Mozilla and Firefox, as browsers, clearly raise the bar and make IE look really silly, with all their new features: typeahead find, tabs, and perhaps the dnd configurable toolbar.
Oh please. Typeahead find is disabled in firefox default installs for a reason: it confuses newbies no end. Tabs - unless you browse with 5+ pages open, and many users don't, tabs are not that useful. The DnD configurable toolbar? IE has had a better one since version 4.
If you are going to evangelize, at least get it right: popup blocker, optional adblocking via Adblock, no ActiveX hassles. Security, security, security.
Even Gecko, a superb renderer (especially for complex layouts) is not a good reason for most people to switch because the sites most people visit work very well with IE (hell, Slashdot renders better in IE than in Firefox).
Also, ICQ was way to complicated (ICQ numbers got oldfashioned quickly after Yahoo and MSN came up with screen names). I don't use AIM much but I fondly remember early versions of Yahoo and MSN messenger: underfeatured but easy on the eyes, compared to the visual bloat of ICQ.
If after-hours coffeeshop talk in the Valley is to be believed, there *is* a Google Messenger coming in 2005, despite denials.
And it won't push MSN out of the market, just like MSN or Yahoo didn't push AIM out of the market. MSN Messenger has HUGE presence internationally and the hassle of getting all your buddies to upgrade is what will keep MSN where it is.
> some fairly respectable economists are starting to see only a 10% chance of avoiding a coming economic meltdown
Stephen Roach is known in investment circles for being bearish. And one ecomist, even ignoring his reputation, != "some... economists". This is not to say that he is wrong (and in his line of work it's useful since he can play an effective devil's advocate) since even the boy who cried wolf was right once, but that statement of yours was classic scaremongering.
And oh, several respectable posters on Slashdot are starting to see that BSD is dying.
> But sandboxing is not a function of the language - it is solely a function of the runtime.
Pedant alert. In this case, ignorant pedant alert. the runtime is the Sun(R) Java(tm) Runtime Environment(tm), and Sun has lawyers who will do bad things to you if you claim the Java moniker does not apply to the JRE (which includes plugins for several popular browsers). Cue "Java is a platform" blather from Sun execs.
In this case, they are simply being hoisted on their own petard. It is a bug in Java. The Platform (or, if you prefer, the thingamajig they sell/give away). Period.
Too bad all the nations can't get into an agreement, if there was a single space program for the whole world
One day, humans will finally stop being suspicous backbiters and untrustworthy assholes in general and the resulting peace and prosperity will give us a Star Trek-ish future.
Until then, competition's the ticket for getting anything done. You think the space race in the 60s was all about brotherhood of man?
What bothers me most with developing countries is the fact that despite spreading diseases, high mortality, poverty, bad living conditions, the law (as in China) there is still growth in population.
There is strong correlation between superior living conditions and lower numbers of children per family unit. Google. Unsurprisingly, most of India's 300 million+ middle class has 1-2 kids.
And this is different from Europe exactly how? In fact, in Europe it's worse, Chirac sits in power, virtually unaccountable for years on end -- and his party got 16% of the vote last year. Where was the accountability when he bribed Saddam? Where was the accountability when Ivory Coast goes up in flames? Where is the accountability when thousands are slaughtered in Darfur and the EU debates ponderously on whether it can be called genocide or not?
Please. Europeans lecturing others on democracy is a joke.
You know, you can take your whole moral superiority complex and your delusional socialist attitude and shove it up your arse.
subjects of multi-billionaire businessmen
No we're not. Rhetoric is one thing, cold facts another. Gates, despite the fashionable Borg icon here, is subject to the same laws as anyone else.
But then you went and handed the bulk of the power to people you could trust even less.
Ask the folk who ran Enron where the power really is. What was it about the wheels of justice grind slow but exceedingly small again?
Yeah, a lot of big corps pay less than full rate on tax. But if you reflexive anti-business types ever paid attention to detail, you'd see they play the same rules as everyone else. They take advantage of every tax break in the book, just as you could if you had a good accountant.
The phrase "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" springs oddly to mind.
