Not what I said. To clarify so that you cannot misinterpret, getting to class, pencils, notebooks, bookbags, textbooks, etc are all part of the cost of attending class.
And to clarify for you, none of those are part of the enrollment or class fees. You don't have to give the university any money for any of those just to enroll in the class.
Its not some separate thing, and Im not sure why youre trying to treat it as such.
Because it is. You seem unable to differentiate between the costs of attending a class, which is what you are required to pay to the Uni so you can attend, and those voluntary costs that you spend other places to make your learning experience easier. You don't NEED a bookbag to attend a class, you choose to buy one if you want it to make your life easier. You don't NEED to buy pencils just so you can attend a class. (You can borrow them from your roommate, have your parents send you a dozen every week, or simply never use a pencil.)
Buying the book for a class is currently in the voluntary category, not covered by class enrollment fees. That puts the costs of books in a different category than class fees.
Now, the suggestion I REPLIED TO, which you keep ignoring, was the application of this restricted gift card system to enrollment fees. That means the Uni would charge you a MANDATORY fee for the book and hand you a gift card that could only be used to buy that book. If you already have the book, too bad. If you didn't want to buy the book, too bad. You pay the Uni for the privilege of attending class, and if you don't pay for the book, too, you don't get enrolled.
You don't seem to think that is a bad idea since apparently you think the cost of the book is a mandatory cost of attending class already. God, I hope you aren't an accounting major, if you can't identify different kinds of costs and how to apply them to real life situations.
The not allowing of alt browsers is hardly MS's biggest transgression. Not allowing for alternative boot loaders was.
No, forcing hardware vendors to sell a Windows license with every system they sold if they wanted to sell them with any system was. As an early linux adopter, I got really tired of paying extra for MS-DOS, and then Windows, on every system I bought, just so I could wipe the disk and install something usable. I was never prevented from installing an "alternative boot loader". Lilo never complained that it couldn't write itself to the MBA.
By the way, I was buying systems with taxpayer dollars. If you paid taxes in the US in the late 90's, you were helping to send money to MS. Bill sends his thanks.
Im at Uni right now, and while the costs of text books really are heinous (as are the per-semester customizations that make resale value 0), you dont really HAVE to buy all of the books-- you can rent, or do without in many cases, or sit next to someone else who did get it.
That's right. RIGHT NOW you don't have to buy any of the textbooks. Nobody asks you to show the textbook before you get the grade. If they do, you can still borrow someone else's.
Did you miss the part of what I replied to that talked about making the cost of the book a part of the course FEES and you get a gift card that will let you buy nothing but a copy of the book?
Regardless, the cost of the book is part of the cost of taking the class.
No, right now, it isn't. As you just said, "you can rent, or do without in many cases, or sit next to someone else who did get it". The fees for the class do NOT include a book.
... Im not really sure this qualifies as a major issue faced by students today.
I didn't say it did. I simply made my opinion on forcing people to pay for a book as part of the fees for a class crystal clear. However, I think that the number of students who complain about the price of a book today will be greatly outnumbered by the students who complain about being forced to pay for the same book as part of the course fees every time they take a class that requires it.
Imagine taking Physics 101 and 102. Imagine having the physics text be part of the course fees -- for both courses. Imagine the ingenuity of the administration of the UNI when they make the book you buy through the course fees be the electronic copy, which you cannot resell and cannot use after the DRM times out at the end of the term.
This may not be a major issue for some. I think it will be for many.
Imagine taking a class at a UNI, and the enrollment fees include a giftcard for the required text book.
Imagine taking a class at a UNI and having the cost of the book NOT be part of the cost of the class, so that someone who already has the book won't have to pay for something they already have, and someone who can buy it cheaper used can save a bundle of money doing that.
Imagine a UNI system that wasn't so money oriented that it didn't force people to buy books they didn't want by charging them upfront in the fees to take the class.
that we may have something a bit more modern than XP.
I'm sorry, but I just don't understand this "it is more modern, we must use it" attitude.
As long as it does what you need done, WHY do you care how "modern" it is? The only reason I can see that "modern" matters is because of the idjits who also think "modern" is important and deliberately write software that won't run on older systems. I'm facing that because I run a server that uses someone like that's code. The important part runs on 2K, which I have a license for and the server runs just fine. The newer parts run only on XP, and I've had to freeze versions where I am because they chose to make it incompatible. (They use the newer features of.NET that are deliberately NOT backwards compatible so that people are forced to update not only the code they are running, but the OS AND the hardware. For a system that is run totally by volunteers. And software that has no real increase in functionality.)
