So the party fields a candidate, but there is nothing but the party's credibility to guarantee that candidate gets into office if that party wins the vote? I mean, do the riding association have legal authority, or is that the party's own rules?
Can you explain exactly what it means when a parliament forms a government? Does that mean decide who serves in what position, like Ministry of State, etc. ? What is a confidence vote and what are its repercusions?
I've never understood it and I haven't yet found a good explanation of it. Not even in Wikipedia.
The United States has a "winner take all" system. That's why we have only two political parties at any given time -- you need to get 51% of the vote to get anywhere at all. If you're a new candidate and you can't get above 20% in polls starting out, forget it.
That's why Democrats and Republicans hate 3rd parties. George HW Bush would have had a second term if he hadn't lost convervative voters to Ross Perot. Al Gore may have been president if he hadn't lost votes to Ralph Nader.
I think it's a fucked up system, because a 3rd party candidate usually draws votes of passionates away from the mainstream candidate who actually has a chance of winning. So then the opponent loses, who has a stand on issues that most of the country disagrees with. It's an effective divide and conquer strategy for politicians with unpopular views.
In parliamentary systems, the voters vote for a party rather then a candidate. Whatever percentage that party gets, they get that many seats in in parliament. So in parliamentarian countries, you have usually 5-8 political parties in the parliament at any given time. There are usually 4-5 major parties, like conservatives, liberals, and some others that would be unfamiliar to Americans. Then there are extremists like fascist and communist parties that might hold a seat or two. So if the communists get 5% of the vote, they get one or two seats -- same for the other extreme groups. The major parties get like 15 - 20% of the vote, and they get more seats. Compare to the American system where you might have maybe three 3rd-party or independent Senators in the Senate. The rest are all republican or democrats.
"But putting that aside, there are probably structural reasons why animals never evolved wheels -- for example, how would do you connect nerves or blood vessels to an appendage that needs to be able to rotate freely?"
Just have some hard, crusty material become the wheels, like horn or bone or beak material. You could have the animals grow new ones every so often, like the rattles on a rattlesnake.
I read the slashdot from page. However, I have RSS subscriptions to some of the craigslist categories (jobs, gigs, and for sale) of my locality and also digg. For these sites, I don't acutally want to read their front page. In the case of craigslist, the 'front page' doesn't actually have any more information than the RSS feed itself, so the RSS feed is more effecient. In the case of Digg, they have inane summaries and commentaries. Don't need 'em.
At other times, I had subscriptions to hack-a-day and freshmeat. Freshmeat was information overload, and hack-a-day didn't really warrant an RSS to read a new item once in a day.
So I think there is a 'right amount' of information that make a good RSS feed.
Humans are pretty good at exterminating animals that are rabbit-sized or larger. However, anything smaller than that and we're useless.
If we're so good at cooking up these chemicals, why can't we get rid of Kudzu, the emerald ash borer, the gypsy moth? There's probably dozens more examples, if not hundreds, of insect and plant pests that we can't rid ourselves of.
My point with the "millions of years" comment is that any plant species extant today has survived millions of years of chemical warfare, and literally millions of different chemicals. It will have no problem when humans cook up one more chemical. It's just round 2,578,729 in a war that has been going on for a long long time. They will have no problem surviving.
"Your assumption requires a survivor. We're talking about tailor-made chemicals designed to kill things."
We're talking about natural selection, a process which has allowed living things to copy themselves for 3 billion years on planet Earth.
So humans dreamed up a few chemicals designed to kill certain types of plants. Big deal. Plants have been ruthlessly trying to kill each other through chemical warfare for millions of years.
"Scientists "started looking" in Asia long ago and as you note,"
You're right. Scientist have started looking in Asia -- I'm not saying that no one is looking in Asia -- but far and away the most money and time is going into the rift valley in Africa. There's a heavy bias of evidence coming out of Africa, but that's only part of the picture. We're looking only at one small, but admittedly important, spot.
