One of the nice things about 256 AAC is that it's high enough bit rate that one could transcode it to MP3 with essentially no noticable loss. 128KB was always a barrier to transcoding since it was just at the threshold of noticability.
(i.e. I can just hear artifcats in 128 MP3, but not in 192kb MP3. I could not hear artifacts in 128KB AAC but I could easily hear artifacts in transcoded AAC to MP3 at 128KB. )
With 256 the trasncoded versions should be artifact free I expect.
I note the audio books are not DRM free even though many sellers (e.g. Borders) now offer DRM free audio books.
Just checked it out. The prices of DRM free 256 Kb AAC are the same as 128kb DRM aac. so better quality and no drm and same price.
why are they still offering the DRM version??
perhaps there are some caveats. One assumes you are not supposed to give the un DRM versions out for free. but what about using them on more of your computers. perhaps the sale agreement has you agree not to use it on more than one computer at a time? even though nothing technical prevents you from violating the legal contract? Or are the sharing rights (5 computers) the same???
Thinking a bit more about this there is a feature that makes newspapers and magazines so bathroom freindly that will be hard to recreate on a reader.
Namley, parallel accessibility. When I sit on my thrown I don't go there to read a specific article. I browse the magazine for something that look intriguing. It's hard to manage that sort of page flipping and scanning on a reader. But it's essential to the use mode.
The thing about all the readers is that I simply would not use one in the bathroom for a lot of sound reasons I'm sure you can imagine.
But it seems like one could create a bathroom reader that would be welcome.
Scrap the Kindle and come up with the iPoo.
What I want is a reader that is bathroom and bathub friendly. Also one I could take outdoors and not worry about it getting rained on or something if I happen to leave it out on the deck by accident.
In this country we don't really have an energy shortage. We have a grid shortage. There's loads of wind and geo thermal and solar and tide energy all in places with feeble grids. That's why for example that texas dude is lobbying to get texas to build grids in the middle of no where. so he can transport his wind energy (to his water pumps but that's another story).
SO the propoer thing to do is not to store wind energy but to send it to consumers AT THE TIME THEY ARE USING THE LEAST POWER. send the ind energy at night when the wind is strong and the grids are unused. Now you don't need as big a grid.
the small existing ones can transport more. and the money you were going to spend for peak loads can be used for the last mile to the wind farms.
consumers can store it in batteries or as heat (electric thermal storage) or make hydrogen fuels, maybe charge the electric car.
give consumers the right to buy the cheapest or greenest power and they will pay for and maintain the batteries.
When I am running virtual box do I create new security holes?
That is to say, suppose for example, the host is a mac and it has a firewall and various TCP wrappers turned on. Now run ububtu or windows in the VM.
Are all my ports now open again? or is the host both firewalling and TCP filtering all the communications?
THat is should I be thinking of the hosted os as being behing a firewall or NAT router or is it fully exposed to the outside?
second suppose my hosted OS gets infected. If it launches a network attack on the host computer is it now attacking from within the fire wall and thus making the host more vulnerable.
Somehow it seems like at least one of these cases must be true.
There DBD folks have the head up their asses. They win no freinds when they go after the short poll in the DRM tent.
It was not till apple came along and prices songs at $1 that it became attractive to put up with the conveniences of their system versus free but inconvenient pirated music.
They created the speed bump model of DRM for music. So actual barriers but speed bumps to limit the rate of spread of music sharing over music purchasing.
With video it appears they may be moving to a more locked down model. It's too early to tell. But why begin by attacking apple? go after the long poll in the tent.
Assuming the line voltage is run through a full wave bridge rectifier, there would be a 120 Hz flicker, imperceptible to most people. Toss a large capacitor across that DC output and you've got dramatically less ripple.
true but then you also have 100 times the surge current when you turn them on, or a slow turn on.
What you say is of course obvious to any EE, and yet i've never actually seen a single 120v LED lamp made that way. One wonders why.
