It is not like there are not 3rd parties in the US, it is just very tough for them to be elected. There are many reasons but the main ones are
You left out the single most important one: Lack of proportional representation.
For the presidency it's of course impossible - there can be only one winner, and so it's almost always an effective choice of two. The senate is almost as bad - since every state gets only two representatives they're more or less bound to be out of major parties.
The real difference could be made in the house of representatives. If parties could run state- or nationwide and be proportionally represented it's a pretty safe bet that greens and libertarians would get some seats, which would be a real breath of fresh air (and show whether they're really worth something). I know I sound patronizing, but you really should update your constitution on this point.
The we are bad, you 3 are bad too thing just doesn't work that much, and thats good.
It's because the voters have so much easier "means of escape". In a two-party system many people would never switch to the other side, because it's so far from their convictions. With four or more parties, you can usually find somewhere ideologically close to go if your usual party shows bad behaviour.
they then send that encrypted number to the Department of Identification along with their number where it is looked up on a database and the company is only given your Name and age group
So now the DoI has a long list of your every attempt at being certified for something - buying booze, viewing adult movies and other heathen activities. Who do you trust with that list? (Or do you really believe it will not somehow be rolled into the no fly list system?)
The current system sucks, but at least there is no centralized master database of all your activity.
Danish radio reported a couple of days ago that a US plane equipped to measure radiation had gone operative near North Korea. I presume they got the data they came for. (Can't find a link, sorry)
All they're trying to do is share something that they think is useful and good. It's entirely different from trying to convert someone religiously
No, it's exactly the same - missionaries also believe that they're offering something "useful and good". Some might do it for the power trip, but I'm not sure that share is significantly higher than it is for OSS advocates.
Well, now that you've corrected your peak power figure I think we more or less agree. (The numbers you actually multiply don't match the ones in the text, but they're only 20% off, so whatever).
It'll be pretty interesting to see how it goes. Looking at their choice of route it looks as if they'll have following winds and currents most of the way. Very unkind persons would call that "cheating".
I guess we'll just have to maroon the scurvy bastards if they don't do it themselves. Happy ITLaPD!
14x5 = 90 m^2. Efficiency 10% gives 9 m^2 effective. Solar influx is around 1kW/M^2. So this gives something like 9 kW peak, equating to about 12 hp.
I think you should recheck your formulas. And I've got this wild idea that the engineers behind the boat have actually thought about what they're doing.
While I applaud these lawyers (that hurt me to say)
Actually, Beckerman has a point that they're not so bad at all. In Denmark the lawyers union is usually one of the few to stand up for the rights of the defendant when the yearly terror measure is passed.
Some of them might need to learn a little more about technology and the distinction between physical and information goods, but then again, it might just be who they work for.
The "anonymous surfing experience" can improved greatly with a little software:
Wallet software (i use kwallet) that auto-fills login forms from a local encrypted storage.
Software that blocks all cookies from ad agencies (blacklist, anyone?) and auto-deletes the rest when closing the last window viewing a given site. (I don't know of any way to set this up in konqueror, please suggest. Privoxy perhaps?)
For the all-important slashdot login, a way to tick off sites that "can keep cookies for a year". That would probably be quite few sites, so wouldn't be much hassle.
That aside, lobbying for better privacy laws would probably also have a quite good ROI. The US has something to learn from the EU there.
They're using the gas pipes as a waveguide, which requires a conducting tube.
But then again, if the ground around the pipe is conducting it would work the same way, only with a slightly higher diameter.
I don't know much about RF tech, but I've heard that making waveguides perform well is hard, and that practice often shows theory to be less than perfect. I suspect it will be much easier to go out and measure a representative sample of gas lines instead of trying to work it out theoretically with so many unknowns.
So, many Internet providers have handled 1000% growths over the last few years, but they can't handle a doubling of DNS load over the time it will take everyone to upgrade to Vista?
At a moment where many people wonder if the use of nanoparticles is safe, it's good to know that nanotechnology has been widely used for a very long time
Ok, all the comments about lead-not-safe and this-isn't-nanotech aside, I think there's something to be said for regulating compounds differently based on particle size.
We do know that some substances changes chemical properties depending on their particle size. We also haven't yet researched the health risks of nanotubes very well, but I think we should do so before spreading tons of the little critters around in field emission displays. They might be quite hard to clean up after the fact.
This is not a call for "safety above all" - it's just an appeal to consider what is already known. (A comparison with cell phones, for instance, would show that cell phone frequencies are by known physics very unlikely to influence chemical reactions beyond thermal effects, hence allowing them per default is quite sensible).