"(since migrations appear to be driven by climate)"
I think that's true for every animal except humans. Look -- you have a hairless, sweaty creature moving from the equator to the artic, with almost no physiological changes. People who inhabit the artic have no more hair than other people. They have salty sweat glands, which arctic animals lack. They don't have any blubber, which other artic mammals do. They don't hibernate through the winter like other artic mammals.
They are a little shorter and more rotund, but these changes are relatively minor when you compare artic animals to their equator-dwelling cousins.
So, when human beings migrated to the frozen north, it wasn't because there was a better climate for them there. It was in fact a worse climate. Hell, there isn't any other single species that spans the whole globe, from the equator to the arctic, from sea level to mountains. Climate is just not a factor when humans decide where to live. I imagine overpopulation and warfare is what drove people to live in the icy north.
"That is a complete logical fallacy. You cannot logically prove a negative."
You misunderstand me. All I'm saying is that in science, if someone says "The Earth is flat", you can come up to them and say "Sir or Ma'am, you are mistaken; here is evidence that contradict your belief. If you cannot find anything wrong with this evidence, I have proven you wrong."
"In science all you can really do is present evidences to bolster your theory, you can never 'prove' it."
Nobody is saying that you can prove anything in science. All we have in science are theories that have not yet been disproven. You are right, you cannot prove anything in science.
"Can I 'prove religion' to you? Nope."
No you can't 'prove' religion. Nor can you 'disprove' religion. That's the difference between science and religion. Science has a method for disproving. Religion doesn't.
"It does? Where? You know that how? Instinct? Statistics? Are you a statistician or do you 'just know' that the above is the case? If so, how do you 'just know'? Personal experience? Maybe. Maybe you came to those conclusions for yourself via experience but don't say that it's evolution that makes you act this way because you can't 'prove' it.."
I'm not a statistician, but I have read books written by scholars who study various fields from human biology to evolutionary psychology, even statistics. They do a pretty good job of providing evidence and logical reasons to believe what crazy things they are proposing.
Scientists are the only group of people who regularly say "Go ahead, prove me wrong, and I will believe you." With religious beliefs, the believer will say, "I refuse to believe you, even if you do prove me wrong" (e.g. any miracle listed in the Bible or any other religious text). In science, you really never can prove anything. You can only *disprove*. In religion, you can neither prove nor disprove.
The source of information in religion is called 'revelation'. You can't figure it out yourself; it can only be revealed to you. Science accepts information arrived at through logic, stuff that you can figure out.
I have no problem with religion or revelation. I'm a pretty religious guy myself. I have a few revelations that I believe in, but I prefer to go to the source myself, rather than rely on second-hand information.
"Why should I? Based on your thinking why should I be nice to anyone unless it serves my own self-interest. Why should I follow the rule of law, etc? Why shouldn't I just become a totally self-centered anarchist--kill or be killed? "
Being nice to people is in your self-interest, because usually they will be nice to you. If you are mean to people, your reputation will quickly spread, and people will be mean to you.
People are interested in fairness, and mostly you will get treated the same way you treat others. If you deal with strangers all the time, it won't matter, but if you might see that person again sometime, or perhaps even every day, you will probably worry about what they think of you and therefore how they will treat you.
"Survival of the fittest and all that, right?"
That's right. We do still live in the jungle. Just step into South Central LA or the middle of the Amazon some time. However, in most places of the world, there is an official gang of tough guys who are called the police. The police are for the most part fair and honest. But they are not afraid to use force and kill people to keep the peace. In LA or the jungle, there are many gangs fighting each other, and none of them are interested in keeping the peace. Most people find that their life is a lot eaier if they side with the police gang instead of any of the others.
" Where in evolutionary theory does it tell me that I have to or even necessarily should be 'nice' to anyone? Just because you want me to and it might make your life better?"
Evolutionary theory says that anyone who can get along with other people will have a better chance of finding food, a receptive mate, and successfully raising children or grandchildren has better reproductive success. If you help someone, that person and everyone else will know about it, and they will help you. Loners who fight everyone and are only in it for themselves die alone, with no children.
