In the 1970s, RAND built models they thought could predict fire patterns in New York, and then used them to justify closing fire stations in NYC's poorest sections in the name of efficiency, a decision that would ultimately displace 600,000 people as their neighborhoods burned.
So the source is a wikipedia page, which cites this book, which is a dead end for now.
If anyone's got a source that actually backs up the notion that RAND explicitly recommended closing down fire stations in poor areas, or the actual claims that "they're just committing arson anyway", I'm very curious, as that's a pretty wild claim. I've emailed them for comment.
They generally have actual gameplay, some sort of challenge or some kind of story.
For sites like StackOverflow, yeah, the badges and such are a bit over done, but even then you have an actual community of people and the reason you're interested in earning them is because people can see you actually had to do something that other people found, if not useful in their paying job, at least informative.
If you're "gamifying" something that is completely pointless and insubstantial, it's bullshit. You can't start with bullshit, add some achievements and upgrades and get anything more than warmed over bullshit.
Same experience. I like Lion, it's just a ton of nice little tweaks and everything else just works. Spaces... it actually works *and* I can set different desktops. Hidden scrollbars... awesome, my monitor is bigger.
And regarding the censorship, you're absolutely right.
From TFS:
Apple knew about the issue before shipping lion, hasn't responded to the issue, and is censoring posts in their support forum that mention words like 'boycott' and 'petition.'
Yeah, because here on/., posts that are hopelessly offtopic are never modded down to death. Are you fucking kidding me, you're really whining that idiotic comments were deleted? Let's do a test, I'll go to CBS news (a typical news site with unmoderated comments) and click the first story I see. Yup, sure enough, the comments are completely fucking retarded.
The executive power represents the country and within the law they can do whatever they want, so yeah people should care about them. The proxy representatives in the legislative chamber have no power because they always have to vote what people tell them to, so they cannot be corrupted in that way, and the delegates in which people delegate via internet voting are the ones with real power, but their vote is public and if they corrupt, people can instantly change their delegation, which acts as a check and balance system.
C'mon now, this is civics 101. Who introduces bills? Who debates them in committees? Who adds amendments, earmarks, etc.? Legislation is far more than just voting on the finished bill. Representatives have plenty of power even if they're not voting. Unless they have a very good explanation for why they didn't mention this, it really seems like you need to ask them some tough questions. Just what are these guys doing behind closed doors?
You talk about the tyranny of the mob, but the real tyranny I know of is that of the rich and powerful minority, the one we have been suffering in this "democracy". Surely any democratic system is far from perfect, but a liquid democracy puts a bar on the current biggest problem, the rich and powerful minority. They won't be able to convince as easily the mob to do whatever they want as a few congressmen and senators, and anyway at any time the mob realizes they have been tricked it will never be too late to change back the law, something really really difficult with other systems.
The "rich" are a shibboleth used by people who need a conveniently vague villain to direct your attention away from the fact that they're about to fuck you. The super mega rich really don't need the government to make them wealthy. After the first billion, it's all a game to them. No, most people sell out their neighbors for a pittance. You look at spies who sold out their country, it's usually not for very much, often just to pay off gambling debts.
Political operatives have been doing this for decades, and there is a real art to fucking people. If you look at the laws that screw us, they are carefully crafted to be very popular, and they benefit very specific groups, not "the rich."
The oldest scam is "soak the rich." Hey, guess what happens when you get older? You make more money, and usually you wind up in the top tax bracket. But unlike Bill Gates, you don't have an expensive accountant to hide all your money. So you wind up being the one who got soaked!
Do you agree that we need campaign finance laws to keep money out of politics? If you do, you fell for the old incumbent protection racket, in which arcane regulations muzzle ordinary citizens. Try running a political ad yourself, some time. You'll get a polite letter explaining that you need to follow the regulations or be fined or go to jail, and you'll find they're impossible to abide by without expensive lawyers.
Do you think your plumber ought to be licensed to ensure that you get quality service? Then you fell for the cartel racket, in which licensing fees and exams are used to constrain the supply of labor and drive up prices.
Do you think there ought to be a minimum wage or, better, a "living" wage? That's a scam used to prevent immigrants and young people from getting jobs.
How about gun control? It's just common sense regulations, right? That's what the Klu Klux Klan called for, after all, it's hard to lynch black people if they can shoot back at you.
Are big corporations in on it? You bet: they champion tons of regulations, like worker's compensation, safety regulations, benefits, building codes, business practices, etc. When you have a whole department to take care of regulations, it's easy to comply. But it routinely puts their smaller competitors out of business.
What about all those environmental regulations, they must be good, right? Did you know that corporations like General Electric paid no taxes w
Photons are also in the most expensive age bracket too. When you look up in the sky and see a photon that has been traveling for millions of years, remember that ever since it was emitted, it has traveled at the speed of light, so no time has ever passed for it. From the photon's PoV, it was "born" in some star and then crashed (at high speed) into your retina less than an instant later.
We see them; they don't see us. Who wants to insure that?
And how the hell will you get them to pay their premiums?