The thing that is awful about led lamps is that most of them are run straight off the AC voltage and have massive 100% brightness flickers. If you are moving it's like a strobe. You don't see it in car lights since they are run off DC. but most, perhaps not all, AC socket lamps I've seen have really bad flicker.
I also how they have secondary lenses since LED's can be very directional the way they are typically resin cast.
Re:Herbal medicine has limited value
on
Trick or Treatment
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Yup it's obvious to any reasonable scientific person that it's the corporate logo stamped on the pill that confers the magic powers.
Well what that assures you is that the pill will dissolve correctly and the dosage and freshness will not vary beyond certain bounds. Delivery of medicine at high does means those factors are non-trivial.
Now I think most alternative medicine is bunk. But the concept that if something is toxic in large doses that a small dose might have medicinal effects is not crazy at all. It is crazy to assume that is a good rule of thumb, but anything that has a strong influence on your body probably is worth considering as a drug. The idea of infinite dilution seems to carry the concept too far.
One form of alternative medicine that gets too much abuse is Vedic medicine which hold that natural based drugs are best delivered not in pure isolated forms but delivered in the context in which they are natually found. The more we learn about proteins and their interaction with small molecules the more that actually makes scientific sense. Although the vedic medicine scheme was not developed with that understanding, in hindsight it may lead to new ways to increase a drugs effectiveness at smaller dosages.
the problem with ostracizing branches of boogie-wooggie medicine is that this allows them to start mixing good and bad practices since no matter what they do they will be osctracized. A good example of this is chiropracty. those doctors know a lot more about muscle skeletle injury diagnosis that the orthopedic surgeons I have been to. But they also then reccomend all kinds of crazy cures like aroma therapy and magnets. SO the quality of their patient asseement skills gets tossed out with the bathwater of their bullshit cures. Orthopedists could learn a lot from the accumulated science of chiropracty but it wont since its too hard to sift through the dross.
it's actually a sign of a potentially good manager if he thinks things are going so well he never needs to see the people more than two tiers down. He's tuned things so he can just be managing his managers and going to skip-level meeting to make sure his managers are managing downward not ass-kissing upward. The fact he is not hands on at your level does not make him not a type-A. He may well still imperious, just not directly with the worker bees.
Or so I guess. But what do I know. You were there.
No it's not the electoral college that disenfranchises people. It's the winner-take-all rule most states have imposed. remove that rule and those people are enfranchised.
In an earlier post I noted a good replacement rule would be to divide the electoral votes proportionately amonge just the top two candidates and also give a +2 bonus to the top vote getting candidates.
(And if you like rank preference voting, I would suggest it be used to choose the two, but not use the EC system itself to balkanize the vote into more than two candidates.)
I worked for an organization which was carved out of the main organization by the sheer force of will and vision of a single manager who became it's head. She then made life impossible for every type-A person in her organization and put very skillful and considerate but not type-A people in as her subbordinates.
everything worked great till she left for the next job. Then for ten years nothing got done, no initiatives lasted longer than 6 months everthing was adrift. A succession of managers drawn from her subborindates got us no where. Finally someone from the outside was brought it and things got a bit better.
The thing about imperious leaders is that they really get the job done. It matters less that they make perfect decisions but that they make a series of connected decisions related to a driving vision. if some decisions are sub-optimal they still are part of the path forward because no one is second guessing the slow progress and everybody is working as a team.
Jobs had both visions, aggression and a sense of style. Apple sells style but does john Ives have the cojones to command?
I can only judge shiller and Ives by their brief appearances but they seem a bit too jolly to me.
It's also not enough to be a tough guy. You actually have to have skills too. That's what happened when Jobs got forced out by the mangerial power plays. Tougher guys without jobs skill and understanding took over and ran it into the ground.
You need the whole package. Jobs is that guy. The question is not if he's trained his subordinates, but if he scared off all the type-A guys with real skill?
What about that dude that wrote Beos? Maybe he'd be someone with some vision and force of personality? How about some of those Execs that started TransMeta?