Especially in a business environment where what is important that it runs your business code, why does it matter if that code runs on Vista or 7 or XP?
What does that have to do with anything? Being unique between users changes nothing. You can have the same correct passcode I do, it doesn't matter.
Passwords are unique per user ID (in this case voter ID), but I'd have to struggle to think of any system in any field where passwords must be unique *across different users*.
A useless and irrelevant stuggle, I'd say.
Wrong. Since when was there a constraint, "a person can only have one passcode that matches to a single candidate"?
In the proposed system. One correct passcode and "any number of" incorrect ones.
The person could have two different passcodes that both point to the right candidate.
And so you move on to the rest of what I wrote where I covered the case where the number of proofs needs to be 2*N+1. If there are two correct passcodes in a different system, then you make the person prove how he voted five times. Please read it all.
They could have *no* correct passcode. It's all their choice.
In which case, five "proofs" will come up with five incorrect answers and the PHB or miscreant trying to coerce your vote will know how you voted. Did you miss that the important result of the system is that nobody can force you to vote by being able to verify your vote? You're busy creating changes to the system that makes it EASIER to find out, not harder.
You enter it. It gives you the same check-up-on-it instructions and then goes back to "Would you like another confirmation?". Repeat up to MAXINT times.
And I demand that you prove to me 2*MAXINT+1 times how you voted. The majority of results will be wrong. I'll know you didn't vote for who I told you to. You lose. (I'm sure you thought "MAXINT" was some realistic limit, but you do realize that nobody will be able to memorize MAXINT of anything, nor will the system store MAXINT codes for you, so there will be a smaller, reasonable limit.)
The fact remains, once you create a system with an external verification (usable outside the scope of the voting booth) you create a system where someone can verify how you voted. It apparently doesn't matter to many people, however. I live in a state where it is possible for someone to actually give their ballot to another person to allow them to vote it. (Vote by mail, Oregon.) I live in a state where you can post your vote and never know if it got counted at all. The election officials can decide that the signature doesn't match and simply ignore your vote. Notice the large outcry against this system? Right, there isn't one. Nobody cares.
94% of the 2.4Ghz bandwidth was used, not 94% of the people were using 2.4Ghz.
No, of the 470,000 connections, 94% of them were made using 2.4GHz. Not "94% of the bandwidth was used". "Fully" is an adjective adding stress to how high the number 94% is.
They then switch units from "connections" to "systems" and report that 47% of the laptops and desktops used 5GHz. Also 2/3 of the iPads.
I suspect that laptops and certainly desktops account for very few "connections", since the connection is made once and held open. There are also a very large number of smart devices that connect and disconnect repeatedly during the day, like my fancy new smartphone. It changes connections when I walk from one end of the building to the other, and when I walk outside it changes depending on how close I am to which node. You can also count every connection from every smart device that is carried onto campus by every visitor, even if they don't authenticate. That's why the percentage of connections is so large, but I bet the percentage of bandwidth used is much different.
A university education isn't for a particular job, it's for life.
No, it's not. It's just to get your first or second job, in a particular field. 5 years out of college, your degree is hardly relevant.
You're still talking about jobs, the OP was talking about life. Not "a lifetime of jobs".
You're still trying to make people into a cog in a worker-bee existance. You're actually proving his point when you say that most of what you got out of college isn't relevant to your job. It wasn't supposed to be.
Universities are supposed to be about producing well-rounded, thinking-able people. People who can learn from history and not simply repeat it. People with horizons larger than Bofink, Idaho or whatever town you grew up in. That's a skill for life, not a particular job.
If you want job skills, that should be what a trade school teaches you. You want to learn electronics so you can be an electronics tech, go to ITI or a community college, not State U. You want IT skills and nothing else, go to an IT school.
Not true. The person says, "I only entered one passcode", and that's the end of it.
And the PHB to whom that person must prove how he voted ALSO votes in the same area and knows that there are "any number of alternative passcodes" that will return the wrong answer. He is not permitted to enter the same passcode more than once while proving how he voted, so "entered one passcode" is false.
