If the writers of the Constitution had wanted a system for direct popular election of the President, they'd have put one in place. They didn't.
I already went over how inclusion in the Consitution doesn't prove it was considered ideal. They were practicing pragmatism. The desire was for a fair system- but creating fairness on a bed of injustice means that some people will lose power and refuse the change. To mollify those people, concessions were made.
No serious historian thinks the means of apportioning Senators was anything but a sop to Rhode Island and its ilk.
This isn't a case where their motivation was a mystery; it was spelled out.
Maybe it was written someplace, but not in the Federalist Papers. You are conflating directness and proportionality. That paper is primarily about the mechanical methods of conducting a vote, which was of import back then, as a single vote spanning the distance from Massachusetts to Georgia was an unprecedented concept.
Fewer than 6 words of the Federalist Papers have any bearing to the topic under discussion, and they are parenthetical. (They are in the 8th paragraph, by the way).
The electoral college is about "unequal political privilege"? That's not something you can just state unsupported and expect to be taken seriously
Do you need support for claims like "69 is less than 87"? Because that's the degree of self-evidence we're dealing with here. Or would you care to deny that in the current system, a citizen of Illinois has more Presidential voting power than one from Utah?
That's what the system has become, but was it originally designed that way?
It absolutely was not. The evidence that the founders of the USA did not anticipate partisan polarity is right there in the Constitution itself. Just look at how the method used to elect the Vice-President has changed throughout history.
Originally, whoever came in 2nd-place in the Presidential election became vice-President. Obviously, that would lead to hilarious and deadly consequences today- just imagine if Al Gore had served a 3rd term as VP under Bush! In 1804, the reality of parties became apparent, and the choice of VP was linked to the president.
Look. The birth rate and the per-capita birth rate are different things! The former is the product of the latter and the total population. The fact that per-capita birth rate is decreasing (in some places) doesn't mean the earth's population isn't increasing enormously.
It's unavoidable that the global birth rate is slowing down- why, if 1981's rate continued until 2041, there'd be a 70 billion population!
Even if this currently-reduce birth rate continues, we'll still hit the 10 billion before 2050.
the US there are less than 25 Births per year per one thousand addults
That's a funny thing to say. It's true, but misleading, because it suggests the number is nearly 25, when really it's less than 15
You are comparing apples and oranges. The two questions are completely separate from one another.
Because ANY proposed voting system that lacks a trusted and verifiable way to collect and tally votes is truly a WASTE OF TIME.
The system today isn't trusted or verifiable...
The argument against the electoral college has been going on for 50 years. It's not new.
No, but there is significant new evidence. Since Bush won with fewer total votes, inherently non-democratic nature of the Electoral College is fresh on everyones' minds.
It's only "whacky" if you assume that a majority of the popular vote ought to decide the election.
Wrong. Get a dictionary and look up "majority". Then flip to "plurality".
Plainly, the Founding Fathers thought otherwise.
It's not clear-cut at all. We can never accurately know the beliefs of another person- we can only try to infer those beliefs from their actions. And if there existed important motives to act contrary to belief, then one must admit the question is not easy to solve.
Would you also claim "Plainly, the Founding Fathers thought that slaves had 3/5ths the value of a man"? Of course you wouldn't.
That was just a compromise offered to convince the slavery states to join up. Likewise, the creation of a Senate whose representation is independent from population was an enticement to attract smaller states into the federation.
Appeal to tradition is rhetorically invalid.
you'll find it surprisingly difficult
No, it isn't. The burden is on advocates of unequal political privilege to defend their position. It is the inherently less tenable side, for that is the cause of elitists, royalists, and dictators.
I'd rather approval voting was suggested rather than the hard-to-understand instant runoff voting.
Bzzt. The fundamentals of IRV are a lot easier to understand than "approval" (Concordet). Just find a random friend and ask if she can guess how to run an "instant runoff election", and then an "approval" one. IRV has the advantage that the name actually describes how to do it!
That is the ONLY advantage IRV has... the alternative-vote-counting movement would've completely settled behind "approval" by now, except that it's harder to teach.
My one vote is worth a LOT less than $50. A $1 contribution my favorite candidate would help him more than my vote.
The election has simply been stolen.
You said compromises a voting machine. That's not really enough to take the whole election.
Combine that with the fact that Amazon are way better than Diebold at securing their systems,
That's backwards. If Amazon is doing it now and Diebold is not, that does nothing to prove that Diebold can't do it. In fact, by showing that doing it right is possible, Amazon has helped Diebold.
parent considered secure electronic voting such a pipe dream given current implementors
He said they were "impossible", with no qualifiers as to current efforts.
And frankly, if you think that in 30 years anyone besides solitary paranoiacs will use non-Internet voting, then you're the one with a pipe dream.
Homosexual people can also reproduce with each other.
