But you're *not* being forced where I live. You just don't have to jump through hoops to vote.
Then it isn't mandatory, and you are arguing for no reason. You don't have to jump through hoops in the US, either. At least not in many places -- and none of those places have mandatory voting.
So, explain to me what you meant when you asked why mandatory voting was NOT a problem in your country, if you don't actually have mandatory voting. Apparently it is NOT a problem in YOUR country because it is NOT mandatory in YOUR country, either.
Your fantasy of arrest is what fuels your stupid rant,
If the state makes something mandatory, it also provides a punishment. Fine, arrest, whatever, the concept is that you think you are going to punish people for not voting when there are any number of reasons why that is impractical at best and unethical at worst.
Compulsory voting is enforced with fines.
You're ignoring the concepts because you don't like one specific word. It doesn't matter if it is a fine or jail time, it is punishing people for exercising what should be a basic human right, the right not to vote.
Response was to "how do you prosecute?". Figure out the local terms on your own,
Well, I already dealt with the "local terms" to show that your suggestion is meaningless. "Honestly, officer, I put my ballot in the mail on October 21st. I don't know why you didn't get it." You're going to prosecute for that? I doubt you're going to get very far.
Mail voting should be illegal
If I had mod points, I'd give you +1 funny. Not only will you not change how Oregon does it now, we've got an unreasonably-well respected Senator who is pushing the concept in Congress (Wyden). It's more likely to come to other parts of the country than to be made illegal, for the simple reason that the easier you make it for people who don't care about the process to vote, the easier it is to get votes through advertising or "benefits".
National obligation implies that voting becomes a holiday,
I'm sorry that your voting experience is limited to where you vote, but I can assure you, there is no such implication as a general rule. Even in states with polling stations and individual registrations, absentee and late hours removes the need for another national holiday.
On last point, you don't understand government imposes its will on all people governed so then for democracy to function all people must have a direct vote in deciding that government.
No, I understand that very well. And they DO have a vote -- IF THEY WANT IT. If they don't want it, then that's their right.
There are no exceptions.
That points directly to my comment about "freedom", and freedom from a totalitarian state that mandates voting in every election is just one example of such.
As just a trivial example of "exception", how about this? I'm traveling in Brazil on National Mandatory Show Up At A Polling Station and Vote Day. How do I vote, and how do I avoid being arrested upon my return to the country? Oh, wait, elections are a state process at the highest level, so my STATE would need to arrest me. And no exceptions for me. I'd just love having that amount of "freedom" from my government.
people brought over as slaves were given arbitrary english names in many cases.
As were many people from countries with difficult-to-pronounce or spell monikers given simple names by the immigration officials when they got off the boat. It wasn't an exclusive problem at the time.
I would think that a citizen being allowed to vote
Well, there's a big difference between whatever country you live in and the US. "Allowed to vote" is a clue.
implicitly entails more freedom than having to beg the state to graciously allow poor old me to vote before I get to vote.
Another difference, it appears. "Beg the state" is a clue.
Having the freedom to ignore the process is more freedom than being forced to vote even if you don't care. Making it mandatory for people who already vote changes nothing for them. Putting a legal obligation and penalties on those who choose not to is a big difference for them, and will simply result in a lot of people who know nothing at all about the candidates or the issues voting for... anyone at all.
The point is simple: if you care enough about the result and have preferences in the candidates and issues, then you are already able to vote. It's just not that hard. If you don't care, then I am quite happy that you be left alone. We would prefer that the results of an election are a true representation of the will of the people, and people who have no will at all shouldn't count either way.
And considering constitutions, this is one of its articles around here.
Well, like I already said, the US isn't the same country as where you live, apparently, so there is likely to be some differences.
Through individual registration at each polling station.
I have no idea what this sentence fragment refers to.
What is a "polling station"? What is "individual registration"? Here in Oregon, everyone who gets a driver's license is automatically registered. There is nothing "individual" about the process. And we vote by mail, so there is no "polling station".
Advantages include requiring time off legal obligation
Simply saying "obligatory voting" does not imply "time off legal obligation". Even in places where there are polls, the polls are open long after the normal workday ends, and there is absentee for anyone who cannot make it to the poll on that day.
increasing availability and representation
It's hard to get more availability than "mailbox" and "automatic registration". Increasing "availability" by sending ballots to people who truly do not care enough about the system to take the simple step of registering does not increase representation, it increases the number of ballots that get thrown into the trash, or available for misuse.
Guess what democracy is based on?
Voluntary participation of an educated electorate.
By not voting. How is any law violated? Given the number of ways a ballot can be lost between the voter and the election office, how do you prosecute?
Come to think of it, how is everyone being automatically registered to vote NOT a huge problem in my country?
I don't know what country you live in, so I can't tell you. If it's the US, it has to do with some small concepts like "freedom" and "Constitution" and "First Amendment" stuff. Otherwise, who knows?
You Americans seem to have awfully peculiar problems.
Yes, we (the USA, not "Americans") are a different country, which is not a bad thing.
The fact is they are purging the voter rolls for no good reason.
No, they are doing it for a good reason, but the data is not sufficient to the task. Its lack of "sufficient" applies across the board, to John Smith and Chan'e'qua N'Gboro both.
That's what US right-wingers are probably scared of.
EVERYONE in the US should be scared of this. It would force people who give absolutely zero shit about the process to vote. It would increase the effect of political advertising because the pool of people who would vote based on name recognition or sound bites would be vastly larger. It would increase the likelyhood of vote fraud because everyone would be registered, so it would be much easier to pick names of people who won't vote to use fraudulently. It would also increase the opportunity for spouses or employers or others to vote on someone's behalf because people who don't give a single damn about voting would be sent a ballot -- in states with vote-by-mail.
No, forcing people to vote is not the right way to solve any problem.