The criticism to direct democracy does not apply to PDI. Partido de Internet is NOT about direct democracy - it's about both direct and representative democracy. You get what you want when you want.
That sounds like a great selling point, but I think you're glossing over the fundamental criticism of democracy expressed by people since Plato, which is, basically, that it's mob rule.
If I'm an artist insulting some religious icon and the mob is screaming for my head, the whole point of limiting democracy is that the mob doesn't get what it wants. They have no right to censor my speech, ergo one person can tell millions to go fuck themselves. Enumerated powers, checks and balances, representative democracy, confederation, all of these are tools to limit mob rule.
But your system puts no bar on the tyranny of the majority. Worse still, no one will care who represents them since they can overrule them any time they want, so with no purpose and guidance from voters, those representatives are really just there to enrich themselves through corruption.
This is useful because some people always want to vote for X party, but in reality they don't agree 100% with it. For exmaple in spain 50+% voted for Partido Popular, but ~97% was against irak war promoted by Partido Popular. All of them could have voted NO had liquid democracy been in place.
But the problem is that what people want doesn't work. A political party will put together a platform that they have to defend in debates. That means, for instance, that they'll say, "I want to spend more on schools." And so their opponents will say, "but how will you pay for them?" So they answer, "I'll raise taxes." In a direct democracy, people will vote for more schools and vote to keep taxes down.
In fact, in the US we had a long history of living pretty carefully within our means, but in 1913 when we enacted the 17th amendment, which introduced popular elections of the Senate. (In the US, the House writes the budget, but it has to concur with the Senate. Before, the Senators were appointed by the States and represented their interests, but now they're effectively no different than the House.) Ever since 1913, we have steadily increased our debt and are now at a breaking point.
MLAA is also crap, compared to "proper" antialiasing (supersampling) or even "draft" antialiasing (multisampling). Any detail smaller than 1 pixel simply isn't rendered with MLAA (and that also means no sub-pixel motion). Essentially, MLAA is just a blur filter, which actually reduces the amount of detail in the image (unlike supersampling, which increases the detail).
Edge detect + supersampling (or edge detect + high multisampling) is by far the best solution.
Oh, and technically blurring is antialiasing. It's just a very primitive flavor of.
Aliasing is when signals become indistinguishable. The common symptom of jaggies occurs when of the ray that is chosen to sample hides the signal of the nearby rays.
But blurring is aliasing! In physical blurring signals from in focus rays are overwhelmed by signals from out of focus rays. Similarly, with a blur filter you're definitely losing data by blurring it with neighboring signals.
And you're right: this technology is nothing but an elaborate blur filter. So this looks like anti-aliasing because it masks one well known symptom, but it's clearly obscuring signal and thus aliasing.
My pet peeve is "gun-toting." No one "totes" a firearm! If it's a pistol, you holster it. If it's a rifle, you sling it or shoulder it. I guess "armed" is too simple.
Seriously? Lots of people tote firearms. Tote means to carry or to have on one's person.
Depends how lazy the guy writing the dictionary is. I've never hear someone say, "tote that rifle to the ready line." You can't get a "tote concealed weapons" permit. No one talks about the "right to keep and tote arms."
The only other expression I'm familiar with is "tote-bag." All I want to know: are we about to go shooting or shopping?
He is a thirteenth-rate thinker who, for reasons that are entirely unclear, has been drastically wrong about a very great deal and yet continues to hold his position on the New York Times' opinion pages.
Yes, it must be embarrassing to be pulling up the rear behind all the 12th rate thinkers.
The problem is, politics is more than one dimensional. It is even more than two dimensional.
In fact, it is (at least) fully cartesian: The X axis is one's desire/tolerance for state control over individuals in general (order vs individualism), the Y axis is one's fiscal ideological inclination (spending/taxation tolerance), and the Z axis is one's social ideological inclination (charity vs non-involvement).
Most folks only think in one-dimensional left-right terms, which is IMHO stupid and dangerous.
You can describe politics with any number of axes, but when you count actual people and what they believe and who they want to live with, you'll find they're clustered around the two poles of politics: left and right.
Sure, there are plenty of flavors of each side, interventionist / isolationist, establishment / populist, etc. But these aren't related to substantial philosophical differences. This can be surprising, but the interventionist argument is we need to act aggressively to prevent threats, whereas the isolationist argument is that our actions are what create the threat. The stated goal of both is peace.
Your basic formula for the left is a developed, uniform state that provides comprehensive social services and welfare, polices your neighbors, actively regulates business and promotes social development. Your basic formula for the right is a federation of smaller states that provide minimal services, rely on you to resolve disputes with your neighbors, provides standards for businesses to operate in, and doesn't meddle with society.
People have come up with other formulas and... they either don't work or are more refinements of the big two. That's why people don't pay attention to them, it's not that people think that left and right are the only options. They've read history and seen that countless people have proposed a third way or other plans, have tried them, and they came up short.
Can amateur journalists PLEASE stop using the phrase "embarrassingly parallel" to describe software tasks? Who's embarrassed? Why are they embarrassed about designing something that can be efficiently processed?
