Actually, my answer was the "Bought-and-Paid-For" Party, which has members on both sides of the Democratic-Republican divide, and clear majority in both houses of Congress (particularly in the Senate).
Problem is that the modern Democratic party has now shown us quite convincingly that even when campaigns are funded mostly by small individual citizen donations, they still rule for the benefit of corporations once they get into office (I'm looking squarely at you, Mr. Obama - you fucking disgrace).
Yes and no. Obama's campaign started out funded significantly by small individual citizen donations, and more funded by smaller donations than either the Clinton or McCain campaigns, but as soon as it became clear he was going to win a lot of the big corporate donor types jumped in to fund him as well and effectively bought him off somewhere between the NH primary and the Democratic convention.
Howard Dean's 2004 campaign, by contrast, was mostly funded by small individual citizen donations, but as soon as it became clear he was actually going to try to implement his policy proposals (like health care reform not written by insurance companies) his campaign was derailed by carefully applying sound editing to a campaign speech he made in Iowa to make it look like he was some sort of wild crazy man.
So let's say you write a novel or a symphony. That's a lot of work. Without copyright at all, anybody can take what you wrote, do the equivalent of photocopying it, and make a big pile of cash off of your work without paying you a dime. The ways anything artistic gets created in a world without copyright are patronage systems (e.g. writers and poets in the service of a monarch), folk art (generally not written down until the 18th century or so), or hobbyists (often nobility) who have the spare time to write.
Remember, copyright was originally created to protect writers from publishers, not the system of protecting publishers from the general public that is currently called "copyright".
Comedy Central: A hydrogen fueling station exploded, forming a huge *bleep* fireball! The most likely cause: Bears.
Onion News Network: Dick Cheney claimed responsibility for the destruction of a hydrogen fueling station. "After spending billions of dollars and thousands of lives getting the oil in Iraq, I didn't want those stupid hippies coming up with a cheap and safe alternative," said Cheney in a press conference this morning.
Actually, this employee was clearly the victim of a BOFH, who in his brilliance not only drove him to drink and made him crazy, but also conveniently destroy the server with evidence of the BOFH's malfeasance. My hat is off to him.
As I mentioned, I'm playing Devil's Advocate. I agree that in an ideal world with lots of admin resources available a developer never has any reason to log into a production system.
* If there's a serious production failure, developers are often called upon to assist the admins, because while they aren't admin experts they generally have some administration skills.
So sit next to the admin while he drives. Been there, done that.
The sorts of situations I'm talking about here are massive outages which overwhelm the admin team's ability to respond. I as a developer have been called on to do things like monitor servers and explain to admins what's going on with them, let them know when they have something working correctly, that sort of thing. It's always very clear in those situations that the admin is ultimately in charge, and a developer is acting solely as a technically-skilled lackey.
* If there's a bug that makes it to production, the time it would take to fix the bug using proper procedures may cost more than doing a quick-and-dirty fix now and cleaning up using proper procedures later.
I've detected, fixed, tested, regression tested, packaged, had admin deploy to a test env, regression tested and had admin deploy to production a bugfix in a couple of hours before now. (The bug was caused by legacy data quality issues.)
The situation I'm talking about here is one where downtime = significant amounts of cash out the door. If you're system normally takes $20,000 worth of orders an hour, and if it can't take orders your customers will go to a competitor, those 2 hours it took to test and deploy a bugfix cost your company $40,000. Better here from a business standpoint is to put in the q&d fix right now (with, say, an 80% chance of working correctly and getting orders coming in again), then start the 2 hour process to put things through QA and the like.
* Diagnosing production-only bugs, which frequently require read-only access. For instance, developers may need read-only access to determine that their software didn't deploy correctly.
Sit with the admin. Get the admin to do ls -lRF and email the output to you. Get the admin to send you the log files. Write a deployment validation script and use it in the automated deployment process.
Which is more cost-effective: having 1 developer looking into a production-only problem, or having 1 developer and 1 admin looking into a production-only problem?
Also, I don't know about you, but when I'm diagnosing a problem, it's not a matter of "check one log file and read the output." It's "start with a log file, see some suggestions of what might be going wrong, come up with non-destructive tests of that theory, rule out possibilities until I'm reasonably sure of an answer, then figure out what needs to happen to fix it". There may be multiples logs to correlate (e.g. an access log and multiple application logs) and which one you need isn't clear until you start diving in.
