I've wondered about it too, and then I got to wondering just how vulnerable a sleeping animal is. If you're about and about, you're making noise, being visible, creating a scent trail. If you're well hidden, such as in an underground den, you can pretty much go unmolested by any animal that might try to eat you. If an animal tries to dig you out, you have plenty of advance warning. Consider how many animals hibernate during the winter. For a prey animal, being out and about is the vulnerable period.
"Oh, and the middle east would be irrelevant. Without money from oil, they would be unable to buy advanced weapons or commit international terrorism, and would basically be another degenerate culture like most of Africa. Sure, they'd kill each other : but we would be able to safely stand back and occasionally drop in food to the refuge camps."
No, what would happen is that countries who can't afford to develop or buy fusion reactors would simply buy more oil, which would then be cheaper on account of the developed world using fusion. The Middle East would be getting their money from China, India, and Africa instead of Europe and America.
"But when you support his imprisonment for those ideas, you might as well move to Egypt. You clearly don't support the values of Western culture. You actually appear to be a force seeking to destroy Western culture."
Which may be why grandparent is called "Bad Analogy Guy".
"I see a problem with publishing the vote totals DURING the election. Makes it too easy for the participants to tell where their efforts are working and where they need to rush the reinforcements."
That's called getting out the vote. I see no problem, legally or ethically, with encouraging people to go out and vote. These 'reinforcements' have to be registered to vote ahead of time, in a specific precinct. You can't just shuttle in voters from anywhere. One person, one vote. As long as it's not voter intimidation or coercion -- i.e. forcing them to vote a certain way, nor voter fraud, such as multiple votes, there's no problem.
The 'problem' you are describing is exactly what happens now, except without the instant feedback of official results. Both the Democrat and Republican party have statistics of where their voters live and they call them during the run-up to the election to make sure they get out and vote. They have very accurate statistical records that they hone after every election to make sure that they are only calling *their* supporters, not the public at large. And they do have instant, continuous feedback in the form of exit polling, both theirs and the media's polling.
"Why do we all need to vote on the same day?
Why do we need to congregate at designated areas?
I can do my banking securely online, why not vote?
Why not have online voting?"
There are some institutions in our society that have a vested interest in lower voter turnout.
As far as your first concern, your best bet would be to start a petition for a constitutional amendment. The US constitution calls for elections on the first Tuesday after a Monday in November, so that needs to be amended to have voting at any time other than the first Tuesday after a Monday in November. You need to rile up enough people to contact either their state or national representatives to call for an amendment. Here's a start for the process:
"Article Five describes the process necessary to amend the Constitution. It establishes two methods of proposing amendments: by Congress or by a national convention requested by the states. Under the first method, Congress can propose an amendment by a two-thirds vote (of a quorum, not necessarily of the entire body) of the Senate and of the House of Representatives. Under the second method, two-thirds (2/3) of the state legislatures may convene and "apply" to Congress to hold a national convention, whereupon Congress must call such a convention for the purpose of considering amendments. As of mid-2006, only the first method (proposal by Congress) has been used."
As far as voting online, it's up to the states to decide how they want to conduct their elections. We already have mail-in voting, so I don't think it would be too much of a jump to get on-line voting.
Problems with paper and electronic voting aside, I think what we really need is secure tallying.
What I'm envisioning is some kind of method where votes can be tallied, and the running tally can be periodically published during the count. I imagine it would have some kind of hashing technology, like PGP, where tallies are perhaps encoded in a string, and the string is published. The hashing token, or whatever mechanism allowed a vote to be legitimately added to the tally, would be passed from one voter to another, after they voted. This puts the power to count votes into the hand of the voters, rather than a poorly-trained election volunteer, a partisan, or a hackable machine. Because of the constraints of the token and hashing, a voter can only vote as they are allowed, without destroying the tally hash string.
Unfortunately, this is [X] a highly technamalogical solution, and while it might be possible, it would be difficult to get people to understand, and thus endorse it.
"Punctuated equilibrium (or punctuated equilibria) is a theory in evolutionary biology which states that most sexually reproducing species will show little to no evolutionary change throughout their history. When evolution does occur, it happens sporadically (by splitting) and occurs relatively quickly compared to the species' full duration on earth."
"Punctuated equilibrium is commonly contrasted against the theory of phyletic gradualism ("evolution by creeps"), which hypothesizes that most evolution occurs uniformly and by the steady and gradual transformation of whole lineages (anagenesis)."
