banning German men of military age from immigrating while at war with Germany.
...Or putting all the Japanese in Americans in camps. That was another great idea that helped us win the war with the Japs and the Jerries. Also, just to fully frame context of the time that you are getting your good ideas from, you should also segregate your colored soldiers from your white soldiers, and keep them mostly in manual labor and support roles.
Yessir, the 1930s and 40s were full of great ideas that we can mine!
That is a bullshit argument. Conservatives use this lie to cover their hate-mongering as simple, prudent policy, but it is pretty trivial to shoot down. If they are so concerned about enforcing immigration law, where is our wall to keep illegal Canadians out? There are plenty of drugs coming south from Canada, why isn't anyone getting worked up over that?
Selectively enforcing immigration law is xenophobic. Brown immigrants are apparently bad, white ones? not so much...
... we also know things like warp drive are just not feasible...
Yet. Three hundred years ago, most of the mundane tech we use on a daily basis would have been considered to be impossible. FTL travel might be impossible via acceleration, but there are many ways to skin a cat. I think that if we don't accidental wipe ourselves out, we will eventually work out some way to travel between stars.
And there is alien life out there. The trick is just finding it.
Modifying software/firmware on computers and devices that you don't own or have been explicitly granted access to is criminal hacking, and a federal felony. Your suggestion might work, but I suspect that the definition of 'white hat' doesn't include incurring hundreds of thousands counts of a felony activity.
Perhaps the word you were looking for is 'Vigilante'?
I understand it may get very frustrating to continually deal with mistakes that are, to him, stupid mistakes.
Clearly his code needs to be rewritten then. If people use your code for a decade and a half, and there are still problems after all that time with employing it correctly, who is at fault? The users, or the faulty design that makes it hard to use correctly? I am going to call out the code author here. A good coder will write code that makes it easy to employ correctly and difficult (if not impossible) to misuse.
Yeah, I just called out Linus. Come down off your thrown jerk-face, and fix your sloppy design. Coders who don't know Linux as well as you do shouldn't get tripped up by this sort of thing.
What exactly are they going to do besides hem and haw at this?
They will hold a senate investigation into the matter, which anyone in the right mind should be terrified of. They will start issuing subpoenas to people in charge at Yahoo, and start asking them questions on national t.v., (which will likely be embarrassing and detrimental to Yahoo's stock price and reputation). Provided that nobody tries to cover anything up (Federal prison time for lying under oath to a senate investigation), the company might get off with a reprimand, provided that there aren't any laws that were discovered to have been broken. But Senators aren't going to sign up for this investigation to NOT prosecute people for covering this up, so they will be out for blood. There is a good chance that something will have been done wrong, and some larges fines will be implemented.
I predict that there will be a number of c-level and VP early 'retirements', when yahoo's board of directors boots people for putting them in the spotlight like that. Following the investigation, expect a few new federal hacking disclosure laws to hit the books next year. This will probably not go well for Yahoo, short their stock now.
NRDC and its consultant Ecos Research found that just a few clicks on a remote control could lead many 2015 and 2016 televisions from Samsung, LG, and Vizio to use up to twice the energy that consumers were told they would.
So, they are accusing the TV manufacturers of cheating on benchmarks, and they go on to say that if a user turns up the brightness, the TV will user more power. I just lost all respect for these clowns.
My initial reaction to this and the MS announcement was to look at the calendar, and make sure it isn't April first, since/. gets particularly silly around that time of year.
My second reaction was to not really care. I hear a lot about fancy pants billionaires buying and selling companies, and promoting crazy ideas, but rarely do they seem to have much of an impact on society.
I settled on: It is a good thing if the latest billionaire dick measuring competition is to see who can cure the most diseases.
Well lets see...Electric cars, encrypting communication to keep governments from spying on people, Working to find cures for cancer, and AIDs, mapping the human genome, exploring space and other planets, improving crop yields, working to reduce carbon emissions, identifying genetic disorders, building a vast world network to improve communication, are a few things that techies are working on that I can rattle off without really thinking deeply about it. Coders and network engineers aren't usually working on solving problems directly, but the infrastructure that supports solving problems much more efficiently. Most interesting problems require teams of people with differing backgrounds to get things solved, and not some single savant coder working on the perfect algorithm for 36 hours straight. Its kind of like asking Albert Einstein's auto mechanic what has he did to improve the state of physics. A lot and very little,depending on your POV.