Oh, and why did I write "nanotech" instead of nanotech? Because the term has become a buzzword so broad as to be almost meaningless, not least because thousands of labs have gained access to funding by putting a "Nanotech lab" sign on the door while continuing their usual work. (My place is partly like that). So be careful when using the term "nanotech" - it might mean vastly different things to different people and the ambiguity is being exploited.
"Worst of it all is that this increases disenchantment with politicians. It's an attack on democracy".
The evening sun throws long shadows over the pink facade of the FP in the center of Skövde. It's half past five, and the atmosphere in the office is lättsam[??], despite the circumstances. A quickly called meeting with the [local?] workgroup is just about to begin as Göteborg-Posten [article is in this paper] tells the news that Niki Westerberg has been charged[?] with a crime.
Christer Winbäck (MP) takes a deep breath and a quick step backwards, towards the wall with the cutouts from the last few days papers. The colour leaves his face, and the smalltalk about the hairdo sticks in the throat.
"That's really complete news to me", he says after a bit of silence. "I'm schocked, is that really true?"
Suddenly the meeting must start in a hurry. Christer Winbäck assures that he knew nothing about the intrusion before Sunday. And that he didn't think it was a matter of anything but the temerity of a few election-fevered youths.
"I truly do regret what has now come out. It was the last thing we needed".
Johnny Foglander, [some youth movement title] is late for the evenings meeting and has managed to be better updated than his colleagues.
"Everything feels really sad. We've been loaded for the final sprint, and then this happens".
"Are you ashamed of your party?"
"No, not of the party. But of the persons that acted unfortunately. This is a wake up call for LuF [the youth movement]. You should start considering what methods are used. What seems innocent at first can become really serious."
In the eye of the storm is social democrat Stig-Olof Friberg. His password was the key to the FP-scandal: [FP = Folkpartiet, the "cracker party"]
"I'm enraged. Tough election tactics are ok, but they must be fair".
"In what school can you learn computer hacking that you're so good at?" - the question's asked by a longhaired boy in the class at Rudebeck school in Tidaholm, where the youth movements hold an infoday.
Johanna Nylander of the FP youth movement, LuF replies quickly, as if she'd waited for the question:
"In my FP schoolworld you learn both that cracking is illegal, and to get passwords that can't be broken in 3 seconds. And that computer security is important", she adds with sharpness in her voice.
Actually Johanna Nylander wasn't supposed to visit Tidaholm today. LuF should have been represented by the now retired local guy Nicklas Lagerlöf. When the half-hour long party information is over and the hotel- and restaurant school class leave, Johanna Nylander repeats her view of the intrusion:
"All politicians should take a course in how to get a working password".
So it is the fault of the Social Democrats themselves that LuF got the passwords?
"I don't think Niklas knew that what he did was criminal, she says, and clarifies that she will not comment any further".
It's not a fun day to be LuF member from Skarsborg.
About 10 miles away, outside the social democratic party district office in Skövde Stig-Olof Friberg is standing in the september heat. He's enraged. According to him it's beyond any doubt, that Niklas Lagerlöf and Per Jodenius should have known that data intrusion is illegal, no matter how the password was obtained.
"It's like stealing my car key and then drive off in my car" he says.
He doesn't think he handled his login carelessly.
"But of course, knowing the result we should have handled security better".
Now the Skövde social democrats wants to leave the scandal and
bring the election campaing into order, Stig-Olof Friberg thinks.
"Worst of it all is that this increases disenchantment with politicians. It's an attack on democracy".
European law says very clearly: Mathematics is not patentable. And MP3 decoding is pure mathematics
Well, I agree with you. But how sure can Sandisk be that the judge will buy it? Case law has a rather tricky history in this area, and EPC art. 52(2) hasn't been very well respected. Besides, Sandisk is in it for the money, not for fairness, respect for the law or the greater common good.
But yes, if this goes all the way it could be a very interesting test case. There's both a hope and a danger there.
Just like they do at Berkeley. I've listened to a couple of the History 5 lectures, and even without the slides they're quite enjoyable. I suppose it might be a bit harder for math classes though.
Did you know perpendicular recording for hard disks was developed in 1976 but is only now being implemented? It's because patent law has caused hard drive makers to sit on the technology and wait for the patent to expire before researching its implementation - which, just so you know, is long before the production phase.