You make it sound awfully high-minded and artfully constructed.
I never actually said the outcome was intentional on the part of the founding fathers or not. The point is, one reason the system has worked so well is likely due to the factors I outlined.
However I am inclined to give the founding fathers some credit. That period of time was one of the high water marks of thoughts on how to organize a self propagating republic. The more I read the more I am impressed with how thought was indeed given to how things would work. Two of the things one finds in diaries and such are concerns about how to keep the system from devolving into either monarchy or theocracy. One of the reasons they did no give people the vote at first was in part the fear of theocracy. The founding fathers while mainly devout christians were also Deists who subscribed to the belief that organizing your religion was not helpful to the purpose of religion. And just as they had had their fill of king george they also had had their fill of not only the church of england but all the even more fanatical religions that had come to america.
it's pretty clear that separation of church and state was indeed in their minds as a two-way street. Giving people the vote they felt was giving bishops the the vote.
We all know about the checks and balances that abound. it seems pretty clear they were deliberately constructing a lot of bodies that had partial but not complete authorities to avoid making the next king.
as for the EC it's alos clear they were thinking about not forcing presidential candidates to campaign. At the time this would have been suicidal. Travel by boat, or by horse into the edges of the republic was actually perilous as well as a drain on treasure and health. having a well infomrmed deliberative body to filter the wishes of the state legislature made for a tiered approach that avoided this kind of travel.
So happy accident or not it's a very stable solution to a tricky optimization problem.
if you dislike the small state bias the place to start is removing the senate. until you do, it would be foolish to remove the tiny bias the presidency has.
The original logic behind winner take all was among other reasons to avoid balkanization of the vote into minor parties. Ultimately the president needs a strong consenus to govern. Splitting the vote too many ways weakens a states emphasis.
Two is plenty. If one is unhappy with two then one should consider other ways of selecting the two (such as run-off voting) and not try to make the electoral system do too many things at the same time.
in case it's not known. the number of electors per state is proportional to the states population, plus 2. (techincally it's equal to the number of congressmen and senators)
One of it's qualities is also to provide a mechanism for reliable elections in the event of disruptions. Death of the candidate or wartime issues were more of a problem a long time ago and this provides the existence of a deliberative body separate from congress itself to consider what to do when the unexpected happens. (Ultimately the legislative branch selects the president in the event all else fails. and this has happened several times.)
Even though the electors are nominally "bound" to vote for the person they were chosen to represent, the intent to give them some deliberative power is clear. Originally they were given two votes. The expectation was they would cast the first vote for locally selected favorite. But they could freely choose some person of greater national interest with the second vote.
Indeed in one election, martin van buren's I believe. The opposing party actually ran three candidates for president, each one a regional favorite in different parts of the country. The plan was that the electors's would down-select to just one of the three in their second vote.
the strategy was never tested as the opposing party had more than 50% of the electors.
But the point is, the electoral system is not supposed to be simply a popular vote. it's supposed to choose the person who is, while very popular, the one who is most representative of a diverse electorate, representing all the states, and with a weight proportional to the state's representation in congress, not simply the number of eligible and able voters.
Many people, who have not carefully pondered the elctoral college system consider it an anachronism.
And it's true some of it's purposes, such as not requiringing candidates to make the perilous journey to all the states and to prevent religious institutions from swaying direct democratic vote have lost their original purposes. And indeed those aspects are gone. The electors are bound democraticly not by the legislative branch as was the norm.
But it's remaining features are of great interest to nerds. It's a very clever optimization problem with a very clever robust solution.
Some people think that the president should be chosen by a popular vote. But instead the design of the college is intended to optimize a different criteria. It's purpose is to choose the person who is best able to govern and is the most broadly representative, not the most popular.
here's the three central challenges it is addressing.
1) Whenever two candidates are sufficiently close in the popular vote as to both be highly popular, the best choice is not the one that eeks out a few extra votes, but rather the one that gathers the votes from the most geographically diverse base. The states form an excellent proxy for diversity.