No can do. Journalists all read each other, and when one comes up with a catchy term, they all pick up on it. This is especially true if they have no idea what they're writing about, or some editor thinks it's punchier or dramatic.
My pet peeve is "gun-toting." No one "totes" a firearm! If it's a pistol, you holster it. If it's a rifle, you sling it or shoulder it. I guess "armed" is too simple.
I always laugh at iOS people who talk about a "unified UI".
Tell me, how do you return to the previous screen, in an iOS application? You can't, because ever app does it differently. In Android, you *always* hit the back button.
How do you bring up preferences for every iOS application? Again, they all do it differently. In Android, it is *always* the menu button.
In fact, pretty much every single iOS application does everything differently - they throw buttons and menus all over the place. Sometimes it is top left, sometimes top right, sometimes it is press and hold... it's nearly random. And there is seldom any visual cues to figure it out either, it is pretty much random guesswork.
Android is far, far more consistent than iOS.
Huh, that has never been a problem for me on iOS. Mind you, I do toss poorly designed apps and I just grab one written by someone else.
What's more important is that the same app works the same way on all my devices, which is the "unified" I think iOS users are talking about. Designers can "throw buttons and menus all over the place" precisely because they know they're showing up pixel for pixel the same between devices, which really does seem to result in better UIs. That also, paradoxically, gives them far more freedom to innovate.
There simply isn't a unified Android UI and it would annoy me to have to choose which hardware I bought based on the UI it would run. I might want a Samsung phone but with the Sense UI.
That attitude pretty sad, isn't it? You don't want to use Android because you're incapable of making choices?
Freedom of choice makes Android a much better environment than Apple's mobile products. Take dual-core phones for example: HTC Sensation, Motorola Atrix, LG Optimus 2X, Samsung Galaxy S2... I think I've missed many others too. How many dual-core options does Apple have again? What if you want a physical keyboard? Different screen size or display technology?
Why do I care how many cores there are? Or different display technology? I have a desktop computer to open up and tinker with. When I'm using my phone, I'm trying to get work done, not screw around with drivers and displays and all that crap.
I'll keep looking at Android, but I just bought an iPad2. The Android market was a dozen different offerings that were thick, heavy, uncomfortable, expensive, not connected to the Internet and didn't stay on for very long.
A tablet is, by definition, thin, light, comfortable, cheap-ish, Internet connected, and has good battery life, so basically you have a dozen different vendors selling netbooks without the keyboard. Why do they even bother? Right, delusional Android fanboys will buy anything.
(And, yes, the only reason Apple offers iPads without cellular data is to advertise a fictitious price.)
Eventually I imagine they'll learn how to make tablets that are actually tablets, and then I'll have to wade through dozens of offerings, 90% of which will still not actually be real tablets, to find, say, three vendors + Apple. Then I go reading the specs and checking reviews just to make sure they're not complete garbage. So after all that work, I will hopefully wind up with something that is marginally better than sticking with Apple.
But what about the other scenario, where some vendor, let's call them Packard Bell, comes up with a brilliant offering that the others just can't match. They have developed the tablet of awesomeness and they are head and shoulders above the rest including Apple.
Then, you'll agree, it would make sense for me to buy into Packard Bell. And then you'll just be bitching that I'm a Packard Bell fan.
How about instead, we create a law that legally prevents the formation of any political party of any kind.
You'd have to completely gut the first amendment. You'd also have to outlaw caucuses within Congress.
And who would be your most enthusiastic supporters, as have been with all political "reforms"? The major parties. Because they'd write the rules, and they'd write them so that business as usual would continue with a new set of hats.
You want people to think? You're going to have to come up with a message that will make them think. And right now, you can't. Just try it. You will run afoul of the FEC, and they will politely tell you what laws you need to comply with, and you won't be able to do so.
The real way to get people thinking is to end all campaign finance restrictions aka incumbent protection laws. These are harmful to everyone involved because they crush the marketplace for ideas and the established, moneyed players know how to walk around them at will.
Lets make people actually have to learn about who they are voting for instead of just looking for the D or the R on the ballot.
You've obviously never done this yourself. Go to a candidate's website. You can usually guess a candidate's affiliation based on two minutes inspecting their issues page. And their issues page is usually 80 - 90% in line with the party platform.
The notion that the parties are the same is probably due to years of politicians pandering to their base by saying, "all those other guys are fakes but *I'm* the real deal!" And then, ten years down the road, even if their voting record is quite consistent with their ideology, a new guy is going to make the same accusation.
Though they need constant pressure from outsiders, all in all the political machines work: they put together a platform that represents what voters want, they really do find fairly good candidates (given the pool of talent and the fairly lousy rewards) and they get these folks elected. Where the little parties are important is that they are idea factories. You need that process of continually generating new ideas, talking to people to understand their needs, etc. because the big parties will, when those ideas gain critical mass, incorporate them. That helps them to remain relevant and it grounds them to the needs of their constituents.