Plenty of people around the world really don't mind Facebook knowing who they are - they just want to hide from their government,
Facebook, as a corporation, is a creation of the government, and the government has methods of getting information from them. In the US, that's a warrant. In other countries, that may be less strenuous on the government. It may be under the table, via hacking, for example.
Facebook exists to make a profit off of the individual's information, and so may wind up selling it to that government, even indirectly. It is much safer for those who are scared of their government's knowledge of their access to a corporate resource to do so completely anonymously, which means no login to Facebook or NYT.
In that event, Tor does the job very well.
Tor has not once prevented Facebook from taking advantage of the one true product they have: the user. And they won't stop NYT from doing that, either. Tor does one job it can, but not the only job necessary.
and that municipal internet will take away from other priorities (specifically road maintenance).
The taxpayers are not a bottomless pocket. I've already pointed out, if you get a $150 million levy for a bond to build municipal internet, you are a LOT less likely to get any bonds for other things like building roads or schools or hospitals or whatever else might be more important. And the focus of the government becomes passing this bond measure instead of working on other things. They do specifically consider the timing of bond and tax measures based on likely voter reaction to being asked for too much all at one time. We've got one levy on that ballot here for Nov. 2. They've admitted that they left a couple others for next May just because taxpayers will probably vote NO on one or more of the multiple requests were they to show up at the same time. At BEST, the city who is asking for $150 million for internet on this ballot is delaying a request for $150 million for street repair, so the claim that THIS bond measure is impacting other city responsibilities is quite true.
Watching city government when there is a bond measure or tax levy on the ballot is fascinating. It truly does become a center of focus that moves a lot of people away from the jobs they are supposed to be doing and onto supporting the new tax. I can say for a fact that the current "public safety tax levy" here is taking the county sheriff away from being sheriff and making him a politician stumping for the tax. That impacts his office, and to deny that is simply loony.
This is the big league and if Comcast can't make it, they don't deserve to play.
That's a wonderful anti-Comcast rant, but any company that cannot profit in a market cannot stay in that market. If you undercut the incumbent provider of a service by first regulating them so they MUST provide less profitable services and then cherry-pick the high-profit services away from them with prices that don't have to include many cost centers the incumbent has, then you drive out competition. And you do so unfairly because you are writing the rules for your competitor and yourself, and your rules are a lot less restrictive than theirs.
The sole reason the city is looking into this is that the "market" has failed to provide the options that many of us want,
And why do you think the market has failed to do that? Could it be because there is no profit in providing the service you want at the low price you want to pay for it? So the answer is to drive out any competition by having a taxpayer backed city company do it?
I'd love a lot of things that aren't available at the price I want to pay. I'd love the city to provide cheap aircraft rentals, for example. I think $100/hr is just way too much. I'd prefer $50/hr. City, step up and do it so I can have what I want.
The franchise model is a choice a city makes coupled with an agreement with a franchisee to provide access to the internet to the people in the city.
If the franchisee is not living up to the agreement, the proper solution is to enforce the existing agreement. The proper solution is not to ignore the existing agreement and create a new competitor without any such agreements.
When better options become available, it is the city's duty to explore them. Comcast is working hard to prevent this
Of COURSE they are. Any sane company would try to prevent competition that doesn't have to abide by the same rules it does, from coming in and cherry-picking services and subscribers to try to put them out of business.
When you make an agreement you need to live by it, until that agreement expires. The city doesn't want to wait until the existing franchise expires, and they don't want to try enticing another company to come in and compete, so they think they can do the job themselves, ignore the rules they put on the existing competitor,
You reference the second sentence later in this diatribe, so presumably you just forgot. "The broadband budget is going to be funded 100 percent through subscriber fees,"
Which means unless they get enough subscribers, they are going to be raising rates to cover the costs, or they are going to cut services. They cannot make this guarantee otherwise. They also will have ZERO subscribers while they are building the system, but building the system requires money. This money comes from -- the taxpayers. Involuntary investors.
Why do you believe politicians when they talk about blue-sky predictions of municipal broadband, but not when they talk about other things? Are politicians honest or dishonest? Here's where the rubber hits the road for this: there is an existing history of government monitoring of public communications, yet you seem to be ready and willing to run all of your internet through the government. You are ready and willing to have all of your neighbors do the same. While you can say "I will always use Tor or a VPN", you cannot say that about your neighbors. They are going to do the same thing they do today, and you will have had a hand in getting their traffic to pass through government pipes.
Companies don't have a right to profit, nor to be protected from competition - public or otherwise.
Show me where I said they did. I said that they need to make a profit to survive, where a government does not. A company that cannot make money eventually goes out of business. A government that cannot "make a profit" raises taxes or cuts services. It is inherently unfair for a city to regulate a company to require services and then operate their own "company" that doesn't have to either make a profit or provide the same services.
As to competition, I suggest you look around. There are plenty of ISPs. If there isn't competition where you live, it's not because nobody can come try to provide it, it's because they look at the market and realize there is just not enough demand. If there were demand, someone would come serve it. ISPs are not protected from competition, there already is competition.
You see the reason we don't let large companies operate at a loss just to drive their competitors out of business is because we learned long ago that this is straight out of the monopolist playbook
We don't let companies do it, so why would we let our representatives do it? Because we would prefer a government monopoly on internet service? Really? The government wouldn't raise prices or tack on fees for this "essential service" once they are the monopoly? Really? Man, I should show you my water bill. The city government is the monopoly here. I cannot dig a well, and by law I must have city water service to keep my house from being condemned. The "water bill" doesn't just charge me for water. It charges me for the water that comes in and then goes back out as sewage. It charges me for the RAIN that might fall on my property. It charges me for BUS SERVICE because the city bus service couldn't make ends meet when it charged the people who ride them. It charges me for TREE TRIMMING. It charges me for sidewalk repairs, even though the last sidewalk repairs I had done were ordered BY THE CITY and paid for OUT OF MY POCKET directly. It charges me for street maintenance. All of that on my WATER BILL, which I think everyone would agree is a truly essential service.
