Consumption based tax is a great method. Of course, then you have to decide on what constitutes consumables.
Personally I like the idea of a simplified progressive tax plan with ZERO exemptions.
so if you make less than x (say 30k) you pay 1% (everyone pays something). but if you make 100K you pay 10% and if you make 1M you pay 15 or 20%, and it would cap out at 20 or 25 %.
I certainly agree with you, in every way. I was just stating that it was technologically feasible to verify the votes to a reasonable degree.
We can't have it both ways, though. Either you have a voter ID or not. If not, then internet voting can NEVER be a reality.
There are ways to make a vID without making it possible to run down who you voted for (but make my other suggestion impossible). You set the database to record if a particular ID has voted, but you keep the actual votes separate. Simple enough.
There are a number of ways to handle this in a sane fashion.
You could just throw out all votes that were not equal to each other. This would mean that if you are just doing random (assuming 2 candidates per position), you would throw out about half of any given random voter's votes.
Another possibility is to put the two machines next to each other and let them work them at the same time.
Then there are post-checks, where everyone has a voter ID and can check their vote after the fact and contest that vote. This would also work so that you couldn't ADD your vote post-hoc, but you could contest your own vote.
Of course, then your voter ID would HAVE to be different from you SOCSEC #, but hey, what's another 20 digit number to remember?
Then I will further contend that you may get more overlap in "randomly" chosen candidates than you might think (That is, if you tell person x to vote randomly, then 2 weeks later tell them to vote the same way, I would guess that you would get greater than 50% overlap in a significant fashion). This is because a) humans don't do random nearly as well as we think we do and b) we remember some things better than you might think.
Okay, you got me. But I think many people will tell you that we are a democracy. I was simply trying to correct that error (unfortunately I made another one in the process...stuff happens, huh?).
That's not exactly what I said (or at least not what I meant). IBM 'lost' to MS because they farmed out their OS to the smaller company.
At the same time, IBM lost in other sectors because they couldn't change fast enough--they were bloated long before MS showed up. I know my history that well. Having not been around like some people to enjoy the 70's in any meaningful fashion (I'm a bicentennial baby), I have to rely on the history books to see what went on.
And those are the Libertarians that scare me. I am NOT a died-in-the-wool lib. I have serious reservations about some of their arguments.
That said, I do think that there is a better way than what is in place at the moment, and that the libs have a certain amount of wisdom in the idea of reducing government power.
I DO see the gov't as necessary for certain essential functions, such as road building, the postal system. In short, those essential services that keep the country running. At times this may even include the regulation of certain businesses.
The rule, in my mind, is that if a business is more powerful than the government, it is too powerful. If the government, is so powerful, however, that NO group of concerned individuals can stop it, then it is also too powerful (and this is the point that we are fast approaching in this country!).
I disagree also about your statement that the ultimate outcome of unrestricted capitalism is a set of market monopolies. Look at IBM--it got SO huge that it couldn't respond to market forces, and so it lost the OS war with MS (of course, if IBM hadn't given MS the torch in the first place...). I'm no economist, but I am sure there are several hereabouts that can tell us the truth on these things.
I DO agree that there is a need for gov't, and for taxes, but the constitution delineates a very different set of taxes than what we have. I STRONGLY recommend that you read Larry Elder's book. He makes a number of very astute observations, but NOWHERE does he advocate the abolishment of gov't.
BTW, walmart could easily build the roads if it wanted. In fact, it could fund the roads across america for a long time if it was in it's best interest to do so (as in, no one else was doing it! Walmart certainly wants us to have good roads, so that we can arrive at their stores to buy more of their stuff so that they can maintain their market dominance. The same goes for EVERY SINGLE RETAILER IN AMERICA!).
I hear this argument against pure democracy a lot! However, I must respectfuly disagree. While it is certainly a possibility that this COULD happen, there are certain ways to avoid this potential pitfall.
The first, and simplest, is to require not a 51% vote, but say a 66%, 75% or 80% vote. This would eliminate a LOT of the problems that you have described.
Second, you CANNOT eliminate, along with the representatives, certain officials, such as the president, judges (who determine constitutionality of laws among other duties), governors or mayors. These people are needed. Even in a pure democracy, there is a need for a head of state. This is because there are certain administrative functions that CANNOT be farmed out to the populace every day. Doing so would be foolish.
The third thing is something that most sane countries have adopted--a constitution. This eliminates (or rather, reduces), the issue that you mentioned above of women voting to disenfranchise men (whatever that means). In essence, the constitution IS the watchdog. Certainly this would mean that we must all become more aware of the law, but that's okay.
