One where the voter has the freedom to vote for the guy he really wants without wasting his vote.
Every time I hear this, I think how this is the quintessential example of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If there were enough people who wanted to vote for X that he would win if they actually did, then when they decide not to vote for him because their vote for him would be wasted, it really is being wasted.
If there aren't enough people who want to vote for X to start with, then it doesn't matter if someone who wants to vote for him does so or not, he won't be elected. You call that "wasting a vote", I'd call that "losing an election".
Either way, you'll never know unless the people who want X actually vote for X and stop complaining about how they think they're wasting their vote, because the truth is they are wasting it if they don't.
The "vote accounts computer" database with encrypted names is available read only to anybody who wants to count & verify votes.
I've already pointed this out, but maybe you missed it. Your system allows the trivial creation of vast numbers of fake votes using simple random numbers for IDs. How does someone with read-only access to an encrypted list of votes check to make sure that those people actually exist, or that fifty of the votes are not from the same person? Answer: HE CANNOT.
If I've rigged the vote so the count comes out in favor of my candidate, do you really think I haven't done it by creating thousands of fake votes with fake "encrypted" names and populating the list you see with them? You're trusting a list when it is created by the people you don't trust, because it's encrypted. Encrypted means it must be good. Yumm.
That could be combatted by changing usernames on a regular or time encrypted basis.
You said the names were encrypted. Now you say they might need to be encrypted twice to make them really secret.
What's more likely to happen is Joe Candidate sends his thugs out to your house demanding your password and username so they can see you voted the right way. Or, as I said, simply create thousands of fake voters for you to waste your time trying to validate.
Luckily voter fraud is less likely than death by lighting.
This is what liberals say when the topic of voter id and making people prove they are authorized to vote before letting them vote comes up.
Otherwise, the elections are being stolen by Republicans and massive vote fraud is why more liberals aren't being elected.
The truth is, voting fraud is quite common in some areas of the country. So common that it is a standing joke. Like Chicago, where they say the districts with cemetaries have a quite good turnout every time a democrat is on the ballot. And "public transit" means the buses that carry the voters around to the different polling places so they can vote multiple times more easily.
Encrypting identity hides the identity, but allows votes to be counted by a publicly available voters/voted file.
It also allows the creation of large numbers of fake votes with random ids. Or one person who is registered ten times in ten different precints to vote ten times without fear of detection. If you can't map the id back to the person, you don't know if the person exists or is unique.
If your're trusting the government to do all the back mapping and security, you might as well trust them to count the votes, too.
Explain to me why I should vote for anything that's not local.
Because if candidate A wins your state it forces B to win eleven others. If candidate B wins your state, he's got fewer other states to win.
This is a big country. One vote in 100,000,000 (a good turnout) is very small, but one vote here, one vote there, pretty soon someone wins all the electoral votes in your state and forces the other guy to win in other states if he's going to be the overall winner.
And because if you don't vote, you have no right to whine about who won. You can't win if you don't play the game.
The "machines" whose inability you denounce were human beings with a pointy tool. The machines don't poke the holes, they simply hold the paper and align it with the candidate names. The humans poke the holes.
Humans which, by the way, adamantly refused to follow the instructions on how to vote. I recall one elderly gentleman standing up and stating loudly that he'd been "voting for fifty years and didn't need to read no instructions to tell [him] how to vote." Apparently, yes, he did, because he was one of the people who couldn't poke a hole in a piece of paper that had been pre-scored to make it easy.
His degree title does have relevance in that it conveys a fairly clear message as to his ability and accomplishments to the average layman, which constitutes the bulk of voters.
Yes, his MD conveys the information that he's been qualified to be a physician, which says nothing about his abilities to be a member of the House of Representatives. I've had many doctors in my life, and not a single one of them would I consider qualified to be a politician. The closest was a DDS who was on the community college board, which he was marginal at.
Considering the amount of time he's had to spend, or should have spent doing lawmaker work, his MD title is not even a good indicator of how good a doctor he is now.
As for the other comment about earning vs. winning: silly boy, everyone knows that politicians buy votes with advertising dollars.