[Emphasis mine]
"We know that because "selective pressure" is a nice polite way of saying, "loads of people dying."
In the case of humans, selective pressure is not necessarily dying. Evolution works on reproductive success, and humans can choose, on the individual and social level, whether or not to reproduce. We don't have to kill people, we can choose not to have children, or to limit the number of children we do have. Whereas for other animals, they aren't really choosing to mate. They do it if they can, and the offspring come if they can.
Again, case in point: punctuated equilibrium. Darwin's original theory claimed gradual change over time, and this was accepted up until the emergence of punctuated equilibrium. But when you look at the fossil record, there *isn't* gradual change over time. For most of the time, millions of years at a stretch, the morphology of species remain relatively *unchanged* -- until there is a periodic big explosion, for whatever reasons, of new morphologies.
And punctuated equilibrium remains controversial to this day.
"Firstly Evolution is not always controversial, a massively insignificant minority occasionally try to cast aspersions upon it but this doesn't make it controversial."
He's not talking about Christian fundamentalists, he's talking about scientists, biologists, geneticists, etc. If you think that they are in lock-step agreement about evolution, and they never disagree or argue or have controversies, you've never been to an academic conference. Case in point: punctuated equilibrium.
"Is it possible that this is a passing phase for the USA? Is the religious right being supported by people who will be dead in 10 years? Or does this run right down through the younger generations?"
No, unfortunately not. This country will always have evangelical, eschatologist Christians as a major influence on its politics. Just look through our history. There have always been this extreme Christian movements that have a lot of mainstream influence, since the begining. The example in particular I'm thinking of is Prohibition (of alcohol). Come to think of it, another one might be the Scopes monkey trial and the teaching of evolution in schools. There have been phases where the extreme Christians have more or less power, like a pendulum, but they've always been there. They probably always will be there.
"The submission appears to be saying that the RIAA doesn't like being countersued."
No, the submission specifically claims that the RIAA is afraid of countersuits ( albeit via a rhetorical question ). There is a difference between "not liking" and "being afraid of" something. The reason that the RIAA would be *afraid* rather than annoyed or in a state of dislike towards it is that countersuits could be a successful strategy against their racketeering and intimidation campaign.
If you are sued by the RIAA, you must defend yourself (or the court will appoint a defense lawyer for you). However, there is no requirement that you countersue. It's an option that defendants must choose to exercise. And the poster's submissions seems to suggest that the RIAA's lawyers *really* don't want people starting to countersue.
"And we already are victim to those who "have no qualms with putting others lives and vehicles at risk." This is the definition of reckless driving (for certain degrees of "risk"). Because they ignore traffic markings and signals right now, the elimination of traffic markings does not affect the risk they pose."
You are correct -- proper traffic signage doesn't eliminate reckless driving. However, the lack of visible and unambiguous signage prevents the public, via the police and the courts, from prosecuting people for reckless driving and taking away their license if they continue to do so. After all, without any signage, reckless driving becomes a matter of opinion, my word against a police officers'.
If someone is driving recklessly, we can cite them for failing to stop at a red light or failing to yield. If there is no designation for yielding, red lights, or stop signs, how can we say what they are doing is wrong?
Cognitive psychology holds that people developed our current repertoire of cognitive abilities from selective pressure in the savannahs of Africa. If that holds true, then we have no natural cognitive toolset to deal with safe driving. Cars are extremely powerful, fast, dangerous machines, yet we have no instinctive fear of them like we do spiders or bears. Even someone who survived a horrible accident is afraid of *driving* or *riding* in a car, not crossing a busy street (unless they were hit by a car).
People just don't have the mental capability to understand the speed and power of a car. You can look both ways before you cross, yet still be totally unaware of a car coming around a turn at 30 miles per hour. Cars move too fast for people to properly cognate.
Furthermore, cars insulate the driver from physical damage, so you don't learn lessons from reckless behavior as quickly as you would if you were walking down the street. You can do a lot of damage to property and people in a car by driving recklessly before you hurt or kill yourself.
And there will be some young yahoo who will purposefully drive recklessly through these unmarked areas, for the sheer thrill of it. Without visible, unambiguous markings, how could a policeperson or public safety official bring this person before a court and charge them with reckless driving or reckless endangerment? Without signage and laws regarding that signage, it's more or less a matter of opinion.
What specific skill sets are missing from the current crop of general IT workers? Network/Server/DB Administration? OK, send them to a 3-6 months training program. Programming or network architecture? Get them into two-year technical programs.