Another way to avoid a pure democracy becoming a mob rule where minorities are treated like dirt (although I don't think that this would really happen) is education. This is one of the tenets of a successful democracy in the first place--people MUST be educated about the decisions. While some critics here have flamed me for daring to state that on average humans are fairly smart, I still think that most people have the ability to make fairly good decisions if they are properly educated.
I do agree that equitable, even and fair enforcement of the laws is important, but equitable laws are *JUST* as important! You CANNOT expect that people will obey unfair laws without complaining.
In organizational psychology we know that one of the biggest complaints that people make about companies they work for is unfair treatment of themselves or coworkers. This is also one of the biggest drivers of workplace violence. This is also true of countries. When the rules are arbitrarily enforced the people are unhappy, even if they are not able to express this displeasure.
Interestingly enough, it is NOT in democracies and free countries where minorities are treated the worst (historically speaking). If you will examine history for a bit, you will see that the most notable and systematic poor treatment of minorities occur in places where the rulers dictate how different classes of people are treated (Nazi Germany being the foremost example, but there are numerous others).
Of course, now that I have mentioned this, someone will bemoan the fate of slaves in America. I have a response, however. First, the leadership in the Southern United states did dictate how the minority was treated. They did it differently that Hitler or Molosovich (sp?), but the social pressure, combined with the KKK, was essentially a dictatorial rulership.
Second, you will see that eventually the democratic system ironed itself out. While some would disagree, I do feel that racism is NOT the problem many civil rights folks would have you believe (after all, they too, have a job made of having a problem--if all racism suddenly ended, Jesse Jackson would be out of a job, something he doesn't want! [note, this is NOT my argument alone, read the larry elder book "Ten things you can't say in America"] ).
I guess my whole point in this is that "pure" democracy *can* work, but you *must* put in safeguards to ensure that. The trouble is in getting them there in the first place, not in enforcing them.
Now, to bring this BACK on topic, taxes are a perfect example of this: Most of us feel that taxes are too high. I personally feel that they are, and I don't end up paying ANY taxes at the end of the year--I make very little money, and I have two children.
Personally, I DO take advantage of several social net programs to make ends meet while i am in coll
You are right in so many ways, but wrong in some of the more important ones.
The trouble is that you are relying on individuals with a vested interest in getting as much money out of you as possible (for a wide variety of reasons) to put checks and balances that work into a system designed to get money from the populace.
Whether we like it or not, we have gone from a majority government (democracy) to a republic (which ONLY works IF the elected representatives are truly ACCOUNTABLE to the people they are supposed to represent). In our day and age, with the methods of communication and data/idea transfer that are available, republics are now an outdated form of government.
The trouble is that most politicians are aware of this on some level, and it scares them to death! Which is right and proper, since it means that if the entire nation EVER wakes up to this fact at the same time, the politicians are in danger of losing their jobs.
The neat thing is that they make the rules, and if they can they will do everything they can to make the idea of changing how our government works a very unpopular/highly illegal idea. This is NOT a good thing.
This country was, fortunately, founded on the idea that from time to time the government might need to be reorganized. Unfortunately, I think that most of us have lost sight of that fact. (Don't get me wrong here, though. I am in favor of change, but not while we have unfinished business overseas. I don't want to be accused of anti-Americanism--I believe this country is very strong and is a good place to live (and if you don't agree, fine, but you then have two options: leave or change it--grousing is just annoying). We need to change though.)
As for taxes, I am NOT in favor of the current tax system, but I do believe that it is better to work within the system to change it, but if that is NOT possible, then it may require more drastic actions.
Taxes are a leech system, and very much unecessary. If we had a true democracy, we would cut out some of the MOST expensive government employees (the pro politicians), and save a ton of money each year. Also the people would have to decide what programs they wanted to spend their moeny on, and I guarantee that if they saw that oooh, hey, spending more money on this means my paycheck gets smaller (what you take home), then most people would cut government spending in many areas.
At the same time, I would increase gov't spending on the areas that are important--education, police, fire, and military. Welfare should be, and needs to be, a private affair, as does social security, retirement, etc. These are things that the community can provide IF there is an incentive to do so. That incentive can be provided in many ways. Personally I buy into the libertarian philosophy that IF you give people their money (instead of taxing them), then they will, on average, give more to charities and similar things than those charities ever get from taxes.