No, sir, you are naive if you think a city monopoly doesn't become the dumping ground for and any all kinds of "fees" that the city thinks we citizens ought to be paying. Sometimes the city even LIES about this stuff, like the "temporary" road maintenance fee that was supposed to be used to fix two specific bits of road and then never went away. And if you think the rates won't go up ever, well. that's even more naive.
A government monopoly is perhaps the worst kind, when it drives competition out of the market.
There is little "freely" when the choice is to accept an agreement written by a more powerful entity with no possibility of negotiation or do without a facility that is in a practical sense a basic requirement of reasonable participation in society.
Cable TV is not a basic requirement. The Cable TV companies did not write the franchise agreements. I was involved in the local government when we dealt with franchises, and the one we had contained a LOT of stuff that the cable company would rather not have there. We demanded PEG facilities and complaint response rates and had authority to veto channel changes. We pissed the cable company off on a regular basis by asking for, and getting, revenue statements to make sure they were operating within the profit guidelines of the franchise, and whenever they asked for a rate increase. The city I live in now wrote in a requirement for the entire system to be upgraded to fiber long before this was a common thing. They have in writing a requirement that ANY change to service is announced to the subscribers more than 30 days in advance, although I cannot get the city to actually do anything when Comcast violates that provision.
So, you have the power structure backwards, and are assuming that because you want something is it a requirement for living.
Now, if you are actually referring to internet, then you've missed the detail that being an ISP doesn't require a franchise from the municipality or agreement from any competitor, unless you want to use the public rights-of-way to distribute your service.
Especially when civil process has apparently been manipulated to eliminate the practical possibility of competition.
"Civil process" has nothing to do with limiting competition. If you want to compete with the cable company, sign the franchise and go for it. You'll lose your socks because you'll never make a profit, but you can try. You'd be a moron to sign a franchise agreement like the ones the cable companies already have, and that's why the city is never going to do it for their services. That's one reason why a municipal internet system is operating at an unfair advantage.
If you want to compete as an ISP, which is what internet service is, go for it. Unless you want access to the local rights of way to distribute your service you don't need a franchise. You'll still need to make sure you make a profit if you want to succeed, and that's another reason why municipal internet services have an unfair advantage. They don't have to make a profit. They can operate at a loss and the general fund will bail them out.
Read a credit card agreement sometime;
Irrelevant. This analogy is so far from analogous to be laughable.
A municipality vs Comcast is a lot more balanced than J Average Citizen vs Comcast.
A fine platitude, but J Average Citizen is not trying to run an ISP. The municipality already has a franchise agreement with the cable company (but not with ISPs in general) that would put them in direct competition with a company that they regulate to some extent -- a third unfair advantage. The municipality can say "Comcast, you must do X, but we don't have to because we say we don't."
Once government creates a system of regulation that limits corporate actions or requires them, then going into direct competition without following the same rules is simply unfair and should not be an acceptable government action.
As I already pointed out, even with so-called "arbitrary precision", you can run into precision errors. No physical device can have INFINITE precision, they all have some upper limit. For a trivial example, take the square root of two, square it, subtract two, and see what your result is.
I think any reasonable user is going to respond to an answer of 1e-39 with "oh, that's zero, but isn't that interesting", not "I have to make a really really tiny shim to put under that table leg to keep it from wobbling."
I don' t think that people who don't understand computer "math" are trolling when they think they can get perfect precision because it is "a computer" and it is supposed to always give the perfect answers to "simple" problems. They're part of the generation that doesn't understand the tools they use and are shocked, I say, shocked when the "computer" tells them something that isn't perfect. That applies to "math", and to the sudden awareness that "the internet" is filled with sources that aren't vetted by experts and sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
There are two purposes for Tor. One is to prevent third parties from tracing you by monitoring your traffic. That is unchanged.
But another purpose is to prevent the SECOND party (FB, or NYT in this case) from tracing you, which having to log in completely defeats.
I don't know, so I'm asking. Is there a javascript function that could appear on a web page served via Tor from NYT or FB that would cause the browser to reach out to another website directly (not via Tor) and disclose the user's actual source IP address? Something like the one pixel images used to track users reading an email. Does the system of the Tor user force all IP traffic through Tor no matter what destination, or can stuff slip out the side, so to speak?
No, they paid $200k for advertising to express their ideas and opinions. And it isn't just "not have any competition", it is to prevent taxpayer based, non-profit, non-franchised competition. Three very important concepts.
The bonds are a burden on the taxpayer. That's who gets to pay back the money that they are borrowing to build the system. It's money taken under threat of force from everyone in a municipality. There is no risk to the investors, they are going to get their money back whether the project is a success or not. They're the rich people who are making profit by investing. The same rich people that we think already make too much money. Tax-free muni bonds are a low-risk profit maker for investors.
The system is non-profit, which means they can undercut the incumbent and force it out of business by always having lower costs. We have laws against corporations "dumping" to do this, and people routinely oppose companies like Walmart that can afford to operate at a loss for some time in a new market, but if a city can do the same thing to a for-profit that's just peachy?
And finally, the municipality is avoiding the franchise process altogether. That's the laws and contracts that require the incumbent cable company to pay fees for access to the public rights-of-way, and provide certain service guarantees like covering the entire franchise area with a variety of services, not just internet. Even if the "city broadband" pays franchise fees, they are paying them to itself and thus what one hand counts as an expense the other counts as profit.