Today, for example, it's easy for a pair of couples to trade off. But in the near future, that won't be necessary. Biologists can already fertilize a lesbian with a clone of her partner- won't be long before that procedure becomes popular.
Have you actually read the standard licensing information for RFCs? Once an RFC is published, it's pretty much set in stone.
Right... so what? You're talking about orthogonal concepts: changability versus openness. Just because the RFCs will never change doesn't make them closed- actually, the fact that nobody can change them protects them from closing!
No, it's very important, even though the problems listed ("traffic, overbuilding, and suburban sprawl") are NOT what we should be worried about.
this question is less relevant in the 2000s, where the growth rate is slowing
1) The statistic that has gone down is per capita growth rate. Total growth rate continues to increase, because there are more people overall. 2) Drops in per-capita growth are most attributed to catastrophic African epidemics. No one should be happy "Oh, we don't need to provide for those people, we'll just let them die"
Be sure to keep the gas tank more than half full, you never know where the next gas station is.
And indeed, there is the single largest problem facing the world today: running out of "gas". Assuming no one in China or India wants to drive an SUV, we will run out of petroleum fuel in 110 years.
(High population) * (high per-capita oil burning) = (end of life as we know it)
Family values are such a touchy issue that if a President brought their opinions in there, it would likely be a breach of the separation between Church and State.
Every Republican candidate at least since Reagan has made a promise to restore Traditional Family Values part of his campaign.
Either you're 3 years old and have never witnessed an election before, or you're accusing Reagan of harboring theocratic leanings.
Alright who's the idiot who moderated #2 off-topic?
If you don't want to remove a question from the list, you've got to down-mod it somehow. Out of 50 questions, only 12 can remain. Since this Q isn't something that either candidate likely has something informative to say about, isn't it better to call it "Off-Topic" than "Redundant" or "Troll"?
Totally wrong. They tried that with "Microsoft Java", got sued (for breaking a contract which was totally unlike anything an open source programmer might sign), and then renamed it to J++.
Linux conforms pretty closely to POSIX and SUS, which are closed standards.
Compared to Java, they aren't closed at all. Despite the existence of an impotent "community process", the Java standard is 100% Sun property. Scott McNeely could totally change the meaning of "Java" every 15 minutes if he wanted to.
Do you want him to be able to take away your work just because it's based on a "Closed Standard" Sun decided to rewrite?
Firefox conforms to RFC 2068 and HTML 4.01.
What do you think a "closed standard" is? There's room for argument ("How open is enough"), but it's quite clear that IETF RFCs are open and Java is closed.
RTFS. The whole point of Sun's proposal is that there can be only one test suite. They want to release Java code including a test suite, so that whoever recieves that code can't redistribute it unless that test suite works. Not some random test suite, but the specific test code included by the original author.
You said earlier you're a video-game maker. Try takling to a professional photographer or other serious imagery user, and you can get a lengthy diatribe about how important proper monitor calibration is to visual fidelity, and how impossible it is to correctly tweak the color distribution of an LCD.
But it's nice to know you have the confidence to pretend you know what you're talking about.
That's what I call a "Twirlip". He's a heavy slashdot-poster who usually ends posts with insults that apply better to himself than anyone else in the thread.
Note that ',' '?' and ':' are all sequence points.
The C standard does not require ":" to be a sequence point. The "a?b:c" construct only contains one obligatory sequence point, on the "?". It may have more, but that's unspecified (NOT undefined, which would be much worse)
No. There are many (contradictory) C standards, you didn't specify which one you're talking about. The function return-type definition used suggests it was written to the old K&R standard, which leaves many things unspecified, but that doesn't mean they're invalid. (When discussing standards, the difference between "unspecified" and "undefined" is quite important!)
You can't modify a variable twice between sequence points
Good thing he doesn't do that, eh? Inside the loop, there are only 2 modifying expressions: "++c" and "r--". As you can see, they modify different variables. Furthermore, they are separated by a sequence point. "?" creates a sequence point. (So does ",", by the way)
Slashdot Mirror
If the writers of the Constitution had wanted a system for direct popular election of the President, they'd have put one in place. They didn't.
I already went over how inclusion in the Consitution doesn't prove it was considered ideal. They were practicing pragmatism. The desire was for a fair system- but creating fairness on a bed of injustice means that some people will lose power and refuse the change. To mollify those people, concessions were made.
No serious historian thinks the means of apportioning Senators was anything but a sop to Rhode Island and its ilk.
This isn't a case where their motivation was a mystery; it was spelled out.
Maybe it was written someplace, but not in the Federalist Papers. You are conflating directness and proportionality. That paper is primarily about the mechanical methods of conducting a vote, which was of import back then, as a single vote spanning the distance from Massachusetts to Georgia was an unprecedented concept.