If you want a good rundown of this read this book by larry elder: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0312 284659/qid=1081129106/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-394713 6-0611016?v=glance&s=books It's a great read for anyone who is curious about the libertarian philosophy, but isn't too preachy.
Personally, it's men like him that make the MOST progress against racism, not the people that are generally seen as civil rights leaders. Those people (such as Bell Hooks), are so often inflamatory instead of conciliatory.
However, I've said too much, I'm going to get flamed just as much as you now...Doh!
However, I think that you SERIOUSLY underestimate the number of people who are on dialup. I am at a university in the southeast, and most of the other graduate students that I know do NOT have broadband internet. In fact, most of the other people I know don't.
The trouble is that the cable company here is not all that great about it, and DSL is distance limited (as always).
I know a LOT of people in big cities that still have dialup. My sister, in Manhattan, still does not have a decent internet connection.
On Topic, though, I don't LIKE the idea of zero install. There's just something about it that weirds me out, and I don't see the future in it.
I guess its partly due to having played UT2003 too much where the mods and mutes are cached, and having WAY too many problems with incompatible versions of the same mod on different servers and not being able to play because of it. If zero install is anything like that, then no thanks.
That said, would someone PLEASE tell me WHY this is better than portage (gentoo), click-n-run (lindows), apt-get(debian), or the lycoris model (whatever they call it)? I personally would rather have it local.
Diskspace not being a problem is actually more of an argument to install everything local, too. Sorry, I don't like it.
and it didn't work in the movie. or real life. it only works with women you wouldn't want to sleep with, drunk or sober (though some of them might look okay....)
I haven't tried any of the statistical functions available in OO.org, but I would guess that they have some of the same problems.
The truth is that R is better, though less userfriendly. Gnumeric (linux only) has a plugin for R, though, and that I would trust to a certain extent.
In all seriousness, though, if you want any thing beyond a median, you should use a real stats package (SPSS, SAS, S-plus, R, etc). You are only hurting yourself otherwise.
The only trouble with intelligence testing is that it is NOT related to the other 4. At all. All the rest are fairly reasonable, much like a pilot's license, but you would NEVER get #1 past a civil liberties group. No way. If an employer tried this they would end up on the wrong end of a discrimination lawsuit. Fast!
Many of you may not know this, but many intelligence tests are biased in their treatment of certain minority groups (African Americans, Hispanics, etc). The way this is determined is simple--you give a large group of white, and a large group of hispanics the same test, then look at how they perform on a different, but cognitively intense task (say programming), and you will see that those who perform about the same on the task will have very different scores on the intelligence test, based on ethnic group.
The most common explanation for this is that intelligence tests tap into certain cultural issues, and not innate cognitive ability.
The upshot of all this is that by having manditory intelligence testing, you would deny perfectly competent minorities access to a mode of transportation.
The solution, of course, is a better battery of tests. The most fair (and unbiased (in a psychometric sense)) method is straight ability test, much like a driver's or pilot's license. This can be done either on a simulator on in a real vehicle, as long as the simulator is sufficiently true to the actual experience of flying it doesn't matter.
I personally favor using simulators for driving tests. Yes they are expensive, but then you don't have some moron out there endangering the public before they get a license (you can also make the test MUCH more objective in terms of scoring). This would be even more important when a flying vehicle was involved.
FWIW, this is my area: I am a grad student in Industrial Psychology--human ability testing is what we know better than just about any other field (even compared to other psychology specialist areas).
Read my sig. It came from someone describing the blind use of stats without really knowing what one is doing.
I am in another fairly statistics heavy field, but one where many people are not mathematically inclined. This leads to a lot of people doing exactly what you describe.
Personally I think even tools like SPSS (which is heavily used in my field) are dangerous because they lead one to doing analyses that don't make any sense given the data. SAS is better, as is S-Plus/R, since these require some understanding of your data.
By the way, if you can't calculate a particular stat by hand, or have never had to, then you really have no business using it or claiming you know what it is. Even a simple standard deviation is useless if you don't know what you are doing.
Means are probably the most dangerous and misused beasts. As an example, a university published in its campus paper that the average communications major from their university started with a salary of $80,000. The trouble is that this included a NBA starting player.
Now, you tell me, how many people that can calculate a mean would even stop to wonder about that. And if something that simple would get through, you had better believe that standard deviations get abused!
As a final note, excel should NEVER be used to calculate ANY statistics beyond a mean, since it uses patently WIERD formulas that DON'T always work (compare the answers against those gotten with SPSS or SAS for more complicated work and you'll be shocked).
having looked at the article, I don't know where this distro fits in:
its not as whiz-bang good as Xandros/Mandrake/etc. it isn't as easy to install as lindows. it isn't as customizeable as gentoo/debian/etc. Lacks the choices of packages/desktops/etc of all of the above.
