It's basically taking a genetic-lineage view of nationality, which is rather race-based IMO. Someone whose ancestors were French, but who does not speak any French or have any French culture, is 0% French IMO, whereas someone who is not "of French heritage", but lives in France, speaks French, and is part of French culture, is French.
Not all European countries, but many of them have laws that if you are "ethnically" of that country's background, you can claim citizenship, but if you are not, it is much more difficult. That was what the example of "ethnic Germans" coming back from the USSR was. Similarly, I can claim Greek citizenship if I wanted to move there, simply because I'm of Greek ancestry, but a "non-ethnically-Greek" immigrant can't. Basically the European version of Israel's "law of return".
You can recount the votes ten times and get ten different numbers. You've got to pick one of them, and which one you pick is pretty arbitrary. And it's unlikely that the number of votes reported for either candidate is actually, down to the last vote, the number of votes that were cast for them.
I saw just yesterday that Switzerland defeated a bill that would make it easier for people who were born and raised in Switzerland, but do not have Swiss citizenship, to gain that citizenship. Ireland recently removed a provision that granted automatic citizenship to people born in the country. It seems the US is quickly being the only country that is inclusive of its immigrants, while Europe is maintains its historical racist policies. There's Turks who have lived in Germany for two generations and still have no citizenship, because the process is arduous. Meanwhile, "ethnic Germans" from the former USSR get pretty much automatic citizenship. Denmark won't even give citizenship to the spouses of its citizens. Etc.
The small states' people would be at the mercy of the large states' people. People in NYC and LA could pass a law lowering taxes for all people who live in large metropolitan areas, to make up just one random example. They could also get lots of "pork" projects pretty easily: a bill to send a bunch of cash to NY, CA, and TX (while excluding everyone else) could pass without too much difficulty. Etc.
If the President represents the largest possible number of Americans, that takes us one step closer to the infamous "tyrrany of the majority" that plagues democratic systems. What the President ought to do is represent the largest possible number of cultural and social groups. This is somewhat approximated by the geographical system: Originally that was a very good approximation, as travel was difficult and so the regions differed greatly; these days it's not as good an approximation, but still better than none.
This is the same reason countries get one vote each in the UN, not votes equal to their populations. If that were the case, the US would get one vote, all of Europe combined would get two votes, and China would get four votes. But that's not how it works, because the UN is not intended to represent all people equally, but all nations. Similarly, the US government should represent all groups within the US, not all US people equally.
The 2000 election was statistically a tie. Under any reasonable margin of error, the difference (under all counts, recounts, and whatever) was less than that margin of error. As any good scientist knows, most measurement systems have an accuracy, and I sincerely doubt that counting all the votes in Florida on 1970s-era punch-card tabulators has an accuracy high enough to trust a margin of under 500 votes in the entire state of Florida.
I don't much like Bush, but IMO the result was not a complete fuck-up that the "Bush stole the election" folks make it out to be. It was basically a statistical tie, and someone broke it rather arbitrarily. That's a lot different than the case in many 3rd-world countries where the guy being arbitrarily put into power is quite a bit behind his opponent, and rigs the election to make it look like he won.
The best projection site I've found so far is race2004.net. It takes into account multiple polls, while most seem to call the states based on whatever the most recent poll is. Since there is such huge volatility in polls this year, that strategy doesn't work to well.
When I use OS X, I really like Adium. It uses libgaim for its messaging, but has its own native-OSX GUI. I think the GTK gaim could learn a few things that are particularly nice about Adium too---I like how it highlights your buddy's names in the buddy list with color codes depending on current messaging status: green if they're currently typing, blue if they've typed something into a window you haven't checked since then, etc.
Well, I personally spend much less than that on hardware, but if it's your hobby and entertainment, I really don't see why so many people have a problem with it. Meanwhile, I know people who think nothing of an $100/month cable bill (gotta have all the premium channels, you know). That's $1,200/year for cable television!
A poor Vietnamese immigrant who works for a living and manages to scrape by.
A rich, privileged black kid; the son of, say, Colin Powell.
Affirmative action policies, at least as implemented in the United States, would give the second preference over the first. Unless you're simply a racist, or favor rich people over poor people, I can't see any way in which favoring rich Black and Hispanic people over poor Asian and White people is "fair". You could redo the example with a poor rural white person living in a trailer park, or with a poor Bangladeshi immigrant, or with any number of other examples, and it would still not exhibit fairness.
They support things like affirmative action, "hate crime" laws, and so on, that would use government power to enforce social policy, which is not a libertarian approach. They don't merely want fair laws that are equally applied to everyone.
Their environmental protection is not libertarian either---they want things like higher fuel taxes and emissions laws and other such government means of influencing usage patterns.
I have no problem admitting it's a government subsidy. I was taking issue with the Green Party's assertions, which you quoted, that nuclear power and nuclear waste disposal are unsafe.