If you are just asking a stupid question like what sort of cool Iphone apps are single handedly saving humanity from oblivion, I really don't know what to say to you.
Articles like this speak volumes about where Slashdot's editorial quality is going....
If I had my way, I'd hang the architects of the domestic spying program for treason. Those are the real traitors to the country. It is the only punishment that is justified by such a monstrous crime.
As opposed to places where people who deny being wankers hang out? Pretty much everybody on the planet is a wanker or a wanker and a liar. If you really aren't masturbating, you probably need to see a doctor or psychiatrist.
Any president would have tried to catch Snowden at that point in the game. If you don't know what someone has, what they intend, and the eventual consequences of their making off with sensitive information, you keep your options open and try to stop them. Obama probably privately approves of what Snowden did at this point in time (he doesn't seem to be a conservative authoritarian type), but politically he isn't going to get involved because it gets him nothing but flack before he leaves office. He may very well sign a pardon as he walks out the door on the last day, because it will make him look good to historians in the long run, and it cost him nothing politically at that point in time.
Here is the fun and dirty fact about pardons: You could blow up a bus full of nus and orphans on National TV, and if enough people wrote their leaders demanding that you were pardoned, you would get a pardon. They have NOTHING to do with justice or fairness for better or worse. Who knows how Obama really feels about the whole incident? Who knows what public opinion will be after the film comes out. I will wager that if the film gets an Oscar or two, (and the added media attention that comes with that), that Snowden gets pardoned because grandma suddenly learns about the whole story and starts writing her representatives in Washington. If public opinion turns, senators will start falling over each other to get in line and demand he be pardoned. The pardon could very well depend on how much money a Hollywood studio decides to spread around to buy a few awards.
Snowden won't get pardoned because he did something that was morally right, but legally wrong. He will get pardoned (if he gets pardoned) because it makes someone in power look good, or it pisses of the opposition somehow. His pardon won't be about justice, but straight up political gamesmanship.
He committed Treason. There is no excuse, no "okay, this time it was okay". Treason. While you approve of what he let out, how he did it and why he did it make him a traitor. We need to stop glorifying him.
....Along with those treasonous bastards who formed the country. Every one of them were traitors, inciting revolution an revolt against the King. Suffering a single traitor is to invite ruin and the decay of Executive and Federal authority!
Slashdot Mirror
I learned that the point of the electoral college was to insure that a candidate would have to win support from a wide variety of voters, and not just a numerical large group in large cities. If there were no electoral system, candidates would campaign almost exclusively in New York, Chicago, LA, and a hand full of other large cities where large numbers of people live.
Instead we have a system where a bunch of small states have an undue influence, and as such, candidates spend all their time campaigning there. I live in a big city on the west coast, I have never even seen a presidential candidate in person.
No matter the system that you set up, there is going to be an optimal way to campaign and court interest groups, that will leave someone out in the cold. Straight popular votes benefit urban voters. Electoral systems gerrymander popular votes in favor of distributed geographical groups.
Now, consider that the the country was rural and agrarian two hundred years ago, so it might have made a lot of sense to force the politicians out of big cities and distribute influence more geographically. Now that clearly isn't the case. Perhaps going to a straight popular vote makes sense in light of the fact that more people live in cities.
And for fuck sake, knock of the partisan bitching. This is a topic that should not be about Hillary vs. Donald, but rather an honest evaluation about the system we use to choose our leaders. Election reform should transcend party, we all benefit from a system that promotes the best leaders to power.
First of, Kudos to parent post for making a well thought out argument for policy that doesn't involve mindlessly demonizing the left or right in some simplistic idiotic fashion.
Your proposal seems very sound, encourage business and lower the barrier to create and compete. Tax the people who profit, not the company. However, I see two problems with your argument.
1) Corporations don't really pass on taxes to the consumers. Most taxes are on profits, not units sold, so unless you are thinking that sales tax is lion's share of tax that is paid out (it isn't), this isn't really an accurate view. A better way to describe taxes for corporations is being paid out of profits that could be returned to investors as profit or used for recapitalization. This would probably just result in the really wealth owners of corporations becoming even more wealth unless you also really cranked up the personal income tax for the wealthy and removed tax dodges. Businesses get to write off business expenses and deduct them from profits already, so removing taxes on profits isn't going to suddenly cause companies to radically change their expenditure on labor or infrastructure.