Maybe it has perfect printer/sound/video support out of the box? That would, at least, be something.
Personally, I think that so many distros is cool, but guys, try to at least come up with a cool name/theme for your distro. I bet most people would love a fire linux (all fire themes, etc) (I can think of a few others too, but hey, so can you...).
Especially since statistical models assume no change when making predictions (or more precisely, they assume no change outside the equation). Typically speaking, I trust the numbers more than the men, but I don't trust every statistician to be honest.
The trouble here is that other things than file sharing could be affecting their sales, and the only way to know is to setup a control group (filesharing vs. no filesharing), but this is not feasible. There are other methods of determining if alternate theories are more plausible than the one suggested by the correlation, but they require some degree of reliable measurement.
The real trouble in all this is that the RIAA, ARIA, etc, have a vested interest in retaining control over the music industry, so fileshring scares the bejeezus out of them (with good reason, too). It is a method where any artist can be evaluated on the merits of their talents, not their marketing team (the current model).
Think you're any good? Start a website, link some torrents, and away you go. But if you suck, or no one sees your site, then your doomed. It's easy to tell if no one is downloading your songs.
Except that M$ would not have gotten where they are without certain key lawsuits and contracts. I personally think that unfettered capitalism is not really the way to go.
Re:Sodipodi for windows is worthless
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You're right--the windows version needs work--and a lot of it. It saves to SVG just fine, but crashes everytime I try to save to png.
Re:Excellent
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I have used photoshop, plenty, and I know the difference between image manipulation and drawing. All that's fine and dandy, but my point is that the impression I get, as someone not in the pro graphics business, is that GIMP is supposed to be able to handle *all* your graphic (non-moving) needs for images, and this is simply not true.
You may say that that's not what its for, and you're probably right, but the impression I had for a long time was just the opposite, and I know plenty of people who feel the same way.
As for your instructions on how to make a shape, I can do that, sure, but it is not intuitive. In fact, I would never have figured that out, but I can draw a box in photoshop easily enough.
I don't mind being told how to do something, but I think that one of two things need to happen: either GIMP needs to handle the drawing functions better, or progs like sodipodi need better community support.
I mention sodipodi in particular because it is the best of the drawing progs I've seen for linux for simple stuff, but is needs a lot of work, too.
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Except that its mostly cosmetic, from my point of view.
There are still tasks that I would like to do that are not possible in an intuitive fashion.
For instance, I frequently draw shapes (you know, circles, squares, rectangles, etc). In Fireworks, Sodipodi, and almost every other image creation/manipulation program I have used, this is a very simple task, and very easy to figure out how to do (click on icon, click on canvas, drag mouse, release button--bingo!).
In GIMP, I still don't know how to do this. I probably never will. Why not? Because this is a task that I use a lot, and if a program is going to make me work for that, then I don't want to use that program.
Sorry, but the UI is not that much better (at least on the windows version).
I will probably get flamed for saying this, and get called an idiot for not knowing how to do this, or told that that's not what the gimp is for, but I don't care--it is a tool that doesn't do what I expect--especially after seeing site's "made with gimp" logos and all their fancy stuff.
Yeah it looks cool, but I could do all that in fireworks much faster than the time it would take me to learn how to make a square in GIMP.
As a note-- I really like sodipodi much better. There are certain things it can't do, but in terms of fire it up and go, sodipodi wins hands down.
In all this discussion of flash and usability, and is it good, there is something that is missing--accessibility. Being in an Industrial Psychology program, this is something we have to think about--can a blind person use your site. If the answer is "I don't know, but I use flash", then no way.
The big drawback for using flash as a navigation system is that the blind cannot use that. Of course, this also means that anyone who uses a text-voice renderer cannot either.
This is the best reason to use CSS instead of some other layout mechanism: It works with readers.
BTW, if you are designing, and have 50 links on your home page (aka slashdot), this will bug the heck out of anyone using a text-reader too.
Slashdot Mirror
#5 IS the way to go.
Consumption based tax is a great method. Of course, then you have to decide on what constitutes consumables.
Personally I like the idea of a simplified progressive tax plan with ZERO exemptions.
so if you make less than x (say 30k) you pay 1% (everyone pays something). but if you make 100K you pay 10% and if you make 1M you pay 15 or 20%, and it would cap out at 20 or 25 %.