How is it hard to imagine that any company that has invested money and time into building a system, based on contracts signed by both parties, to oppose a change that makes their contracts still binding but doesn't require those who compete with them to have the same provisions? If you ran an auto repair shop, let's say, where you had contracted with the city to lease a parcel of land from them with a provision that they'd send all city maintenance to your shop, and suddenly the city is letting a competitor use city land for their auto shop for free, paying the competitor's employees, and sending all their business to that other shop, wouldn't you object?
you forfeit your rights, you lose your $200K and you give everything built/upgraded so far to the competition you just prevented.
This is a fascinating idea, and I wonder how we apply it to other advertising. Do political candidates who spend $200k in political advertising but don't win the election owe $200k to the winning competitor and have to give the winner all of their campaign stuff? The losing political candidate did try to spend $200k to not have any competition, so why wouldn't your idea apply?
What is scarier is the "forfeit your rights". The right to free speech is kinda important. Or maybe every losing candidate in a political arena loses his right to free speech and we never hear from them again. One and done. Yeah, I like it.
If the broadband market is so underserved that cities think they have to do it, why aren't there more broadband companies springing up to serve this teeming mass of yearning netizens? You'd think that anyone who came to town offering a cheaper alternative to the incumbent, using cheaper distribution systems and not burdened by non-internet services (like paying ESPN and local broadcast carriage fees for cable TV) would be raking in cash hand over fist.
And yet, we hear that these companies don't show up. They leave the huge piles of cash on the table for the cable company to rake in. (We "hear" that, because in my city there is an alternative that uses cheaper distribution systems and is competing quite well.)
Comcast cannot stop competitors who follow the required franchise process from entering the market, so where are the competitors -- if there is a demand?
they should have reprogrammed the calculator to use a lookup table for all perfects squares between zero and
I realize that saying that process would be unwieldly probably won't deter you, so let's use some actual numbers. Let's say you have a ten digit calculator. There are 10 billion integers that can be displayed (0-9,999,999,999). Amongst those will be 100,000 exact squares. You need to have a table of 100,000 squares and their square roots.
BUT, let's not forget, your calculator can also display 2.25, which has an exact square root of 1.5. You'll want the correct answer for that. There will be an additional 3162 "perfect squares" that are numbers of the form n.5 that will have a display of ten digits or less. There will be another 316 "perfect squares" of ten digits or less that have square roots of n.25 or n.75.
Let's call it 110,000 "perfect squares" for a ten digit display. But, wait, your calculator may have more internal precision than that 10 digits, so there will be more "perfect squares" that you need to look out for. For example, 1.0078125 has a perfect square of 1.01568603515625. A ten digit display can only display part of that, but that won't prevent you from entering it and pressing "sqrt", will it?
Your "ten digit" table will need to have more than 32 bits for each integer since you only get to four billion with 32 bits. At least 33 bits. And you'll need to search that table to find out your perfect square isn't in there.
By the time you've searched the table, if you have the memory available and want to increase the cost of your calculator to include it, you could have calculated the almost perfect answer and be off by only a very very tiny amount.
As I pointed out elsewhere, if you are doing calculations for theoretical physics and need perfect answers, do it symbolically. If you are trying to figure out how long a piece of lumber to cut for a project, use your calculator that gives good enough answers. Not even the folks creating firing tables by hand using calculators cared about 1e-39 errors.
So, how are we expect to get the true math answers with these calculations then?:(
If you want "true math answers", do math symbolically instead of numerically.
There are entire books and courses on numerical methods that talk about doing calculations on numbers instead of symbols, how to minimize errors, and why they appear.
Wow, I could reproduce it easily in my updated 64-bit W7 HPE SP1 machine. Why hasn't MS fixed it?
The hatred for Microsoft runs deep in this group, to ignore the fact that the calculations are actually being done by an IEEE-754 compliant floating point processor in the Intel or AMD CPU, and not by Microsoft doing it in their code.
What's fun is having an 80 bit IEEE processing unit on a 64 bit CPU. You can get different answers depending on whether the calculations are done entirely in 80 bit FPU or 64 bit CPU.
So, it isn't Microsoft's failure to fix. It's a known limitation of using a digital computer to "do math".
You might pipe back that the computer could be written to work in arbitrary precision binary coded decimal, but that leaves the problem of errors at the edge of the precision, no matter what that precision is. Even "arbitrary" doesn't mean "unlimited", both for speed and hardware constraints.
If complex FPU math loops cause your calculator app to get wrong answers for problems a grade-school kid can do
The answers are correct to within the precision of the operation. A square root that is off by 1e-39 from the perfect answer of "2" is correct within any reasonable definition of precision.
When it comes to math, "correct" should always win.
A calculator isn't doing "math", which is a representation of reality and not reality itself. It is calculating numbers. And, because the hardware is a physical thing while math is a theoretical construct, for former cannot achieve perfection while the latter can. The fact that you have to represent a real number as a limited sum of powers of two means you can have an infinite number of "numbers" that you cannot possibly represent perfectly.
Your idea of a lookup table would be interesting, if it weren't unwieldly and horribly impractical.
Not strange at all. That is zero within "eps", and is because they are using the Intel or AMD math processor for the square root. WE look at "4" and know the square root is exactly two because we learned that. The CPU goes through a standard algorithm for determining the square root of a number, and because of the inherent imprecision of floating point math with a limited number of bits, the answer is not identical to zero because the square root of 4 is not identical to 2.
Precisely. The post i responded to said it wouldn't return 12, but it does.
Calculator on XP returns 18. Calculator on Win 7 returns 18. I don't have a simple four function calculator handy, but I would bet that it gets 18, too.
This is a problem of algebraic entry vs. RPN. The former requires look-ahead to know the right answer. "If the next operator which hasn't been pressed yet is mult or div I don't do this add or sub yet...".
The "calculator" that came stock with my Galaxy Tab doesn't do immediate operations, it records the equation you enter and then processes it when you press "=". It gets 12.
Slashdot Mirror
But you're *not* being forced where I live. You just don't have to jump through hoops to vote.