Actually it springs to my mind too, but for certain European countries which think banning fox hunting is more important than fixing the NHS (if you think your free healthcare will last, I pity you).
Capitalism is not perfect, certainly, but it's a whole lot better than the nanny-state some would substitute it with.
> You seem be be implying that the pollsters would intentionally lie. That is was you are saying right?
Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence. Of course, I believe the incompetence here was circumstantial -- this was no run-of-the-mill election, they would probably have done better in a 'more normal' election.
I don't think they intentionally lied. I believe their results are misleading because their sampling techniques could not cope with the turnout they got. For example, dollars to doughnuts they oversampled urban areas in an election that saw heavy exurban and rural turnout -- and then (since exit poll results are corrected using actual poll results) overweighted exurban and rural responses.
That's indeed the popular explanation, but somehow I have a hard time believing that Kerry supporters all lemming-like voted early in the morning.
It's slightly more plausible that angrier voters (overwhelmingly Kerry) were more committed and so got in line earlier, but they do seem to have been over-represented in early NEP sampling (possibly because they were more vocal?).
If that is the case, one has to wonder if the NEP similarly oversampled vocal Republican supporters later in the day.
The skew in the afternoon's leaked numbers (which overwhelmingly favored Kerry) and the final tally suggests something was fishy in NEP sampling this time. When exit poll numbers swung sharply like that, its time to wonder what the hell the pollsters were doing.
the result of a multi-party system, rather than the two-party system we have now.
AFAIK the two party system isn't codified in law anywhere, it seems to be a side effect of our electoral system. If we had proportional representation based on the popular vote for all our elections (senate, house, state senates) it'd be pretty easy for the "alternate" parties to get their candidates in at least into a state senate.
What I'm really trying to say is -- I believe proportional representation encourages a multiparty system, whereas our system encourages a 2-party one, and it's not an accident that Germany (for example) has the multiparty system it has now.
I still want to know how it happened that every single state happened to have the exact same system of assigning its electoral votes
I'd imagine it was a way of making the state more attractive as a prize: CA, FL, NY, OH are all prizes because with their n votes they inflict -2n damage to the loser. Splitting the vote, assuming a 55/45 or even a 60/40 tally, would make it less attractive to campaign in that state - a candidate would say, hey, my party organization would deliver me 40% of the vote and (say 4 seats out of 10) here with just an appearance or two, lemme move on to that other state which is all-or-nothing.
Btw, I'm a big skeptic about proportional representation for this reason: all-or-nothing raises the stakes and makes the prize that much more attractive. Proportional systems try to represent *everyone*, resulting in so many voices in the decision making process that nothing ever gets done, any point of view is buried under layers of "consensus" (as is happening in.de and.fr today, at the risk of offending our Euro visitors).
They may not want to give that up for historical reasons. Okay by me since the General Assembly et al are talking shops, nothing more; as long as they don't _all_ want seats and vetoes on the Security Council (i.e., either France or Britain has to give up her post for Europe, and no EU member can be nominated to a nonpermanent seat since Europe already has a seat.)
Don't mix Calif. and SF, and NY and NYC. In a popular vote, candidates would have to concentrate on the larger urban agglomerates because that's where the voters were. The current system penalizes candidates who ignore less populous areas, thus largely balancing out the urban skew.
If we did as you suggest (popular vote) the agenda would be set by urban america alone, because that's where the BULK of the votes are.. rural votes, even if matching or slightly exceeding the urband vote, would be harder to reach because the they would be scattered across the nation. Elections -- especially campaigning -- is not all about math, it's about logistics too.
As time goes on I suppose you can regard Europe in the same way, so you'll eventually have another big, real grown-up country to compare yourselves with!
I certainly hope so, whenever it happens. Big countries have their own problems, so I'd expect empathy from Europe-the-nation (more than the sniping we get now). Although given the name-calling between it members, it looks as if this nation will take some time to birth itself.
About why I can't accept Europe as a nation yet: If we stick to the original rudimentary charter available to the Federal US government (interstate trade, maintaining the union's borders, and dealing with the outside world) it's clear Europe is 1/3rd there (common market which IIRC regulates internation trade and currency -- with exceptions).