SO, for the DVD will there be a JUSTIN BAILEY hack?
That would be cool--if the movie doesn't just suck!
I love metroid, but it would be SO easy to screw this one up in a major way.
Maybe the DVD will come with a remake of the original game that you can play with your remote. That would be amusing....
I certainly agree with you, in every way. I was just stating that it was technologically feasible to verify the votes to a reasonable degree.
We can't have it both ways, though. Either you have a voter ID or not. If not, then internet voting can NEVER be a reality.
There are ways to make a vID without making it possible to run down who you voted for (but make my other suggestion impossible). You set the database to record if a particular ID has voted, but you keep the actual votes separate. Simple enough.
There are a number of ways to handle this in a sane fashion.
You could just throw out all votes that were not equal to each other. This would mean that if you are just doing random (assuming 2 candidates per position), you would throw out about half of any given random voter's votes.
Another possibility is to put the two machines next to each other and let them work them at the same time.
Then there are post-checks, where everyone has a voter ID and can check their vote after the fact and contest that vote. This would also work so that you couldn't ADD your vote post-hoc, but you could contest your own vote.
Of course, then your voter ID would HAVE to be different from you SOCSEC #, but hey, what's another 20 digit number to remember?
Then I will further contend that you may get more overlap in "randomly" chosen candidates than you might think (That is, if you tell person x to vote randomly, then 2 weeks later tell them to vote the same way, I would guess that you would get greater than 50% overlap in a significant fashion). This is because a) humans don't do random nearly as well as we think we do and b) we remember some things better than you might think.
For some.
For me it said "gentoo", which some kind of bird, i think
Okay, you got me. But I think many people will tell you that we are a democracy. I was simply trying to correct that error (unfortunately I made another one in the process...stuff happens, huh?).
Thanks.
That's not exactly what I said (or at least not what I meant). IBM 'lost' to MS because they farmed out their OS to the smaller company.
At the same time, IBM lost in other sectors because they couldn't change fast enough--they were bloated long before MS showed up. I know my history that well. Having not been around like some people to enjoy the 70's in any meaningful fashion (I'm a bicentennial baby), I have to rely on the history books to see what went on.
And those are the Libertarians that scare me. I am NOT a died-in-the-wool lib. I have serious reservations about some of their arguments.
That said, I do think that there is a better way than what is in place at the moment, and that the libs have a certain amount of wisdom in the idea of reducing government power.
I DO see the gov't as necessary for certain essential functions, such as road building, the postal system. In short, those essential services that keep the country running. At times this may even include the regulation of certain businesses.
The rule, in my mind, is that if a business is more powerful than the government, it is too powerful. If the government, is so powerful, however, that NO group of concerned individuals can stop it, then it is also too powerful (and this is the point that we are fast approaching in this country!).
I disagree also about your statement that the ultimate outcome of unrestricted capitalism is a set of market monopolies. Look at IBM--it got SO huge that it couldn't respond to market forces, and so it lost the OS war with MS (of course, if IBM hadn't given MS the torch in the first place...). I'm no economist, but I am sure there are several hereabouts that can tell us the truth on these things.
I DO agree that there is a need for gov't, and for taxes, but the constitution delineates a very different set of taxes than what we have. I STRONGLY recommend that you read Larry Elder's book. He makes a number of very astute observations, but NOWHERE does he advocate the abolishment of gov't.
BTW, walmart could easily build the roads if it wanted. In fact, it could fund the roads across america for a long time if it was in it's best interest to do so (as in, no one else was doing it! Walmart certainly wants us to have good roads, so that we can arrive at their stores to buy more of their stuff so that they can maintain their market dominance. The same goes for EVERY SINGLE RETAILER IN AMERICA!).
'nough said for now.
I hear this argument against pure democracy a lot! However, I must respectfuly disagree. While it is certainly a possibility that this COULD happen, there are certain ways to avoid this potential pitfall.
The first, and simplest, is to require not a 51% vote, but say a 66%, 75% or 80% vote. This would eliminate a LOT of the problems that you have described.
Second, you CANNOT eliminate, along with the representatives, certain officials, such as the president, judges (who determine constitutionality of laws among other duties), governors or mayors. These people are needed. Even in a pure democracy, there is a need for a head of state. This is because there are certain administrative functions that CANNOT be farmed out to the populace every day. Doing so would be foolish.