Then it isn't mandatory, and you are arguing for no reason. You don't have to jump through hoops in the US, either. At least not in many places -- and none of those places have mandatory voting.
So, explain to me what you meant when you asked why mandatory voting was NOT a problem in your country, if you don't actually have mandatory voting. Apparently it is NOT a problem in YOUR country because it is NOT mandatory in YOUR country, either.
Your fantasy of arrest is what fuels your stupid rant,
If the state makes something mandatory, it also provides a punishment. Fine, arrest, whatever, the concept is that you think you are going to punish people for not voting when there are any number of reasons why that is impractical at best and unethical at worst.
Compulsory voting is enforced with fines.
You're ignoring the concepts because you don't like one specific word. It doesn't matter if it is a fine or jail time, it is punishing people for exercising what should be a basic human right, the right not to vote.
Response was to "how do you prosecute?". Figure out the local terms on your own,
Well, I already dealt with the "local terms" to show that your suggestion is meaningless. "Honestly, officer, I put my ballot in the mail on October 21st. I don't know why you didn't get it." You're going to prosecute for that? I doubt you're going to get very far.
Mail voting should be illegal
If I had mod points, I'd give you +1 funny. Not only will you not change how Oregon does it now, we've got an unreasonably-well respected Senator who is pushing the concept in Congress (Wyden). It's more likely to come to other parts of the country than to be made illegal, for the simple reason that the easier you make it for people who don't care about the process to vote, the easier it is to get votes through advertising or "benefits".
National obligation implies that voting becomes a holiday,
I'm sorry that your voting experience is limited to where you vote, but I can assure you, there is no such implication as a general rule. Even in states with polling stations and individual registrations, absentee and late hours removes the need for another national holiday.
On last point, you don't understand government imposes its will on all people governed so then for democracy to function all people must have a direct vote in deciding that government.
No, I understand that very well. And they DO have a vote -- IF THEY WANT IT. If they don't want it, then that's their right.
There are no exceptions.
That points directly to my comment about "freedom", and freedom from a totalitarian state that mandates voting in every election is just one example of such.
As just a trivial example of "exception", how about this? I'm traveling in Brazil on National Mandatory Show Up At A Polling Station and Vote Day. How do I vote, and how do I avoid being arrested upon my return to the country? Oh, wait, elections are a state process at the highest level, so my STATE would need to arrest me. And no exceptions for me. I'd just love having that amount of "freedom" from my government.
people brought over as slaves were given arbitrary english names in many cases.
As were many people from countries with difficult-to-pronounce or spell monikers given simple names by the immigration officials when they got off the boat. It wasn't an exclusive problem at the time.
I would think that a citizen being allowed to vote
Well, there's a big difference between whatever country you live in and the US. "Allowed to vote" is a clue.
implicitly entails more freedom than having to beg the state to graciously allow poor old me to vote before I get to vote.
Another difference, it appears. "Beg the state" is a clue.
Having the freedom to ignore the process is more freedom than being forced to vote even if you don't care. Making it mandatory for people who already vote changes nothing for them. Putting a legal obligation and penalties on those who choose not to is a big difference for them, and will simply result in a lot of people who know nothing at all about the candidates or the issues voting for ... anyone at all.
The point is simple: if you care enough about the result and have preferences in the candidates and issues, then you are already able to vote. It's just not that hard. If you don't care, then I am quite happy that you be left alone. We would prefer that the results of an election are a true representation of the will of the people, and people who have no will at all shouldn't count either way.
And considering constitutions, this is one of its articles around here.
Well, like I already said, the US isn't the same country as where you live, apparently, so there is likely to be some differences.
Through individual registration at each polling station.
I have no idea what this sentence fragment refers to.
What is a "polling station"? What is "individual registration"? Here in Oregon, everyone who gets a driver's license is automatically registered. There is nothing "individual" about the process. And we vote by mail, so there is no "polling station".
Advantages include requiring time off legal obligation
Simply saying "obligatory voting" does not imply "time off legal obligation". Even in places where there are polls, the polls are open long after the normal workday ends, and there is absentee for anyone who cannot make it to the poll on that day.
increasing availability and representation
It's hard to get more availability than "mailbox" and "automatic registration". Increasing "availability" by sending ballots to people who truly do not care enough about the system to take the simple step of registering does not increase representation, it increases the number of ballots that get thrown into the trash, or available for misuse.
Guess what democracy is based on?
Voluntary participation of an educated electorate.
How do you NOT vote if it's compulsory?
By not voting. How is any law violated? Given the number of ways a ballot can be lost between the voter and the election office, how do you prosecute?
Come to think of it, how is everyone being automatically registered to vote NOT a huge problem in my country?
I don't know what country you live in, so I can't tell you. If it's the US, it has to do with some small concepts like "freedom" and "Constitution" and "First Amendment" stuff. Otherwise, who knows?
You Americans seem to have awfully peculiar problems.
Yes, we (the USA, not "Americans") are a different country, which is not a bad thing.
The fact is they are purging the voter rolls for no good reason.
No, they are doing it for a good reason, but the data is not sufficient to the task. Its lack of "sufficient" applies across the board, to John Smith and Chan'e'qua N'Gboro both.
That's what US right-wingers are probably scared of.
EVERYONE in the US should be scared of this. It would force people who give absolutely zero shit about the process to vote. It would increase the effect of political advertising because the pool of people who would vote based on name recognition or sound bites would be vastly larger. It would increase the likelyhood of vote fraud because everyone would be registered, so it would be much easier to pick names of people who won't vote to use fraudulently. It would also increase the opportunity for spouses or employers or others to vote on someone's behalf because people who don't give a single damn about voting would be sent a ballot -- in states with vote-by-mail.
No, forcing people to vote is not the right way to solve any problem.
