I suppose I'm a hardliner; I favor leaving the broader system as is.
I think the electoral college works fine, and the state-level winner-take-all approach forces candidates to appeal to a broader base of voters in most states (New York and California being anomalies in which very large urban areas completely dominate the whole state).
Likewise, I see nothing wrong with the present voting system. It's simple, and it works. While I don't disagree that this can limit national support for third party candidates in marginal situations, I am also fairly convinced that the existing style of voting works plenty well provided that there is broad enough support for the third party in the first place. Which is to say, if a third party candidate were to provide a platform that was interesting to a broad enough number of Americans, I am pretty sure that they could win the Presidency. Especially if they can cough up the funds to campaign effectively.
I cannot recall if there were any legal cases on it, or how they came out if there were. It certainly looks suspicious, and probably skirts the edge of things if it's actually legal.
Despite the hue and cry from certain parties, the U. S. economy is in pretty fair shape and still getting better. It's not dotcom-bubble level, but it's not bad. It was worse when the SP was released.
That said, I think his criticisms of both systems are pretty well on the mark, but I'm still confident that the DS will perform sufficiently to stick around. It has a large and growing library of games stretching back to the original GameBoy, in addition to the titles planned for exclusively for it. Remakes can be a bit of a drag, but remakes of good games are still good games, and many of today's gamers did not grow up with an NES. If Square decides to release their FFIII remake stateside finally, it will be a brand-new game, practically speaking, for the U. S. market.
What looks, to me, like a more interesting parallel is between the original GameBoy and the Lynx, TurboGrafx, Game Gear, and other portable consoles of the early to mid nineties. The GameBoy has consistently beaten its competitors by being good enough for a lower price. Despite all the other feaures of the PSP, I suspect that's what will happen here, too.
I fail to understand why it should matter to me John Q. Britisher would rather I voted Democrat. In fact, given the general internation consensus on America, I think I'm more likely to consider the endorsement of John Kerry by millions of John and Jane Q. Europeans rather a negative indicator of his capability as President.
I rather expect that I'm greatly overstating the problem. Nevertheless, if such a program became widespread, there would be people who took them for granted. It only takes one jerk, after all, to screw over the commons for everyone by using it for a restroom.
Granted, I'm cynical almost to the point of absurdity, and I'm exaggerating the case to make a point. All the same, most places (especially, say, places in the U. S.) don't have a good track record with common property.
That'll be your physics, I think, not your chemistry. Various bits of thermodynamics apparently require that top efficiency from an internal combustion engine is going to be around 30%. The waste energy is, I expect, mostly shed in the form of heat.
ObDisclaimer: I'm neither a physicist nor an ME, or a chemist for that matter.
I've seen how people treat public parks, public restrooms, public sidewalks, and public transportation.
What would happen here is that you walk up to the car, hear the door unlock so you can get in, and find out that somebody broke the rearview trying to manually adjust a little too far. The seat doesn't adjust, because someone else poured coffee into the seat and shorted out the servos. The radio display is cracked, and has chewing gum stuck to it. But you won't need to adjust the radio, but the someone has done you the favor of blowing out the cones on the car speakers. You might have one side mirror, but the climate control will be stuck on 'heat'. In July.
Did I mention that the seat is sticky because the nimrod who spilled their drink into it didn't clean it up? Or that someone else has been scrawling dirty limericks on the dashboards, and phone numbers with exhortations of a 'good time' to be had? But be glad you didn't get the Com-U-Car next to it, because you saw the guy get out, and it looked like he'd thrown up in the passenger seat.
All things considered, I think I'd rather the bus, taxi, or just drive my own. At least my own car doesn't have any odors I don't already know about.
Your standard classification is irrelevant. The U. S. media establishment is the U. S. media establishment. Relative to the audience and citizenry which the U. S. media serves, the major U. S. media news outlets are mostly biased left, or left of center. Evaluating U. S. news reporting and editorial journalism by the biases of other countries' and regions' journalists as an excuse to decry it as, universally, a right-wing organ ignores the context in which it exists.
This owes to several factors, including bias within the academic establishment and a journalistic monoculture.