The third thing is something that most sane countries have adopted--a constitution. This eliminates (or rather, reduces), the issue that you mentioned above of women voting to disenfranchise men (whatever that means). In essence, the constitution IS the watchdog. Certainly this would mean that we must all become more aware of the law, but that's okay.
Another way to avoid a pure democracy becoming a mob rule where minorities are treated like dirt (although I don't think that this would really happen) is education. This is one of the tenets of a successful democracy in the first place--people MUST be educated about the decisions. While some critics here have flamed me for daring to state that on average humans are fairly smart, I still think that most people have the ability to make fairly good decisions if they are properly educated.
I do agree that equitable, even and fair enforcement of the laws is important, but equitable laws are *JUST* as important! You CANNOT expect that people will obey unfair laws without complaining.
In organizational psychology we know that one of the biggest complaints that people make about companies they work for is unfair treatment of themselves or coworkers. This is also one of the biggest drivers of workplace violence. This is also true of countries. When the rules are arbitrarily enforced the people are unhappy, even if they are not able to express this displeasure.
Interestingly enough, it is NOT in democracies and free countries where minorities are treated the worst (historically speaking). If you will examine history for a bit, you will see that the most notable and systematic poor treatment of minorities occur in places where the rulers dictate how different classes of people are treated (Nazi Germany being the foremost example, but there are numerous others).
Of course, now that I have mentioned this, someone will bemoan the fate of slaves in America. I have a response, however. First, the leadership in the Southern United states did dictate how the minority was treated. They did it differently that Hitler or Molosovich (sp?), but the social pressure, combined with the KKK, was essentially a dictatorial rulership.
Second, you will see that eventually the democratic system ironed itself out. While some would disagree, I do feel that racism is NOT the problem many civil rights folks would have you believe (after all, they too, have a job made of having a problem--if all racism suddenly ended, Jesse Jackson would be out of a job, something he doesn't want! [note, this is NOT my argument alone, read the larry elder book "Ten things you can't say in America"] ).
I guess my whole point in this is that "pure" democracy *can* work, but you *must* put in safeguards to ensure that. The trouble is in getting them there in the first place, not in enforcing them.
Now, to bring this BACK on topic, taxes are a perfect example of this: Most of us feel that taxes are too high. I personally feel that they are, and I don't end up paying ANY taxes at the end of the year--I make very little money, and I have two children.
Personally, I DO take advantage of several social net programs to make ends meet while i am in coll
You are right in so many ways, but wrong in some of the more important ones.
2 284659/qid=1081129106/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-394713 6-0611016?v=glance&s=books
The trouble is that you are relying on individuals with a vested interest in getting as much money out of you as possible (for a wide variety of reasons) to put checks and balances that work into a system designed to get money from the populace.
Whether we like it or not, we have gone from a majority government (democracy) to a republic (which ONLY works IF the elected representatives are truly ACCOUNTABLE to the people they are supposed to represent). In our day and age, with the methods of communication and data/idea transfer that are available, republics are now an outdated form of government.
The trouble is that most politicians are aware of this on some level, and it scares them to death! Which is right and proper, since it means that if the entire nation EVER wakes up to this fact at the same time, the politicians are in danger of losing their jobs.
The neat thing is that they make the rules, and if they can they will do everything they can to make the idea of changing how our government works a very unpopular/highly illegal idea. This is NOT a good thing.
This country was, fortunately, founded on the idea that from time to time the government might need to be reorganized. Unfortunately, I think that most of us have lost sight of that fact. (Don't get me wrong here, though. I am in favor of change, but not while we have unfinished business overseas. I don't want to be accused of anti-Americanism--I believe this country is very strong and is a good place to live (and if you don't agree, fine, but you then have two options: leave or change it--grousing is just annoying). We need to change though.)
As for taxes, I am NOT in favor of the current tax system, but I do believe that it is better to work within the system to change it, but if that is NOT possible, then it may require more drastic actions.
Taxes are a leech system, and very much unecessary. If we had a true democracy, we would cut out some of the MOST expensive government employees (the pro politicians), and save a ton of money each year. Also the people would have to decide what programs they wanted to spend their moeny on, and I guarantee that if they saw that oooh, hey, spending more money on this means my paycheck gets smaller (what you take home), then most people would cut government spending in many areas.
At the same time, I would increase gov't spending on the areas that are important--education, police, fire, and military. Welfare should be, and needs to be, a private affair, as does social security, retirement, etc. These are things that the community can provide IF there is an incentive to do so. That incentive can be provided in many ways. Personally I buy into the libertarian philosophy that IF you give people their money (instead of taxing them), then they will, on average, give more to charities and similar things than those charities ever get from taxes.