The day Europe can take joint decisions on defense and foreign policy it will show it is a real country, IMO. And this is nontrivial because these things (all rationalization aside) are emotive: you can't wipe away years of European history and mistrust in a day.
Btw, you may want to read this (rather long) old document, it's tangentially related to the European superstate and shows how European 'unity' has often been imagined more as a pawn than anything else.
I'm sorry the word offended you, but I really can't help it if you have stopwords in your brain:-)
"Toy" implied nothing about a countries worth (GDP, social or moral) it was an expression of size and relative cultural homogenity. IMO even a populous country like Britain is a toy when compared to say, the US, China, India and Australia and their geographic spread and the cultural differences that brings. This post has a little more.
Even in a small nation like Britain, there are issues in urban/rural governance as urbanites force their POV onto rural folk (cf fox hunting?). Imagine that problem magnified 100X or more in a large country with many more geographies and cultures.
Spend some time shutting between AZ and NY and you'll know what I mean:-)
What you're basically suggesting is (not exactly, but) similar to the vote splitting done by Maine and Nebraska and proposed in Colorado. Let me (inaccurately) call it "one county one vote". If we are prepared to bring down the granularity to this level, I really see no objection to the "one man one vote" that others are suggesting -- it would be simpler for everyone.
OTOH, I believe there's a bigger lesson here: don't try to change the rules of the game when you lose (I'd say this to Repubs if they cried about losing Ohio and the election inspite of winning the popular vote as well). The electoral college has served the US remarkably well for something thought up by gentleman farmers in the horse-and-buggy era.
I hate to disappoint you, but the european union (which has a larger population than the united states) also uses popular votes for its parlament...
I hate to disappoint YOU, mon ami, but call me the day you elect a European parliament that actually does something useful, like debate direct or VAT tax rates seriously, or decide monetary policy, or approve a declaration of war. A popularly elected fart house != parliament.
Even that aside Germany has nearly 1/3 of the population of the united states (80M vs. 250M), so the countries are not acatually "toy-sized"
Toy-sized as in size and geographical diversity (because that is what produces the different cultures and living conditions I was talking about in my earlier post). Germany is big, but its very homogenous compared to the US, China, India, Australia or many other countries with geographical and climactic spread. Btw: Germany, France and Spain are the biggest Europe can manage (without looking at an almanac), Italy and Greece are small by any world standard, Britain onwards things start looking laughable sizewise.
Incidentally, I have friends in both France and Germany, which is why I'm kind of sad about how they are today. Both are ruled by proportional representation systems and both are floundering. Study how proportional rep systems work and you'll see why (hint: they ossify even as they try to build "consensus" and are totally unprepared for fast changing events -- here fast means relatively slow stuff like worsening labor competitiveness, among other things).
You are correct in some of what you say, but you're forgetting:
A third idea was to have the president elected by a direct popular vote.
Direct election was rejected not because the Framers of the Constitution
doubted public intelligence but rather because they feared that without
sufficient information about candidates from outside their State, people
would naturally vote for a "favorite son" from their own State or region. At
worst, no president would emerge with a popular majority sufficient to
govern the whole country. At best, the choice of president would always be
decided by the largest, most populous States with little regard for the
smaller ones.
> The principle here is majority rule, minority rights. The electoral college doesn't guarantee that.
It was never designed to. It was designed to be a good electoral solution for a nation shaped larger than a toy. Canada and India have found out to their peril how applying the Westminster model to large nations result in populism that ultimately weakens the economy.
> In other words, a more committed majority state can be disregarded
And you propose to disregard a minority in favor of a majority. Yeah, that's the ticket. It's called the Federal government for a reason, you know, not a *central* government.
It's "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a *more* perfect Union", not a *perfect* union. If you don't like it, campaign to have the rules changed. See how many agree. Until then, shut up. (I guess the choice of a armed rebellion is always open to you but I wouldn't advise it.)
Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla and Firefox, as browsers, clearly raise the bar and make IE look really silly, with all their new features: typeahead find, tabs, and perhaps the dnd configurable toolbar.
Oh please. Typeahead find is disabled in firefox default installs for a reason: it confuses newbies no end. Tabs - unless you browse with 5+ pages open, and many users don't, tabs are not that useful. The DnD configurable toolbar? IE has had a better one since version 4.
If you are going to evangelize, at least get it right: popup blocker, optional adblocking via Adblock, no ActiveX hassles. Security, security, security.
Even Gecko, a superb renderer (especially for complex layouts) is not a good reason for most people to switch because the sites most people visit work very well with IE (hell, Slashdot renders better in IE than in Firefox).
Lots of ICQ users in Eastern Europe and Russia.
Also, ICQ was way to complicated (ICQ numbers got oldfashioned quickly after Yahoo and MSN came up with screen names). I don't use AIM much but I fondly remember early versions of Yahoo and MSN messenger: underfeatured but easy on the eyes, compared to the visual bloat of ICQ.
If after-hours coffeeshop talk in the Valley is to be believed, there *is* a Google Messenger coming in 2005, despite denials.
And it won't push MSN out of the market, just like MSN or Yahoo didn't push AIM out of the market. MSN Messenger has HUGE presence internationally and the hassle of getting all your buddies to upgrade is what will keep MSN where it is.
> some fairly respectable economists are starting to see only a 10% chance of avoiding a coming economic meltdown
... economists". This is not to say that he is wrong (and in his line of work it's useful since he can play an effective devil's advocate) since even the boy who cried wolf was right once, but that statement of yours was classic scaremongering.
Stephen Roach is known in investment circles for being bearish. And one ecomist, even ignoring his reputation, != "some
And oh, several respectable posters on Slashdot are starting to see that BSD is dying.
> But sandboxing is not a function of the language - it is solely a function of the runtime.
Pedant alert. In this case, ignorant pedant alert. the runtime is the Sun(R) Java(tm) Runtime Environment(tm), and Sun has lawyers who will do bad things to you if you claim the Java moniker does not apply to the JRE (which includes plugins for several popular browsers). Cue "Java is a platform" blather from Sun execs.
In this case, they are simply being hoisted on their own petard. It is a bug in Java. The Platform (or, if you prefer, the thingamajig they sell/give away). Period.
Ban camera phones? Given how the Japanese love their camera phones there'll be tanks rolling on the streets before that happens. :-)
Incidentally, isn't buying via mobile already huge in South Korea?
Too bad all the nations can't get into an agreement, if there was a single space program for the whole world
One day, humans will finally stop being suspicous backbiters and untrustworthy assholes in general and the resulting peace and prosperity will give us a Star Trek-ish future.
Until then, competition's the ticket for getting anything done. You think the space race in the 60s was all about brotherhood of man?
What bothers me most with developing countries is the fact that despite spreading diseases, high mortality, poverty, bad living conditions, the law (as in China) there is still growth in population.
There is strong correlation between superior living conditions and lower numbers of children per family unit. Google. Unsurprisingly, most of India's 300 million+ middle class has 1-2 kids.
And this is different from Europe exactly how? In fact, in Europe it's worse, Chirac sits in power, virtually unaccountable for years on end -- and his party got 16% of the vote last year. Where was the accountability when he bribed Saddam? Where was the accountability when Ivory Coast goes up in flames? Where is the accountability when thousands are slaughtered in Darfur and the EU debates ponderously on whether it can be called genocide or not?
Please. Europeans lecturing others on democracy is a joke.
You know, you can take your whole moral superiority complex and your delusional socialist attitude and shove it up your arse.
subjects of multi-billionaire businessmen
No we're not. Rhetoric is one thing, cold facts another. Gates, despite the fashionable Borg icon here, is subject to the same laws as anyone else.
But then you went and handed the bulk of the power to people you could trust even less.
Ask the folk who ran Enron where the power really is. What was it about the wheels of justice grind slow but exceedingly small again?