If you'd like to claim that the international affiliates of U. S. news media organs are right-leaning compared to their audiences, that is your prerogative; I'll not dispute it. But, if the argument is that the U. S. media is largely 'conservative', you're off your nut.
No, I evidence diversity of political opinion by the number of inter- and intra-party differences of opinion. Consider that the Republican party can contain people of such diverse opinions as George W. Bush, Rick Santorum, John McCain, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and George Pataki. Some of them are hard-line conservatives or religious right-wingers, some are moderates, some are fiscal conservatives and social liberals, and some few are socially conservative and fiscally liberal. The Democratic Party has a similarly broad reach that might be easily evidenced by the not-too-distant primary season.
Views which fall even farther afield from the centerline of US politics may find representation in third parties. You are correct that it is unlikely that a third party will gain great enough support to ascend to the Presidency. This is not tantamount to saying that U. S. politics is not diverse: a broad range of views are represented and may, if their constituency is large enough, find representation in national institutions.
There are two major difficulties in their way. First is that a third party which gains noticeable support is often used as an indication of changes in the views of the electorate, and so the Big Two will tend, either consciously or unconsciously shift to reflect those changes, siphoning potential supporters from the third party and forcing them into more extreme or marginal positions. Second is that the electorate simply doesn't have enough people who place a high enough priority on the goals and principles of $third_party, or agree with them closely enough, to bring that party into political ascendancy to a footing that is equal or greater than that of the pre-existing parties. The reason people don't vote for third parties isn't "that they can't win." It's that people place a higher value on priorities which may run counter to supporting particular third parties.
Partly, this is due to the continued dominance of the two major parties. The members of either coalition splitting into more tightly cohesive groups would provide the other party a major advantage in the legislature. In a political system with many major parties, coalition governments are often necessary for the controlling party to maintain a great enough degree of control over the legislature to govern effectively. This leads to compromise and alliance between closely compatible parties on major issues. In the U. S., this sort of compromise already happens within the major parties. Internal factions, bound together by a major issue or collection of issues, agree to work together and compromise on various major issues on which they disagree in order to further the cause of the more important issues.
This year, the issues seem to be national security, vis a vis the War on Terror, and George W. Bush. The Democrats are (sort of) united in their belief that national security and the War on Terror can be best pursued by police and judicial activity within existing legal frameworks, and that it would be best for us all if George W. Bush were not President. The Republicans, broadly, hold the opposite opinion, preferring to prosecute the war on terror via military means and to support Bush both as an effective war President, and an effective President domestically (not without reservations, obviously, but broadly and generally speaking).
The implied statement was that there is no diversity of opinion within United States politics. This is, and I think I have done a fair job of demonstrating it to be, patently false. The political spectrum in U. S. accomodates a very broad range of opinions on just about any issue you could name -- look at the citizenry and you will find supporters and critics of almost any and every political policy or decision, with the probably inclusion of sunshine and puppies. At the national level, the U. S. polity is not, I suspect, significantly less diverse than that of most other major democracies (and almost certainly more diverse than non-democracies). It is probably more con
If a minority party is having difficulty finding traction in a popular election, who should be surprised, or offended? More so when the parties in question are, often, relatively marginalised by their own political positions and candidates. There is nothing really stopping you from voting for a minor party's candidate. Write the name in, if you must, but complaining that any particular party doesn't have enough supporters to generate "a wider spectrum of political opinion" is either disingenuous (because the complaint is paramount to saying, "There aren't enough people who agree with me") or just fatuous (because it ignores the spread of political opinion represented within the major parties).
Vote for Badnarik, or Nader, or Cobb, or Walt Brown, or whoever. If they can drum up enough support to win (or even enough to produce a measurable blip on the electoral radar), they will be able to exert some influence on national politics, as the Big Two make moves in that direction to pick up those voters. If they don't manage enough support, it will be because they don't have that support in the first place: either the positions they represent aren't that popular, or they're already represented well enough by another candidate (such as one of the Big Two).
Minor parties don't function in the U. S. the way they do in other countries. I am unconvinced that they need to.
We have a wide range of political opinion. Do you know how many political parties the US has, even on the national level?
