Umm, I noticed Badnarik and Cobb (actual candidates)are both missing, whereas Hillary Clinton and a bunch of people who are not even running are listed.
Not to mention, after seeing a real-life example it seems needlessly complicated as compared to our current system or approval voting
What you said reminded me of one of the ancient Greek system where once a year the assembly voted on whether to have an ostracism. They would each name a citizen that they disliked, and the person with the majority would be exiled from the city for 10 years, with their property intact. They used to get rid of anyone who was becoming too powerful. I think that would be great if we exile disliked members of the govt. for 10 years. (Or even just having the opportunity for a recall, where a politician could not run for office for 10 years)
One of the benefits of being ostracised from political life is that they now had to find something to do with their time. If I remember right, Herodotus was exiled from the greek city of Halicarnassus, and as a result he wrote the history of the Greeks which we now know in large part because of him
You're missing the whole point of the original question here and replacing it with a typical Fox-News/ big media question that is repeated time and time and time again.
The original poster is talking about a radical reform of our electoral system, not nitpicky details of whether we should use this machine or that machine to tally votes.
I'm not saying yours isn't a valid question; but it's going to be asked a thousand times by CNN et al. However, you can bet no one at the debates is going to ask a question about a major overhaul of our democratic system like the parent post. This is the perfect forum to ask these tough questions that wont be covered otherwise... I can honestly say I have zero interest in the Bush-Kerry debates on tv, but I would love to hear their answers to half of these questions that were proposed.
What I forsee happening is a real rift between performance vs storage harddrives.
I think you're on to something there. In the desktop market though, there's always the RAID possibility to keep prices low. That is, I don't see an equivalent-sized performance drive becoming prohibitively expensive since you can always RAID two or more together. Now, with laptops, and low power devices that's rarely an option so I could definitely see a huge disconnect between performance desktop HDs and laptop drives
You bring up a really good point. This would be a important thing to find out before we send an interstellar mission or a probe to some of the closest stars. An electromagnetic barrier, or even a small force like that could nudge the craft in the wrong direction and spell disaster for a mission. You'd hate to be millions of miles out, with the minimum amount of fuel, and suddenly realize you're going in the wrong direction
There have been a lot of psychological studies on this phenomena of estimating. Rather, it falls under the broad categories of Judgement and Decision-Making studies. For instance, try this example from a study (Tversky, Kahneman 1974):
Quickly estimate in less than 5 seconds the answer to this multiplication problem:
8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1
When this question was asked of a different group of people only in reverse (ie. 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8), people estimated significantly lower than the first group did. For the first group the median estimate was 2250. For the second, the median estimate was only 512!! (The actual answer is 40320 if you are wondering)
The explanation for this is what is called a Framing Effect, which basically means that the way in which the question is asked (or the answers are presented) influences how we respond.
Some other common effects... -People tend to be overconfident in their responses, which leads us to make poor decisions. ("I'm 80% sure this is correct.") -Another is Illusory Correlation in which our expectations keep us from judging events and people objectively. (for example, We assume that tall people are good at basketball.) -We tend to not instinctively believe in statistics... (ie, if we flip a coin 9 times and it comes up Heads, we tend to assume the probability for the next toss being Tails as being more than 50%) Lotteries work this way too, because we overestimate our chances of winning. -And finally, we show a hindsight bias; that things make perfect sense after the fact.
A good textbook on these topics is Sternberg's "Coginitive Pyschology"
I have to agree with you there. I love talk radio and really wish that more NPR stations would cut out their hours of classical music. I'd much rather see two separate stations than to have them assume that the audience of NPR shows are automatically classical music fans. Put on a BBC stream or something if they don't have anything better to play
Good points. I wonder how noticeable our terrestrial radio signals are now?
I've heard somewhere though, that pretty soon our signals will be on such narrow bands and so directional that we will probably stop leaking most of the broadcast radiation we do now. Which I guess in your scenario would be a good one... give us time to advance a little further technologically before we're heard again
I would think that the chances of an alien race discovering an asteroid with our DNA on it would be infinitely less than them seeing our radiation signals.
Not to mention the time involved for those rocks to travel interstellar distances. The radio signals will get there at the speed of light. Assuming the rocks don't vaporize along the way, by the time they arrive anywhere, we're talking millions->billions of years later... by which time if we haven't gone extinct, surely we will have already acheived interstellar travel.