I recently participated in a beta test of some of your email-tracking software. I forwarded it to ten of my friends, as requested, but have not as of yet received a check for the compensation that was promised for my participation. Is there something else I need to do to claim the money?
This isn't some newfangled use: black-hats and gray-hats have been called "hackers" forever. Wozniak and Jobs were phreakers too back in the 1970s, remember?
In most low-limit online poker games, people will go with you all the way even if they have crap. It's always going to be a showdown, so it's very hard to bluff people out of their money without having at least something that could reasonably win. So playing a fairly tight strategy works well. Especially since people rotate tables a lot (pop on to play 10 minutes during lunch break or something), so don't notice you're playing tight.
...I don't think helping anti-environmental Democrats helps. All you end up doing is promoting anti-environmentalism within the Democratic party. If you do that too much, it eventually won't make a difference which party is in power, if they both hate the environment.
How does voting for a Democrat who wants to destroy the environment, when he's running against a pro-environment Republican, help things? That's sending the message, "even if you help the environment, I'm still voting Democrat because I don't like you Republican folk." The idea is to send a message by actually voting for those who are responsible on the environment, and voting against those (like our Democratic friend from MN) who are irresponsible. Otherwise the only message you're sending is "if you want my vote, join the Democratic party, and I'll vote for you even if you make it your campaign platform to chop down trees as much as possible."
It was bad enough that you posted a somewhat clunky and not particulrly funny parody of the "this shows slashdot's anti-Microsoft" bias posts that show up now and then.
But the fact that you then felt the need to explain your painfully obvious "joke" in the second paragraph, really takes the cake.
By takes the cake, I mean your information superhighway driver's license is being revoked.
If you have been to the emergency room three separate times for a "busted open arm/leg", perhaps you need to avoid doing whatever it is that's causing that.
If you take a look at the League of Conservation Voter's identification of the worst policians in terms of environmental record, it's true that most are Republicans, but not all. In particular, if you happen to live in Minnesota's 7th district, and care about the environment, you'd do well to vote against Democrat Collin Peterson, who has one of the worst environmental records in the House.
The results he verified are so small that they don't need to be verified at all: they could be entered verbatim into the court record, and it'd be pretty obvious those 15 lines of code aren't the infringement SCO is looking for. What the evidence rests on is that the other millions of lines the program *didn't* flag aren't infringements. That means it rests entirely on what the program does, which is something ESR could better attest to, being the one who wrote it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's basically taking a genetic-lineage view of nationality, which is rather race-based IMO. Someone whose ancestors were French, but who does not speak any French or have any French culture, is 0% French IMO, whereas someone who is not "of French heritage", but lives in France, speaks French, and is part of French culture, is French.
Not all European countries, but many of them have laws that if you are "ethnically" of that country's background, you can claim citizenship, but if you are not, it is much more difficult. That was what the example of "ethnic Germans" coming back from the USSR was. Similarly, I can claim Greek citizenship if I wanted to move there, simply because I'm of Greek ancestry, but a "non-ethnically-Greek" immigrant can't. Basically the European version of Israel's "law of return".
You can recount the votes ten times and get ten different numbers. You've got to pick one of them, and which one you pick is pretty arbitrary. And it's unlikely that the number of votes reported for either candidate is actually, down to the last vote, the number of votes that were cast for them.
I saw just yesterday that Switzerland defeated a bill that would make it easier for people who were born and raised in Switzerland, but do not have Swiss citizenship, to gain that citizenship. Ireland recently removed a provision that granted automatic citizenship to people born in the country. It seems the US is quickly being the only country that is inclusive of its immigrants, while Europe is maintains its historical racist policies. There's Turks who have lived in Germany for two generations and still have no citizenship, because the process is arduous. Meanwhile, "ethnic Germans" from the former USSR get pretty much automatic citizenship. Denmark won't even give citizenship to the spouses of its citizens. Etc.
The small states' people would be at the mercy of the large states' people. People in NYC and LA could pass a law lowering taxes for all people who live in large metropolitan areas, to make up just one random example. They could also get lots of "pork" projects pretty easily: a bill to send a bunch of cash to NY, CA, and TX (while excluding everyone else) could pass without too much difficulty. Etc.
If the President represents the largest possible number of Americans, that takes us one step closer to the infamous "tyrrany of the majority" that plagues democratic systems. What the President ought to do is represent the largest possible number of cultural and social groups. This is somewhat approximated by the geographical system: Originally that was a very good approximation, as travel was difficult and so the regions differed greatly; these days it's not as good an approximation, but still better than none.
This is the same reason countries get one vote each in the UN, not votes equal to their populations. If that were the case, the US would get one vote, all of Europe combined would get two votes, and China would get four votes. But that's not how it works, because the UN is not intended to represent all people equally, but all nations. Similarly, the US government should represent all groups within the US, not all US people equally.