Plenty of people around the world really don't mind Facebook knowing who they are - they just want to hide from their government,
Facebook, as a corporation, is a creation of the government, and the government has methods of getting information from them. In the US, that's a warrant. In other countries, that may be less strenuous on the government. It may be under the table, via hacking, for example.
Facebook exists to make a profit off of the individual's information, and so may wind up selling it to that government, even indirectly. It is much safer for those who are scared of their government's knowledge of their access to a corporate resource to do so completely anonymously, which means no login to Facebook or NYT.
In that event, Tor does the job very well.
Tor has not once prevented Facebook from taking advantage of the one true product they have: the user. And they won't stop NYT from doing that, either. Tor does one job it can, but not the only job necessary.
and that municipal internet will take away from other priorities (specifically road maintenance).
The taxpayers are not a bottomless pocket. I've already pointed out, if you get a $150 million levy for a bond to build municipal internet, you are a LOT less likely to get any bonds for other things like building roads or schools or hospitals or whatever else might be more important. And the focus of the government becomes passing this bond measure instead of working on other things. They do specifically consider the timing of bond and tax measures based on likely voter reaction to being asked for too much all at one time. We've got one levy on that ballot here for Nov. 2. They've admitted that they left a couple others for next May just because taxpayers will probably vote NO on one or more of the multiple requests were they to show up at the same time. At BEST, the city who is asking for $150 million for internet on this ballot is delaying a request for $150 million for street repair, so the claim that THIS bond measure is impacting other city responsibilities is quite true.
Watching city government when there is a bond measure or tax levy on the ballot is fascinating. It truly does become a center of focus that moves a lot of people away from the jobs they are supposed to be doing and onto supporting the new tax. I can say for a fact that the current "public safety tax levy" here is taking the county sheriff away from being sheriff and making him a politician stumping for the tax. That impacts his office, and to deny that is simply loony.
This is the big league and if Comcast can't make it, they don't deserve to play.
That's a wonderful anti-Comcast rant, but any company that cannot profit in a market cannot stay in that market. If you undercut the incumbent provider of a service by first regulating them so they MUST provide less profitable services and then cherry-pick the high-profit services away from them with prices that don't have to include many cost centers the incumbent has, then you drive out competition. And you do so unfairly because you are writing the rules for your competitor and yourself, and your rules are a lot less restrictive than theirs.
The sole reason the city is looking into this is that the "market" has failed to provide the options that many of us want,
And why do you think the market has failed to do that? Could it be because there is no profit in providing the service you want at the low price you want to pay for it? So the answer is to drive out any competition by having a taxpayer backed city company do it?
I'd love a lot of things that aren't available at the price I want to pay. I'd love the city to provide cheap aircraft rentals, for example. I think $100/hr is just way too much. I'd prefer $50/hr. City, step up and do it so I can have what I want.
The franchise model is a choice a city makes coupled with an agreement with a franchisee to provide access to the internet to the people in the city.
If the franchisee is not living up to the agreement, the proper solution is to enforce the existing agreement. The proper solution is not to ignore the existing agreement and create a new competitor without any such agreements.
When better options become available, it is the city's duty to explore them. Comcast is working hard to prevent this
Of COURSE they are. Any sane company would try to prevent competition that doesn't have to abide by the same rules it does, from coming in and cherry-picking services and subscribers to try to put them out of business.
When you make an agreement you need to live by it, until that agreement expires. The city doesn't want to wait until the existing franchise expires, and they don't want to try enticing another company to come in and compete, so they think they can do the job themselves, ignore the rules they put on the existing competitor,
You reference the second sentence later in this diatribe, so presumably you just forgot. "The broadband budget is going to be funded 100 percent through subscriber fees,"
Which means unless they get enough subscribers, they are going to be raising rates to cover the costs, or they are going to cut services. They cannot make this guarantee otherwise. They also will have ZERO subscribers while they are building the system, but building the system requires money. This money comes from -- the taxpayers. Involuntary investors.
Why do you believe politicians when they talk about blue-sky predictions of municipal broadband, but not when they talk about other things? Are politicians honest or dishonest? Here's where the rubber hits the road for this: there is an existing history of government monitoring of public communications, yet you seem to be ready and willing to run all of your internet through the government. You are ready and willing to have all of your neighbors do the same. While you can say "I will always use Tor or a VPN", you cannot say that about your neighbors. They are going to do the same thing they do today, and you will have had a hand in getting their traffic to pass through government pipes.
Companies don't have a right to profit, nor to be protected from competition - public or otherwise.
Show me where I said they did. I said that they need to make a profit to survive, where a government does not. A company that cannot make money eventually goes out of business. A government that cannot "make a profit" raises taxes or cuts services. It is inherently unfair for a city to regulate a company to require services and then operate their own "company" that doesn't have to either make a profit or provide the same services.
As to competition, I suggest you look around. There are plenty of ISPs. If there isn't competition where you live, it's not because nobody can come try to provide it, it's because they look at the market and realize there is just not enough demand. If there were demand, someone would come serve it. ISPs are not protected from competition, there already is competition.
You see the reason we don't let large companies operate at a loss just to drive their competitors out of business is because we learned long ago that this is straight out of the monopolist playbook
We don't let companies do it, so why would we let our representatives do it? Because we would prefer a government monopoly on internet service? Really? The government wouldn't raise prices or tack on fees for this "essential service" once they are the monopoly? Really? Man, I should show you my water bill. The city government is the monopoly here. I cannot dig a well, and by law I must have city water service to keep my house from being condemned. The "water bill" doesn't just charge me for water. It charges me for the water that comes in and then goes back out as sewage. It charges me for the RAIN that might fall on my property. It charges me for BUS SERVICE because the city bus service couldn't make ends meet when it charged the people who ride them. It charges me for TREE TRIMMING. It charges me for sidewalk repairs, even though the last sidewalk repairs I had done were ordered BY THE CITY and paid for OUT OF MY POCKET directly. It charges me for street maintenance. All of that on my WATER BILL, which I think everyone would agree is a truly essential service.