But how come then, that Giant Magnetoresistance which was discovered in '88/'89 was in harddrives from a variety of manufacturers within the decade? Just because someone patented the idea of perpendicular recording (PR) doesn't mean it's ready for implementation yet. I'd rather guess that PR hasn't really been competitive until recently because there was plenty of room for improvement using in-plane magnetization (which is in general easier to achieve and stabilize than out-of-plane magnetization). Also, the wikipedia PR article says (unreferenced) that the system was considered for floppy drives in the 80ies, and this article says manufacturers started research in the "late 1980's and early 1990's"
I'm no big fan of patents, but forgive me for being skeptical until you document this specific claim.
What was defeated was the move to make software patents explicitly legal. Right now they are (IMHO) illegal under the European Patent Convention, but a rather jumbled mess of case law has built up to allow about 30'000 of them anyway.
The EPO, patent lawyers and some big companies wanted to make them really legal, but huge protests managed to turn the original proposal around to be rather against software patents. In the end, even the original proponents voted against it, and it was defeated by a wide margin.
What's brewing right now is the European Patent Litigation Agreement which would allow the European Patent Office a very strong influence in both granting and enforcing patents - no independent judgement available. In the words of the FFII
The EPLA would remove all national patent courts and put a single European-wide court in its place. However, the judges of this European-wide court would be appointed by the people who run the European Patent Office. Moreover, these judges could hold positions at the European Patent Office in parallel. Further, every six years these judges can be re-appointed if they live up to the expectations of, again, the very same people who run the European Patent Office.
EPLA puts an executive organisation in charge of running the judiciary. This is unacceptable.
Germany is a member of the EU where mathematical operations are specifically excluded from patentability
That would indeed seem to be the reasonable interpretation of the European Patent Convention which prohibits patenting of "programs for computers". In practice, several countries have built case law where you can patent, not "a program doing X" but "a computer running a program doing X" which very much amounts to the same thing in other words. (In the same way you can't patent business models "Persons A, B and C doing Y", but often "Persons A, B and C doing Y with a computer network").
Slashdot Mirror
It is not like there are not 3rd parties in the US, it is just very tough for them to be elected. There are many reasons but the main ones are
You left out the single most important one: Lack of proportional representation.
For the presidency it's of course impossible - there can be only one winner, and so it's almost always an effective choice of two. The senate is almost as bad - since every state gets only two representatives they're more or less bound to be out of major parties.
The real difference could be made in the house of representatives. If parties could run state- or nationwide and be proportionally represented it's a pretty safe bet that greens and libertarians would get some seats, which would be a real breath of fresh air (and show whether they're really worth something). I know I sound patronizing, but you really should update your constitution on this point.
The we are bad, you 3 are bad too thing just doesn't work that much, and thats good.
It's because the voters have so much easier "means of escape". In a two-party system many people would never switch to the other side, because it's so far from their convictions. With four or more parties, you can usually find somewhere ideologically close to go if your usual party shows bad behaviour.
When the elephants fight, the grass is trampled
-- Ancient African proverb.
(Ok, I don't know if it's really African, but it sounds like that, what with elephants and stuff).
I wish I had gotten to finish my unified theory of relativity
Yeah, that's a pretty common deathbed thought.
they then send that encrypted number to the Department of Identification along with their number where it is looked up on a database and the company is only given your Name and age group
So now the DoI has a long list of your every attempt at being certified for something - buying booze, viewing adult movies and other heathen activities. Who do you trust with that list? (Or do you really believe it will not somehow be rolled into the no fly list system?)
The current system sucks, but at least there is no centralized master database of all your activity.
Danish radio reported a couple of days ago that a US plane equipped to measure radiation had gone operative near North Korea. I presume they got the data they came for. (Can't find a link, sorry)
n/t
..my full name, address and phone number? They don't even know what PLANET I'm on for Zarquons sake!
Not to mention the piss-poor interstellar data protection laws.
All they're trying to do is share something that they think is useful and good. It's entirely different from trying to convert someone religiously
No, it's exactly the same - missionaries also believe that they're offering something "useful and good". Some might do it for the power trip, but I'm not sure that share is significantly higher than it is for OSS advocates.
Well, now that you've corrected your peak power figure I think we more or less agree. (The numbers you actually multiply don't match the ones in the text, but they're only 20% off, so whatever).
It'll be pretty interesting to see how it goes. Looking at their choice of route it looks as if they'll have following winds and currents most of the way. Very unkind persons would call that "cheating".
I guess we'll just have to maroon the scurvy bastards if they don't do it themselves. Happy ITLaPD!
So it's only going to give 12hp at a small time around local noon, at the tropics.
That's why I said "9 kW peak". You get 2.2 hp ~ 1.6kW peak, which is about a factor of 6 off.