Where you came to the conclusion that there's precisely three, I have no clue.
Where you came to the conclusion I said that there were only three I have no clue.
Three is the minimum number of responses required to get a definitive answer to the question "how did you vote?" If you have the person prove how he voted using one passcode, he could either enter the right passcode or the wrong passcode, so you have either one answer that is right or one that is wrong. You can't tell.
If you have him do it twice with different codes, he either does it once with the right one and once with the wrong one, or twice with wrong ones. If he does the former, you get two different answers and no indication which is correct. If he does the latter, you get two of the same answer and you know the correct answer is the opposite.
So, if you have him do it three times, he either enters the right passcode one time or no times, giving you either a set of responses with one correct and two incorrect answers, or a set of three identical (incorrect) answers. In either case, the majority wins, and the majority of answers will be the WRONG ones.
Now, you could try to fix the problem by having an unknown number of correct passcodes to go with the incorrect ones, but that would require people to memorize many sets of passcodes, and that's not practical. It will be bad enough that they need to memorize one passcode. Can you imagine the furor that would erupt when someone forgets their correct passcode and goes online to see if their vote was recorded correctly? "Hey! You got my vote WRONG!" Chaos, cries of corruption and vote rigging, all kinds of stuff. All because people forgot their correct passcode and got the wrong answer back from an incorrect one -- by design.
This problem is very similar to the "pulling socks at random from the drawer" problem. How many socks do you need to pull from a drawer to get a matched pair, if there are two colors? Three guarantees a match. Not quite the same, because the sock problem answer is just "number of colors plus one", and the passcode problem is "number of correct passcodes times two plus one." (Three correct passcodes means PHB make you prove your vote seven times. At best, you can get three correct answers back using different passcodes. The other four will be wrong, and the majority still wins.)
'cos the US is the only country on earth with juries and fair trials.
'cos the US has diplomats in many countries that don't. 'cos the US grants diplomatic immunity to those countries when they have diplomats here. 'cos Iraq could easily turn into a country that has neither trials nor juries. 'cos its peaceful neighbor Iran has problems with the same thing.
And US soldiers, spies and mercenaries have no history of massacre, murder and rape in the region.
Not the massive, overwhelming kind that your statement implies.
The Wyden campaign was the one that started the dirty ads. As for representing "actual human beings", well, thanks so much for the kind words. He doesn't represent me very well. Does that make me not a human in your opinion?
He is great for the liberals that make up the two major cities in Oregon. He grabs onto a lot of hot-button issues but then never delivers. He's got the union backing, but apparently we should believe that they wouldn't listen to him regarding running this campaign ad. Plausible deniablility?
Of course, your opinion of him may differ, and that's why the US is so nice.
"I'd like to order a couple of Wydens for my state, is Oregon going to be making any more or do you guys want the monopoly on politicians with heads outside their asses?"
You do realize you are talking about the fellow who, when running against Gordon Smith for the senate, promised to run a clean, above-board respectable campaign based on issues and not mudslinging? And then two days later the "Smith killed a kid" ads started showing up?
Smith owns a food processing company. A young worker there died in an accident. The ads made it out that Smith was personally responsible for the death. Two days after those ads appeared, Smith appeared in ads with the kids parents, who supported Smith and made it clear it was an accident and Smith wasn't at fault.
There are some solutions to this, of course -- for example, allowing the user to enter a passcode to see the real vote and any number of alternative passcodes to get to see fake votes registered to them. So they can still check up on their vote with their real passcode but can "prove" a fake vote to someone else with a fake passcode. Nobody can thus be assured that they successfully pressured someone to vote the way they wanted.
"Show me how you voted."
"Ok, now show me how you voted using a different passcode."
"Ok, now show me how you voted using another different passcode."
At a minimum, two out of three times the answer will be opposite the truth. If all three match, then all three are wrong. Even Dilbert's PHB would be able to figure that one out.
If you say "send back random answers for invalid passcodes", you've just put the kneecaps of your voter in jeopardy since 50% of the time the "proof" of the correct vote will be wrong. The only safe way out of that dilemma is for the voter to vote the way he was told, which means that the coercion worked, and the system to prevent the possibility of such coercion has failed.
Redeeming your own property isn't the same as a second-hand sale
According to the La law, yes, it is. Sell something to a second-hand dealer, it becomes his. Buy it back, it's secondhand. Used. You wouldn't pay new price to get back something you sold him, would you?