Human beings are a group animal. Like ants or prarie dogs, we can't really make it on our own. People who can work co-operatively in groups fare better and therefore have more children than loners. Co-operative groups thereby outperform loners.
"I'm not debating their points (I've not read the article yet), but it would seem to require us to throw out the data that we already have."
No, it doesn't.
It just asks us to start looking in Asia also. "All the evidence" comes from Africa because all the digs are happening in Africa. Archaeology and paleontology are sciences which suffer from heavy biases in their observations. First off, what are the chances that any bone would become a fossil? Slim to none. Secondly, we can't ramdonly sample the whole earth's surface with dig teams. We dig in places where the lead researcher "has a good feeling", or gets word from a local farmer about strange rocks.
"If homo species migrated to the rest of the world from Asia, then it would have requires Lucy, a relatively primitive human to have gotten to Africa, then start a long series of descendents and multiple branches of evolution there, eventually resulting in homo sapiens."
Lucy, who was an Australopithecus afarensis (way before people -- not even Homo or same as us ) stays in Africa, as does her descendants, A. garhi.
Her even later descendents Homo erectus, H. habilis, or neanderthalis wanders out into Asia and becomes H. sapiens, who in turn wanders back to Africa, and of course, the rest of the world. Note that fossils of H. erectus, which is considered to be two species before modern humans, were found in Dragonbone cave in China.
Well, people may not have business with the courts specifically, but perhaps with some other branches of government, such as licence renewal, etc.
I'm guessing that South Korea doesn't have exactly the same divisions of government that we have -- legislative, executive, and judicial. Maybe registering to do your taxes online gets you signed up for online summons, etc. Just a guess. Or maybe the beauracracy of S. Korea is stupid and inefficient like all the other countries of the world.
I knew a very smart and experienced admin from Slovenia. He was trying to tell me about script-kiddies. He asked me what the word was for "the froth of piss". I told him we didn't have such a word in English. Well, that was his ideas of script kiddies.
"Bohr and his followers want to transfer a property of the mind (knowledge) to a property of nature (reality)."
Hey, mind and reality are not diametrically opposed opposites, as 3000+ years of western philosophy would have you believe.
I think in order to move forward, we are going to have to have a better idea about the relationship between mind and reality.
Note: I am not saying that people create reality with their minds or anything like that. All I am saying is that mind and reality are not opposites. They have some other kind of relationship, and we should more clearly define it.
"I also don't think it's fair to compare a CEO to Presidents past or present. Most CEOs don't have a PR dept solely dedicated to making them look good, or dedicated to documenting the Christmas antics of their pets for that matter."
Well, CEOs don't have to stick their neck out like a president has to. CEOs can basically work in total privacy as far as the company is concerned. Also, CEOs, or rather the companies they work for, *do* have a PR department that makes the company look good.
Historically, the press (legitimate and otherwise) has been tough on the president and other politicians (they can always count on support from the opposing party), but if they are tough on CEOs, they are communists ( unless the CEO really effed up, like with Enron and so forth).
They didn't do this to compete with free software. They did this to compete with pirated versions of their own software.
MS was asking the various Asian governments to crack down on pirated software. The government said, "Look, we will do all we can, but you can't expect anyone here to pay these prices. They're outrageous. You'll have to bring them down if you seriously expect anyone to buy them."
"Microsoft also now sells something called Windows Starter Edition in some parts of the world -- supposedly for as low as $37 or $38 (US) in Thailand, including a basic version of Microsoft Office. In other words, Microsoft is starting to compete on price"
Competing with whom?
They are not competing with any market competitor. They are competing with the low income of less wealthy parts of the world, compared to their relatively wealthy home base of the United States.
Slashdot Mirror
Where can I purchase one of your food-chewing gloves, my good man?
So could I simplify this and replace the phrase "form a new government" with "pick new ministers" when I listen to NPR?
Oh, thanks for the nice hot serving of crow!
So the party fields a candidate, but there is nothing but the party's credibility to guarantee that candidate gets into office if that party wins the vote? I mean, do the riding association have legal authority, or is that the party's own rules?
Thansk for weighing in.