Yeah, a lot of big corps pay less than full rate on tax. But if you reflexive anti-business types ever paid attention to detail, you'd see they play the same rules as everyone else. They take advantage of every tax break in the book, just as you could if you had a good accountant.
The phrase "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" springs oddly to mind.
Actually it springs to my mind too, but for certain European countries which think banning fox hunting is more important than fixing the NHS (if you think your free healthcare will last, I pity you).
Capitalism is not perfect, certainly, but it's a whole lot better than the nanny-state some would substitute it with.
> You seem be be implying that the pollsters would intentionally lie. That is was you are saying right?
Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence. Of course, I believe the incompetence here was circumstantial -- this was no run-of-the-mill election, they would probably have done better in a 'more normal' election.
I don't think they intentionally lied. I believe their results are misleading because their sampling techniques could not cope with the turnout they got. For example, dollars to doughnuts they oversampled urban areas in an election that saw heavy exurban and rural turnout -- and then (since exit poll results are corrected using actual poll results) overweighted exurban and rural responses.
That's indeed the popular explanation, but somehow I have a hard time believing that Kerry supporters all lemming-like voted early in the morning.
It's slightly more plausible that angrier voters (overwhelmingly Kerry) were more committed and so got in line earlier, but they do seem to have been over-represented in early NEP sampling (possibly because they were more vocal?).
If that is the case, one has to wonder if the NEP similarly oversampled vocal Republican supporters later in the day.
The skew in the afternoon's leaked numbers (which overwhelmingly favored Kerry) and the final tally suggests something was fishy in NEP sampling this time. When exit poll numbers swung sharply like that, its time to wonder what the hell the pollsters were doing.
Actually, that's true -- the trick (at least for non-Danes IMO) is to parse words out of the lilting flow :-)
Oh, Finnish is fine, but Danish-- *gags*
Get it usable enough that people aren't going to have problems with it
You mean: get it usable enough so that *in the programmer's* opinion others are not going to have trouble with it.
That's the attitude that gave us X.
the result of a multi-party system, rather than the two-party system we have now.
AFAIK the two party system isn't codified in law anywhere, it seems to be a side effect of our electoral system. If we had proportional representation based on the popular vote for all our elections (senate, house, state senates) it'd be pretty easy for the "alternate" parties to get their candidates in at least into a state senate.
What I'm really trying to say is -- I believe proportional representation encourages a multiparty system, whereas our system encourages a 2-party one, and it's not an accident that Germany (for example) has the multiparty system it has now.
I still want to know how it happened that every single state happened to have the exact same system of assigning its electoral votes
.de and .fr today, at the risk of offending our Euro visitors).
I'd imagine it was a way of making the state more attractive as a prize: CA, FL, NY, OH are all prizes because with their n votes they inflict -2n damage to the loser. Splitting the vote, assuming a 55/45 or even a 60/40 tally, would make it less attractive to campaign in that state - a candidate would say, hey, my party organization would deliver me 40% of the vote and (say 4 seats out of 10) here with just an appearance or two, lemme move on to that other state which is all-or-nothing.
Btw, I'm a big skeptic about proportional representation for this reason: all-or-nothing raises the stakes and makes the prize that much more attractive. Proportional systems try to represent *everyone*, resulting in so many voices in the decision making process that nothing ever gets done, any point of view is buried under layers of "consensus" (as is happening in
They may not want to give that up for historical reasons. Okay by me since the General Assembly et al are talking shops, nothing more; as long as they don't _all_ want seats and vetoes on the Security Council (i.e., either France or Britain has to give up her post for Europe, and no EU member can be nominated to a nonpermanent seat since Europe already has a seat.)
My, how you miss the point -- or choose to.
Don't mix Calif. and SF, and NY and NYC. In a popular vote, candidates would have to concentrate on the larger urban agglomerates because that's where the voters were. The current system penalizes candidates who ignore less populous areas, thus largely balancing out the urban skew.
If we did as you suggest (popular vote) the agenda would be set by urban america alone, because that's where the BULK of the votes are.. rural votes, even if matching or slightly exceeding the urband vote, would be harder to reach because the they would be scattered across the nation. Elections -- especially campaigning -- is not all about math, it's about logistics too.