One thing that goes along with the insurance, is to keep a good list of all your gear , movies, etc... (Serial #s on the expensive items)
If you are unfortunate enough to be robbed, you'll at least have a list to give the police.
On the other hand, people tend to borrow a lot of things in college like movies and games. Sometimes even without your permission (ie if a roomate borrows or loans out your stuff to a friend). When things are out of your sight for a long time, if you're anything like me, you'll tend to forget about them, and never get them back. So if I could do it all over again, I'd definitely keep better track of the stuff I had.
To avoid the problem of companies renewing something infinitely, I'd suggest not having a minimum period, and charging $1 for the first year. For each subsequent year, the renewal fee would double. So the 2nd year it'd be $2, 3rd year $4, etc...
By the time the copyright got to 21 years it'd be over a million dollars to renew it, which would strongly encourage people to just let it go to the public domain. This way would also protect small time inventors/writers, since even at 7 years, it's only $64 to renew.
I think it would be interesting if they had a female antagonist this time around in the 3rd movie. I can't remember a single female in the other movies with a position in the Empire or with the dark side of the force.
The thing that scares me though, if Lucas did end up doing that, I can just see him writing a hokey script along the lines of Star trek 8 (first contact)
Good idea although why not just buy a video camera? Then she can take it back to her room, and FF through the lecture. Sure, it's a little more expensive, but it's only one thing to worry about
Heck, if she could set up the camera, she wouldn't even need to go to class. (unless the teacher required active participation)
Parent is absolutely right. I haven't paid for a magazine the last 3 years, and I have about 20 subscriptions (popular ones like rolling stone, maxim, tv-guide, pc-gamer, biking, etc..) It's absolutely true... there's lots of businesses built around giving free subscriptions to "business professionals" who I suppose they assume will be buying the products the magazines advertise.
Do a google search, or go to one of these online deal websites and it's not too hard to find offers for free magazines out there. Of course some of them do ask for survey-type information when you sign up, so if you're uncomfortable about that you might be out of luck... but I have come across quite a few that only need the name/address to send it to
Parent brings up a good point; these problems started at O'Hare when American airlines basically moved its hub (and many of the connections) from St. Louis to Chicago. United saw this and increased their flights to Chicago to stay competitive with American. Add that to the summer storms that go through the midwest, runways that cross each other, and the increasing number of smaller planes, and it has turned out to be a recipe for disaster there.
I have to respond to this because it irks me so much when people place so much stock in dictionary definitions.
The english language is constantly evolving, and will continue to. Words get used in different ways, and over time will come to mean different things. Trying to read something in Old English is near impossible, and that was still in use less than 1000 years ago. In the last few hundred years our grammar (the way we construct sentences) has changed, along with the meanings of many many words. Ever seen the marks in a dictionary that denote an archaic definition of a word? A good number of those definitions were in common use at the turn of the century.
The simple fact is the English language is constantly evolving, and there's not much you can do to stop it. "She is *married* to her college sweetheart" "He is *married* to his work." "This is the *marriage* of many ideas."
All are in common usage now, probably in that order. Who knows what will happen in the next hundred years, perhaps the word marriage will only mean "the union of people/ideas" or something along those lines.
Like all the all the other dictionary zealots out there, you can go on all you want about how according to Encarta (or whatever other end all source you choose) that someone is wrong...but in the end it's the common usage that will prevail, not the definitions that you seem to be
"married" to. The English language makes progress just like any other type of technology.
After having read the book, I didn't think the movie was too bad. But, I would definitely agree they did a horrible job explaining what in the world was going on... I think I would have been completely lost if I didn't already know the story. I dunno, maybe all the rain at the beginning lulled me into a stupor
Yeah no doubt, when I read that I was like "Wow, they should post that into Wikipedia instead of here". But I do have to say that it was more of an interesting read than the actual Wikpedia Article on the ancient olympics
First of all I think one has to accept all aspects of the observable world around us. And all the evidence for life points to evolution/natural selection. It is true and been proven, as much as gravity or quantum mechanics (which has been verified more than anything else). You can see it happen with bacteria over a relatively short period of time. Diseases mutate and change, some survive and overtake others based on natural selection.