And you don't even need to take back physical possession - they can rip it up in front of you.
Physical possession isn't the definition of ownership. If I loan you a book, I still own the book, but I don't have physical possession. You own the check when you buy it back secondhand, you've just told the person holding it to rip it up for you.
Direct democracy is 3 wolves and 1 sheep voting on who gets eaten for dinner. Compromise is 3 wolves and 1 sheep agreeing to only eat half the sheep.
I wish I had mod points today.
We've got a system that was designed to be democratic while also eternally preserving the rights of that sheep. It's not ideal, but compromise, consensus, direct democracy? Good fucking lord those ideas are so much worse
I wish I could give you two ++ mod points that I don't have today.
There it really is a debt that needs to be paid as you have already received your food and/or drink. I wonder if all you had was cash and they refused your payment if you would still be legally required to pay?
If they told you ahead of time that they didn't accept cash and you went ahead and ordered anyway, then yes, you are legally required to pay. They put a legal precondition on the sale, you accepted that condition.
There is a local gas station in town that doesn't accept $50 bills. They post this quite prominently, and every time I stop and say "fill for cash" they remind me before they start that they don't take $50 bills. Were I to whip out a fifty and say "that's all I got, take it or leave it", I'm still legally obligated to pay.
Law enforcement: when someone steals your stereo and sells it to the second hand shop, they'll have a record of who did it, and when someone buys it from that shop before you find out and can recover it, you can find it and get it back.
i go once a year and it's always full. people too cheap to pay for internet and asian kids.
Yeah, if you are too cheap to pay for an asian kid, you shouldn't have one. After all, what's he going to do after school if you can't afford internet for him to surf?
Why is it that people keep lumping science fiction with fantasy? What is it that makes the two in any way related?
What is it that makes people think readers who want sci-fi are interested in fantasy, so that there needs to be one list of the "top 100"? Or vice versa.
I mean, The Lord of the Rings was a good book, but sci-fi it ain't, and it's not the same kind of book as The Martian Chronicles or real sci-fi.
The interactive selection was a joke. There are so many places where you are asked "A or not A" and then wind up with only B as a possibility. You want space, but "not too far"? Mars vs. the rest of the universe. Sigh.
You're right on the square. Same argument. The energy goes as the square. Ban anything going faster than 5 MPH because it is unsafe. Science says so.
But even that doesn't really determine how bad an accident is
Laws don't deal with any specific accident, they deal with trying to prevent them altogether, or lessening the overall damage. Science says that the energy goes up as the square, which is good enough to justify a very very low speed limit everywhere. For safety. Ignoring all other concerns.
I'm not sure where you've got the idea that science is so limited in its scope.
And I have no idea where you got the idea I said anything of the sort.
I'm not sure how science could result in laws without any consideration for anything else.
Then you haven't been reading this thread. We're talking about the application of science to "pubic policy" and laws. Science can easily result in laws without consideration for anything else if you demand that science be the basis for laws.
You'll note, if you read carefully, that this has nothing at all to do with pseudo or junk science, and nothing really to do with ice cream. Ice cream was one trivial example. Real science, used as the basis for law, is just as bad as pseudo or junk science.
Now, stop telling people I'm scared that someone is going to use junk science to take my ice cream away, dipshit.
The whole idea of the founders was to put a second party into the Congress that was indirectly responsible to the people (via their elected state houses), but not popularly elected, and thus less subject to the passions of the moment.
The reason they weren't elected, and why there are two for every state, is that they were intended to be the body that looked out for the interests of the country as a whole and not the specific interests of the state they came from or the voters therein. Ratification of treaties falls squarely under that baliwick, since treaties tend to have an impact on the entire country and not just one or two states. Ditto federal appointments.
The 17th amendment was a big mistake, because now all we have are people looking out for their own skins and getting re-elected instead of looking out for the US. This has turned the Senate into nothing more than a posh version of the House.
Slashdot Mirror
Not what I said. To clarify so that you cannot misinterpret, getting to class, pencils, notebooks, bookbags, textbooks, etc are all part of the cost of attending class.
And to clarify for you, none of those are part of the enrollment or class fees. You don't have to give the university any money for any of those just to enroll in the class.
Its not some separate thing, and Im not sure why youre trying to treat it as such.