2) the president is the man who must follow the will of the legislative branch. Like it or not we have a union formed around a senate which has a large small state bias. If you dislike the small state bias, then you should complain about the senate not the electoral college. The president has to work with the senate after he's elected so it makes a lot of sense to give the presidentially election a minor small state bias.
this 2=extra elector bias is quite small but insures that desiderata 1 and 2 are carried out.
3) the third function of the EC system is population normalization. The president is president of all the people, not just the ones that voted or even the ones that voted for for him. He's even the president of the ones that can't vote. (felons, children, women, and slaves all counted towards the population count since the begining). Thus no matter how many people cast votes, the total effect of tose votes is viewed as a sampling of the TOTAL population of the state. So the vote's effect is renormalized to the total state population by the EC system. Even if one person voted in CA, they get 45 electors.
As an example, in the last election, the turnout in Alaska was quite small for whatever reason. but they still get the full electoral count.
The real problem with the EC system is not that it does not perfectly track the popular vote--it's not trying to be an approximation of that criteria. It's really trying to bias the choice to someone who is both popular and diversely popular.
the real reason the EC system has some difficulties is the silly winner-take-all process.
instead of eliminating it here's a suggestion. remove the winner take-all division of electors. instead, take the top-two vote-getters and approtion the electors between them in each state according to the state's popular votes. Award a 2-elector bonus to the overall vote-getter.
this preserves the renormalization, the small state bias, and the diversity bonus. But it removes all the problems.
macs do get credit for putting the passwords where they belong: in a centralized password keychain. Firefox rolls it's own separate password manager. At various time firefox's keychain has been found to be insecure and it's separate from your other keychains. There's no simple keychain brownser interface like the centralized keychain protection system safari uses.
If you want to encrypt or hide or transport all your passwords it's easy in safari but hard in firefox since how it's done changes.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the nice things about 256 AAC is that it's high enough bit rate that one could transcode it to MP3 with essentially no noticable loss. 128KB was always a barrier to transcoding since it was just at the threshold of noticability.
(i.e. I can just hear artifcats in 128 MP3, but not in 192kb MP3. I could not hear artifacts in 128KB AAC but I could easily hear artifacts in transcoded AAC to MP3 at 128KB. )
With 256 the trasncoded versions should be artifact free I expect.
I note the audio books are not DRM free even though many sellers (e.g. Borders) now offer DRM free audio books.
Just checked it out. The prices of DRM free 256 Kb AAC are the same as 128kb DRM aac. so better quality and no drm and same price.
why are they still offering the DRM version??
perhaps there are some caveats. One assumes you are not supposed to give the un DRM versions out for free. but what about using them on more of your computers. perhaps the sale agreement has you agree not to use it on more than one computer at a time? even though nothing technical prevents you from violating the legal contract? Or are the sharing rights (5 computers) the same???
Thinking a bit more about this there is a feature that makes newspapers and magazines so bathroom freindly that will be hard to recreate on a reader.
Namley, parallel accessibility. When I sit on my thrown I don't go there to read a specific article. I browse the magazine for something that look intriguing. It's hard to manage that sort of page flipping and scanning on a reader. But it's essential to the use mode.
The thing about all the readers is that I simply would not use one in the bathroom for a lot of sound reasons I'm sure you can imagine.
But it seems like one could create a bathroom reader that would be welcome.
Scrap the Kindle and come up with the iPoo.
What I want is a reader that is bathroom and bathub friendly. Also one I could take outdoors and not worry about it getting rained on or something if I happen to leave it out on the deck by accident.
Oh wait, they do.
it's the second gig they added no doubt. Your zune now lives in the cloud.
In this country we don't really have an energy shortage. We have a grid shortage. There's loads of wind and geo thermal and solar and tide energy all in places with feeble grids. That's why for example that texas dude is lobbying to get texas to build grids in the middle of no where. so he can transport his wind energy (to his water pumps but that's another story).