If you want a good rundown of this read this book by larry elder: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/031
It's a great read for anyone who is curious about the libertarian philosophy, but isn't too preachy.
Personally, it's men like him that make the MOST progress against racism, not the people that are generally seen as civil rights leaders. Those people (such as Bell Hooks), are so often inflamatory instead of conciliatory.
However, I've said too much, I'm going to get flamed just as much as you now...Doh!
Interesting psuedonym...
However, I think that you SERIOUSLY underestimate the number of people who are on dialup. I am at a university in the southeast, and most of the other graduate students that I know do NOT have broadband internet. In fact, most of the other people I know don't.
The trouble is that the cable company here is not all that great about it, and DSL is distance limited (as always).
I know a LOT of people in big cities that still have dialup. My sister, in Manhattan, still does not have a decent internet connection.
On Topic, though, I don't LIKE the idea of zero install. There's just something about it that weirds me out, and I don't see the future in it.
I guess its partly due to having played UT2003 too much where the mods and mutes are cached, and having WAY too many problems with incompatible versions of the same mod on different servers and not being able to play because of it. If zero install is anything like that, then no thanks.
That said, would someone PLEASE tell me WHY this is better than portage (gentoo), click-n-run (lindows), apt-get(debian), or the lycoris model (whatever they call it)? I personally would rather have it local.
Diskspace not being a problem is actually more of an argument to install everything local, too. Sorry, I don't like it.
and it didn't work in the movie. or real life. it only works with women you wouldn't want to sleep with, drunk or sober (though some of them might look okay....)
I haven't tried any of the statistical functions available in OO.org, but I would guess that they have some of the same problems.
The truth is that R is better, though less userfriendly. Gnumeric (linux only) has a plugin for R, though, and that I would trust to a certain extent.
In all seriousness, though, if you want any thing beyond a median, you should use a real stats package (SPSS, SAS, S-plus, R, etc). You are only hurting yourself otherwise.
Had a job, not in IT, once where I was getting about $15 to sweep. For a high school job, that's not bad.
The only trouble with intelligence testing is that it is NOT related to the other 4. At all. All the rest are fairly reasonable, much like a pilot's license, but you would NEVER get #1 past a civil liberties group. No way. If an employer tried this they would end up on the wrong end of a discrimination lawsuit. Fast!
Many of you may not know this, but many intelligence tests are biased in their treatment of certain minority groups (African Americans, Hispanics, etc). The way this is determined is simple--you give a large group of white, and a large group of hispanics the same test, then look at how they perform on a different, but cognitively intense task (say programming), and you will see that those who perform about the same on the task will have very different scores on the intelligence test, based on ethnic group.
The most common explanation for this is that intelligence tests tap into certain cultural issues, and not innate cognitive ability.
The upshot of all this is that by having manditory intelligence testing, you would deny perfectly competent minorities access to a mode of transportation.
The solution, of course, is a better battery of tests. The most fair (and unbiased (in a psychometric sense)) method is straight ability test, much like a driver's or pilot's license. This can be done either on a simulator on in a real vehicle, as long as the simulator is sufficiently true to the actual experience of flying it doesn't matter.
I personally favor using simulators for driving tests. Yes they are expensive, but then you don't have some moron out there endangering the public before they get a license (you can also make the test MUCH more objective in terms of scoring). This would be even more important when a flying vehicle was involved.
FWIW, this is my area: I am a grad student in Industrial Psychology--human ability testing is what we know better than just about any other field (even compared to other psychology specialist areas).
Read my sig. It came from someone describing the blind use of stats without really knowing what one is doing.
I am in another fairly statistics heavy field, but one where many people are not mathematically inclined. This leads to a lot of people doing exactly what you describe.
Personally I think even tools like SPSS (which is heavily used in my field) are dangerous because they lead one to doing analyses that don't make any sense given the data. SAS is better, as is S-Plus/R, since these require some understanding of your data.
By the way, if you can't calculate a particular stat by hand, or have never had to, then you really have no business using it or claiming you know what it is. Even a simple standard deviation is useless if you don't know what you are doing.
Means are probably the most dangerous and misused beasts. As an example, a university published in its campus paper that the average communications major from their university started with a salary of $80,000. The trouble is that this included a NBA starting player.
Now, you tell me, how many people that can calculate a mean would even stop to wonder about that. And if something that simple would get through, you had better believe that standard deviations get abused!