People often think that the metaphysical framework is somehow terribly broken and that we just need to all look past the left-right divide. It's bullshit. There is a fair amount of complexity within politics, but, even in a parliamentary system, you generally have two major parties and a host of also-rans. During certain national crises you'll get a viable third-party briefly, but the marketplace of ideas is dominated by the liberal / conservative dichotomy. My best (brief) explanation as to why is that the left and right map to two fundamental aspects of the human condition. There are lots of viewpoints and such, there are lots of ways to slice and dice any particular issue, there are layers of metaphysical complexity, but when you get down to integrating your ideas with the needs of actual constituents, you wind up with something that is left-wing or right-wing.
Sure, there are moderates. They get a disproportionate amount of media coverage because they get the "swing" vote and because the left and the right try to sell their plans to them. But the reality is that the left and the right only do that after they framed the debate, and the center has to pick between the choices they're given. What's most important is that the centrists still caucus with the left or the right. So they may be voting for the other side on most issues but they're still voting for your speaker (or leader) to give your side control of the House (or Senate).
That's pretty interesting that they're doing that, but flipping through the sites, I can't see any attempt to explain why it's a remotely good idea. Criticisms of direct democracy go all the way back to Plato, do they attempt to answer them?
Also, isn't there an issue with people supporting a traditional party and then voting in the "liquid democracy" anyway?
Let me get this straight. We actually need yet another party claiming to be the center?
Last time I looked, the Democrats are simply recyclying Republican policy from the past. If it actually became a viable leftist party that would actually make politcs possible again.
I wish they'd recycle one of those budgets. The Democrat controlled Senate hasn't passed a budget in 800 days, which includes over a year in which they controlled the Presidency, the House and the Senate. Okay, granted, Obama did pass a budget that was voted down 99-0, but seriously, how can they bitch about the country being on the brink of default when they don't have an actual budget?
Compromise, to recall the grade-school concept, is when two parties make two separate propositions and then resolve their differences to find a course of action somewhere between. When one side won't propose anything, they're being uncompromising.
(If you want to play, any mention of a Democratic budget must contain a link to the actual text, and a link to a CBO analysis of it. For example, here's the Ryan budget, and the CBO's analysis.)
You have to understand that Thomas Friedman is an avatar of ineptitude. I can't possibly outdo Matt Taibbi's take on his recent book, so I'll link it.
But let's look at why this effort is doomed to failure. Friedman recommends it, so that's strikes one, two and three already. If Friedman said pants were convenient and comfortable, you'd be best advised to buy a kilt. He has such an incredible track record of being utterly wrong about everything imaginable.
Serious reason: It's centrist. According to voting records meticulously compiled by the right and the left, the voters will elect, at any given time, virtually no moderates whatsoever. If you're a liberal Democrat or a conservative Republican, your legislators tend to vote, contrary to popular griping, 80% to 90% in line with your views. What people are really bitching about when they claim the parties are the same is that they're not getting their way, which is the whole point of the system.
The only reason we have moderate legislators is because some states happen to be evenly split. There is no centrist "base" for a centrist party to draw from, not in the US, not anywhere. There is no base because there's no ideology for them to get fired up about. An ideology can rest on a vision (e.g. progressivism) or principles (e.g. conservatism), neither of which centrism has.
The major parties duke it out to try to win the best compromise they can get for their base and centrism is a reaction to this. It is effectively saying that, somehow, they can arrive at a better compromise without the uncivilized process of duking it out. But to believe that you can arrive at that compromise without the fighting, you have to believe that people with passionate beliefs don't really mean it or you have greater insight than pretty much everyone or, as proof that establishment types can be conspiracy theorists too, shadowy figures are stirring them up to further their evil ends.
And, as the parent avers, it's already not terribly centrist. Most of these "non-partisan" organizations drift towards liberalism over time, the exact reasons for this dynamic are hard to pin down, but it happens all over the place.
The major parties and the US culture in general are pretty good at preventing outright dictatorship.
This new party is more likely to be a step towards fascism; it has several hallmarks of it: youth-oriented, "third-way", etc.
And the main problem is not lack of third parties. It's the incumbents creating campaign finance reform laws that are really incumbent protection laws.
Maybe you saw Colbert's recent stunt where he tried to start his own PAC? These guys are going to want to start their own PAC, and they won't have Viacom's army of lawyers to help them. The GOP and Dems, on the other hand, have extensive fundraising networks set up to help them navigate campaign finance laws.
Yeah, mea culpa, didn't want to spend *that* much time reading over the MySQL docs, but you missed my qualifying it as "by default" a few times. You're right about Oracle et al using read committed, brainfart there, but the larger point was that only "serializable" is truly guaranteeing consistency, and you specifically have to turn that on.
Slashdot Mirror
In the 1970s, RAND built models they thought could predict fire patterns in New York, and then used them to justify closing fire stations in NYC's poorest sections in the name of efficiency, a decision that would ultimately displace 600,000 people as their neighborhoods burned.
So the source is a wikipedia page, which cites this book, which is a dead end for now.