2) Corporations are used as personal piggy-banks by the very wealthy. By removing any taxes on corporate profits, you allow me as a majority interest holder in a large or wealthy corporation to keep my profits in the corp and then use the profits to acquire more companies and aggregate holdings completely tax free. And only divesting as I needed cash. It would be like being able to put your entire income into a tax free ROTH account, and only deducting money (and therefor paying taxes) when you bought groceries, but accruing wealth and interest in the interim.
If you want to do something like this, you would need to put some rules in place to keep corporations either reinvesting or divesting profits to shareholders and employees.
Dammit, 30 seconds after posting that I realized it was even better as... I got .99999999 problems, and a float ain't one......
I got 98.99999999 problems, and a float ain't one......
The fact that that Zuckerberg is Jewish makes the fact that he is being named in a German lawsuit about hate speech an holocaust denial particularly deliciously ironic.
Why would the marines need anything that isn't a ground attack aircraft or a transport? Giving the marines Apaches or a-10s make sense. Giving them transport helicopters to move troops or supplies also makes sense. But why would they need fighters? When are they working in a theater of combat that the Air force or navy isn't maintaining air superiority for them?
Let's use full context here. Banning Muslims from extremest hot spots until we can improve how we vet them. Not much different from banning German men of military age from immigrating while at war with Germany.
...Or putting all the Japanese in Americans in camps. That was another great idea that helped us win the war with the Japs and the Jerries. Also, just to fully frame context of the time that you are getting your good ideas from, you should also segregate your colored soldiers from your white soldiers, and keep them mostly in manual labor and support roles.
Yessir, the 1930s and 40s were full of great ideas that we can mine!
That is a bullshit argument. Conservatives use this lie to cover their hate-mongering as simple, prudent policy, but it is pretty trivial to shoot down. If they are so concerned about enforcing immigration law, where is our wall to keep illegal Canadians out? There are plenty of drugs coming south from Canada, why isn't anyone getting worked up over that?
Selectively enforcing immigration law is xenophobic. Brown immigrants are apparently bad, white ones? not so much...
I got a kick out out of the use of the word 'slump'. It suggests a temporary drop, as opposed to a permanent decline in demand for a new computer.
Yet. Three hundred years ago, most of the mundane tech we use on a daily basis would have been considered to be impossible. FTL travel might be impossible via acceleration, but there are many ways to skin a cat. I think that if we don't accidental wipe ourselves out, we will eventually work out some way to travel between stars.
And there is alien life out there. The trick is just finding it.
Trump will build a firewall and get the Russians to pay for it.
Modifying software/firmware on computers and devices that you don't own or have been explicitly granted access to is criminal hacking, and a federal felony. Your suggestion might work, but I suspect that the definition of 'white hat' doesn't include incurring hundreds of thousands counts of a felony activity.
Perhaps the word you were looking for is 'Vigilante'?
I understand it may get very frustrating to continually deal with mistakes that are, to him, stupid mistakes.
Clearly his code needs to be rewritten then. If people use your code for a decade and a half, and there are still problems after all that time with employing it correctly, who is at fault? The users, or the faulty design that makes it hard to use correctly? I am going to call out the code author here. A good coder will write code that makes it easy to employ correctly and difficult (if not impossible) to misuse.
Yeah, I just called out Linus. Come down off your thrown jerk-face, and fix your sloppy design. Coders who don't know Linux as well as you do shouldn't get tripped up by this sort of thing.
They will hold a senate investigation into the matter, which anyone in the right mind should be terrified of. They will start issuing subpoenas to people in charge at Yahoo, and start asking them questions on national t.v., (which will likely be embarrassing and detrimental to Yahoo's stock price and reputation). Provided that nobody tries to cover anything up (Federal prison time for lying under oath to a senate investigation), the company might get off with a reprimand, provided that there aren't any laws that were discovered to have been broken. But Senators aren't going to sign up for this investigation to NOT prosecute people for covering this up, so they will be out for blood. There is a good chance that something will have been done wrong, and some larges fines will be implemented.