So, you're trying to fix what shouldn't involve the government at all,
I think you're replying to me. Hard to tell with the funky indenting and such from this/. display. If not, then ignore the rest.
Why do you think that the government shouldn't be involved in civil unions? Those have legal status and convey legal rights and responsibilities. How do you have a civil union without the government involved?
Can you explain how adding more government regulations to this isn't going to end up a cluster fuck like it always has?
I'm not the one pushing for more or less government regulation over marriage or civil unions. I'm the one saying "fix the thing that will give you what you claim you want". And maybe "explain why civil unions isn't what you want, because it sounds like it is."
Why do people always think "more laws and more regulations will make everything better", when it never does?
If civil unions are good enough for gay couples, shouldn't they be good enough for straight couples too?
If that's all they want, of course. Did I imply otherwise?
Get the government out of marriage entirely. Call it a civil union and forget about the sex of the people involved.
Sounds fine to me. Did I imply otherwise?
Leave "marriage" to the churches, and give that no legal weight whatsoever.
Give it the legal weight that the local or state government wants to give it. That's all. I'd tell my reps to give it none. I'm not going to tell some other state how they should deal with a state issue.
Since when is it "groupthink" to refer to a man using the most prestigious of the titles he's earned?
Which is more prestigious? A title that hundreds of people have, maybe even thousands, in a several county area, or a title that only one person in that area has (and only 435 in the entire country)? A title that comes about because a panel of five to seven people say you've accomplished the prerequisites (for Ph.D doctors, the committee), or one that takes the votes of tens of thousands of people to achieve?
A title that is completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand and the job being performed by that individual, or the title that goes with the job?
You'll notice they did away with that an adopted the constitution.
I don't know how you call it "doing away with" the concept of a weak federal government when they enacted a constitution based on that concept, and which explicitely said at the end "anything not taken by the feds in this constitution is left to the states and the people."
And, since "marriage" doesn't appear in the US Constitution, it's one of those things that are, by default, left to the states to deal with. Maybe it's some ICC-based issue? Selling wives across a state line would be hindered if different states had different laws about marriage?
"State's rights" in practice is almost always a way to hide one's immoral motives.
So every founder of this country that favored a weak central federal government was just trying to hide some "immoral motive", and wasn't thinking about how we'd just come out of a war with a central federal government system that had repressed pretty much whatever it wanted even though it was on the other side of an ocean from us?
Or is the concept that the best government is the one closest and most responsive to the citizens that have granted it the right to exist somehow an "immoral motive"?
One needs to separate "marriage" as a private/religious institution from government reward of the same.
One should, but it never seems to happen. Those who want gay marriage don't seem to want to settle for a legal status that doesn't include the term "marriage". Civil unions aren't good enough. Fixing bad civil union laws isn't good enough, even though they're trying to fix what they consider to be bad marriage laws, so they're trying to get laws changed either way.
The only legitimate interest, IMO, for government giving special privileges to those who marry (tax benefits, primarily) are related to preventing offspring from becoming wards of the state, something which doesn't apply to homosexual couples.
Can you explain why the foibles and pitfalls that can happen to heterosexual marriages that would cause the children involved to become wards of the state are not applicable to homosexual marriage partners? Is there something that protects them from becoming homeless/unemployed and going on the dole, or divorce, or dual fatality car crashes that take out both parents?
He was reelected 11 times, often by overwhelming margins. So it seems his constituents disagree with you.
Unless you have some information about who was running against him, you don't know if his constituents were picking the lesser of two weevils or actually supporting his platforms. Even so, many people vote for the incumbent simply because they recognize his name, or they choose the devil they know instead of the devil they don't. Or, their votes were bought with fancy advertising and FUD campaigns. (Obama got a lot of votes because of the "Anyone But Bush" campaign tactics -- in an election where Bush wasn't even a candidate! FUD.)
Make no mistake: there's nothing "free" about the state-granted monopolies the wireless and cable industry have.
What state-granted monopolies the wireless and cable industry have?
There are currently more than one (four, five, ?) wireless providers in my area, and anyone who wants to enter a franchise agreement with the city is free to put up a new cable system. That's not a monopoly. That's "you want to hang your wires in our rights-of-way, you pay us".