As far as the deployment failure, the reason we'd be in a deployment failure situation in the first place is that the automated deployment process failed. There's nothing that proves that the automated deployment validation script can't also have the same problem that the automated deployment process had.
* Helping admins properly configure their software.
Absolutely sit with the admin.
With read-only access, a developer can look at things at different times than admins, can look for different things from admins, and instruct admins on what their software needs to work properly. While in theory everything should work fine with good documentation, being able to actually look and verify things yourself helps immensely when things don't work fine.
I'll agree with you on this much: Under no circumstances
So why would we want developers to work with the expectation that they get to intervene at the last instant to resolve their failures?
Because if there's a problem, there will be an expectation that they need to intervene to resolve their failures.
To play Devil's Advocate here, there are some semi-legit reasons why developers might get production access:
If there's a serious production failure, developers are often called upon to assist the admins, because while they aren't admin experts they generally have some administration skills.
If there's a bug that makes it to production, the time it would take to fix the bug using proper procedures may cost more than doing a quick-and-dirty fix now and cleaning up using proper procedures later.
Diagnosing production-only bugs, which frequently require read-only access. For instance, developers may need read-only access to determine that their software didn't deploy correctly.
Helping admins properly configure their software.
Now, none of this should be done willy-nilly. The basic rule at my workplace is that a developer can do nothing that could potentially alter behavior without managerial approval and admin approval where appropriate. At the same time, the primary enforcement of that rule is trusting our devs, so very little of that is actually enforced technologically.
Copyright is a public policy issue and it should be decided by the public, not by a cartel of businesses.
Wait, so you want it to be different than most other public policy issues these days?
As one guy described it in The Corporation, public policy decisions these days get hashed out in small rooms where the people involved are generally US government agencies and representatives of the major corporations in the respective industries. The public debates in Congress and the press are basically a sideshow.
Ah, yes, the joys of guilt by association. Of course, by a much shorter chain, bin Talal funds Kevin Bacon, so obviously we should denounce him as well.
The conservative's main voter base (blue-collar, working class, middle Americans) are the ones hurt the most by Republican policy.
That combines a couple of mis-perceptions of the Republican Party base.
First off, most conservative politicians do a good job of protecting agricultural subsidies, which appear at least like they benefit farmers. They also do an excellent job of protecting military pork based in their districts. There are a lot of blue-collar middle Americans who's jobs depend on their conservative representatives. If your town's economy depends on building missiles to be used in Iraq, someone like Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul threatens your livelihood. So at least by all appearances, folks like Bob Dole did look out for rural blue-collar interests. (That they robbed everyone else in order to do it, and otherwise ruined the economy, is besides the point.)
Secondly, blue-collar rural folks aren't as much the Republican Party base as Republicans like to project. The real base has historically been suburban upper-middle-class white men. For instance, the key group of Reagan's rise to power wasn't rural folks at all, but Orange County California. What the Republicans have been able to do historically in rural areas much more effectively than other areas is put out the idea in rural communities that urban people are their enemies and that any public spending programs benefit urban people at the cost of rural people. (In fact, the exact opposite is true.)
Ok, let's for the sake of argument say that there's a campaign going on between two candidates, John Davidson and David Johnson. An investigative reporter has discovered boatloads of evidence that John Davidson's campaign has committed massive fraud. He's done similar investigations of David Johnson's campaign and found nothing remotely similar.
Now, what's the best course of action for our intrepid gumshoe reporter and his editor?
A. Reporting on the facts known about John Davidson's campaign (with an appropriate amount of space given to Davidson's rebuttal),
B. not reporting on the fraud at all to avoid the appearance of bias against Davidson's campaign or bias in favor of Johnson's campaign, or
C. reporting on the fraud and implying that Johnson is quite possibly engaging in the same sort of thing, despite investigation showing that this is untrue?
The truth isn't always balanced or unbiased, and hiding a truth that may have a biased effect is introducing a lie of omission.
But tap water? Really? Dude, they put fluoride and chlorine in that - drinking the stuff is just crazy.
Actually, tap water is generally safer to drink than bottled water, because municipal water systems are held to much higher safety standards. And many municipal system's waters have held up well against bottled water in blind taste tests as well.