SO the propoer thing to do is not to store wind energy but to send it to consumers AT THE TIME THEY ARE USING THE LEAST POWER. send the ind energy at night when the wind is strong and the grids are unused. Now you don't need as big a grid.
the small existing ones can transport more. and the money you were going to spend for peak loads can be used for the last mile to the wind farms.
consumers can store it in batteries or as heat (electric thermal storage) or make hydrogen fuels, maybe charge the electric car.
give consumers the right to buy the cheapest or greenest power and they will pay for and maintain the batteries.
When I am running virtual box do I create new security holes?
That is to say, suppose for example, the host is a mac and it has a firewall and various TCP wrappers turned on. Now run ububtu or windows in the VM.
Are all my ports now open again? or is the host both firewalling and TCP filtering all the communications?
THat is should I be thinking of the hosted os as being behing a firewall or NAT router or is it fully exposed to the outside?
second suppose my hosted OS gets infected. If it launches a network attack on the host computer is it now attacking from within the fire wall and thus making the host more vulnerable.
Somehow it seems like at least one of these cases must be true.
There DBD folks have the head up their asses. They win no freinds when they go after the short poll in the DRM tent.
It was not till apple came along and prices songs at $1 that it became attractive to put up with the conveniences of their system versus free but inconvenient pirated music.
They created the speed bump model of DRM for music. So actual barriers but speed bumps to limit the rate of spread of music sharing over music purchasing.
With video it appears they may be moving to a more locked down model. It's too early to tell. But why begin by attacking apple? go after the long poll in the tent.
In fact that is exactly how they are designed. But they still are off about 20% of the time during the cross-over
You can buy a single 5 watt led that is the same brightness as a 50 watt incandesscant.
Assuming the line voltage is run through a full wave bridge rectifier, there would be a 120 Hz flicker, imperceptible to most people. Toss a large capacitor across that DC output and you've got dramatically less ripple.
true but then you also have 100 times the surge current when you turn them on, or a slow turn on.
What you say is of course obvious to any EE, and yet i've never actually seen a single 120v LED lamp made that way. One wonders why.
uh... because they do and you can buy them.
The thing that is awful about led lamps is that most of them are run straight off the AC voltage and have massive 100% brightness flickers. If you are moving it's like a strobe. You don't see it in car lights since they are run off DC. but most, perhaps not all, AC socket lamps I've seen have really bad flicker.
I also how they have secondary lenses since LED's can be very directional the way they are typically resin cast.
Yup it's obvious to any reasonable scientific person that it's the corporate logo stamped on the pill that confers the magic powers.
Well what that assures you is that the pill will dissolve correctly and the dosage and freshness will not vary beyond certain bounds. Delivery of medicine at high does means those factors are non-trivial.
Now I think most alternative medicine is bunk. But the concept that if something is toxic in large doses that a small dose might have medicinal effects is not crazy at all. It is crazy to assume that is a good rule of thumb, but anything that has a strong influence on your body probably is worth considering as a drug. The idea of infinite dilution seems to carry the concept too far.
One form of alternative medicine that gets too much abuse is Vedic medicine which hold that natural based drugs are best delivered not in pure isolated forms but delivered in the context in which they are natually found. The more we learn about proteins and their interaction with small molecules the more that actually makes scientific sense. Although the vedic medicine scheme was not developed with that understanding, in hindsight it may lead to new ways to increase a drugs effectiveness at smaller dosages.
the problem with ostracizing branches of boogie-wooggie medicine is that this allows them to start mixing good and bad practices since no matter what they do they will be osctracized. A good example of this is chiropracty. those doctors know a lot more about muscle skeletle injury diagnosis that the orthopedic surgeons I have been to. But they also then reccomend all kinds of crazy cures like aroma therapy and magnets. SO the quality of their patient asseement skills gets tossed out with the bathwater of their bullshit cures. Orthopedists could learn a lot from the accumulated science of chiropracty but it wont since its too hard to sift through the dross.
it's actually a sign of a potentially good manager if he thinks things are going so well he never needs to see the people more than two tiers down. He's tuned things so he can just be managing his managers and going to skip-level meeting to make sure his managers are managing downward not ass-kissing upward. The fact he is not hands on at your level does not make him not a type-A. He may well still imperious, just not directly with the worker bees.