Now, for cable, there is effectively a financial monopoly since it costs a lot of money to build a cable system and very little return for both companies if two try to wire the same area. That's not "state-granted", that's economics. Even if there were no franchise agreements or franchise fees, there would still be no economic incentive for a second cable provider to enter an already serviced market.
No, the real morons are the ones who want to make a "left turn" at that intersection and so they simply turn left -- going the wrong way around the circle. I wouldn't call firemen morons, when they take the larger equipment through the traffic circle they almost have to drive up on the center concrete thing.
Personally, I'd pay good money for an implantable watch that ran on energy from glucose in the blood or some such.
You could make a fortune if you could make a device that would monitor the glucose level and simply burn excess above ~100 mcg/L. Sits in the renal or hepatic artery and dumps waste product into the lower intestine or bladder directly. Much better use of the technology than a simple watch.
Traffic circles are easy, only americans seem to have problems with them. I blame this on the lack of yield signs and the low standards for getting a license.
Traffic circles have yield signs at every entrance. You can't have many more than that. I blame the problem with traffic circles on the failure of the driving handbooks to clearly state how they are to be treated and what the signs marking one are. They show roundabout signs, and talk about who yields to who in the "circular roadway", and then leave the implication that traffic circles are the same.
Roundabouts are much easier, and different. Traffic circles are nothing more than four way yields and should be built as such.
I would imagine the car would do the same thing human drivers do, and given a theoretical 3 lanes of unmarked road, space themselves accordingly.
Most of I5 through Oregon is two lanes each way. In theory, you'd have three cars trying to occupy two lanes.
Much as we somehow figure out how to park on unmarked grass at the county fair without needing chalk or paint lines.
Yes, because there are people there to guide you. I've seen what happens when you let people park in a field at the fair without anyone or anything to give them a clue. It isn't pretty. Rows of cars that are three deep (trapping the guy in the middle) is one of the least painful failure modes. Even just failure to optimize the packing so you wind up with a lot at half capacity that has no place left to park is bad enough.
Autonomous cars would mean the end of revenue streams from red light cameras, speed traps,
Oh, I don't know. This summary (presumably a quote from TFA) is telling me that this autonomous driver will turn my 60 minute freeway trip into 38 minutes. It's 60 miles by freeway from where I live to the airport, a trip which takes almost exactly 60 minutes. (Plus the time to get to the freeway, of course).
That would put me at an average of 94 MPH for the trip. I think speed traps will do quite well with this system.
Even if that was true -- and I disagree that that is a reasonable reading -- it wouldn't matter, because even read that way it still opposes teaching actual critical thinking skills,...
Only those in programs that have a PURPOSE of undermining parental authority and questioning fixed beliefs. All the words, please.
It was a direct quote,...
It was a quote, but not a direct quote, and in any case, I was explicit in saying that the rest of the sentence CONTAINS. I didn't say that I was quoting it in entirety. I didn't imply as much, either, unless you are trying to argue that the word "contains" implies "contains this and only this and nothing else", which is absurd.
And in any case, I've already quoted the entire plank, so if you are confused, you can find the information.
Also, when the corporation committed a crime, the CEO would go to prison.
Some of them have. Bernie Madoff and Kenneth Lay, to name two. I'm sure you could find more if you cared. Yes, pretty easy. Google "CEO prison".
Kevin Cassidy, 30 months in federal prison.
Ken Beverly, two years.
Dennis Kozlowski, 8 1/3 to 25
Bernard Ebbers, 25 years
Jeffrey Keith "Jeff" Skilling, 24 years
That's just a sample from the first page of google results.
But, of course, you probably meant to say "if anyone working for the corporation committed a crime, the CEO would go to prison." Where did you get the idea that someone who works for a corporation makes the corporation liable for his actions? Well, board members and officers, yes. A shipping supervisor who dumps trash instead of sending it to through the proper disposal channels? Hardly.
The people who make up a corporation are still people, and they still have rights. Even in the USA.
Slashdot Mirror
One where the voter has the freedom to vote for the guy he really wants without wasting his vote.