Fewer than 6 words of the Federalist Papers have any bearing to the topic under discussion, and they are parenthetical. (They are in the 8th paragraph, by the way).
The electoral college is about "unequal political privilege"? That's not something you can just state unsupported and expect to be taken seriously
Do you need support for claims like "69 is less than 87"? Because that's the degree of self-evidence we're dealing with here. Or would you care to deny that in the current system, a citizen of Illinois has more Presidential voting power than one from Utah?
That's what the system has become, but was it originally designed that way?
It absolutely was not. The evidence that the founders of the USA did not anticipate partisan polarity is right there in the Constitution itself. Just look at how the method used to elect the Vice-President has changed throughout history.
Originally, whoever came in 2nd-place in the Presidential election became vice-President. Obviously, that would lead to hilarious and deadly consequences today- just imagine if Al Gore had served a 3rd term as VP under Bush! In 1804, the reality of parties became apparent, and the choice of VP was linked to the president.
Look. The birth rate and the per-capita birth rate are different things! The former is the product of the latter and the total population. The fact that per-capita birth rate is decreasing (in some places) doesn't mean the earth's population isn't increasing enormously.
It's unavoidable that the global birth rate is slowing down- why, if 1981's rate continued until 2041, there'd be a 70 billion population!
Even if this currently-reduce birth rate continues, we'll still hit the 10 billion before 2050.
the US there are less than 25 Births per year per one thousand addults
That's a funny thing to say. It's true, but misleading, because it suggests the number is nearly 25, when really it's less than 15
Notice how I said a "better question".
You are comparing apples and oranges. The two questions are completely separate from one another.
Because ANY proposed voting system that lacks a trusted and verifiable way to collect and tally votes is truly a WASTE OF TIME.
The system today isn't trusted or verifiable...
The argument against the electoral college has been going on for 50 years. It's not new.
No, but there is significant new evidence. Since Bush won with fewer total votes, inherently non-democratic nature of the Electoral College is fresh on everyones' minds.
It's only "whacky" if you assume that a majority of the popular vote ought to decide the election.
Wrong. Get a dictionary and look up "majority". Then flip to "plurality".
Plainly, the Founding Fathers thought otherwise.
It's not clear-cut at all. We can never accurately know the beliefs of another person- we can only try to infer those beliefs from their actions. And if there existed important motives to act contrary to belief, then one must admit the question is not easy to solve.
Would you also claim "Plainly, the Founding Fathers thought that slaves had 3/5ths the value of a man"? Of course you wouldn't.
That was just a compromise offered to convince the slavery states to join up. Likewise, the creation of a Senate whose representation is independent from population was an enticement to attract smaller states into the federation.
Appeal to tradition is rhetorically invalid.
you'll find it surprisingly difficult
No, it isn't. The burden is on advocates of unequal political privilege to defend their position. It is the inherently less tenable side, for that is the cause of elitists, royalists, and dictators.
I'd rather approval voting was suggested rather than the hard-to-understand instant runoff voting.
Bzzt. The fundamentals of IRV are a lot easier to understand than "approval" (Concordet). Just find a random friend and ask if she can guess how to run an "instant runoff election", and then an "approval" one. IRV has the advantage that the name actually describes how to do it!
That is the ONLY advantage IRV has... the alternative-vote-counting movement would've completely settled behind "approval" by now, except that it's harder to teach.
You had to be a land owner in the US to be eligible to vote.
And, ye needed a penis!
Thankfully, Michael Badnarik marks it as a main point in his campaign.
Also, the Green party (represented in this election by David Cobb) includes the decriminalization of marijuana possession as part of their platform.
Before that point, it was possible to get tax stamps for it, but there was some complication (by design)
Wrong and wrong.
You CAN still get those stamps, and you did NOT need to incriminate yourself to do so.
Note that the IRS never handled taxes on the sale of goods, anyway.
YOU LOSE YOUR VOTE
My one vote is worth a LOT less than $50. A $1 contribution my favorite candidate would help him more than my vote.
The election has simply been stolen.
You said compromises a voting machine. That's not really enough to take the whole election.
Combine that with the fact that Amazon are way better than Diebold at securing their systems,
That's backwards. If Amazon is doing it now and Diebold is not, that does nothing to prove that Diebold can't do it. In fact, by showing that doing it right is possible, Amazon has helped Diebold.
parent considered secure electronic voting such a pipe dream given current implementors
He said they were "impossible", with no qualifiers as to current efforts.
And frankly, if you think that in 30 years anyone besides solitary paranoiacs will use non-Internet voting, then you're the one with a pipe dream.
The RIAA might be able to hire good lawyers, but they can't change the truth.
O. J. Simpson might be able to hire good lawyers, but he can't get away with slashing peoples' heads off.
Black people can reproduce with each other.