Here's a hint: it's more than two. Here's another hint: it's also more than four.
There's a bunch of them, and the spectrum includes socialists, Communists, pacifists, libertarians, conservatives, hard-right and hard-left groups. Even the two major parties are more politically diverse than you seem to give them credit for.
No, a baby boomer, at least in the context of the Social Security problem, was a child born during the baby boom of 1945-65. The group you refer to as their parents is either the Silent Generation or the G. I. Generation (aka the Greatest Generation, and a handful of other names, reflecting their involvement in fighting WWII).
Run "baby boomer definition" through Google and see what you get. I'd be curious to know which web dictionary you got you're definition from; it's not correct.
Not quite. Many definitions have the baby boom running into the sixties; the Gen Xers and some of the early "Gen Y" folks are the boomer's kids. The boomers have begun to retire, but only just.
Incidentally, the baby boom is usually defined as the massive upswing in birthrates that came about in America the aftermath of the second World War. With the retirement age at 65, and WWII ending in 1945, the very earliest boomers probably won't reach standard retirement age for another six years or so. There's certainly nothing to stop them from retiring earlier (and, undoubtedly, many of them have done so), but it's a bit silly to assume that they've all retired. I doubt it's even plausible to say that most of the initial boomers have retired.
Thank you very much for providing the single explanatory reply that is both wholly informative and wholly civil in tone. I find it both an unexpected and a highly welcome experience to get such a thing on Slashdot.
Again, sir, I think you. And it does sound like an intriguing prospect.
Buy 'em lunch at a decent-ish restaurant, or at least one of their choosing. Preferably someplace that will allow them to leave the office and sit down to eat. Set aside an hour or so.
Other than that... Try not to get in their way. A manager's job is more about coordinating the efforts of his people with the people above and to either side of them, and especially about keeping the heat off them from above (they're your people). Being loyal to your managees and avoiding micromanagement will go farther than any management technique found in any book or seminar. Deal with them as straight as you can, and treat them like adults.
If it's illegal, then the course of action is obvious, isn't it? Take the school to court, after consultation with a lawyer versed in the proper sections of the legal codes.
I'm speaking solely on the grounds of common sense, which is not always compatible with legality. Which is to say that this doesn't look, to me, like a matter of regulating 'the airwaves'. My guess is that the private WAPs are generating an excess of packets because they overlap with the campus wireless network, so there are many, many laptops in or around the one building that are continually jumping between networks, which would rather quickly saturate the school's network (since they're all popping in and out of it, but not all of them will be touching any single private access point).
With that view in mind, I find it insulting that you characterise me as suggesting that students should be 'sheep', when I am, in fact, suggesting that they not act like self-centered jerks by placing their own desire for a private network in their apartment above the broader needs of the rest of the campus. I could be wrong and the WAPs may only be interfering with network service by disrupting transmission within the building and not causing problems outside it, but it wouldn't change the fact that I'm suggesting that they bear a little privation (ethernet cables) in the interest of preserving a shared resource (the campus network), not that they should be 'sheep'.
I have the strangest feeling that "apartment" means "dorm room" in this context. At least, the article gave no indication that the problem was being caused by students living off-campus. So, the first problem is that they're renting space from the school. The school certainly has the right to set ground rules on their own property.
The second problem is that it's the school's network that's getting boned by this behavior, and that means that students' wireless networks are screwing over other students. The school also has the right to set ground rules regarding on-campus network usage.
In any case, nobody ever died because they had to use Cat5. I did it at my alma mater for four years, because either nobody had or nobody could afford wireless gear at the time. I'm sure you and your classmates will survive, somehow, this minor restriction in privilege.
I'm pretty sure that's handled on a state by state basis. The crux of the problem apparently is that West Virginia has no statutes directing the actions of their electors, nor for punishing them in the case of the above behavior. Some states do, West Virginian apparently isn't one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
I cannot wait to overclock my brain.
I suppose I'm a hardliner; I favor leaving the broader system as is.
I think the electoral college works fine, and the state-level winner-take-all approach forces candidates to appeal to a broader base of voters in most states (New York and California being anomalies in which very large urban areas completely dominate the whole state).