Because it is. You seem unable to differentiate between the costs of attending a class, which is what you are required to pay to the Uni so you can attend, and those voluntary costs that you spend other places to make your learning experience easier. You don't NEED a bookbag to attend a class, you choose to buy one if you want it to make your life easier. You don't NEED to buy pencils just so you can attend a class. (You can borrow them from your roommate, have your parents send you a dozen every week, or simply never use a pencil.)
Buying the book for a class is currently in the voluntary category, not covered by class enrollment fees. That puts the costs of books in a different category than class fees.
Now, the suggestion I REPLIED TO, which you keep ignoring, was the application of this restricted gift card system to enrollment fees. That means the Uni would charge you a MANDATORY fee for the book and hand you a gift card that could only be used to buy that book. If you already have the book, too bad. If you didn't want to buy the book, too bad. You pay the Uni for the privilege of attending class, and if you don't pay for the book, too, you don't get enrolled.
You don't seem to think that is a bad idea since apparently you think the cost of the book is a mandatory cost of attending class already. God, I hope you aren't an accounting major, if you can't identify different kinds of costs and how to apply them to real life situations.
The not allowing of alt browsers is hardly MS's biggest transgression. Not allowing for alternative boot loaders was.
No, forcing hardware vendors to sell a Windows license with every system they sold if they wanted to sell them with any system was. As an early linux adopter, I got really tired of paying extra for MS-DOS, and then Windows, on every system I bought, just so I could wipe the disk and install something usable. I was never prevented from installing an "alternative boot loader". Lilo never complained that it couldn't write itself to the MBA.
By the way, I was buying systems with taxpayer dollars. If you paid taxes in the US in the late 90's, you were helping to send money to MS. Bill sends his thanks.
Im at Uni right now, and while the costs of text books really are heinous (as are the per-semester customizations that make resale value 0), you dont really HAVE to buy all of the books-- you can rent, or do without in many cases, or sit next to someone else who did get it.
That's right. RIGHT NOW you don't have to buy any of the textbooks. Nobody asks you to show the textbook before you get the grade. If they do, you can still borrow someone else's.
Did you miss the part of what I replied to that talked about making the cost of the book a part of the course FEES and you get a gift card that will let you buy nothing but a copy of the book?
Regardless, the cost of the book is part of the cost of taking the class.
No, right now, it isn't. As you just said, "you can rent, or do without in many cases, or sit next to someone else who did get it". The fees for the class do NOT include a book.
... Im not really sure this qualifies as a major issue faced by students today.
I didn't say it did. I simply made my opinion on forcing people to pay for a book as part of the fees for a class crystal clear. However, I think that the number of students who complain about the price of a book today will be greatly outnumbered by the students who complain about being forced to pay for the same book as part of the course fees every time they take a class that requires it.
Imagine taking Physics 101 and 102. Imagine having the physics text be part of the course fees -- for both courses. Imagine the ingenuity of the administration of the UNI when they make the book you buy through the course fees be the electronic copy, which you cannot resell and cannot use after the DRM times out at the end of the term.
This may not be a major issue for some. I think it will be for many.
Imagine taking a class at a UNI, and the enrollment fees include a giftcard for the required text book.
Imagine taking a class at a UNI and having the cost of the book NOT be part of the cost of the class, so that someone who already has the book won't have to pay for something they already have, and someone who can buy it cheaper used can save a bundle of money doing that.
Imagine a UNI system that wasn't so money oriented that it didn't force people to buy books they didn't want by charging them upfront in the fees to take the class.
Ahh Wendy, I'm such a dreamer.
that we may have something a bit more modern than XP.
I'm sorry, but I just don't understand this "it is more modern, we must use it" attitude.
As long as it does what you need done, WHY do you care how "modern" it is? The only reason I can see that "modern" matters is because of the idjits who also think "modern" is important and deliberately write software that won't run on older systems. I'm facing that because I run a server that uses someone like that's code. The important part runs on 2K, which I have a license for and the server runs just fine. The newer parts run only on XP, and I've had to freeze versions where I am because they chose to make it incompatible. (They use the newer features of .NET that are deliberately NOT backwards compatible so that people are forced to update not only the code they are running, but the OS AND the hardware. For a system that is run totally by volunteers. And software that has no real increase in functionality.)