How did you calculate peak power?
Let's see:
14x5 = 90 m^2. Efficiency 10% gives 9 m^2 effective. Solar influx is around 1kW/M^2. So this gives something like 9 kW peak, equating to about 12 hp.
I think you should recheck your formulas. And I've got this wild idea that the engineers behind the boat have actually thought about what they're doing.
While I applaud these lawyers (that hurt me to say)
Actually, Beckerman has a point that they're not so bad at all. In Denmark the lawyers union is usually one of the few to stand up for the rights of the defendant when the yearly terror measure is passed.
Some of them might need to learn a little more about technology and the distinction between physical and information goods, but then again, it might just be who they work for.
The "anonymous surfing experience" can improved greatly with a little software:
Wallet software (i use kwallet) that auto-fills login forms from a local encrypted storage.
Software that blocks all cookies from ad agencies (blacklist, anyone?) and auto-deletes the rest when closing the last window viewing a given site. (I don't know of any way to set this up in konqueror, please suggest. Privoxy perhaps?)
For the all-important slashdot login, a way to tick off sites that "can keep cookies for a year". That would probably be quite few sites, so wouldn't be much hassle.
That aside, lobbying for better privacy laws would probably also have a quite good ROI. The US has something to learn from the EU there.
They're using the gas pipes as a waveguide, which requires a conducting tube.
But then again, if the ground around the pipe is conducting it would work the same way, only with a slightly higher diameter.
I don't know much about RF tech, but I've heard that making waveguides perform well is hard, and that practice often shows theory to be less than perfect. I suspect it will be much easier to go out and measure a representative sample of gas lines instead of trying to work it out theoretically with so many unknowns.
If you didn't know either, check wikipedia
So, many Internet providers have handled 1000% growths over the last few years, but they can't handle a doubling of DNS load over the time it will take everyone to upgrade to Vista?
Yeah right.
At a moment where many people wonder if the use of nanoparticles is safe, it's good to know that nanotechnology has been widely used for a very long time
Ok, all the comments about lead-not-safe and this-isn't-nanotech aside, I think there's something to be said for regulating compounds differently based on particle size.
We do know that some substances changes chemical properties depending on their particle size. We also haven't yet researched the health risks of nanotubes very well, but I think we should do so before spreading tons of the little critters around in field emission displays. They might be quite hard to clean up after the fact.
This is not a call for "safety above all" - it's just an appeal to consider what is already known. (A comparison with cell phones, for instance, would show that cell phone frequencies are by known physics very unlikely to influence chemical reactions beyond thermal effects, hence allowing them per default is quite sensible).
Oh, and why did I write "nanotech" instead of nanotech? Because the term has become a buzzword so broad as to be almost meaningless, not least because thousands of labs have gained access to funding by putting a "Nanotech lab" sign on the door while continuing their usual work. (My place is partly like that). So be careful when using the term "nanotech" - it might mean vastly different things to different people and the ambiguity is being exploited.
"Worst of it all is that this increases disenchantment with politicians. It's an attack on democracy".
The evening sun throws long shadows over the pink facade of the FP in the center of Skövde. It's half past five, and the atmosphere in the office is lättsam[??], despite the circumstances. A quickly called meeting with the [local?] workgroup is just about to begin as Göteborg-Posten [article is in this paper] tells the news that Niki Westerberg has been charged[?] with a crime.
Christer Winbäck (MP) takes a deep breath and a quick step backwards, towards the wall with the cutouts from the last few days papers. The colour leaves his face, and the smalltalk about the hairdo sticks in the throat.
"That's really complete news to me", he says after a bit of silence. "I'm schocked, is that really true?"
Suddenly the meeting must start in a hurry. Christer Winbäck assures that he knew nothing about the intrusion before Sunday. And that he didn't think it was a matter of anything but the temerity of a few election-fevered youths.
"I truly do regret what has now come out. It was the last thing we needed".
Johnny Foglander, [some youth movement title] is late for the evenings meeting and has managed to be better updated than his colleagues.
"Everything feels really sad. We've been loaded for the final sprint, and then this happens".
"Are you ashamed of your party?"
"No, not of the party. But of the persons that acted unfortunately. This is a wake up call for LuF [the youth movement]. You should start considering what methods are used. What seems innocent at first can become really serious."
Neither English nor Swedish is my mother tongue.
Everything began in Skövde [Swedish city]
In the eye of the storm is social democrat Stig-Olof Friberg. His password was the key to the FP-scandal: [FP = Folkpartiet, the "cracker party"]
"I'm enraged. Tough election tactics are ok, but they must be fair".