I predict that there will be a number of c-level and VP early 'retirements', when yahoo's board of directors boots people for putting them in the spotlight like that. Following the investigation, expect a few new federal hacking disclosure laws to hit the books next year. This will probably not go well for Yahoo, short their stock now.
from TFA:
NRDC and its consultant Ecos Research found that just a few clicks on a remote control could lead many 2015 and 2016 televisions from Samsung, LG, and Vizio to use up to twice the energy that consumers were told they would.
So, they are accusing the TV manufacturers of cheating on benchmarks, and they go on to say that if a user turns up the brightness, the TV will user more power. I just lost all respect for these clowns.
My initial reaction to this and the MS announcement was to look at the calendar, and make sure it isn't April first, since /. gets particularly silly around that time of year.
My second reaction was to not really care. I hear a lot about fancy pants billionaires buying and selling companies, and promoting crazy ideas, but rarely do they seem to have much of an impact on society.
I settled on: It is a good thing if the latest billionaire dick measuring competition is to see who can cure the most diseases.
lets see......Apple + McLaren = Apple maps getting you completely lost faster than ever before.......?
OMG! Thirld world countries took all our good jobs, now they are stealing our trash!
I'm sure President Trump will know how to solve this with a wall or something....
Well lets see...Electric cars, encrypting communication to keep governments from spying on people, Working to find cures for cancer, and AIDs, mapping the human genome, exploring space and other planets, improving crop yields, working to reduce carbon emissions, identifying genetic disorders, building a vast world network to improve communication, are a few things that techies are working on that I can rattle off without really thinking deeply about it. Coders and network engineers aren't usually working on solving problems directly, but the infrastructure that supports solving problems much more efficiently. Most interesting problems require teams of people with differing backgrounds to get things solved, and not some single savant coder working on the perfect algorithm for 36 hours straight. Its kind of like asking Albert Einstein's auto mechanic what has he did to improve the state of physics. A lot and very little,depending on your POV.
If you are just asking a stupid question like what sort of cool Iphone apps are single handedly saving humanity from oblivion, I really don't know what to say to you.
Articles like this speak volumes about where Slashdot's editorial quality is going....
If I had my way, I'd hang the architects of the domestic spying program for treason. Those are the real traitors to the country. It is the only punishment that is justified by such a monstrous crime.
As opposed to places where people who deny being wankers hang out? Pretty much everybody on the planet is a wanker or a wanker and a liar. If you really aren't masturbating, you probably need to see a doctor or psychiatrist.
Any president would have tried to catch Snowden at that point in the game. If you don't know what someone has, what they intend, and the eventual consequences of their making off with sensitive information, you keep your options open and try to stop them. Obama probably privately approves of what Snowden did at this point in time (he doesn't seem to be a conservative authoritarian type), but politically he isn't going to get involved because it gets him nothing but flack before he leaves office. He may very well sign a pardon as he walks out the door on the last day, because it will make him look good to historians in the long run, and it cost him nothing politically at that point in time.
Here is the fun and dirty fact about pardons: You could blow up a bus full of nus and orphans on National TV, and if enough people wrote their leaders demanding that you were pardoned, you would get a pardon. They have NOTHING to do with justice or fairness for better or worse. Who knows how Obama really feels about the whole incident? Who knows what public opinion will be after the film comes out. I will wager that if the film gets an Oscar or two, (and the added media attention that comes with that), that Snowden gets pardoned because grandma suddenly learns about the whole story and starts writing her representatives in Washington. If public opinion turns, senators will start falling over each other to get in line and demand he be pardoned. The pardon could very well depend on how much money a Hollywood studio decides to spread around to buy a few awards.
Snowden won't get pardoned because he did something that was morally right, but legally wrong. He will get pardoned (if he gets pardoned) because it makes someone in power look good, or it pisses of the opposition somehow. His pardon won't be about justice, but straight up political gamesmanship.
The joke bombed, but you know what? Sometime jokes are funny, while being pointlessly pedantic never is.
Thanks for reasoning your way through a funny comment, I bet they LOVE you at parties.
He committed Treason. There is no excuse, no "okay, this time it was okay". Treason. While you approve of what he let out, how he did it and why he did it make him a traitor. We need to stop glorifying him.
....Along with those treasonous bastards who formed the country. Every one of them were traitors, inciting revolution an revolt against the King. Suffering a single traitor is to invite ruin and the decay of Executive and Federal authority!