Especially in a business environment where what is important that it runs your business code, why does it matter if that code runs on Vista or 7 or XP?
??? Are you confusing a password with a user id?
Why do you think that? The word was "passcode".
Since when are passwords unique between users?
What does that have to do with anything? Being unique between users changes nothing. You can have the same correct passcode I do, it doesn't matter.
Passwords are unique per user ID (in this case voter ID), but I'd have to struggle to think of any system in any field where passwords must be unique *across different users*.
A useless and irrelevant stuggle, I'd say.
Wrong. Since when was there a constraint, "a person can only have one passcode that matches to a single candidate"?
In the proposed system. One correct passcode and "any number of" incorrect ones.
The person could have two different passcodes that both point to the right candidate.
And so you move on to the rest of what I wrote where I covered the case where the number of proofs needs to be 2*N+1. If there are two correct passcodes in a different system, then you make the person prove how he voted five times. Please read it all.
They could have *no* correct passcode. It's all their choice.
In which case, five "proofs" will come up with five incorrect answers and the PHB or miscreant trying to coerce your vote will know how you voted. Did you miss that the important result of the system is that nobody can force you to vote by being able to verify your vote? You're busy creating changes to the system that makes it EASIER to find out, not harder.
You enter it. It gives you the same check-up-on-it instructions and then goes back to "Would you like another confirmation?". Repeat up to MAXINT times.
And I demand that you prove to me 2*MAXINT+1 times how you voted. The majority of results will be wrong. I'll know you didn't vote for who I told you to. You lose. (I'm sure you thought "MAXINT" was some realistic limit, but you do realize that nobody will be able to memorize MAXINT of anything, nor will the system store MAXINT codes for you, so there will be a smaller, reasonable limit.)
The fact remains, once you create a system with an external verification (usable outside the scope of the voting booth) you create a system where someone can verify how you voted. It apparently doesn't matter to many people, however. I live in a state where it is possible for someone to actually give their ballot to another person to allow them to vote it. (Vote by mail, Oregon.) I live in a state where you can post your vote and never know if it got counted at all. The election officials can decide that the signature doesn't match and simply ignore your vote. Notice the large outcry against this system? Right, there isn't one. Nobody cares.
94% of the 2.4Ghz bandwidth was used, not 94% of the people were using 2.4Ghz.
No, of the 470,000 connections, 94% of them were made using 2.4GHz. Not "94% of the bandwidth was used". "Fully" is an adjective adding stress to how high the number 94% is.
They then switch units from "connections" to "systems" and report that 47% of the laptops and desktops used 5GHz. Also 2/3 of the iPads.
I suspect that laptops and certainly desktops account for very few "connections", since the connection is made once and held open. There are also a very large number of smart devices that connect and disconnect repeatedly during the day, like my fancy new smartphone. It changes connections when I walk from one end of the building to the other, and when I walk outside it changes depending on how close I am to which node. You can also count every connection from every smart device that is carried onto campus by every visitor, even if they don't authenticate. That's why the percentage of connections is so large, but I bet the percentage of bandwidth used is much different.
A university education isn't for a particular job, it's for life.
No, it's not. It's just to get your first or second job, in a particular field. 5 years out of college, your degree is hardly relevant.
You're still talking about jobs, the OP was talking about life. Not "a lifetime of jobs".
You're still trying to make people into a cog in a worker-bee existance. You're actually proving his point when you say that most of what you got out of college isn't relevant to your job. It wasn't supposed to be.
Universities are supposed to be about producing well-rounded, thinking-able people. People who can learn from history and not simply repeat it. People with horizons larger than Bofink, Idaho or whatever town you grew up in. That's a skill for life, not a particular job.
If you want job skills, that should be what a trade school teaches you. You want to learn electronics so you can be an electronics tech, go to ITI or a community college, not State U. You want IT skills and nothing else, go to an IT school.
That's how it is supposed to be.
Not true. The person says, "I only entered one passcode", and that's the end of it.
And the PHB to whom that person must prove how he voted ALSO votes in the same area and knows that there are "any number of alternative passcodes" that will return the wrong answer. He is not permitted to enter the same passcode more than once while proving how he voted, so "entered one passcode" is false.
Where you came to the conclusion that there's precisely three, I have no clue.
Where you came to the conclusion I said that there were only three I have no clue.