Every time I hear this, I think how this is the quintessential example of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If there were enough people who wanted to vote for X that he would win if they actually did, then when they decide not to vote for him because their vote for him would be wasted, it really is being wasted.
If there aren't enough people who want to vote for X to start with, then it doesn't matter if someone who wants to vote for him does so or not, he won't be elected. You call that "wasting a vote", I'd call that "losing an election".
Either way, you'll never know unless the people who want X actually vote for X and stop complaining about how they think they're wasting their vote, because the truth is they are wasting it if they don't.
The "vote accounts computer" database with encrypted names is available read only to anybody who wants to count & verify votes.
I've already pointed this out, but maybe you missed it. Your system allows the trivial creation of vast numbers of fake votes using simple random numbers for IDs. How does someone with read-only access to an encrypted list of votes check to make sure that those people actually exist, or that fifty of the votes are not from the same person? Answer: HE CANNOT.
If I've rigged the vote so the count comes out in favor of my candidate, do you really think I haven't done it by creating thousands of fake votes with fake "encrypted" names and populating the list you see with them? You're trusting a list when it is created by the people you don't trust, because it's encrypted. Encrypted means it must be good. Yumm.
That could be combatted by changing usernames on a regular or time encrypted basis.
You said the names were encrypted. Now you say they might need to be encrypted twice to make them really secret.
What's more likely to happen is Joe Candidate sends his thugs out to your house demanding your password and username so they can see you voted the right way. Or, as I said, simply create thousands of fake voters for you to waste your time trying to validate.
Luckily voter fraud is less likely than death by lighting.
This is what liberals say when the topic of voter id and making people prove they are authorized to vote before letting them vote comes up.
Otherwise, the elections are being stolen by Republicans and massive vote fraud is why more liberals aren't being elected.
The truth is, voting fraud is quite common in some areas of the country. So common that it is a standing joke. Like Chicago, where they say the districts with cemetaries have a quite good turnout every time a democrat is on the ballot. And "public transit" means the buses that carry the voters around to the different polling places so they can vote multiple times more easily.
Encrypting identity hides the identity, but allows votes to be counted by a publicly available voters/voted file.
It also allows the creation of large numbers of fake votes with random ids. Or one person who is registered ten times in ten different precints to vote ten times without fear of detection. If you can't map the id back to the person, you don't know if the person exists or is unique.
If your're trusting the government to do all the back mapping and security, you might as well trust them to count the votes, too.
Explain to me why I should vote for anything that's not local.
Because if candidate A wins your state it forces B to win eleven others. If candidate B wins your state, he's got fewer other states to win.
This is a big country. One vote in 100,000,000 (a good turnout) is very small, but one vote here, one vote there, pretty soon someone wins all the electoral votes in your state and forces the other guy to win in other states if he's going to be the overall winner.
And because if you don't vote, you have no right to whine about who won. You can't win if you don't play the game.
Humans which, by the way, adamantly refused to follow the instructions on how to vote. I recall one elderly gentleman standing up and stating loudly that he'd been "voting for fifty years and didn't need to read no instructions to tell [him] how to vote." Apparently, yes, he did, because he was one of the people who couldn't poke a hole in a piece of paper that had been pre-scored to make it easy.
His degree title does have relevance in that it conveys a fairly clear message as to his ability and accomplishments to the average layman, which constitutes the bulk of voters.
Yes, his MD conveys the information that he's been qualified to be a physician, which says nothing about his abilities to be a member of the House of Representatives. I've had many doctors in my life, and not a single one of them would I consider qualified to be a politician. The closest was a DDS who was on the community college board, which he was marginal at.
Considering the amount of time he's had to spend, or should have spent doing lawmaker work, his MD title is not even a good indicator of how good a doctor he is now.
As for the other comment about earning vs. winning: silly boy, everyone knows that politicians buy votes with advertising dollars.
So, you're trying to fix what shouldn't involve the government at all,
I think you're replying to me. Hard to tell with the funky indenting and such from this /. display. If not, then ignore the rest.