How long would it take to train the current talent pool in the missing talent sets vs. importing foreign workers. My guess is it would take about as much time to train the current talent pool as it would to get foreign workers in here. To me it simply sounds like companies just don't want to invest in training and education.
If you are unwilling to invest in education, then in 5 years, those foreign workers whom you imported will not have the appropriate skillset either, and the entire IT pool will again be worthless to you, and you will need to import even more workers. The answer is simply education and training.
Just a point of fact -- all treaties and tariffs have to be ratified by the senate. So it's not just Bush's decree, but also the decree of 50+ senators.
Is it just me or does MS seem to design everything by a giant committee, headed up by accountants and market-speak droids?
The seem to be used to dealing with business customers who don't understand computers and don't want or need to -- they just know that MS is the 'best of breed' and MS will take care of their every need. They have no imagination and no ideas of their own about how a computer could solve their problems, or what they want out of it -- they just want to sit down at a training course and have MS tell them how a computer works and what to do with it. They are just there for the ride, eagerly consuming whatever lowest-common-denominator crap MS pumps out.
Meanwhile, the younger kids coming up are computer savy, have a general idea of how computers work and what you can expect out of them, and most importantly what sucks and what doesn't. That's why the iPod has built such a strong brand -- not for its sleek styling, but for its user friendly interface. Instead of another button for another feature, it has *basically* one button (or two buttons, or one nested button) for *all* of its features. This is what the music listeners of today want -- an *easy* way to get to their music. This is worth repeating -- the iPod is simply the easiest path to their music. That's all.
Meanwhile, the MS zune seems to be designed to please music labels and MS' own need for vendor lock-in, with its DRM, shoddy music store, and crappy sharing features. Go ahead, please everyone but the customer who you expect to pay for the privilege of using your crap. Though I must admit, it does work well in the business world.
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You seem to be forgetting that our ancestors are theorized to have been preyed upon by hawks, eagles, and large tree-climbing cats.
do you really want to drink water that tastes like old tire?
I've wondered about it too, and then I got to wondering just how vulnerable a sleeping animal is. If you're about and about, you're making noise, being visible, creating a scent trail. If you're well hidden, such as in an underground den, you can pretty much go unmolested by any animal that might try to eat you. If an animal tries to dig you out, you have plenty of advance warning. Consider how many animals hibernate during the winter. For a prey animal, being out and about is the vulnerable period.
"And don't say "pussy," because in my experience any major metropolitan area is pretty much choked with good-looking women, wherever you go.
;)
True, but they do tend to clot more in some places than in others..."
Okay, but what does that have to do with the distribution of good-looking women in a city?
"Oh, and the middle east would be irrelevant. Without money from oil, they would be unable to buy advanced weapons or commit international terrorism, and would basically be another degenerate culture like most of Africa. Sure, they'd kill each other : but we would be able to safely stand back and occasionally drop in food to the refuge camps."
No, what would happen is that countries who can't afford to develop or buy fusion reactors would simply buy more oil, which would then be cheaper on account of the developed world using fusion. The Middle East would be getting their money from China, India, and Africa instead of Europe and America.
"But when you support his imprisonment for those ideas, you might as well move to Egypt. You clearly don't support the values of Western culture. You actually appear to be a force seeking to destroy Western culture."
Which may be why grandparent is called "Bad Analogy Guy".
"I see a problem with publishing the vote totals DURING the election. Makes it too easy for the participants to tell where their efforts are working and where they need to rush the reinforcements."
That's called getting out the vote. I see no problem, legally or ethically, with encouraging people to go out and vote. These 'reinforcements' have to be registered to vote ahead of time, in a specific precinct. You can't just shuttle in voters from anywhere. One person, one vote. As long as it's not voter intimidation or coercion -- i.e. forcing them to vote a certain way, nor voter fraud, such as multiple votes, there's no problem.
The 'problem' you are describing is exactly what happens now, except without the instant feedback of official results. Both the Democrat and Republican party have statistics of where their voters live and they call them during the run-up to the election to make sure they get out and vote. They have very accurate statistical records that they hone after every election to make sure that they are only calling *their* supporters, not the public at large. And they do have instant, continuous feedback in the form of exit polling, both theirs and the media's polling.
Try China.
So you are against the mail-in ballots that most states have at this point?
"Why do we all need to vote on the same day?
Why do we need to congregate at designated areas?
I can do my banking securely online, why not vote?
Why not have online voting?"