Likewise, I see nothing wrong with the present voting system. It's simple, and it works. While I don't disagree that this can limit national support for third party candidates in marginal situations, I am also fairly convinced that the existing style of voting works plenty well provided that there is broad enough support for the third party in the first place. Which is to say, if a third party candidate were to provide a platform that was interesting to a broad enough number of Americans, I am pretty sure that they could win the Presidency. Especially if they can cough up the funds to campaign effectively.
Indeed. And I like it that way.
I'll be sure to write my Congressman to vote against both!
I cannot recall if there were any legal cases on it, or how they came out if there were. It certainly looks suspicious, and probably skirts the edge of things if it's actually legal.
Okay. News to me.
Despite the hue and cry from certain parties, the U. S. economy is in pretty fair shape and still getting better. It's not dotcom-bubble level, but it's not bad. It was worse when the SP was released.
That said, I think his criticisms of both systems are pretty well on the mark, but I'm still confident that the DS will perform sufficiently to stick around. It has a large and growing library of games stretching back to the original GameBoy, in addition to the titles planned for exclusively for it. Remakes can be a bit of a drag, but remakes of good games are still good games, and many of today's gamers did not grow up with an NES. If Square decides to release their FFIII remake stateside finally, it will be a brand-new game, practically speaking, for the U. S. market.
What looks, to me, like a more interesting parallel is between the original GameBoy and the Lynx, TurboGrafx, Game Gear, and other portable consoles of the early to mid nineties. The GameBoy has consistently beaten its competitors by being good enough for a lower price. Despite all the other feaures of the PSP, I suspect that's what will happen here, too.
The Annenberg Public Policy Center is here, a detailed release fo the specific study is here (it's a pdf).
But I'd like to point out that Soros has put far more than two cents into this election.
I fail to understand why it should matter to me John Q. Britisher would rather I voted Democrat. In fact, given the general internation consensus on America, I think I'm more likely to consider the endorsement of John Kerry by millions of John and Jane Q. Europeans rather a negative indicator of his capability as President.
I suppose they liked Carter, too?
I rather expect that I'm greatly overstating the problem. Nevertheless, if such a program became widespread, there would be people who took them for granted. It only takes one jerk, after all, to screw over the commons for everyone by using it for a restroom.
Granted, I'm cynical almost to the point of absurdity, and I'm exaggerating the case to make a point. All the same, most places (especially, say, places in the U. S.) don't have a good track record with common property.
Well, I stand corrected, then.
That'll be your physics, I think, not your chemistry. Various bits of thermodynamics apparently require that top efficiency from an internal combustion engine is going to be around 30%. The waste energy is, I expect, mostly shed in the form of heat.
ObDisclaimer: I'm neither a physicist nor an ME, or a chemist for that matter.
Thanks, but no thanks.
I've seen how people treat public parks, public restrooms, public sidewalks, and public transportation.
What would happen here is that you walk up to the car, hear the door unlock so you can get in, and find out that somebody broke the rearview trying to manually adjust a little too far. The seat doesn't adjust, because someone else poured coffee into the seat and shorted out the servos. The radio display is cracked, and has chewing gum stuck to it. But you won't need to adjust the radio, but the someone has done you the favor of blowing out the cones on the car speakers. You might have one side mirror, but the climate control will be stuck on 'heat'. In July.
Did I mention that the seat is sticky because the nimrod who spilled their drink into it didn't clean it up? Or that someone else has been scrawling dirty limericks on the dashboards, and phone numbers with exhortations of a 'good time' to be had? But be glad you didn't get the Com-U-Car next to it, because you saw the guy get out, and it looked like he'd thrown up in the passenger seat.
All things considered, I think I'd rather the bus, taxi, or just drive my own. At least my own car doesn't have any odors I don't already know about.
Your standard classification is irrelevant. The U. S. media establishment is the U. S. media establishment. Relative to the audience and citizenry which the U. S. media serves, the major U. S. media news outlets are mostly biased left, or left of center. Evaluating U. S. news reporting and editorial journalism by the biases of other countries' and regions' journalists as an excuse to decry it as, universally, a right-wing organ ignores the context in which it exists.