Why do you think that the government shouldn't be involved in civil unions? Those have legal status and convey legal rights and responsibilities. How do you have a civil union without the government involved?
Can you explain how adding more government regulations to this isn't going to end up a cluster fuck like it always has?
I'm not the one pushing for more or less government regulation over marriage or civil unions. I'm the one saying "fix the thing that will give you what you claim you want". And maybe "explain why civil unions isn't what you want, because it sounds like it is."
Why do people always think "more laws and more regulations will make everything better", when it never does?
Who said anything about "always"?
If civil unions are good enough for gay couples, shouldn't they be good enough for straight couples too?
If that's all they want, of course. Did I imply otherwise?
Get the government out of marriage entirely. Call it a civil union and forget about the sex of the people involved.
Sounds fine to me. Did I imply otherwise?
Leave "marriage" to the churches, and give that no legal weight whatsoever.
Give it the legal weight that the local or state government wants to give it. That's all. I'd tell my reps to give it none. I'm not going to tell some other state how they should deal with a state issue.
Since when is it "groupthink" to refer to a man using the most prestigious of the titles he's earned?
Which is more prestigious? A title that hundreds of people have, maybe even thousands, in a several county area, or a title that only one person in that area has (and only 435 in the entire country)? A title that comes about because a panel of five to seven people say you've accomplished the prerequisites (for Ph.D doctors, the committee), or one that takes the votes of tens of thousands of people to achieve?
A title that is completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand and the job being performed by that individual, or the title that goes with the job?
You'll notice they did away with that an adopted the constitution.
I don't know how you call it "doing away with" the concept of a weak federal government when they enacted a constitution based on that concept, and which explicitely said at the end "anything not taken by the feds in this constitution is left to the states and the people."
And, since "marriage" doesn't appear in the US Constitution, it's one of those things that are, by default, left to the states to deal with. Maybe it's some ICC-based issue? Selling wives across a state line would be hindered if different states had different laws about marriage?
"State's rights" in practice is almost always a way to hide one's immoral motives.
So every founder of this country that favored a weak central federal government was just trying to hide some "immoral motive", and wasn't thinking about how we'd just come out of a war with a central federal government system that had repressed pretty much whatever it wanted even though it was on the other side of an ocean from us?
Or is the concept that the best government is the one closest and most responsive to the citizens that have granted it the right to exist somehow an "immoral motive"?
Does he propose to create an alternative body for creating dollars? Or does he considers that only private banks should be able to create money?
US money is currently created by the Treasury, not the FED. Why would getting rid of the FED change that?
One needs to separate "marriage" as a private/religious institution from government reward of the same.
One should, but it never seems to happen. Those who want gay marriage don't seem to want to settle for a legal status that doesn't include the term "marriage". Civil unions aren't good enough. Fixing bad civil union laws isn't good enough, even though they're trying to fix what they consider to be bad marriage laws, so they're trying to get laws changed either way.
The only legitimate interest, IMO, for government giving special privileges to those who marry (tax benefits, primarily) are related to preventing offspring from becoming wards of the state, something which doesn't apply to homosexual couples.
Can you explain why the foibles and pitfalls that can happen to heterosexual marriages that would cause the children involved to become wards of the state are not applicable to homosexual marriage partners? Is there something that protects them from becoming homeless/unemployed and going on the dole, or divorce, or dual fatality car crashes that take out both parents?
He was reelected 11 times, often by overwhelming margins. So it seems his constituents disagree with you.
Unless you have some information about who was running against him, you don't know if his constituents were picking the lesser of two weevils or actually supporting his platforms. Even so, many people vote for the incumbent simply because they recognize his name, or they choose the devil they know instead of the devil they don't. Or, their votes were bought with fancy advertising and FUD campaigns. (Obama got a lot of votes because of the "Anyone But Bush" campaign tactics -- in an election where Bush wasn't even a candidate! FUD.)
Nobody knows for sure.
Make no mistake: there's nothing "free" about the state-granted monopolies the wireless and cable industry have.
What state-granted monopolies the wireless and cable industry have?
There are currently more than one (four, five, ?) wireless providers in my area, and anyone who wants to enter a franchise agreement with the city is free to put up a new cable system. That's not a monopoly. That's "you want to hang your wires in our rights-of-way, you pay us".