Are the authors talking about this study?
If anyone's got a source that actually backs up the notion that RAND explicitly recommended closing down fire stations in poor areas, or the actual claims that "they're just committing arson anyway", I'm very curious, as that's a pretty wild claim. I've emailed them for comment.
Why aren't they all like Achievement Unlocked or Upgrade Complete?
They generally have actual gameplay, some sort of challenge or some kind of story.
For sites like StackOverflow, yeah, the badges and such are a bit over done, but even then you have an actual community of people and the reason you're interested in earning them is because people can see you actually had to do something that other people found, if not useful in their paying job, at least informative.
If you're "gamifying" something that is completely pointless and insubstantial, it's bullshit. You can't start with bullshit, add some achievements and upgrades and get anything more than warmed over bullshit.
It is reasonable to search everyone if they want to travel?
If people are actively trying to kill them by blowing up the plane, yes.
Same experience. I like Lion, it's just a ton of nice little tweaks and everything else just works. Spaces... it actually works *and* I can set different desktops. Hidden scrollbars... awesome, my monitor is bigger.
And regarding the censorship, you're absolutely right.
From TFS:
Apple knew about the issue before shipping lion, hasn't responded to the issue, and is censoring posts in their support forum that mention words like 'boycott' and 'petition.'
Yeah, because here on /., posts that are hopelessly offtopic are never modded down to death. Are you fucking kidding me, you're really whining that idiotic comments were deleted? Let's do a test, I'll go to CBS news (a typical news site with unmoderated comments) and click the first story I see. Yup, sure enough, the comments are completely fucking retarded.
But didn't you move out of time t0 originally?
The executive power represents the country and within the law they can do whatever they want, so yeah people should care about them. The proxy representatives in the legislative chamber have no power because they always have to vote what people tell them to, so they cannot be corrupted in that way, and the delegates in which people delegate via internet voting are the ones with real power, but their vote is public and if they corrupt, people can instantly change their delegation, which acts as a check and balance system.
C'mon now, this is civics 101. Who introduces bills? Who debates them in committees? Who adds amendments, earmarks, etc.? Legislation is far more than just voting on the finished bill. Representatives have plenty of power even if they're not voting. Unless they have a very good explanation for why they didn't mention this, it really seems like you need to ask them some tough questions. Just what are these guys doing behind closed doors?
You talk about the tyranny of the mob, but the real tyranny I know of is that of the rich and powerful minority, the one we have been suffering in this "democracy". Surely any democratic system is far from perfect, but a liquid democracy puts a bar on the current biggest problem, the rich and powerful minority. They won't be able to convince as easily the mob to do whatever they want as a few congressmen and senators, and anyway at any time the mob realizes they have been tricked it will never be too late to change back the law, something really really difficult with other systems.
The "rich" are a shibboleth used by people who need a conveniently vague villain to direct your attention away from the fact that they're about to fuck you. The super mega rich really don't need the government to make them wealthy. After the first billion, it's all a game to them. No, most people sell out their neighbors for a pittance. You look at spies who sold out their country, it's usually not for very much, often just to pay off gambling debts.
Political operatives have been doing this for decades, and there is a real art to fucking people. If you look at the laws that screw us, they are carefully crafted to be very popular, and they benefit very specific groups, not "the rich."
The oldest scam is "soak the rich." Hey, guess what happens when you get older? You make more money, and usually you wind up in the top tax bracket. But unlike Bill Gates, you don't have an expensive accountant to hide all your money. So you wind up being the one who got soaked!
Do you agree that we need campaign finance laws to keep money out of politics? If you do, you fell for the old incumbent protection racket, in which arcane regulations muzzle ordinary citizens. Try running a political ad yourself, some time. You'll get a polite letter explaining that you need to follow the regulations or be fined or go to jail, and you'll find they're impossible to abide by without expensive lawyers.
Do you think your plumber ought to be licensed to ensure that you get quality service? Then you fell for the cartel racket, in which licensing fees and exams are used to constrain the supply of labor and drive up prices.
Do you think there ought to be a minimum wage or, better, a "living" wage? That's a scam used to prevent immigrants and young people from getting jobs.
How about gun control? It's just common sense regulations, right? That's what the Klu Klux Klan called for, after all, it's hard to lynch black people if they can shoot back at you.
Are big corporations in on it? You bet: they champion tons of regulations, like worker's compensation, safety regulations, benefits, building codes, business practices, etc. When you have a whole department to take care of regulations, it's easy to comply. But it routinely puts their smaller competitors out of business.
What about all those environmental regulations, they must be good, right? Did you know that corporations like General Electric paid no taxes w
Photons are also in the most expensive age bracket too. When you look up in the sky and see a photon that has been traveling for millions of years, remember that ever since it was emitted, it has traveled at the speed of light, so no time has ever passed for it. From the photon's PoV, it was "born" in some star and then crashed (at high speed) into your retina less than an instant later.
We see them; they don't see us. Who wants to insure that?
And how the hell will you get them to pay their premiums?