Or so I guess. But what do I know. You were there.
maybe Bill gates would like a second chance without all the MS baggage to try out his visions.
No it's not the electoral college that disenfranchises people. It's the winner-take-all rule most states have imposed. remove that rule and those people are enfranchised.
In an earlier post I noted a good replacement rule would be to divide the electoral votes proportionately amonge just the top two candidates and also give a +2 bonus to the top vote getting candidates.
(And if you like rank preference voting, I would suggest it be used to choose the two, but not use the EC system itself to balkanize the vote into more than two candidates.)
I worked for an organization which was carved out of the main organization by the sheer force of will and vision of a single manager who became it's head. She then made life impossible for every type-A person in her organization and put very skillful and considerate but not type-A people in as her subbordinates.
everything worked great till she left for the next job. Then for ten years nothing got done, no initiatives lasted longer than 6 months everthing was adrift. A succession of managers drawn from her subborindates got us no where. Finally someone from the outside was brought it and things got a bit better.
The thing about imperious leaders is that they really get the job done. It matters less that they make perfect decisions but that they make a series of connected decisions related to a driving vision. if some decisions are sub-optimal they still are part of the path forward because no one is second guessing the slow progress and everybody is working as a team.
Jobs had both visions, aggression and a sense of style. Apple sells style but does john Ives have the cojones to command?
I can only judge shiller and Ives by their brief appearances but they seem a bit too jolly to me.
It's also not enough to be a tough guy. You actually have to have skills too. That's what happened when Jobs got forced out by the mangerial power plays. Tougher guys without jobs skill and understanding took over and ran it into the ground.
You need the whole package. Jobs is that guy. The question is not if he's trained his subordinates, but if he scared off all the type-A guys with real skill?
What about that dude that wrote Beos? Maybe he'd be someone with some vision and force of personality? How about some of those Execs that started TransMeta?
Or maybe Fake-Steve.
You make it sound awfully high-minded and artfully constructed.
I never actually said the outcome was intentional on the part of the founding fathers or not. The point is, one reason the system has worked so well is likely due to the factors I outlined.
However I am inclined to give the founding fathers some credit. That period of time was one of the high water marks of thoughts on how to organize a self propagating republic. The more I read the more I am impressed with how thought was indeed given to how things would work. Two of the things one finds in diaries and such are concerns about how to keep the system from devolving into either monarchy or theocracy. One of the reasons they did no give people the vote at first was in part the fear of theocracy. The founding fathers while mainly devout christians were also Deists who subscribed to the belief that organizing your religion was not helpful to the purpose of religion. And just as they had had their fill of king george they also had had their fill of not only the church of england but all the even more fanatical religions that had come to america.
it's pretty clear that separation of church and state was indeed in their minds as a two-way street. Giving people the vote they felt was giving bishops the the vote.
We all know about the checks and balances that abound. it seems pretty clear they were deliberately constructing a lot of bodies that had partial but not complete authorities to avoid making the next king.
as for the EC it's alos clear they were thinking about not forcing presidential candidates to campaign. At the time this would have been suicidal. Travel by boat, or by horse into the edges of the republic was actually perilous as well as a drain on treasure and health. having a well infomrmed deliberative body to filter the wishes of the state legislature made for a tiered approach that avoided this kind of travel.
So happy accident or not it's a very stable solution to a tricky optimization problem.
if you dislike the small state bias the place to start is removing the senate. until you do, it would be foolish to remove the tiny bias the presidency has.
The original logic behind winner take all was among other reasons to avoid balkanization of the vote into minor parties. Ultimately the president needs a strong consenus to govern. Splitting the vote too many ways weakens a states emphasis.