Now, it's true there haven't been any studies on whether this flouridated water saps and impurifies all of our precious bodily fluids, but in general tap water is cheaper, safer, and more convenient than its bottled counterpart assuming you're in a First World country.
In other words, they love BSD-style open source, where they can grab the network stack and incorporate it into their proprietary operating system. I doubt they're so keen on GPL-style open source, where they can grab a network stack if they share their entire operating system source with the public.
You've mis-characterized Computer Science significantly. Computer science has nothing to do with writing code, and everything to do with designing algorithms. Code is a convenient way of describing an algorithm, but it's not an algorithm.
The difference? Porting Emacs to the Amiga is coding. Analyzing the automatic indentation algorithm and finding ways to reduce the amount of backtracking is computer science.
I'd say I just made my case - they have a much easier time understanding AAVE than legal language that is (theoretically at least) written in Standard English.
I don't see the problem. Everyone knows killbots have a preset kill limit, so you can beat them by sending wave after wave of your own men at them until their kill limit is reached!
So-called "Standard English" and AAVE are mutually comprehensible languages, and always have been. Even in Airplane!, where they're deliberately exaggerating the differences for comic effect, you can understand the meaning of "My momma no raise no dummies, I dug her rap!" perfectly well.
Another way of thinking about it: which is easier for your average Standard English speaker to understand: AAVE or a cell phone contract?
It's not only feasible to produce quite detailed topo maps of the entire US, there's a government agency that does precisely that, namely the US Geological Survey. There maps are in degrees and minutes rather than 100km squares, but generally serve the same purpose.
The other fun part about the USGS is that they left markers embedded in rocks at important points like mountain peaks.
There are also many private organizations that sell topographical maps with fairly detailed info as well as lat-long and all the other things you'd expect on a map.
You wouldn't be referring to the White Mountains in New Hampshire, would you? My sister used to do S&R up there (as well as some other places), and has some great stories like a guy who called in lost who described his location as "I'm lying in a field with blue flowers" and was unable to provide any more information, including where he started and what trail he had been following. And of course every year a bunch of yokels get themselves killed on Mount Washington, although most of that happens in the spring and fall when things look quite pleasant at the base while at the summit it's snowing and a wind chill of -20 F. To give an idea of how dangerous a lot of those mountains are during the winter: people who are planning on climbing Denali and other major mountaineering peaks use the White Mountains as a training ground, because it's possible to go up there for the day, experience arctic conditions for a while, and be back down at the base for dinner.
The basic story is that rescuers take risks every time they go out to look for somebody, and it's important to recognize that. If you do need a rescue, it will help immensely if your call for help includes: - A good description of where you are, including where you started, what landmarks you've passed recently, what trail you were following or are on, GPS coordinates if you have them, and anything else you can think of that will help your rescuers find you easily. - A good description of the injuries and risks to the victim. For instance, if someone has broken their leg, but is otherwise seems fine and has stable vital signs, that means a significantly less risky and expensive rescue than if they've broken a leg and several ribs and punctured a lung and has pulse rate rising every hour. Ideally somebody in the group has proper wilderness first aid training, and if so they should treat the patient according to their training. - What tools and supplies you have with you, including whether you can stay the night reasonably safely. This is especially important late in the day. - What self-rescue efforts you have taken already and plan to take. For instance, in the case of a broken leg, it will help if you explain that you're going to splint the leg and start working on improvising a litter, and will call again if the group starts moving. - Oh yes, and while we're on the subject, move the group if and only if you can explain exactly where you're going and the route you plan to take. Otherwise, stay put at the spot that you've explained to your rescuers.
Most of European countries have more than 2 electable parties unlike the US were the only 2 electable parties defend the same vested interests but have 2 different public faces to deceive the plebes.
Which is is many ways an inevitable result of plurality voting in the US versus a parliamentary system in most European countries.
For instance, in the US in 2000, if you assume that half the votes for Ralph Nader would have gone to Gore had Nader not run, Gore wins by a landslide in the electoral college, so effectively voting for Nader was voting to allow Bush to get in without voting for Bush.
By contrast, in the recent UK election, votes for Liberal Democrat candidates, which in the US system would probably have just helped the Conservatives win more easily, instead helped the Liberal Democrats. That allowed the Liberal Democrats to marginalize the Labour Party. There is a downside though, which is that in a parliament a tiny party in a coalition government can control things by threatening to leave the coalition and spark a confidence vote.