Can you explain exactly what it means when a parliament forms a government? Does that mean decide who serves in what position, like Ministry of State, etc. ? What is a confidence vote and what are its repercusions?
I've never understood it and I haven't yet found a good explanation of it. Not even in Wikipedia.
The party decide who the actual representative is, in most parliamentary systems. I'm not sure that that's true everywhere, though.
The idea is that voters vote for a party and an agenda, rather than a personality.
The United States has a "winner take all" system. That's why we have only two political parties at any given time -- you need to get 51% of the vote to get anywhere at all. If you're a new candidate and you can't get above 20% in polls starting out, forget it.
That's why Democrats and Republicans hate 3rd parties. George HW Bush would have had a second term if he hadn't lost convervative voters to Ross Perot. Al Gore may have been president if he hadn't lost votes to Ralph Nader.
I think it's a fucked up system, because a 3rd party candidate usually draws votes of passionates away from the mainstream candidate who actually has a chance of winning. So then the opponent loses, who has a stand on issues that most of the country disagrees with. It's an effective divide and conquer strategy for politicians with unpopular views.
In parliamentary systems, the voters vote for a party rather then a candidate. Whatever percentage that party gets, they get that many seats in in parliament. So in parliamentarian countries, you have usually 5-8 political parties in the parliament at any given time. There are usually 4-5 major parties, like conservatives, liberals, and some others that would be unfamiliar to Americans. Then there are extremists like fascist and communist parties that might hold a seat or two. So if the communists get 5% of the vote, they get one or two seats -- same for the other extreme groups. The major parties get like 15 - 20% of the vote, and they get more seats. Compare to the American system where you might have maybe three 3rd-party or independent Senators in the Senate. The rest are all republican or democrats.
"But putting that aside, there are probably structural reasons why animals never evolved wheels -- for example, how would do you connect nerves or blood vessels to an appendage that needs to be able to rotate freely?"
Just have some hard, crusty material become the wheels, like horn or bone or beak material. You could have the animals grow new ones every so often, like the rattles on a rattlesnake.
The blog of the guy linked in the article says that we can't expect anything from MS before the 9th.
I read the slashdot from page. However, I have RSS subscriptions to some of the craigslist categories (jobs, gigs, and for sale) of my locality and also digg. For these sites, I don't acutally want to read their front page. In the case of craigslist, the 'front page' doesn't actually have any more information than the RSS feed itself, so the RSS feed is more effecient. In the case of Digg, they have inane summaries and commentaries. Don't need 'em.
At other times, I had subscriptions to hack-a-day and freshmeat. Freshmeat was information overload, and hack-a-day didn't really warrant an RSS to read a new item once in a day.
So I think there is a 'right amount' of information that make a good RSS feed.
Humans are pretty good at exterminating animals that are rabbit-sized or larger. However, anything smaller than that and we're useless.
If we're so good at cooking up these chemicals, why can't we get rid of Kudzu, the emerald ash borer, the gypsy moth? There's probably dozens more examples, if not hundreds, of insect and plant pests that we can't rid ourselves of.
My point with the "millions of years" comment is that any plant species extant today has survived millions of years of chemical warfare, and literally millions of different chemicals. It will have no problem when humans cook up one more chemical. It's just round 2,578,729 in a war that has been going on for a long long time. They will have no problem surviving.
"Your assumption requires a survivor. We're talking about tailor-made chemicals designed to kill things."
We're talking about natural selection, a process which has allowed living things to copy themselves for 3 billion years on planet Earth.
So humans dreamed up a few chemicals designed to kill certain types of plants. Big deal. Plants have been ruthlessly trying to kill each other through chemical warfare for millions of years.
"Scientists "started looking" in Asia long ago and as you note,"
You're right. Scientist have started looking in Asia -- I'm not saying that no one is looking in Asia -- but far and away the most money and time is going into the rift valley in Africa. There's a heavy bias of evidence coming out of Africa, but that's only part of the picture. We're looking only at one small, but admittedly important, spot.