The criticism to direct democracy does not apply to PDI. Partido de Internet is NOT about direct democracy - it's about both direct and representative democracy. You get what you want when you want.
That sounds like a great selling point, but I think you're glossing over the fundamental criticism of democracy expressed by people since Plato, which is, basically, that it's mob rule.
If I'm an artist insulting some religious icon and the mob is screaming for my head, the whole point of limiting democracy is that the mob doesn't get what it wants. They have no right to censor my speech, ergo one person can tell millions to go fuck themselves. Enumerated powers, checks and balances, representative democracy, confederation, all of these are tools to limit mob rule.
But your system puts no bar on the tyranny of the majority. Worse still, no one will care who represents them since they can overrule them any time they want, so with no purpose and guidance from voters, those representatives are really just there to enrich themselves through corruption.
This is useful because some people always want to vote for X party, but in reality they don't agree 100% with it. For exmaple in spain 50+% voted for Partido Popular, but ~97% was against irak war promoted by Partido Popular. All of them could have voted NO had liquid democracy been in place.
But the problem is that what people want doesn't work. A political party will put together a platform that they have to defend in debates. That means, for instance, that they'll say, "I want to spend more on schools." And so their opponents will say, "but how will you pay for them?" So they answer, "I'll raise taxes." In a direct democracy, people will vote for more schools and vote to keep taxes down.
In fact, in the US we had a long history of living pretty carefully within our means, but in 1913 when we enacted the 17th amendment, which introduced popular elections of the Senate. (In the US, the House writes the budget, but it has to concur with the Senate. Before, the Senators were appointed by the States and represented their interests, but now they're effectively no different than the House.) Ever since 1913, we have steadily increased our debt and are now at a breaking point.
MLAA is also crap, compared to "proper" antialiasing (supersampling) or even "draft" antialiasing (multisampling). Any detail smaller than 1 pixel simply isn't rendered with MLAA (and that also means no sub-pixel motion). Essentially, MLAA is just a blur filter, which actually reduces the amount of detail in the image (unlike supersampling, which increases the detail).
Edge detect + supersampling (or edge detect + high multisampling) is by far the best solution.
Oh, and technically blurring is antialiasing. It's just a very primitive flavor of.
Aliasing is when signals become indistinguishable. The common symptom of jaggies occurs when of the ray that is chosen to sample hides the signal of the nearby rays.
But blurring is aliasing! In physical blurring signals from in focus rays are overwhelmed by signals from out of focus rays. Similarly, with a blur filter you're definitely losing data by blurring it with neighboring signals.
And you're right: this technology is nothing but an elaborate blur filter. So this looks like anti-aliasing because it masks one well known symptom, but it's clearly obscuring signal and thus aliasing.
My pet peeve is "gun-toting." No one "totes" a firearm! If it's a pistol, you holster it. If it's a rifle, you sling it or shoulder it. I guess "armed" is too simple.
Seriously? Lots of people tote firearms. Tote means to carry or to have on one's person.
Depends how lazy the guy writing the dictionary is. I've never hear someone say, "tote that rifle to the ready line." You can't get a "tote concealed weapons" permit. No one talks about the "right to keep and tote arms."
The only other expression I'm familiar with is "tote-bag." All I want to know: are we about to go shooting or shopping?
He is a thirteenth-rate thinker who, for reasons that are entirely unclear, has been drastically wrong about a very great deal and yet continues to hold his position on the New York Times' opinion pages.
Yes, it must be embarrassing to be pulling up the rear behind all the 12th rate thinkers.
The problem is, politics is more than one dimensional. It is even more than two dimensional.
In fact, it is (at least) fully cartesian: The X axis is one's desire/tolerance for state control over individuals in general (order vs individualism), the Y axis is one's fiscal ideological inclination (spending/taxation tolerance), and the Z axis is one's social ideological inclination (charity vs non-involvement).
Most folks only think in one-dimensional left-right terms, which is IMHO stupid and dangerous.
You can describe politics with any number of axes, but when you count actual people and what they believe and who they want to live with, you'll find they're clustered around the two poles of politics: left and right.
Sure, there are plenty of flavors of each side, interventionist / isolationist, establishment / populist, etc. But these aren't related to substantial philosophical differences. This can be surprising, but the interventionist argument is we need to act aggressively to prevent threats, whereas the isolationist argument is that our actions are what create the threat. The stated goal of both is peace.
Your basic formula for the left is a developed, uniform state that provides comprehensive social services and welfare, polices your neighbors, actively regulates business and promotes social development. Your basic formula for the right is a federation of smaller states that provide minimal services, rely on you to resolve disputes with your neighbors, provides standards for businesses to operate in, and doesn't meddle with society.
People have come up with other formulas and... they either don't work or are more refinements of the big two. That's why people don't pay attention to them, it's not that people think that left and right are the only options. They've read history and seen that countless people have proposed a third way or other plans, have tried them, and they came up short.
Can amateur journalists PLEASE stop using the phrase "embarrassingly parallel" to describe software tasks? Who's embarrassed? Why are they embarrassed about designing something that can be efficiently processed?