There are some institutions in our society that have a vested interest in lower voter turnout.
As far as your first concern, your best bet would be to start a petition for a constitutional amendment. The US constitution calls for elections on the first Tuesday after a Monday in November, so that needs to be amended to have voting at any time other than the first Tuesday after a Monday in November. You need to rile up enough people to contact either their state or national representatives to call for an amendment. Here's a start for the process:
"Article Five describes the process necessary to amend the Constitution. It establishes two methods of proposing amendments: by Congress or by a national convention requested by the states. Under the first method, Congress can propose an amendment by a two-thirds vote (of a quorum, not necessarily of the entire body) of the Senate and of the House of Representatives. Under the second method, two-thirds (2/3) of the state legislatures may convene and "apply" to Congress to hold a national convention, whereupon Congress must call such a convention for the purpose of considering amendments. As of mid-2006, only the first method (proposal by Congress) has been used."
As far as voting online, it's up to the states to decide how they want to conduct their elections. We already have mail-in voting, so I don't think it would be too much of a jump to get on-line voting.
Problems with paper and electronic voting aside, I think what we really need is secure tallying.
What I'm envisioning is some kind of method where votes can be tallied, and the running tally can be periodically published during the count. I imagine it would have some kind of hashing technology, like PGP, where tallies are perhaps encoded in a string, and the string is published. The hashing token, or whatever mechanism allowed a vote to be legitimately added to the tally, would be passed from one voter to another, after they voted. This puts the power to count votes into the hand of the voters, rather than a poorly-trained election volunteer, a partisan, or a hackable machine. Because of the constraints of the token and hashing, a voter can only vote as they are allowed, without destroying the tally hash string.
Unfortunately, this is [X] a highly technamalogical solution, and while it might be possible, it would be difficult to get people to understand, and thus endorse it.
Almost everything you claim is contradicted by the wikipedia article on punctuated equilibrium.
Select quotes:
"Punctuated equilibrium (or punctuated equilibria) is a theory in evolutionary biology which states that most sexually reproducing species will show little to no evolutionary change throughout their history. When evolution does occur, it happens sporadically (by splitting) and occurs relatively quickly compared to the species' full duration on earth."
"Punctuated equilibrium is commonly contrasted against the theory of phyletic gradualism ("evolution by creeps"), which hypothesizes that most evolution occurs uniformly and by the steady and gradual transformation of whole lineages (anagenesis)." [Emphasis mine]
"We know that because "selective pressure" is a nice polite way of saying, "loads of people dying."
In the case of humans, selective pressure is not necessarily dying. Evolution works on reproductive success, and humans can choose, on the individual and social level, whether or not to reproduce. We don't have to kill people, we can choose not to have children, or to limit the number of children we do have. Whereas for other animals, they aren't really choosing to mate. They do it if they can, and the offspring come if they can.
Again, case in point: punctuated equilibrium. Darwin's original theory claimed gradual change over time, and this was accepted up until the emergence of punctuated equilibrium. But when you look at the fossil record, there *isn't* gradual change over time. For most of the time, millions of years at a stretch, the morphology of species remain relatively *unchanged* -- until there is a periodic big explosion, for whatever reasons, of new morphologies.
And punctuated equilibrium remains controversial to this day.
Or how the man who was able to answer the question "What was I just saying to you?" had more reproductive success.
"Firstly Evolution is not always controversial, a massively insignificant minority occasionally try to cast aspersions upon it but this doesn't make it controversial."
He's not talking about Christian fundamentalists, he's talking about scientists, biologists, geneticists, etc. If you think that they are in lock-step agreement about evolution, and they never disagree or argue or have controversies, you've never been to an academic conference. Case in point: punctuated equilibrium.
"Is it possible that this is a passing phase for the USA? Is the religious right being supported by people who will be dead in 10 years? Or does this run right down through the younger generations?"
No, unfortunately not. This country will always have evangelical, eschatologist Christians as a major influence on its politics. Just look through our history. There have always been this extreme Christian movements that have a lot of mainstream influence, since the begining. The example in particular I'm thinking of is Prohibition (of alcohol). Come to think of it, another one might be the Scopes monkey trial and the teaching of evolution in schools. There have been phases where the extreme Christians have more or less power, like a pendulum, but they've always been there. They probably always will be there.
I stand corrected. You don't have to defend yourself in a civil case.
"The submission appears to be saying that the RIAA doesn't like being countersued."