"(since migrations appear to be driven by climate)"
I think that's true for every animal except humans. Look -- you have a hairless, sweaty creature moving from the equator to the artic, with almost no physiological changes. People who inhabit the artic have no more hair than other people. They have salty sweat glands, which arctic animals lack. They don't have any blubber, which other artic mammals do. They don't hibernate through the winter like other artic mammals. They are a little shorter and more rotund, but these changes are relatively minor when you compare artic animals to their equator-dwelling cousins.
So, when human beings migrated to the frozen north, it wasn't because there was a better climate for them there. It was in fact a worse climate. Hell, there isn't any other single species that spans the whole globe, from the equator to the arctic, from sea level to mountains. Climate is just not a factor when humans decide where to live. I imagine overpopulation and warfare is what drove people to live in the icy north.
"That is a complete logical fallacy. You cannot logically prove a negative."
You misunderstand me. All I'm saying is that in science, if someone says "The Earth is flat", you can come up to them and say "Sir or Ma'am, you are mistaken; here is evidence that contradict your belief. If you cannot find anything wrong with this evidence, I have proven you wrong."
"In science all you can really do is present evidences to bolster your theory, you can never 'prove' it."
Nobody is saying that you can prove anything in science. All we have in science are theories that have not yet been disproven. You are right, you cannot prove anything in science.
"Can I 'prove religion' to you? Nope."
No you can't 'prove' religion. Nor can you 'disprove' religion. That's the difference between science and religion. Science has a method for disproving. Religion doesn't.
" Asia... Africa... Asia... Africa...
What do you believe?"
What in the hell are you talking about?
"It does? Where? You know that how? Instinct? Statistics? Are you a statistician or do you 'just know' that the above is the case? If so, how do you 'just know'? Personal experience? Maybe. Maybe you came to those conclusions for yourself via experience but don't say that it's evolution that makes you act this way because you can't 'prove' it.."
I'm not a statistician, but I have read books written by scholars who study various fields from human biology to evolutionary psychology, even statistics. They do a pretty good job of providing evidence and logical reasons to believe what crazy things they are proposing.
Scientists are the only group of people who regularly say "Go ahead, prove me wrong, and I will believe you." With religious beliefs, the believer will say, "I refuse to believe you, even if you do prove me wrong" (e.g. any miracle listed in the Bible or any other religious text). In science, you really never can prove anything. You can only *disprove*. In religion, you can neither prove nor disprove.
The source of information in religion is called 'revelation'. You can't figure it out yourself; it can only be revealed to you. Science accepts information arrived at through logic, stuff that you can figure out.
I have no problem with religion or revelation. I'm a pretty religious guy myself. I have a few revelations that I believe in, but I prefer to go to the source myself, rather than rely on second-hand information.
"Why should I? Based on your thinking why should I be nice to anyone unless it serves my own self-interest. Why should I follow the rule of law, etc? Why shouldn't I just become a totally self-centered anarchist--kill or be killed? "
Being nice to people is in your self-interest, because usually they will be nice to you. If you are mean to people, your reputation will quickly spread, and people will be mean to you.
People are interested in fairness, and mostly you will get treated the same way you treat others. If you deal with strangers all the time, it won't matter, but if you might see that person again sometime, or perhaps even every day, you will probably worry about what they think of you and therefore how they will treat you.
"Survival of the fittest and all that, right?"
That's right. We do still live in the jungle. Just step into South Central LA or the middle of the Amazon some time. However, in most places of the world, there is an official gang of tough guys who are called the police. The police are for the most part fair and honest. But they are not afraid to use force and kill people to keep the peace. In LA or the jungle, there are many gangs fighting each other, and none of them are interested in keeping the peace. Most people find that their life is a lot eaier if they side with the police gang instead of any of the others.
" Where in evolutionary theory does it tell me that I have to or even necessarily should be 'nice' to anyone? Just because you want me to and it might make your life better?"
Evolutionary theory says that anyone who can get along with other people will have a better chance of finding food, a receptive mate, and successfully raising children or grandchildren has better reproductive success. If you help someone, that person and everyone else will know about it, and they will help you. Loners who fight everyone and are only in it for themselves die alone, with no children.