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Actually, my answer was the "Bought-and-Paid-For" Party, which has members on both sides of the Democratic-Republican divide, and clear majority in both houses of Congress (particularly in the Senate).
Problem is that the modern Democratic party has now shown us quite convincingly that even when campaigns are funded mostly by small individual citizen donations, they still rule for the benefit of corporations once they get into office (I'm looking squarely at you, Mr. Obama - you fucking disgrace).
Yes and no. Obama's campaign started out funded significantly by small individual citizen donations, and more funded by smaller donations than either the Clinton or McCain campaigns, but as soon as it became clear he was going to win a lot of the big corporate donor types jumped in to fund him as well and effectively bought him off somewhere between the NH primary and the Democratic convention.
Howard Dean's 2004 campaign, by contrast, was mostly funded by small individual citizen donations, but as soon as it became clear he was actually going to try to implement his policy proposals (like health care reform not written by insurance companies) his campaign was derailed by carefully applying sound editing to a campaign speech he made in Iowa to make it look like he was some sort of wild crazy man.
So let's say you write a novel or a symphony. That's a lot of work. Without copyright at all, anybody can take what you wrote, do the equivalent of photocopying it, and make a big pile of cash off of your work without paying you a dime. The ways anything artistic gets created in a world without copyright are patronage systems (e.g. writers and poets in the service of a monarch), folk art (generally not written down until the 18th century or so), or hobbyists (often nobility) who have the spare time to write.
Remember, copyright was originally created to protect writers from publishers, not the system of protecting publishers from the general public that is currently called "copyright".
You left out the more reputable news outlets:
Comedy Central: A hydrogen fueling station exploded, forming a huge *bleep* fireball! The most likely cause: Bears.
Onion News Network: Dick Cheney claimed responsibility for the destruction of a hydrogen fueling station. "After spending billions of dollars and thousands of lives getting the oil in Iraq, I didn't want those stupid hippies coming up with a cheap and safe alternative," said Cheney in a press conference this morning.
Why, I am, if I do say so myself.
Actually, this employee was clearly the victim of a BOFH, who in his brilliance not only drove him to drink and made him crazy, but also conveniently destroy the server with evidence of the BOFH's malfeasance. My hat is off to him.
As I mentioned, I'm playing Devil's Advocate. I agree that in an ideal world with lots of admin resources available a developer never has any reason to log into a production system.
* If there's a serious production failure, developers are often called upon to assist the admins, because while they aren't admin experts they generally have some administration skills.
So sit next to the admin while he drives. Been there, done that.
The sorts of situations I'm talking about here are massive outages which overwhelm the admin team's ability to respond. I as a developer have been called on to do things like monitor servers and explain to admins what's going on with them, let them know when they have something working correctly, that sort of thing. It's always very clear in those situations that the admin is ultimately in charge, and a developer is acting solely as a technically-skilled lackey.
* If there's a bug that makes it to production, the time it would take to fix the bug using proper procedures may cost more than doing a quick-and-dirty fix now and cleaning up using proper procedures later.
I've detected, fixed, tested, regression tested, packaged, had admin deploy to a test env, regression tested and had admin deploy to production a bugfix in a couple of hours before now. (The bug was caused by legacy data quality issues.)
The situation I'm talking about here is one where downtime = significant amounts of cash out the door. If you're system normally takes $20,000 worth of orders an hour, and if it can't take orders your customers will go to a competitor, those 2 hours it took to test and deploy a bugfix cost your company $40,000. Better here from a business standpoint is to put in the q&d fix right now (with, say, an 80% chance of working correctly and getting orders coming in again), then start the 2 hour process to put things through QA and the like.
* Diagnosing production-only bugs, which frequently require read-only access. For instance, developers may need read-only access to determine that their software didn't deploy correctly.
Sit with the admin. Get the admin to do ls -lRF and email the output to you. Get the admin to send you the log files. Write a deployment validation script and use it in the automated deployment process.
Which is more cost-effective: having 1 developer looking into a production-only problem, or having 1 developer and 1 admin looking into a production-only problem?
Also, I don't know about you, but when I'm diagnosing a problem, it's not a matter of "check one log file and read the output." It's "start with a log file, see some suggestions of what might be going wrong, come up with non-destructive tests of that theory, rule out possibilities until I'm reasonably sure of an answer, then figure out what needs to happen to fix it". There may be multiples logs to correlate (e.g. an access log and multiple application logs) and which one you need isn't clear until you start diving in.