Three is the minimum number of responses required to get a definitive answer to the question "how did you vote?" If you have the person prove how he voted using one passcode, he could either enter the right passcode or the wrong passcode, so you have either one answer that is right or one that is wrong. You can't tell.
If you have him do it twice with different codes, he either does it once with the right one and once with the wrong one, or twice with wrong ones. If he does the former, you get two different answers and no indication which is correct. If he does the latter, you get two of the same answer and you know the correct answer is the opposite.
So, if you have him do it three times, he either enters the right passcode one time or no times, giving you either a set of responses with one correct and two incorrect answers, or a set of three identical (incorrect) answers. In either case, the majority wins, and the majority of answers will be the WRONG ones.
Now, you could try to fix the problem by having an unknown number of correct passcodes to go with the incorrect ones, but that would require people to memorize many sets of passcodes, and that's not practical. It will be bad enough that they need to memorize one passcode. Can you imagine the furor that would erupt when someone forgets their correct passcode and goes online to see if their vote was recorded correctly? "Hey! You got my vote WRONG!" Chaos, cries of corruption and vote rigging, all kinds of stuff. All because people forgot their correct passcode and got the wrong answer back from an incorrect one -- by design.
This problem is very similar to the "pulling socks at random from the drawer" problem. How many socks do you need to pull from a drawer to get a matched pair, if there are two colors? Three guarantees a match. Not quite the same, because the sock problem answer is just "number of colors plus one", and the passcode problem is "number of correct passcodes times two plus one." (Three correct passcodes means PHB make you prove your vote seven times. At best, you can get three correct answers back using different passcodes. The other four will be wrong, and the majority still wins.)
'cos the US is the only country on earth with juries and fair trials.
'cos the US has diplomats in many countries that don't. 'cos the US grants diplomatic immunity to those countries when they have diplomats here. 'cos Iraq could easily turn into a country that has neither trials nor juries. 'cos its peaceful neighbor Iran has problems with the same thing.
And US soldiers, spies and mercenaries have no history of massacre, murder and rape in the region.
Not the massive, overwhelming kind that your statement implies.
The Wyden campaign was the one that started the dirty ads. As for representing "actual human beings", well, thanks so much for the kind words. He doesn't represent me very well. Does that make me not a human in your opinion?
He is great for the liberals that make up the two major cities in Oregon. He grabs onto a lot of hot-button issues but then never delivers. He's got the union backing, but apparently we should believe that they wouldn't listen to him regarding running this campaign ad. Plausible deniablility?
Of course, your opinion of him may differ, and that's why the US is so nice.
"I'd like to order a couple of Wydens for my state, is Oregon going to be making any more or do you guys want the monopoly on politicians with heads outside their asses?"
You do realize you are talking about the fellow who, when running against Gordon Smith for the senate, promised to run a clean, above-board respectable campaign based on issues and not mudslinging? And then two days later the "Smith killed a kid" ads started showing up?
Smith owns a food processing company. A young worker there died in an accident. The ads made it out that Smith was personally responsible for the death. Two days after those ads appeared, Smith appeared in ads with the kids parents, who supported Smith and made it clear it was an accident and Smith wasn't at fault.
Yeah, that's the guy. You can have him.
There are some solutions to this, of course -- for example, allowing the user to enter a passcode to see the real vote and any number of alternative passcodes to get to see fake votes registered to them. So they can still check up on their vote with their real passcode but can "prove" a fake vote to someone else with a fake passcode. Nobody can thus be assured that they successfully pressured someone to vote the way they wanted.
"Show me how you voted."
"Ok, now show me how you voted using a different passcode."
"Ok, now show me how you voted using another different passcode."
At a minimum, two out of three times the answer will be opposite the truth. If all three match, then all three are wrong. Even Dilbert's PHB would be able to figure that one out.
If you say "send back random answers for invalid passcodes", you've just put the kneecaps of your voter in jeopardy since 50% of the time the "proof" of the correct vote will be wrong. The only safe way out of that dilemma is for the voter to vote the way he was told, which means that the coercion worked, and the system to prevent the possibility of such coercion has failed.
Redeeming your own property isn't the same as a second-hand sale
According to the La law, yes, it is. Sell something to a second-hand dealer, it becomes his. Buy it back, it's secondhand. Used. You wouldn't pay new price to get back something you sold him, would you?
And you don't even need to take back physical possession - they can rip it up in front of you.