Now, for cable, there is effectively a financial monopoly since it costs a lot of money to build a cable system and very little return for both companies if two try to wire the same area. That's not "state-granted", that's economics. Even if there were no franchise agreements or franchise fees, there would still be no economic incentive for a second cable provider to enter an already serviced market.
No, the real morons are the ones who want to make a "left turn" at that intersection and so they simply turn left -- going the wrong way around the circle. I wouldn't call firemen morons, when they take the larger equipment through the traffic circle they almost have to drive up on the center concrete thing.
Personally, I'd pay good money for an implantable watch that ran on energy from glucose in the blood or some such.
You could make a fortune if you could make a device that would monitor the glucose level and simply burn excess above ~100 mcg/L. Sits in the renal or hepatic artery and dumps waste product into the lower intestine or bladder directly. Much better use of the technology than a simple watch.
Guess at where the lane is and try to imitate the other cars on the road.
<parental voice> "If every other car on the road jumped off a bridge, would you?" </parental voice>
Traffic circles are easy, only americans seem to have problems with them. I blame this on the lack of yield signs and the low standards for getting a license.
Traffic circles have yield signs at every entrance. You can't have many more than that. I blame the problem with traffic circles on the failure of the driving handbooks to clearly state how they are to be treated and what the signs marking one are. They show roundabout signs, and talk about who yields to who in the "circular roadway", and then leave the implication that traffic circles are the same.
Roundabouts are much easier, and different. Traffic circles are nothing more than four way yields and should be built as such.
That under Oregon law. YMMV.
I would imagine the car would do the same thing human drivers do, and given a theoretical 3 lanes of unmarked road, space themselves accordingly.
Most of I5 through Oregon is two lanes each way. In theory, you'd have three cars trying to occupy two lanes.
Much as we somehow figure out how to park on unmarked grass at the county fair without needing chalk or paint lines.
Yes, because there are people there to guide you. I've seen what happens when you let people park in a field at the fair without anyone or anything to give them a clue. It isn't pretty. Rows of cars that are three deep (trapping the guy in the middle) is one of the least painful failure modes. Even just failure to optimize the packing so you wind up with a lot at half capacity that has no place left to park is bad enough.
Autonomous cars would mean the end of revenue streams from red light cameras, speed traps,
Oh, I don't know. This summary (presumably a quote from TFA) is telling me that this autonomous driver will turn my 60 minute freeway trip into 38 minutes. It's 60 miles by freeway from where I live to the airport, a trip which takes almost exactly 60 minutes. (Plus the time to get to the freeway, of course).
That would put me at an average of 94 MPH for the trip. I think speed traps will do quite well with this system.
(a play off of MS's typical logo -> "Where do you want to go today?").
I thought that was "where do you want to go, toady?"
Even if that was true -- and I disagree that that is a reasonable reading -- it wouldn't matter, because even read that way it still opposes teaching actual critical thinking skills,...
Only those in programs that have a PURPOSE of undermining parental authority and questioning fixed beliefs. All the words, please.
It was a direct quote,...
It was a quote, but not a direct quote, and in any case, I was explicit in saying that the rest of the sentence CONTAINS. I didn't say that I was quoting it in entirety. I didn't imply as much, either, unless you are trying to argue that the word "contains" implies "contains this and only this and nothing else", which is absurd.
And in any case, I've already quoted the entire plank, so if you are confused, you can find the information.
Also, when the corporation committed a crime, the CEO would go to prison.
Some of them have. Bernie Madoff and Kenneth Lay, to name two. I'm sure you could find more if you cared. Yes, pretty easy. Google "CEO prison".
That's just a sample from the first page of google results.
But, of course, you probably meant to say "if anyone working for the corporation committed a crime, the CEO would go to prison." Where did you get the idea that someone who works for a corporation makes the corporation liable for his actions? Well, board members and officers, yes. A shipping supervisor who dumps trash instead of sending it to through the proper disposal channels? Hardly.
The people who make up a corporation are still people, and they still have rights. Even in the USA.