As far as the deployment failure, the reason we'd be in a deployment failure situation in the first place is that the automated deployment process failed. There's nothing that proves that the automated deployment validation script can't also have the same problem that the automated deployment process had.
* Helping admins properly configure their software.
Absolutely sit with the admin.
With read-only access, a developer can look at things at different times than admins, can look for different things from admins, and instruct admins on what their software needs to work properly. While in theory everything should work fine with good documentation, being able to actually look and verify things yourself helps immensely when things don't work fine.
I'll agree with you on this much: Under no circumstances
Actually, to appeal to hip-hop fans, they're calling it the iMbizzle.
Well, the ice box has already been tried.
So why would we want developers to work with the expectation that they get to intervene at the last instant to resolve their failures?
Because if there's a problem, there will be an expectation that they need to intervene to resolve their failures.
To play Devil's Advocate here, there are some semi-legit reasons why developers might get production access:
Now, none of this should be done willy-nilly. The basic rule at my workplace is that a developer can do nothing that could potentially alter behavior without managerial approval and admin approval where appropriate. At the same time, the primary enforcement of that rule is trusting our devs, so very little of that is actually enforced technologically.
Copyright is a public policy issue and it should be decided by the public, not by a cartel of businesses.
Wait, so you want it to be different than most other public policy issues these days?
As one guy described it in The Corporation, public policy decisions these days get hashed out in small rooms where the people involved are generally US government agencies and representatives of the major corporations in the respective industries. The public debates in Congress and the press are basically a sideshow.
Ah, yes, the joys of guilt by association. Of course, by a much shorter chain, bin Talal funds Kevin Bacon, so obviously we should denounce him as well.
The conservative's main voter base (blue-collar, working class, middle Americans) are the ones hurt the most by Republican policy.
That combines a couple of mis-perceptions of the Republican Party base.
First off, most conservative politicians do a good job of protecting agricultural subsidies, which appear at least like they benefit farmers. They also do an excellent job of protecting military pork based in their districts. There are a lot of blue-collar middle Americans who's jobs depend on their conservative representatives. If your town's economy depends on building missiles to be used in Iraq, someone like Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul threatens your livelihood. So at least by all appearances, folks like Bob Dole did look out for rural blue-collar interests. (That they robbed everyone else in order to do it, and otherwise ruined the economy, is besides the point.)
Secondly, blue-collar rural folks aren't as much the Republican Party base as Republicans like to project. The real base has historically been suburban upper-middle-class white men. For instance, the key group of Reagan's rise to power wasn't rural folks at all, but Orange County California. What the Republicans have been able to do historically in rural areas much more effectively than other areas is put out the idea in rural communities that urban people are their enemies and that any public spending programs benefit urban people at the cost of rural people. (In fact, the exact opposite is true.)
Ok, let's for the sake of argument say that there's a campaign going on between two candidates, John Davidson and David Johnson. An investigative reporter has discovered boatloads of evidence that John Davidson's campaign has committed massive fraud. He's done similar investigations of David Johnson's campaign and found nothing remotely similar.
Now, what's the best course of action for our intrepid gumshoe reporter and his editor?
A. Reporting on the facts known about John Davidson's campaign (with an appropriate amount of space given to Davidson's rebuttal),
B. not reporting on the fraud at all to avoid the appearance of bias against Davidson's campaign or bias in favor of Johnson's campaign, or
C. reporting on the fraud and implying that Johnson is quite possibly engaging in the same sort of thing, despite investigation showing that this is untrue?
The truth isn't always balanced or unbiased, and hiding a truth that may have a biased effect is introducing a lie of omission.
But we were evicted from our hole in the ground. We had to go live in a lake!
But tap water? Really? Dude, they put fluoride and chlorine in that - drinking the stuff is just crazy.
Actually, tap water is generally safer to drink than bottled water, because municipal water systems are held to much higher safety standards. And many municipal system's waters have held up well against bottled water in blind taste tests as well.
Now, it's true there haven't been any studies on whether this flouridated water saps and impurifies all of our precious bodily fluids, but in general tap water is cheaper, safer, and more convenient than its bottled counterpart assuming you're in a First World country.