No, sir, you are naive if you think a city monopoly doesn't become the dumping ground for and any all kinds of "fees" that the city thinks we citizens ought to be paying. Sometimes the city even LIES about this stuff, like the "temporary" road maintenance fee that was supposed to be used to fix two specific bits of road and then never went away. And if you think the rates won't go up ever, well. that's even more naive.
A government monopoly is perhaps the worst kind, when it drives competition out of the market.
There is little "freely" when the choice is to accept an agreement written by a more powerful entity with no possibility of negotiation or do without a facility that is in a practical sense a basic requirement of reasonable participation in society.
Cable TV is not a basic requirement. The Cable TV companies did not write the franchise agreements. I was involved in the local government when we dealt with franchises, and the one we had contained a LOT of stuff that the cable company would rather not have there. We demanded PEG facilities and complaint response rates and had authority to veto channel changes. We pissed the cable company off on a regular basis by asking for, and getting, revenue statements to make sure they were operating within the profit guidelines of the franchise, and whenever they asked for a rate increase. The city I live in now wrote in a requirement for the entire system to be upgraded to fiber long before this was a common thing. They have in writing a requirement that ANY change to service is announced to the subscribers more than 30 days in advance, although I cannot get the city to actually do anything when Comcast violates that provision.
So, you have the power structure backwards, and are assuming that because you want something is it a requirement for living.
Now, if you are actually referring to internet, then you've missed the detail that being an ISP doesn't require a franchise from the municipality or agreement from any competitor, unless you want to use the public rights-of-way to distribute your service.
Especially when civil process has apparently been manipulated to eliminate the practical possibility of competition.
"Civil process" has nothing to do with limiting competition. If you want to compete with the cable company, sign the franchise and go for it. You'll lose your socks because you'll never make a profit, but you can try. You'd be a moron to sign a franchise agreement like the ones the cable companies already have, and that's why the city is never going to do it for their services. That's one reason why a municipal internet system is operating at an unfair advantage.
If you want to compete as an ISP, which is what internet service is, go for it. Unless you want access to the local rights of way to distribute your service you don't need a franchise. You'll still need to make sure you make a profit if you want to succeed, and that's another reason why municipal internet services have an unfair advantage. They don't have to make a profit. They can operate at a loss and the general fund will bail them out.
Read a credit card agreement sometime;
Irrelevant. This analogy is so far from analogous to be laughable.
A municipality vs Comcast is a lot more balanced than J Average Citizen vs Comcast.
A fine platitude, but J Average Citizen is not trying to run an ISP. The municipality already has a franchise agreement with the cable company (but not with ISPs in general) that would put them in direct competition with a company that they regulate to some extent -- a third unfair advantage. The municipality can say "Comcast, you must do X, but we don't have to because we say we don't."
Once government creates a system of regulation that limits corporate actions or requires them, then going into direct competition without following the same rules is simply unfair and should not be an acceptable government action.
I think any reasonable user is going to respond to an answer of 1e-39 with "oh, that's zero, but isn't that interesting", not "I have to make a really really tiny shim to put under that table leg to keep it from wobbling."
if round(result) squared = initial number then result = round(result)
round(1.5) squared is 4, which is not the initial number 2.25. Algorithm fails.
round (result squared) would be 2, also not 2.25.
uh, he's trolling.
I don' t think that people who don't understand computer "math" are trolling when they think they can get perfect precision because it is "a computer" and it is supposed to always give the perfect answers to "simple" problems. They're part of the generation that doesn't understand the tools they use and are shocked, I say, shocked when the "computer" tells them something that isn't perfect. That applies to "math", and to the sudden awareness that "the internet" is filled with sources that aren't vetted by experts and sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
It seems to defeat the whole purpose
There are two purposes for Tor. One is to prevent third parties from tracing you by monitoring your traffic. That is unchanged.
But another purpose is to prevent the SECOND party (FB, or NYT in this case) from tracing you, which having to log in completely defeats.
I don't know, so I'm asking. Is there a javascript function that could appear on a web page served via Tor from NYT or FB that would cause the browser to reach out to another website directly (not via Tor) and disclose the user's actual source IP address? Something like the one pixel images used to track users reading an email. Does the system of the Tor user force all IP traffic through Tor no matter what destination, or can stuff slip out the side, so to speak?
You paid $200K to not have any competition?
No, they paid $200k for advertising to express their ideas and opinions. And it isn't just "not have any competition", it is to prevent taxpayer based, non-profit, non-franchised competition. Three very important concepts.
The bonds are a burden on the taxpayer. That's who gets to pay back the money that they are borrowing to build the system. It's money taken under threat of force from everyone in a municipality. There is no risk to the investors, they are going to get their money back whether the project is a success or not. They're the rich people who are making profit by investing. The same rich people that we think already make too much money. Tax-free muni bonds are a low-risk profit maker for investors.
The system is non-profit, which means they can undercut the incumbent and force it out of business by always having lower costs. We have laws against corporations "dumping" to do this, and people routinely oppose companies like Walmart that can afford to operate at a loss for some time in a new market, but if a city can do the same thing to a for-profit that's just peachy?
And finally, the municipality is avoiding the franchise process altogether. That's the laws and contracts that require the incumbent cable company to pay fees for access to the public rights-of-way, and provide certain service guarantees like covering the entire franchise area with a variety of services, not just internet. Even if the "city broadband" pays franchise fees, they are paying them to itself and thus what one hand counts as an expense the other counts as profit.