The 2000 election was statistically a tie. Under any reasonable margin of error, the difference (under all counts, recounts, and whatever) was less than that margin of error. As any good scientist knows, most measurement systems have an accuracy, and I sincerely doubt that counting all the votes in Florida on 1970s-era punch-card tabulators has an accuracy high enough to trust a margin of under 500 votes in the entire state of Florida.
I don't much like Bush, but IMO the result was not a complete fuck-up that the "Bush stole the election" folks make it out to be. It was basically a statistical tie, and someone broke it rather arbitrarily. That's a lot different than the case in many 3rd-world countries where the guy being arbitrarily put into power is quite a bit behind his opponent, and rigs the election to make it look like he won.
The main reason? HDTV is fucking expensive. Also, there are not very many channels.
The best projection site I've found so far is race2004.net. It takes into account multiple polls, while most seem to call the states based on whatever the most recent poll is. Since there is such huge volatility in polls this year, that strategy doesn't work to well.
When I use OS X, I really like Adium. It uses libgaim for its messaging, but has its own native-OSX GUI. I think the GTK gaim could learn a few things that are particularly nice about Adium too---I like how it highlights your buddy's names in the buddy list with color codes depending on current messaging status: green if they're currently typing, blue if they've typed something into a window you haven't checked since then, etc.
Well, I personally spend much less than that on hardware, but if it's your hobby and entertainment, I really don't see why so many people have a problem with it. Meanwhile, I know people who think nothing of an $100/month cable bill (gotta have all the premium channels, you know). That's $1,200/year for cable television!
Affirmative action policies, at least as implemented in the United States, would give the second preference over the first. Unless you're simply a racist, or favor rich people over poor people, I can't see any way in which favoring rich Black and Hispanic people over poor Asian and White people is "fair". You could redo the example with a poor rural white person living in a trailer park, or with a poor Bangladeshi immigrant, or with any number of other examples, and it would still not exhibit fairness.
They support things like affirmative action, "hate crime" laws, and so on, that would use government power to enforce social policy, which is not a libertarian approach. They don't merely want fair laws that are equally applied to everyone.
Their environmental protection is not libertarian either---they want things like higher fuel taxes and emissions laws and other such government means of influencing usage patterns.
I have no problem admitting it's a government subsidy. I was taking issue with the Green Party's assertions, which you quoted, that nuclear power and nuclear waste disposal are unsafe.
Meanwhile, France generates nearly all their power with nuclear reactors, and seems to have no safety problems. Surely we can do as well as they can?
I recently participated in a beta test of some of your email-tracking software. I forwarded it to ten of my friends, as requested, but have not as of yet received a check for the compensation that was promised for my participation. Is there something else I need to do to claim the money?
Is probably not constitutional. You can't stop a willing group of participants from engaging in anonymous conversation with each other.
This isn't some newfangled use: black-hats and gray-hats have been called "hackers" forever. Wozniak and Jobs were phreakers too back in the 1970s, remember?
In most low-limit online poker games, people will go with you all the way even if they have crap. It's always going to be a showdown, so it's very hard to bluff people out of their money without having at least something that could reasonably win. So playing a fairly tight strategy works well. Especially since people rotate tables a lot (pop on to play 10 minutes during lunch break or something), so don't notice you're playing tight.
...I don't think helping anti-environmental Democrats helps. All you end up doing is promoting anti-environmentalism within the Democratic party. If you do that too much, it eventually won't make a difference which party is in power, if they both hate the environment.
How does voting for a Democrat who wants to destroy the environment, when he's running against a pro-environment Republican, help things? That's sending the message, "even if you help the environment, I'm still voting Democrat because I don't like you Republican folk." The idea is to send a message by actually voting for those who are responsible on the environment, and voting against those (like our Democratic friend from MN) who are irresponsible. Otherwise the only message you're sending is "if you want my vote, join the Democratic party, and I'll vote for you even if you make it your campaign platform to chop down trees as much as possible."
It was bad enough that you posted a somewhat clunky and not particulrly funny parody of the "this shows slashdot's anti-Microsoft" bias posts that show up now and then.
But the fact that you then felt the need to explain your painfully obvious "joke" in the second paragraph, really takes the cake.
By takes the cake, I mean your information superhighway driver's license is being revoked.
If you have been to the emergency room three separate times for a "busted open arm/leg", perhaps you need to avoid doing whatever it is that's causing that.
If you take a look at the League of Conservation Voter's identification of the worst policians in terms of environmental record, it's true that most are Republicans, but not all. In particular, if you happen to live in Minnesota's 7th district, and care about the environment, you'd do well to vote against Democrat Collin Peterson, who has one of the worst environmental records in the House.
The results he verified are so small that they don't need to be verified at all: they could be entered verbatim into the court record, and it'd be pretty obvious those 15 lines of code aren't the infringement SCO is looking for. What the evidence rests on is that the other millions of lines the program *didn't* flag aren't infringements. That means it rests entirely on what the program does, which is something ESR could better attest to, being the one who wrote it.