As time goes on I suppose you can regard Europe in the same way, so you'll eventually have another big, real grown-up country to compare yourselves with!
I certainly hope so, whenever it happens. Big countries have their own problems, so I'd expect empathy from Europe-the-nation (more than the sniping we get now). Although given the name-calling between it members, it looks as if this nation will take some time to birth itself.
About why I can't accept Europe as a nation yet: If we stick to the original rudimentary charter available to the Federal US government (interstate trade, maintaining the union's borders, and dealing with the outside world) it's clear Europe is 1/3rd there (common market which IIRC regulates internation trade and currency -- with exceptions).
The day Europe can take joint decisions on defense and foreign policy it will show it is a real country, IMO. And this is nontrivial because these things (all rationalization aside) are emotive: you can't wipe away years of European history and mistrust in a day.
Btw, you may want to read this (rather long) old document, it's tangentially related to the European superstate and shows how European 'unity' has often been imagined more as a pawn than anything else.
I'm sorry the word offended you, but I really can't help it if you have stopwords in your brain :-)
:-)
"Toy" implied nothing about a countries worth (GDP, social or moral) it was an expression of size and relative cultural homogenity. IMO even a populous country like Britain is a toy when compared to say, the US, China, India and Australia and their geographic spread and the cultural differences that brings. This post has a little more.
Even in a small nation like Britain, there are issues in urban/rural governance as urbanites force their POV onto rural folk (cf fox hunting?). Imagine that problem magnified 100X or more in a large country with many more geographies and cultures.
Spend some time shutting between AZ and NY and you'll know what I mean
What you're basically suggesting is (not exactly, but) similar to the vote splitting done by Maine and Nebraska and proposed in Colorado. Let me (inaccurately) call it "one county one vote". If we are prepared to bring down the granularity to this level, I really see no objection to the "one man one vote" that others are suggesting -- it would be simpler for everyone.
OTOH, I believe there's a bigger lesson here: don't try to change the rules of the game when you lose (I'd say this to Repubs if they cried about losing Ohio and the election inspite of winning the popular vote as well). The electoral college has served the US remarkably well for something thought up by gentleman farmers in the horse-and-buggy era.
I hate to disappoint you, but the european union (which has a larger population than the united states) also uses popular votes for its parlament...
I hate to disappoint YOU, mon ami, but call me the day you elect a European parliament that actually does something useful, like debate direct or VAT tax rates seriously, or decide monetary policy, or approve a declaration of war. A popularly elected fart house != parliament.
Even that aside Germany has nearly 1/3 of the population of the united states (80M vs. 250M), so the countries are not acatually "toy-sized"
Toy-sized as in size and geographical diversity (because that is what produces the different cultures and living conditions I was talking about in my earlier post). Germany is big, but its very homogenous compared to the US, China, India, Australia or many other countries with geographical and climactic spread. Btw: Germany, France and Spain are the biggest Europe can manage (without looking at an almanac), Italy and Greece are small by any world standard, Britain onwards things start looking laughable sizewise.
Incidentally, I have friends in both France and Germany, which is why I'm kind of sad about how they are today. Both are ruled by proportional representation systems and both are floundering. Study how proportional rep systems work and you'll see why (hint: they ossify even as they try to build "consensus" and are totally unprepared for fast changing events -- here fast means relatively slow stuff like worsening labor competitiveness, among other things).
> The principle here is majority rule, minority rights. The electoral college doesn't guarantee that.
It was never designed to. It was designed to be a good electoral solution for a nation shaped larger than a toy. Canada and India have found out to their peril how applying the Westminster model to large nations result in populism that ultimately weakens the economy.
> In other words, a more committed majority state can be disregarded
And you propose to disregard a minority in favor of a majority. Yeah, that's the ticket. It's called the Federal government for a reason, you know, not a *central* government.
It's "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a *more* perfect Union", not a *perfect* union. If you don't like it, campaign to have the rules changed. See how many agree. Until then, shut up. (I guess the choice of a armed rebellion is always open to you but I wouldn't advise it.)