This owes to several factors, including bias within the academic establishment and a journalistic monoculture.
If you'd like to claim that the international affiliates of U. S. news media organs are right-leaning compared to their audiences, that is your prerogative; I'll not dispute it. But, if the argument is that the U. S. media is largely 'conservative', you're off your nut.
No, I evidence diversity of political opinion by the number of inter- and intra-party differences of opinion. Consider that the Republican party can contain people of such diverse opinions as George W. Bush, Rick Santorum, John McCain, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and George Pataki. Some of them are hard-line conservatives or religious right-wingers, some are moderates, some are fiscal conservatives and social liberals, and some few are socially conservative and fiscally liberal. The Democratic Party has a similarly broad reach that might be easily evidenced by the not-too-distant primary season.
Views which fall even farther afield from the centerline of US politics may find representation in third parties. You are correct that it is unlikely that a third party will gain great enough support to ascend to the Presidency. This is not tantamount to saying that U. S. politics is not diverse: a broad range of views are represented and may, if their constituency is large enough, find representation in national institutions.
There are two major difficulties in their way. First is that a third party which gains noticeable support is often used as an indication of changes in the views of the electorate, and so the Big Two will tend, either consciously or unconsciously shift to reflect those changes, siphoning potential supporters from the third party and forcing them into more extreme or marginal positions. Second is that the electorate simply doesn't have enough people who place a high enough priority on the goals and principles of $third_party, or agree with them closely enough, to bring that party into political ascendancy to a footing that is equal or greater than that of the pre-existing parties. The reason people don't vote for third parties isn't "that they can't win." It's that people place a higher value on priorities which may run counter to supporting particular third parties.
Partly, this is due to the continued dominance of the two major parties. The members of either coalition splitting into more tightly cohesive groups would provide the other party a major advantage in the legislature. In a political system with many major parties, coalition governments are often necessary for the controlling party to maintain a great enough degree of control over the legislature to govern effectively. This leads to compromise and alliance between closely compatible parties on major issues. In the U. S., this sort of compromise already happens within the major parties. Internal factions, bound together by a major issue or collection of issues, agree to work together and compromise on various major issues on which they disagree in order to further the cause of the more important issues.
This year, the issues seem to be national security, vis a vis the War on Terror, and George W. Bush. The Democrats are (sort of) united in their belief that national security and the War on Terror can be best pursued by police and judicial activity within existing legal frameworks, and that it would be best for us all if George W. Bush were not President. The Republicans, broadly, hold the opposite opinion, preferring to prosecute the war on terror via military means and to support Bush both as an effective war President, and an effective President domestically (not without reservations, obviously, but broadly and generally speaking).
The implied statement was that there is no diversity of opinion within United States politics. This is, and I think I have done a fair job of demonstrating it to be, patently false. The political spectrum in U. S. accomodates a very broad range of opinions on just about any issue you could name -- look at the citizenry and you will find supporters and critics of almost any and every political policy or decision, with the probably inclusion of sunshine and puppies. At the national level, the U. S. polity is not, I suspect, significantly less diverse than that of most other major democracies (and almost certainly more diverse than non-democracies). It is probably more con
That's pretty much irrelevant.
If a minority party is having difficulty finding traction in a popular election, who should be surprised, or offended? More so when the parties in question are, often, relatively marginalised by their own political positions and candidates. There is nothing really stopping you from voting for a minor party's candidate. Write the name in, if you must, but complaining that any particular party doesn't have enough supporters to generate "a wider spectrum of political opinion" is either disingenuous (because the complaint is paramount to saying, "There aren't enough people who agree with me") or just fatuous (because it ignores the spread of political opinion represented within the major parties).
Vote for Badnarik, or Nader, or Cobb, or Walt Brown, or whoever. If they can drum up enough support to win (or even enough to produce a measurable blip on the electoral radar), they will be able to exert some influence on national politics, as the Big Two make moves in that direction to pick up those voters. If they don't manage enough support, it will be because they don't have that support in the first place: either the positions they represent aren't that popular, or they're already represented well enough by another candidate (such as one of the Big Two).