No, the submission specifically claims that the RIAA is afraid of countersuits ( albeit via a rhetorical question ). There is a difference between "not liking" and "being afraid of" something. The reason that the RIAA would be *afraid* rather than annoyed or in a state of dislike towards it is that countersuits could be a successful strategy against their racketeering and intimidation campaign.
If you are sued by the RIAA, you must defend yourself (or the court will appoint a defense lawyer for you). However, there is no requirement that you countersue. It's an option that defendants must choose to exercise. And the poster's submissions seems to suggest that the RIAA's lawyers *really* don't want people starting to countersue.
"And we already are victim to those who "have no qualms with putting others lives and vehicles at risk." This is the definition of reckless driving (for certain degrees of "risk"). Because they ignore traffic markings and signals right now, the elimination of traffic markings does not affect the risk they pose."
You are correct -- proper traffic signage doesn't eliminate reckless driving. However, the lack of visible and unambiguous signage prevents the public, via the police and the courts, from prosecuting people for reckless driving and taking away their license if they continue to do so. After all, without any signage, reckless driving becomes a matter of opinion, my word against a police officers'.
If someone is driving recklessly, we can cite them for failing to stop at a red light or failing to yield. If there is no designation for yielding, red lights, or stop signs, how can we say what they are doing is wrong?
Cognitive psychology holds that people developed our current repertoire of cognitive abilities from selective pressure in the savannahs of Africa. If that holds true, then we have no natural cognitive toolset to deal with safe driving. Cars are extremely powerful, fast, dangerous machines, yet we have no instinctive fear of them like we do spiders or bears. Even someone who survived a horrible accident is afraid of *driving* or *riding* in a car, not crossing a busy street (unless they were hit by a car).
People just don't have the mental capability to understand the speed and power of a car. You can look both ways before you cross, yet still be totally unaware of a car coming around a turn at 30 miles per hour. Cars move too fast for people to properly cognate.
Furthermore, cars insulate the driver from physical damage, so you don't learn lessons from reckless behavior as quickly as you would if you were walking down the street. You can do a lot of damage to property and people in a car by driving recklessly before you hurt or kill yourself.
And there will be some young yahoo who will purposefully drive recklessly through these unmarked areas, for the sheer thrill of it. Without visible, unambiguous markings, how could a policeperson or public safety official bring this person before a court and charge them with reckless driving or reckless endangerment? Without signage and laws regarding that signage, it's more or less a matter of opinion.
What specific skill sets are missing from the current crop of general IT workers? Network/Server/DB Administration? OK, send them to a 3-6 months training program. Programming or network architecture? Get them into two-year technical programs.
How long would it take to train the current talent pool in the missing talent sets vs. importing foreign workers. My guess is it would take about as much time to train the current talent pool as it would to get foreign workers in here. To me it simply sounds like companies just don't want to invest in training and education.
If you are unwilling to invest in education, then in 5 years, those foreign workers whom you imported will not have the appropriate skillset either, and the entire IT pool will again be worthless to you, and you will need to import even more workers. The answer is simply education and training.
Just a point of fact -- all treaties and tariffs have to be ratified by the senate. So it's not just Bush's decree, but also the decree of 50+ senators.
"Hello. My name is Bob Zune. It looks like you are writing a letter..."
Is it just me or does MS seem to design everything by a giant committee, headed up by accountants and market-speak droids?
The seem to be used to dealing with business customers who don't understand computers and don't want or need to -- they just know that MS is the 'best of breed' and MS will take care of their every need. They have no imagination and no ideas of their own about how a computer could solve their problems, or what they want out of it -- they just want to sit down at a training course and have MS tell them how a computer works and what to do with it. They are just there for the ride, eagerly consuming whatever lowest-common-denominator crap MS pumps out.
Meanwhile, the younger kids coming up are computer savy, have a general idea of how computers work and what you can expect out of them, and most importantly what sucks and what doesn't. That's why the iPod has built such a strong brand -- not for its sleek styling, but for its user friendly interface. Instead of another button for another feature, it has *basically* one button (or two buttons, or one nested button) for *all* of its features. This is what the music listeners of today want -- an *easy* way to get to their music. This is worth repeating -- the iPod is simply the easiest path to their music. That's all.
Meanwhile, the MS zune seems to be designed to please music labels and MS' own need for vendor lock-in, with its DRM, shoddy music store, and crappy sharing features. Go ahead, please everyone but the customer who you expect to pay for the privilege of using your crap. Though I must admit, it does work well in the business world.