In other words, they love BSD-style open source, where they can grab the network stack and incorporate it into their proprietary operating system. I doubt they're so keen on GPL-style open source, where they can grab a network stack if they share their entire operating system source with the public.
You've mis-characterized Computer Science significantly. Computer science has nothing to do with writing code, and everything to do with designing algorithms. Code is a convenient way of describing an algorithm, but it's not an algorithm.
The difference? Porting Emacs to the Amiga is coding. Analyzing the automatic indentation algorithm and finding ways to reduce the amount of backtracking is computer science.
I'd say I just made my case - they have a much easier time understanding AAVE than legal language that is (theoretically at least) written in Standard English.
I don't see the problem. Everyone knows killbots have a preset kill limit, so you can beat them by sending wave after wave of your own men at them until their kill limit is reached!
So-called "Standard English" and AAVE are mutually comprehensible languages, and always have been. Even in Airplane!, where they're deliberately exaggerating the differences for comic effect, you can understand the meaning of "My momma no raise no dummies, I dug her rap!" perfectly well.
Another way of thinking about it: which is easier for your average Standard English speaker to understand: AAVE or a cell phone contract?
We have nuclear fusion reactors. It's just that they use up more energy than they create.
It's not only feasible to produce quite detailed topo maps of the entire US, there's a government agency that does precisely that, namely the US Geological Survey. There maps are in degrees and minutes rather than 100km squares, but generally serve the same purpose.
The other fun part about the USGS is that they left markers embedded in rocks at important points like mountain peaks.
There are also many private organizations that sell topographical maps with fairly detailed info as well as lat-long and all the other things you'd expect on a map.
You wouldn't be referring to the White Mountains in New Hampshire, would you? My sister used to do S&R up there (as well as some other places), and has some great stories like a guy who called in lost who described his location as "I'm lying in a field with blue flowers" and was unable to provide any more information, including where he started and what trail he had been following. And of course every year a bunch of yokels get themselves killed on Mount Washington, although most of that happens in the spring and fall when things look quite pleasant at the base while at the summit it's snowing and a wind chill of -20 F. To give an idea of how dangerous a lot of those mountains are during the winter: people who are planning on climbing Denali and other major mountaineering peaks use the White Mountains as a training ground, because it's possible to go up there for the day, experience arctic conditions for a while, and be back down at the base for dinner.
The basic story is that rescuers take risks every time they go out to look for somebody, and it's important to recognize that. If you do need a rescue, it will help immensely if your call for help includes:
- A good description of where you are, including where you started, what landmarks you've passed recently, what trail you were following or are on, GPS coordinates if you have them, and anything else you can think of that will help your rescuers find you easily.
- A good description of the injuries and risks to the victim. For instance, if someone has broken their leg, but is otherwise seems fine and has stable vital signs, that means a significantly less risky and expensive rescue than if they've broken a leg and several ribs and punctured a lung and has pulse rate rising every hour. Ideally somebody in the group has proper wilderness first aid training, and if so they should treat the patient according to their training.
- What tools and supplies you have with you, including whether you can stay the night reasonably safely. This is especially important late in the day.
- What self-rescue efforts you have taken already and plan to take. For instance, in the case of a broken leg, it will help if you explain that you're going to splint the leg and start working on improvising a litter, and will call again if the group starts moving.
- Oh yes, and while we're on the subject, move the group if and only if you can explain exactly where you're going and the route you plan to take. Otherwise, stay put at the spot that you've explained to your rescuers.
Most of European countries have more than 2 electable parties unlike the US were the only 2 electable parties defend the same vested interests but have 2 different public faces to deceive the plebes.
Which is is many ways an inevitable result of plurality voting in the US versus a parliamentary system in most European countries.
For instance, in the US in 2000, if you assume that half the votes for Ralph Nader would have gone to Gore had Nader not run, Gore wins by a landslide in the electoral college, so effectively voting for Nader was voting to allow Bush to get in without voting for Bush.
By contrast, in the recent UK election, votes for Liberal Democrat candidates, which in the US system would probably have just helped the Conservatives win more easily, instead helped the Liberal Democrats. That allowed the Liberal Democrats to marginalize the Labour Party. There is a downside though, which is that in a parliament a tiny party in a coalition government can control things by threatening to leave the coalition and spark a confidence vote.
In short, I hate Arrow's Impossibility Theorem.