Two is plenty. If one is unhappy with two then one should consider other ways of selecting the two (such as run-off voting) and not try to make the electoral system do too many things at the same time.
in case it's not known. the number of electors per state is proportional to the states population, plus 2. (techincally it's equal to the number of congressmen and senators)
One of it's qualities is also to provide a mechanism for reliable elections in the event of disruptions. Death of the candidate or wartime issues were more of a problem a long time ago and this provides the existence of a deliberative body separate from congress itself to consider what to do when the unexpected happens. (Ultimately the legislative branch selects the president in the event all else fails. and this has happened several times.)
Even though the electors are nominally "bound" to vote for the person they were chosen to represent, the intent to give them some deliberative power is clear. Originally they were given two votes. The expectation was they would cast the first vote for locally selected favorite. But they could freely choose some person of greater national interest with the second vote.
Indeed in one election, martin van buren's I believe. The opposing party actually ran three candidates for president, each one a regional favorite in different parts of the country. The plan was that the electors's would down-select to just one of the three in their second vote.
the strategy was never tested as the opposing party had more than 50% of the electors.
But the point is, the electoral system is not supposed to be simply a popular vote. it's supposed to choose the person who is, while very popular, the one who is most representative of a diverse electorate, representing all the states, and with a weight proportional to the state's representation in congress, not simply the number of eligible and able voters.
Many people, who have not carefully pondered the elctoral college system consider it an anachronism.
And it's true some of it's purposes, such as not requiringing candidates to make the perilous journey to all the states and to prevent religious institutions from swaying direct democratic vote have lost their original purposes. And indeed those aspects are gone. The electors are bound democraticly not by the legislative branch as was the norm.
But it's remaining features are of great interest to nerds. It's a very clever optimization problem with a very clever robust solution.
Some people think that the president should be chosen by a popular vote. But instead the design of the college is intended to optimize a different criteria. It's purpose is to choose the person who is best able to govern and is the most broadly representative, not the most popular.
here's the three central challenges it is addressing.
1) Whenever two candidates are sufficiently close in the popular vote as to both be highly popular, the best choice is not the one that eeks out a few extra votes, but rather the one that gathers the votes from the most geographically diverse base. The states form an excellent proxy for diversity.
2) the president is the man who must follow the will of the legislative branch. Like it or not we have a union formed around a senate which has a large small state bias. If you dislike the small state bias, then you should complain about the senate not the electoral college. The president has to work with the senate after he's elected so it makes a lot of sense to give the presidentially election a minor small state bias.
this 2=extra elector bias is quite small but insures that desiderata 1 and 2 are carried out.
3) the third function of the EC system is population normalization. The president is president of all the people, not just the ones that voted or even the ones that voted for for him. He's even the president of the ones that can't vote. (felons, children, women, and slaves all counted towards the population count since the begining). Thus no matter how many people cast votes, the total effect of tose votes is viewed as a sampling of the TOTAL population of the state. So the vote's effect is renormalized to the total state population by the EC system. Even if one person voted in CA, they get 45 electors.
As an example, in the last election, the turnout in Alaska was quite small for whatever reason. but they still get the full electoral count.
The real problem with the EC system is not that it does not perfectly track the popular vote--it's not trying to be an approximation of that criteria. It's really trying to bias the choice to someone who is both popular and diversely popular.
the real reason the EC system has some difficulties is the silly winner-take-all process.
instead of eliminating it here's a suggestion. remove the winner take-all division of electors. instead, take the top-two vote-getters and approtion the electors between them in each state according to the state's popular votes. Award a 2-elector bonus to the overall vote-getter.
this preserves the renormalization, the small state bias, and the diversity bonus. But it removes all the problems.
macs do get credit for putting the passwords where they belong: in a centralized password keychain. Firefox rolls it's own separate password manager. At various time firefox's keychain has been found to be insecure and it's separate from your other keychains. There's no simple keychain brownser interface like the centralized keychain protection system safari uses.
If you want to encrypt or hide or transport all your passwords it's easy in safari but hard in firefox since how it's done changes.