Physical possession isn't the definition of ownership. If I loan you a book, I still own the book, but I don't have physical possession. You own the check when you buy it back secondhand, you've just told the person holding it to rip it up for you.
Direct democracy is 3 wolves and 1 sheep voting on who gets eaten for dinner. Compromise is 3 wolves and 1 sheep agreeing to only eat half the sheep.
I wish I had mod points today.
We've got a system that was designed to be democratic while also eternally preserving the rights of that sheep. It's not ideal, but compromise, consensus, direct democracy? Good fucking lord those ideas are so much worse
I wish I could give you two ++ mod points that I don't have today.
There it really is a debt that needs to be paid as you have already received your food and/or drink. I wonder if all you had was cash and they refused your payment if you would still be legally required to pay?
If they told you ahead of time that they didn't accept cash and you went ahead and ordered anyway, then yes, you are legally required to pay. They put a legal precondition on the sale, you accepted that condition.
There is a local gas station in town that doesn't accept $50 bills. They post this quite prominently, and every time I stop and say "fill for cash" they remind me before they start that they don't take $50 bills. Were I to whip out a fifty and say "that's all I got, take it or leave it", I'm still legally obligated to pay.
It took the federal government five days to get boots on the ground.
That's a failure of the state government, which adamantly refused to take the one step required to get the feds "on the ground".
I prefer a federal government that doesn't come busting into every state matter without being asked, thank you very much.
Have them pay with a cheque, then redeem their own cheque immediately for cash. Problem solved.
So you're saying they should sell you a second-hand check for cash?
Other motive?
Law enforcement: when someone steals your stereo and sells it to the second hand shop, they'll have a record of who did it, and when someone buys it from that shop before you find out and can recover it, you can find it and get it back.
i go once a year and it's always full. people too cheap to pay for internet and asian kids.
Yeah, if you are too cheap to pay for an asian kid, you shouldn't have one. After all, what's he going to do after school if you can't afford internet for him to surf?
I mean, The Lord of the Rings was a good book, but sci-fi it ain't, and it's not the same kind of book as The Martian Chronicles or real sci-fi.
The interactive selection was a joke. There are so many places where you are asked "A or not A" and then wind up with only B as a possibility. You want space, but "not too far"? Mars vs. the rest of the universe. Sigh.
Newton's laws of motion don't discuss momentum at all.
The second law states that the net force on a particle is equal to the time rate of change of its linear momentum p in an inertial reference frame
You're right on the square. Same argument. The energy goes as the square. Ban anything going faster than 5 MPH because it is unsafe. Science says so.
But even that doesn't really determine how bad an accident is
Laws don't deal with any specific accident, they deal with trying to prevent them altogether, or lessening the overall damage. Science says that the energy goes up as the square, which is good enough to justify a very very low speed limit everywhere. For safety. Ignoring all other concerns.
I'm not sure where you've got the idea that science is so limited in its scope.
And I have no idea where you got the idea I said anything of the sort.
I'm not sure how science could result in laws without any consideration for anything else.
Then you haven't been reading this thread. We're talking about the application of science to "pubic policy" and laws. Science can easily result in laws without consideration for anything else if you demand that science be the basis for laws.
You'll note, if you read carefully, that this has nothing at all to do with pseudo or junk science, and nothing really to do with ice cream. Ice cream was one trivial example. Real science, used as the basis for law, is just as bad as pseudo or junk science.
Now, stop telling people I'm scared that someone is going to use junk science to take my ice cream away, dipshit.
Obfuscant is clearly scared of psuedoscience being used to justify policy decisions that will come after him and other ice-cream eaters.
You are clearly a moron, because you want to put words in other people's mouths.
The whole idea of the founders was to put a second party into the Congress that was indirectly responsible to the people (via their elected state houses), but not popularly elected, and thus less subject to the passions of the moment.
The reason they weren't elected, and why there are two for every state, is that they were intended to be the body that looked out for the interests of the country as a whole and not the specific interests of the state they came from or the voters therein. Ratification of treaties falls squarely under that baliwick, since treaties tend to have an impact on the entire country and not just one or two states. Ditto federal appointments.
The 17th amendment was a big mistake, because now all we have are people looking out for their own skins and getting re-elected instead of looking out for the US. This has turned the Senate into nothing more than a posh version of the House.