As a final note, excel should NEVER be used to calculate ANY statistics beyond a mean, since it uses patently WIERD formulas that DON'T always work (compare the answers against those gotten with SPSS or SAS for more complicated work and you'll be shocked).
having looked at the article, I don't know where this distro fits in:
its not as whiz-bang good as Xandros/Mandrake/etc.
it isn't as easy to install as lindows.
it isn't as customizeable as gentoo/debian/etc.
Lacks the choices of packages/desktops/etc of all of the above.
Maybe it has perfect printer/sound/video support out of the box? That would, at least, be something.
Personally, I think that so many distros is cool, but guys, try to at least come up with a cool name/theme for your distro. I bet most people would love a fire linux (all fire themes, etc) (I can think of a few others too, but hey, so can you...).
Especially since statistical models assume no change when making predictions (or more precisely, they assume no change outside the equation). Typically speaking, I trust the numbers more than the men, but I don't trust every statistician to be honest.
The trouble here is that other things than file sharing could be affecting their sales, and the only way to know is to setup a control group (filesharing vs. no filesharing), but this is not feasible. There are other methods of determining if alternate theories are more plausible than the one suggested by the correlation, but they require some degree of reliable measurement.
The real trouble in all this is that the RIAA, ARIA, etc, have a vested interest in retaining control over the music industry, so fileshring scares the bejeezus out of them (with good reason, too). It is a method where any artist can be evaluated on the merits of their talents, not their marketing team (the current model).
Think you're any good? Start a website, link some torrents, and away you go. But if you suck, or no one sees your site, then your doomed. It's easy to tell if no one is downloading your songs.
And just exactly how many coconuts are there to a VW? I want this in terms I understand, not some antiquated system of measurement.
Except that M$ would not have gotten where they are without certain key lawsuits and contracts. I personally think that unfettered capitalism is not really the way to go.
You're right--the windows version needs work--and a lot of it. It saves to SVG just fine, but crashes everytime I try to save to png.
I have used photoshop, plenty, and I know the difference between image manipulation and drawing. All that's fine and dandy, but my point is that the impression I get, as someone not in the pro graphics business, is that GIMP is supposed to be able to handle *all* your graphic (non-moving) needs for images, and this is simply not true.
You may say that that's not what its for, and you're probably right, but the impression I had for a long time was just the opposite, and I know plenty of people who feel the same way.
As for your instructions on how to make a shape, I can do that, sure, but it is not intuitive. In fact, I would never have figured that out, but I can draw a box in photoshop easily enough.
I don't mind being told how to do something, but I think that one of two things need to happen: either GIMP needs to handle the drawing functions better, or progs like sodipodi need better community support.
I mention sodipodi in particular because it is the best of the drawing progs I've seen for linux for simple stuff, but is needs a lot of work, too.
Except that its mostly cosmetic, from my point of view.
There are still tasks that I would like to do that are not possible in an intuitive fashion.
For instance, I frequently draw shapes (you know, circles, squares, rectangles, etc). In Fireworks, Sodipodi, and almost every other image creation/manipulation program I have used, this is a very simple task, and very easy to figure out how to do (click on icon, click on canvas, drag mouse, release button--bingo!).
In GIMP, I still don't know how to do this. I probably never will. Why not? Because this is a task that I use a lot, and if a program is going to make me work for that, then I don't want to use that program.
Sorry, but the UI is not that much better (at least on the windows version).
I will probably get flamed for saying this, and get called an idiot for not knowing how to do this, or told that that's not what the gimp is for, but I don't care--it is a tool that doesn't do what I expect--especially after seeing site's "made with gimp" logos and all their fancy stuff.
Yeah it looks cool, but I could do all that in fireworks much faster than the time it would take me to learn how to make a square in GIMP.
As a note-- I really like sodipodi much better. There are certain things it can't do, but in terms of fire it up and go, sodipodi wins hands down.
that's all i've got.
In all this discussion of flash and usability, and is it good, there is something that is missing--accessibility. Being in an Industrial Psychology program, this is something we have to think about--can a blind person use your site. If the answer is "I don't know, but I use flash", then no way.
The big drawback for using flash as a navigation system is that the blind cannot use that. Of course, this also means that anyone who uses a text-voice renderer cannot either.
This is the best reason to use CSS instead of some other layout mechanism: It works with readers.
BTW, if you are designing, and have 50 links on your home page (aka slashdot), this will bug the heck out of anyone using a text-reader too.
Depends, but a lot of geeks are interested in cars--it's the whole "ooh, I wonder how that works" gene that we seem to all have.