Minor parties don't function in the U. S. the way they do in other countries. I am unconvinced that they need to.
We have a wide range of political opinion. Do you know how many political parties the US has, even on the national level?
Here's a hint: it's more than two.
Here's another hint: it's also more than four.
There's a bunch of them, and the spectrum includes socialists, Communists, pacifists, libertarians, conservatives, hard-right and hard-left groups. Even the two major parties are more politically diverse than you seem to give them credit for.
No, a baby boomer, at least in the context of the Social Security problem, was a child born during the baby boom of 1945-65. The group you refer to as their parents is either the Silent Generation or the G. I. Generation (aka the Greatest Generation, and a handful of other names, reflecting their involvement in fighting WWII).
Run "baby boomer definition" through Google and see what you get. I'd be curious to know which web dictionary you got you're definition from; it's not correct.
Not quite. Many definitions have the baby boom running into the sixties; the Gen Xers and some of the early "Gen Y" folks are the boomer's kids. The boomers have begun to retire, but only just.
Incidentally, the baby boom is usually defined as the massive upswing in birthrates that came about in America the aftermath of the second World War. With the retirement age at 65, and WWII ending in 1945, the very earliest boomers probably won't reach standard retirement age for another six years or so. There's certainly nothing to stop them from retiring earlier (and, undoubtedly, many of them have done so), but it's a bit silly to assume that they've all retired. I doubt it's even plausible to say that most of the initial boomers have retired.
Thank you very much for providing the single explanatory reply that is both wholly informative and wholly civil in tone. I find it both an unexpected and a highly welcome experience to get such a thing on Slashdot.
Again, sir, I think you. And it does sound like an intriguing prospect.
Buy 'em lunch at a decent-ish restaurant, or at least one of their choosing. Preferably someplace that will allow them to leave the office and sit down to eat. Set aside an hour or so.
... Try not to get in their way. A manager's job is more about coordinating the efforts of his people with the people above and to either side of them, and especially about keeping the heat off them from above (they're your people). Being loyal to your managees and avoiding micromanagement will go farther than any management technique found in any book or seminar. Deal with them as straight as you can, and treat them like adults.
Other than that
If it's illegal, then the course of action is obvious, isn't it? Take the school to court, after consultation with a lawyer versed in the proper sections of the legal codes.
I'm speaking solely on the grounds of common sense, which is not always compatible with legality. Which is to say that this doesn't look, to me, like a matter of regulating 'the airwaves'. My guess is that the private WAPs are generating an excess of packets because they overlap with the campus wireless network, so there are many, many laptops in or around the one building that are continually jumping between networks, which would rather quickly saturate the school's network (since they're all popping in and out of it, but not all of them will be touching any single private access point).
With that view in mind, I find it insulting that you characterise me as suggesting that students should be 'sheep', when I am, in fact, suggesting that they not act like self-centered jerks by placing their own desire for a private network in their apartment above the broader needs of the rest of the campus. I could be wrong and the WAPs may only be interfering with network service by disrupting transmission within the building and not causing problems outside it, but it wouldn't change the fact that I'm suggesting that they bear a little privation (ethernet cables) in the interest of preserving a shared resource (the campus network), not that they should be 'sheep'.
I have the strangest feeling that "apartment" means "dorm room" in this context. At least, the article gave no indication that the problem was being caused by students living off-campus. So, the first problem is that they're renting space from the school. The school certainly has the right to set ground rules on their own property.
The second problem is that it's the school's network that's getting boned by this behavior, and that means that students' wireless networks are screwing over other students. The school also has the right to set ground rules regarding on-campus network usage.
In any case, nobody ever died because they had to use Cat5. I did it at my alma mater for four years, because either nobody had or nobody could afford wireless gear at the time. I'm sure you and your classmates will survive, somehow, this minor restriction in privilege.
I'm pretty sure that's handled on a state by state basis. The crux of the problem apparently is that West Virginia has no statutes directing the actions of their electors, nor for punishing them in the case of the above behavior. Some states do, West Virginian apparently isn't one of them.