No can do. Journalists all read each other, and when one comes up with a catchy term, they all pick up on it. This is especially true if they have no idea what they're writing about, or some editor thinks it's punchier or dramatic.
My pet peeve is "gun-toting." No one "totes" a firearm! If it's a pistol, you holster it. If it's a rifle, you sling it or shoulder it. I guess "armed" is too simple.
Glad to see that amateur journalists have created an article in wikipedia whose "sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations."
I always laugh at iOS people who talk about a "unified UI".
Tell me, how do you return to the previous screen, in an iOS application? You can't, because ever app does it differently. In Android, you *always* hit the back button.
How do you bring up preferences for every iOS application? Again, they all do it differently. In Android, it is *always* the menu button.
In fact, pretty much every single iOS application does everything differently - they throw buttons and menus all over the place. Sometimes it is top left, sometimes top right, sometimes it is press and hold... it's nearly random. And there is seldom any visual cues to figure it out either, it is pretty much random guesswork.
Android is far, far more consistent than iOS.
Huh, that has never been a problem for me on iOS. Mind you, I do toss poorly designed apps and I just grab one written by someone else.
What's more important is that the same app works the same way on all my devices, which is the "unified" I think iOS users are talking about. Designers can "throw buttons and menus all over the place" precisely because they know they're showing up pixel for pixel the same between devices, which really does seem to result in better UIs. That also, paradoxically, gives them far more freedom to innovate.
There simply isn't a unified Android UI and it would annoy me to have to choose which hardware I bought based on the UI it would run. I might want a Samsung phone but with the Sense UI.
That attitude pretty sad, isn't it? You don't want to use Android because you're incapable of making choices?
Freedom of choice makes Android a much better environment than Apple's mobile products. Take dual-core phones for example: HTC Sensation, Motorola Atrix, LG Optimus 2X, Samsung Galaxy S2... I think I've missed many others too. How many dual-core options does Apple have again? What if you want a physical keyboard? Different screen size or display technology?
Why do I care how many cores there are? Or different display technology? I have a desktop computer to open up and tinker with. When I'm using my phone, I'm trying to get work done, not screw around with drivers and displays and all that crap.
I'll keep looking at Android, but I just bought an iPad2. The Android market was a dozen different offerings that were thick, heavy, uncomfortable, expensive, not connected to the Internet and didn't stay on for very long.
A tablet is, by definition, thin, light, comfortable, cheap-ish, Internet connected, and has good battery life, so basically you have a dozen different vendors selling netbooks without the keyboard. Why do they even bother? Right, delusional Android fanboys will buy anything.
(And, yes, the only reason Apple offers iPads without cellular data is to advertise a fictitious price.)
Eventually I imagine they'll learn how to make tablets that are actually tablets, and then I'll have to wade through dozens of offerings, 90% of which will still not actually be real tablets, to find, say, three vendors + Apple. Then I go reading the specs and checking reviews just to make sure they're not complete garbage. So after all that work, I will hopefully wind up with something that is marginally better than sticking with Apple.
But what about the other scenario, where some vendor, let's call them Packard Bell, comes up with a brilliant offering that the others just can't match. They have developed the tablet of awesomeness and they are head and shoulders above the rest including Apple.
Then, you'll agree, it would make sense for me to buy into Packard Bell. And then you'll just be bitching that I'm a Packard Bell fan.
How about instead, we create a law that legally prevents the formation of any political party of any kind.
You'd have to completely gut the first amendment. You'd also have to outlaw caucuses within Congress.
And who would be your most enthusiastic supporters, as have been with all political "reforms"? The major parties. Because they'd write the rules, and they'd write them so that business as usual would continue with a new set of hats.
You want people to think? You're going to have to come up with a message that will make them think. And right now, you can't. Just try it. You will run afoul of the FEC, and they will politely tell you what laws you need to comply with, and you won't be able to do so.
The real way to get people thinking is to end all campaign finance restrictions aka incumbent protection laws. These are harmful to everyone involved because they crush the marketplace for ideas and the established, moneyed players know how to walk around them at will.
Lets make people actually have to learn about who they are voting for instead of just looking for the D or the R on the ballot.
You've obviously never done this yourself. Go to a candidate's website. You can usually guess a candidate's affiliation based on two minutes inspecting their issues page. And their issues page is usually 80 - 90% in line with the party platform.
The notion that the parties are the same is probably due to years of politicians pandering to their base by saying, "all those other guys are fakes but *I'm* the real deal!" And then, ten years down the road, even if their voting record is quite consistent with their ideology, a new guy is going to make the same accusation.
Though they need constant pressure from outsiders, all in all the political machines work: they put together a platform that represents what voters want, they really do find fairly good candidates (given the pool of talent and the fairly lousy rewards) and they get these folks elected. Where the little parties are important is that they are idea factories. You need that process of continually generating new ideas, talking to people to understand their needs, etc. because the big parties will, when those ideas gain critical mass, incorporate them. That helps them to remain relevant and it grounds them to the needs of their constituents.