How is it hard to imagine that any company that has invested money and time into building a system, based on contracts signed by both parties, to oppose a change that makes their contracts still binding but doesn't require those who compete with them to have the same provisions? If you ran an auto repair shop, let's say, where you had contracted with the city to lease a parcel of land from them with a provision that they'd send all city maintenance to your shop, and suddenly the city is letting a competitor use city land for their auto shop for free, paying the competitor's employees, and sending all their business to that other shop, wouldn't you object?
you forfeit your rights, you lose your $200K and you give everything built/upgraded so far to the competition you just prevented.
This is a fascinating idea, and I wonder how we apply it to other advertising. Do political candidates who spend $200k in political advertising but don't win the election owe $200k to the winning competitor and have to give the winner all of their campaign stuff? The losing political candidate did try to spend $200k to not have any competition, so why wouldn't your idea apply?
What is scarier is the "forfeit your rights". The right to free speech is kinda important. Or maybe every losing candidate in a political arena loses his right to free speech and we never hear from them again. One and done. Yeah, I like it.
If the broadband market is so underserved that cities think they have to do it, why aren't there more broadband companies springing up to serve this teeming mass of yearning netizens? You'd think that anyone who came to town offering a cheaper alternative to the incumbent, using cheaper distribution systems and not burdened by non-internet services (like paying ESPN and local broadcast carriage fees for cable TV) would be raking in cash hand over fist.
And yet, we hear that these companies don't show up. They leave the huge piles of cash on the table for the cable company to rake in. (We "hear" that, because in my city there is an alternative that uses cheaper distribution systems and is competing quite well.)
Comcast cannot stop competitors who follow the required franchise process from entering the market, so where are the competitors -- if there is a demand?
The fine article tries to point out that the
Math is a technical subject, as are numerical methods. It's the guts of a computer, did you think it would be baling wire and spit?
they should have reprogrammed the calculator to use a lookup table for all perfects squares between zero and
I realize that saying that process would be unwieldly probably won't deter you, so let's use some actual numbers. Let's say you have a ten digit calculator. There are 10 billion integers that can be displayed (0-9,999,999,999). Amongst those will be 100,000 exact squares. You need to have a table of 100,000 squares and their square roots.
BUT, let's not forget, your calculator can also display 2.25, which has an exact square root of 1.5. You'll want the correct answer for that. There will be an additional 3162 "perfect squares" that are numbers of the form n.5 that will have a display of ten digits or less. There will be another 316 "perfect squares" of ten digits or less that have square roots of n.25 or n.75.
Let's call it 110,000 "perfect squares" for a ten digit display. But, wait, your calculator may have more internal precision than that 10 digits, so there will be more "perfect squares" that you need to look out for. For example, 1.0078125 has a perfect square of 1.01568603515625. A ten digit display can only display part of that, but that won't prevent you from entering it and pressing "sqrt", will it?
Your "ten digit" table will need to have more than 32 bits for each integer since you only get to four billion with 32 bits. At least 33 bits. And you'll need to search that table to find out your perfect square isn't in there.
By the time you've searched the table, if you have the memory available and want to increase the cost of your calculator to include it, you could have calculated the almost perfect answer and be off by only a very very tiny amount.
As I pointed out elsewhere, if you are doing calculations for theoretical physics and need perfect answers, do it symbolically. If you are trying to figure out how long a piece of lumber to cut for a project, use your calculator that gives good enough answers. Not even the folks creating firing tables by hand using calculators cared about 1e-39 errors.
So, how are we expect to get the true math answers with these calculations then? :(
If you want "true math answers", do math symbolically instead of numerically.
There are entire books and courses on numerical methods that talk about doing calculations on numbers instead of symbols, how to minimize errors, and why they appear.
Wow, I could reproduce it easily in my updated 64-bit W7 HPE SP1 machine. Why hasn't MS fixed it?
The hatred for Microsoft runs deep in this group, to ignore the fact that the calculations are actually being done by an IEEE-754 compliant floating point processor in the Intel or AMD CPU, and not by Microsoft doing it in their code.
What's fun is having an 80 bit IEEE processing unit on a 64 bit CPU. You can get different answers depending on whether the calculations are done entirely in 80 bit FPU or 64 bit CPU.
So, it isn't Microsoft's failure to fix. It's a known limitation of using a digital computer to "do math".
You might pipe back that the computer could be written to work in arbitrary precision binary coded decimal, but that leaves the problem of errors at the edge of the precision, no matter what that precision is. Even "arbitrary" doesn't mean "unlimited", both for speed and hardware constraints.
If complex FPU math loops cause your calculator app to get wrong answers for problems a grade-school kid can do
The answers are correct to within the precision of the operation. A square root that is off by 1e-39 from the perfect answer of "2" is correct within any reasonable definition of precision.
When it comes to math, "correct" should always win.
A calculator isn't doing "math", which is a representation of reality and not reality itself. It is calculating numbers. And, because the hardware is a physical thing while math is a theoretical construct, for former cannot achieve perfection while the latter can. The fact that you have to represent a real number as a limited sum of powers of two means you can have an infinite number of "numbers" that you cannot possibly represent perfectly.
Your idea of a lookup table would be interesting, if it weren't unwieldly and horribly impractical.
How strange.
Not strange at all. That is zero within "eps", and is because they are using the Intel or AMD math processor for the square root. WE look at "4" and know the square root is exactly two because we learned that. The CPU goes through a standard algorithm for determining the square root of a number, and because of the inherent imprecision of floating point math with a limited number of bits, the answer is not identical to zero because the square root of 4 is not identical to 2.
Precisely. The post i responded to said it wouldn't return 12, but it does.
Calculator on XP returns 18. Calculator on Win 7 returns 18. I don't have a simple four function calculator handy, but I would bet that it gets 18, too.
This is a problem of algebraic entry vs. RPN. The former requires look-ahead to know the right answer. "If the next operator which hasn't been pressed yet is mult or div I don't do this add or sub yet ...".
The "calculator" that came stock with my Galaxy Tab doesn't do immediate operations, it records the equation you enter and then processes it when you press "=". It gets 12.