Homosexual people can also reproduce with each other.
Today, for example, it's easy for a pair of couples to trade off. But in the near future, that won't be necessary. Biologists can already fertilize a lesbian with a clone of her partner- won't be long before that procedure becomes popular.
Have you actually read the standard licensing information for RFCs? Once an RFC is published, it's pretty much set in stone.
Right... so what? You're talking about orthogonal concepts: changability versus openness. Just because the RFCs will never change doesn't make them closed- actually, the fact that nobody can change them protects them from closing!
Overpopulation is largely a bugaboo.
No, it's very important, even though the problems listed ("traffic, overbuilding, and suburban sprawl") are NOT what we should be worried about.
this question is less relevant in the 2000s, where the growth rate is slowing
1) The statistic that has gone down is per capita growth rate. Total growth rate continues to increase, because there are more people overall.
2) Drops in per-capita growth are most attributed to catastrophic African epidemics. No one should be happy "Oh, we don't need to provide for those people, we'll just let them die"
Be sure to keep the gas tank more than half full, you never know where the next gas station is.
And indeed, there is the single largest problem facing the world today: running out of "gas". Assuming no one in China or India wants to drive an SUV, we will run out of petroleum fuel in 110 years.
(High population) * (high per-capita oil burning) = (end of life as we know it)
Family values are such a touchy issue that if a President brought their opinions in there, it would likely be a breach of the separation between Church and State.
Every Republican candidate at least since Reagan has made a promise to restore Traditional Family Values part of his campaign.
Either you're 3 years old and have never witnessed an election before, or you're accusing Reagan of harboring theocratic leanings.
Assuming the moon was made of green cheese, I would eat it.
Assuming the rights of the customers are protected, I would gladly buy books online.
Oh wait! They are, and I do!
Alright who's the idiot who moderated #2 off-topic?
If you don't want to remove a question from the list, you've got to down-mod it somehow. Out of 50 questions, only 12 can remain. Since this Q isn't something that either candidate likely has something informative to say about, isn't it better to call it "Off-Topic" than "Redundant" or "Troll"?
Microsoft already tried that with J++.
Totally wrong. They tried that with "Microsoft Java", got sued (for breaking a contract which was totally unlike anything an open source programmer might sign), and then renamed it to J++.
Linux conforms pretty closely to POSIX and SUS, which are closed standards.
Compared to Java, they aren't closed at all. Despite the existence of an impotent "community process", the Java standard is 100% Sun property. Scott McNeely could totally change the meaning of "Java" every 15 minutes if he wanted to.
Do you want him to be able to take away your work just because it's based on a "Closed Standard" Sun decided to rewrite?
Firefox conforms to RFC 2068 and HTML 4.01.
What do you think a "closed standard" is? There's room for argument ("How open is enough"), but it's quite clear that IETF RFCs are open and Java is closed.
What if many test suites are flawed
RTFS. The whole point of Sun's proposal is that there can be only one test suite. They want to release Java code including a test suite, so that whoever recieves that code can't redistribute it unless that test suite works. Not some random test suite, but the specific test code included by the original author.
I'll take a poor CRT over a good LCD anyday.
I'd take the good LCD, sell it, and buy 2 good CRTs, and a motorcycle.
I should know.
Why should you know??
You said earlier you're a video-game maker. Try takling to a professional photographer or other serious imagery user, and you can get a lengthy diatribe about how important proper monitor calibration is to visual fidelity, and how impossible it is to correctly tweak the color distribution of an LCD.
But it's nice to know you have the confidence to pretend you know what you're talking about.
That's what I call a "Twirlip". He's a heavy slashdot-poster who usually ends posts with insults that apply better to himself than anyone else in the thread.
Note that ',' '?' and ':' are all sequence points.
The C standard does not require ":" to be a sequence point. The "a?b:c" construct only contains one obligatory sequence point, on the "?". It may have more, but that's unspecified (NOT undefined, which would be much worse)
That isn't valid C according to the standards
No. There are many (contradictory) C standards, you didn't specify which one you're talking about. The function return-type definition used suggests it was written to the old K&R standard, which leaves many things unspecified, but that doesn't mean they're invalid. (When discussing standards, the difference between "unspecified" and "undefined" is quite important!)
You can't modify a variable twice between sequence points
Good thing he doesn't do that, eh? Inside the loop, there are only 2 modifying expressions: "++c" and "r--". As you can see, they modify different variables. Furthermore, they are separated by a sequence point. "?" creates a sequence point. (So does ",", by the way)
You may be thinking: "A vote for Cthulhu is a vote for Bush."
Cthulu is just a rip-off from Urotsukdoki, and Bush is pretty clearly based on a Lupin 3rd enemy.
even bothered breaking out the title from the acronym.
The first poster to mention "SEL" broke it out...