Human beings are a group animal. Like ants or prarie dogs, we can't really make it on our own. People who can work co-operatively in groups fare better and therefore have more children than loners. Co-operative groups thereby outperform loners.
"I'm not debating their points (I've not read the article yet), but it would seem to require us to throw out the data that we already have."
No, it doesn't.
It just asks us to start looking in Asia also. "All the evidence" comes from Africa because all the digs are happening in Africa. Archaeology and paleontology are sciences which suffer from heavy biases in their observations. First off, what are the chances that any bone would become a fossil? Slim to none. Secondly, we can't ramdonly sample the whole earth's surface with dig teams. We dig in places where the lead researcher "has a good feeling", or gets word from a local farmer about strange rocks.
"If homo species migrated to the rest of the world from Asia, then it would have requires Lucy, a relatively primitive human to have gotten to Africa, then start a long series of descendents and multiple branches of evolution there, eventually resulting in homo sapiens."
Lucy, who was an Australopithecus afarensis (way before people -- not even Homo or same as us ) stays in Africa, as does her descendants, A. garhi.
Her even later descendents Homo erectus, H. habilis, or neanderthalis wanders out into Asia and becomes H. sapiens, who in turn wanders back to Africa, and of course, the rest of the world. Note that fossils of H. erectus, which is considered to be two species before modern humans, were found in Dragonbone cave in China.
A good understanding of this wikipedia entry for human evolution might help you understand the situation.
That reminds me of a sticker I saw on my buddy's amiga about 10 years ago. It read, "Intel Outside".
Well, people may not have business with the courts specifically, but perhaps with some other branches of government, such as licence renewal, etc.
I'm guessing that South Korea doesn't have exactly the same divisions of government that we have -- legislative, executive, and judicial. Maybe registering to do your taxes online gets you signed up for online summons, etc. Just a guess. Or maybe the beauracracy of S. Korea is stupid and inefficient like all the other countries of the world.
SO, to re-cap:
"We can't even get people to sign up for FasTrak toll payment,..."
South Koreans != Americans.
My guess is there is probably some benefit to signing up, like being able to do court business you *want* to do electronically.
"Bohr and his followers want to transfer a property of the mind (knowledge) to a property of nature (reality)."
Hey, mind and reality are not diametrically opposed opposites, as 3000+ years of western philosophy would have you believe.
I think in order to move forward, we are going to have to have a better idea about the relationship between mind and reality.
Note: I am not saying that people create reality with their minds or anything like that. All I am saying is that mind and reality are not opposites. They have some other kind of relationship, and we should more clearly define it.
"I also don't think it's fair to compare a CEO to Presidents past or present. Most CEOs don't have a PR dept solely dedicated to making them look good, or dedicated to documenting the Christmas antics of their pets for that matter."
Well, CEOs don't have to stick their neck out like a president has to. CEOs can basically work in total privacy as far as the company is concerned. Also, CEOs, or rather the companies they work for, *do* have a PR department that makes the company look good.
Historically, the press (legitimate and otherwise) has been tough on the president and other politicians (they can always count on support from the opposing party), but if they are tough on CEOs, they are communists ( unless the CEO really effed up, like with Enron and so forth).
I'm curious, who is the authority on alcohol serving containers? How do they decide what coat of arms to use?
They didn't do this to compete with free software. They did this to compete with pirated versions of their own software.
MS was asking the various Asian governments to crack down on pirated software. The government said, "Look, we will do all we can, but you can't expect anyone here to pay these prices. They're outrageous. You'll have to bring them down if you seriously expect anyone to buy them."
"Microsoft also now sells something called Windows Starter Edition in some parts of the world -- supposedly for as low as $37 or $38 (US) in Thailand, including a basic version of Microsoft Office. In other words, Microsoft is starting to compete on price "
Competing with whom?
They are not competing with any market competitor. They are competing with the low income of less wealthy parts of the world, compared to their relatively wealthy home base of the United States.