"In what school can you learn computer hacking that you're so good at?" - the question's asked by a longhaired boy in the class at Rudebeck school in Tidaholm, where the youth movements hold an infoday.
Johanna Nylander of the FP youth movement, LuF replies quickly, as if she'd waited for the question: "In my FP schoolworld you learn both that cracking is illegal, and to get passwords that can't be broken in 3 seconds. And that computer security is important", she adds with sharpness in her voice.
Actually Johanna Nylander wasn't supposed to visit Tidaholm today. LuF should have been represented by the now retired local guy Nicklas Lagerlöf. When the half-hour long party information is over and the hotel- and restaurant school class leave, Johanna Nylander repeats her view of the intrusion: "All politicians should take a course in how to get a working password".
So it is the fault of the Social Democrats themselves that LuF got the passwords? "I don't think Niklas knew that what he did was criminal, she says, and clarifies that she will not comment any further".
It's not a fun day to be LuF member from Skarsborg.
About 10 miles away, outside the social democratic party district office in Skövde Stig-Olof Friberg is standing in the september heat. He's enraged. According to him it's beyond any doubt, that Niklas Lagerlöf and Per Jodenius should have known that data intrusion is illegal, no matter how the password was obtained.
"It's like stealing my car key and then drive off in my car" he says.
He doesn't think he handled his login carelessly.
"But of course, knowing the result we should have handled security better".
Now the Skövde social democrats wants to leave the scandal and bring the election campaing into order, Stig-Olof Friberg thinks.
"Worst of it all is that this increases disenchantment with politicians. It's an attack on democracy".
--- The rest in a moment ---
European law says very clearly: Mathematics is not patentable. And MP3 decoding is pure mathematics
Well, I agree with you. But how sure can Sandisk be that the judge will buy it? Case law has a rather tricky history in this area, and EPC art. 52(2) hasn't been very well respected. Besides, Sandisk is in it for the money, not for fairness, respect for the law or the greater common good.
But yes, if this goes all the way it could be a very interesting test case. There's both a hope and a danger there.
Just like they do at Berkeley. I've listened to a couple of the History 5 lectures, and even without the slides they're quite enjoyable. I suppose it might be a bit harder for math classes though.
Did you know perpendicular recording for hard disks was developed in 1976 but is only now being implemented? It's because patent law has caused hard drive makers to sit on the technology and wait for the patent to expire before researching its implementation - which, just so you know, is long before the production phase.
But how come then, that Giant Magnetoresistance which was discovered in '88/'89 was in harddrives from a variety of manufacturers within the decade? Just because someone patented the idea of perpendicular recording (PR) doesn't mean it's ready for implementation yet. I'd rather guess that PR hasn't really been competitive until recently because there was plenty of room for improvement using in-plane magnetization (which is in general easier to achieve and stabilize than out-of-plane magnetization). Also, the wikipedia PR article says (unreferenced) that the system was considered for floppy drives in the 80ies, and this article says manufacturers started research in the "late 1980's and early 1990's"
I'm no big fan of patents, but forgive me for being skeptical until you document this specific claim.
What was defeated was the move to make software patents explicitly legal. Right now they are (IMHO) illegal under the European Patent Convention, but a rather jumbled mess of case law has built up to allow about 30'000 of them anyway.
The EPO, patent lawyers and some big companies wanted to make them really legal, but huge protests managed to turn the original proposal around to be rather against software patents. In the end, even the original proponents voted against it, and it was defeated by a wide margin.
What's brewing right now is the European Patent Litigation Agreement which would allow the European Patent Office a very strong influence in both granting and enforcing patents - no independent judgement available. In the words of the FFII
The EPLA would remove all national patent courts and put a single European-wide court in its place. However, the judges of this European-wide court would be appointed by the people who run the European Patent Office. Moreover, these judges could hold positions at the European Patent Office in parallel. Further, every six years these judges can be re-appointed if they live up to the expectations of, again, the very same people who run the European Patent Office.
EPLA puts an executive organisation in charge of running the judiciary. This is unacceptable.
Germany is a member of the EU where mathematical operations are specifically excluded from patentability
That would indeed seem to be the reasonable interpretation of the European Patent Convention which prohibits patenting of "programs for computers". In practice, several countries have built case law where you can patent, not "a program doing X" but "a computer running a program doing X" which very much amounts to the same thing in other words. (In the same way you can't patent business models "Persons A, B and C doing Y", but often "Persons A, B and C doing Y with a computer network").
For a start you can dive into this very humorous treatment of "as such".