People often think that the metaphysical framework is somehow terribly broken and that we just need to all look past the left-right divide. It's bullshit. There is a fair amount of complexity within politics, but, even in a parliamentary system, you generally have two major parties and a host of also-rans. During certain national crises you'll get a viable third-party briefly, but the marketplace of ideas is dominated by the liberal / conservative dichotomy. My best (brief) explanation as to why is that the left and right map to two fundamental aspects of the human condition. There are lots of viewpoints and such, there are lots of ways to slice and dice any particular issue, there are layers of metaphysical complexity, but when you get down to integrating your ideas with the needs of actual constituents, you wind up with something that is left-wing or right-wing.
Sure, there are moderates. They get a disproportionate amount of media coverage because they get the "swing" vote and because the left and the right try to sell their plans to them. But the reality is that the left and the right only do that after they framed the debate, and the center has to pick between the choices they're given. What's most important is that the centrists still caucus with the left or the right. So they may be voting for the other side on most issues but they're still voting for your speaker (or leader) to give your side control of the House (or Senate).
That's pretty interesting that they're doing that, but flipping through the sites, I can't see any attempt to explain why it's a remotely good idea. Criticisms of direct democracy go all the way back to Plato, do they attempt to answer them?
Also, isn't there an issue with people supporting a traditional party and then voting in the "liquid democracy" anyway?
Let me get this straight. We actually need yet another party claiming to be the center?
Last time I looked, the Democrats are simply recyclying Republican policy from the past. If it actually became a viable leftist party that would actually make politcs possible again.
I wish they'd recycle one of those budgets. The Democrat controlled Senate hasn't passed a budget in 800 days, which includes over a year in which they controlled the Presidency, the House and the Senate. Okay, granted, Obama did pass a budget that was voted down 99-0, but seriously, how can they bitch about the country being on the brink of default when they don't have an actual budget?
Compromise, to recall the grade-school concept, is when two parties make two separate propositions and then resolve their differences to find a course of action somewhere between. When one side won't propose anything, they're being uncompromising.
(If you want to play, any mention of a Democratic budget must contain a link to the actual text, and a link to a CBO analysis of it. For example, here's the Ryan budget, and the CBO's analysis.)
You have to understand that Thomas Friedman is an avatar of ineptitude. I can't possibly outdo Matt Taibbi's take on his recent book, so I'll link it.
But let's look at why this effort is doomed to failure. Friedman recommends it, so that's strikes one, two and three already. If Friedman said pants were convenient and comfortable, you'd be best advised to buy a kilt. He has such an incredible track record of being utterly wrong about everything imaginable.
Serious reason: It's centrist. According to voting records meticulously compiled by the right and the left, the voters will elect, at any given time, virtually no moderates whatsoever. If you're a liberal Democrat or a conservative Republican, your legislators tend to vote, contrary to popular griping, 80% to 90% in line with your views. What people are really bitching about when they claim the parties are the same is that they're not getting their way, which is the whole point of the system.
The only reason we have moderate legislators is because some states happen to be evenly split. There is no centrist "base" for a centrist party to draw from, not in the US, not anywhere. There is no base because there's no ideology for them to get fired up about. An ideology can rest on a vision (e.g. progressivism) or principles (e.g. conservatism), neither of which centrism has.
The major parties duke it out to try to win the best compromise they can get for their base and centrism is a reaction to this. It is effectively saying that, somehow, they can arrive at a better compromise without the uncivilized process of duking it out. But to believe that you can arrive at that compromise without the fighting, you have to believe that people with passionate beliefs don't really mean it or you have greater insight than pretty much everyone or, as proof that establishment types can be conspiracy theorists too, shadowy figures are stirring them up to further their evil ends.
And, as the parent avers, it's already not terribly centrist. Most of these "non-partisan" organizations drift towards liberalism over time, the exact reasons for this dynamic are hard to pin down, but it happens all over the place.
The major parties and the US culture in general are pretty good at preventing outright dictatorship.
This new party is more likely to be a step towards fascism; it has several hallmarks of it: youth-oriented, "third-way", etc.
And the main problem is not lack of third parties. It's the incumbents creating campaign finance reform laws that are really incumbent protection laws.
Maybe you saw Colbert's recent stunt where he tried to start his own PAC? These guys are going to want to start their own PAC, and they won't have Viacom's army of lawyers to help them. The GOP and Dems, on the other hand, have extensive fundraising networks set up to help them navigate campaign finance laws.
God damn it! I don't come to slashdot to learn things! But just this once...
Only makes sense if you're doing small scale stuff, and (because you don't understand depreciation) will want to hang on to old drives.
Drobo is very flexible, but horribly slow.
Yeah, mea culpa, didn't want to spend *that* much time reading over the MySQL docs, but you missed my qualifying it as "by default" a few times. You're right about Oracle et al using read committed, brainfart there, but the larger point was that only "serializable" is truly guaranteeing consistency, and you specifically have to turn that on.
...until you sober up and realize that the liquor store is 20 miles away.
So, just have it delivered.