That being said I think the only sane way to believe in creation is to accept that God created a universe/world that works on its own, period. And the key to life working is evolution. So if you're going to believe God created the world 10,000 years ago, you have to accept that He created a world in the middle of its life cycle with no evidence to the contrary.
In nerd terms this would be like if you sent a save game file to a friend, and they were able to start off at that point, even though they didn't actually play the game from the beginning on their computer. Heh, then maybe we are one big saved game from another universe.
But regardless of what you do believe, please remember that the bible as it is today was compiled from a large number of sources in the 4th century by men. This doesn't necessarily mean it's not true, but it does leave room open for debate.
1. It would be nice if you could turn on a feature to preload all the links on a webpage, specifying how many links deep to load, and if it optimized it according to your connection.
2. Another related feature might be to preload all your frequently visited sites (with a couple links deep) so that you can take them with you in the car or on a plane.
3. On a more ambitious note have a visual way of noting what type of web page you are looking at (such as, make the tab a different color, or the border of the page, or even the link itself). You could have blogs turn RED, news sites BLUE, commercial sites YELLOW, etc... This would definitely be useful to determine whether a site is even worth visiting at a glance.
First let me start of by saying, I love the idea of public transportation, and that this was a great *idea* Unfortunately this light rail line is wrought with major problems in its implementation.
-First of all, the tracks are laid right into the street. Not only has it been causing massive traffic congestion but often times the train itself has to wait for traffic lights! They should have elevated it or buried it.
-Stations: There are WAY too many stations. Obviously there was some lobbying going on by the downtown businesses because there is a freaking stop every 2 blocks!! It is literally faster to walk. The NYC subway stops are a more sensible 10 blocks or more away from each other for the most part.
-Furthermore, most of these stations are OUTDOORS with NO ENCLOSED SPACE. Let me remind you this is a state with 6 months of winter, and subzero temperatures are very common. And none of them match up with the skyway system here (an excellent way to get around in the winter btw).
-It doesn't connect to anything important...yet. They are working on the connections to the airport and the Mall of America, but those will not be done until Dec. 04.
That 96000 total is extremely deceptive in that after the weekend when it was no longer FREE, the attendance dropped like a rock. The peak attendance on these trains was something like 14 people at a time. On a monday morning during rush hour. Not suprising considering how inefficient they are. The bus system is much the same here.
My hope is that they take this stretch of the line as a lesson in what not to do, and instead try to model it off of other major cities with successful public transit.
I asked about this with quest a while back, so things might have changed since then. And also the CSR may have had no idea what they were talking about but here's what they told me.
Unfortunately with the metered service, they consider using the DSL connection as "using the phone". So for every minute you are using the dsl, they charge you that 1cent a minute or whatever the price may be. This is all on top of a $10 a month base fee, and all the associated taxes (almost another $10).
So basically you would end up spending more having the metered line. But now since a voice connection is no longer a requirement for dsl, I imagine things may have changed. For the record comcast does the same thing regarding cable here. $10 extra for not having cable tv (which is exactly what their limited basic service costs- go figure). The difference though is that neither one of these options (either dsl or cable) has any yearly contracts. In fact, I haven't heard of any lengthy contracts in a long time outside of cell phones. That's here in the midwest so things might be different on the coasts
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention, after seeing a real-life example it seems needlessly complicated as compared to our current system or approval voting
One of the benefits of being ostracised from political life is that they now had to find something to do with their time. If I remember right, Herodotus was exiled from the greek city of Halicarnassus, and as a result he wrote the history of the Greeks which we now know in large part because of him
The original poster is talking about a radical reform of our electoral system, not nitpicky details of whether we should use this machine or that machine to tally votes.
I'm not saying yours isn't a valid question; but it's going to be asked a thousand times by CNN et al. However, you can bet no one at the debates is going to ask a question about a major overhaul of our democratic system like the parent post. This is the perfect forum to ask these tough questions that wont be covered otherwise... I can honestly say I have zero interest in the Bush-Kerry debates on tv, but I would love to hear their answers to half of these questions that were proposed.
I think you're on to something there. In the desktop market though, there's always the RAID possibility to keep prices low. That is, I don't see an equivalent-sized performance drive becoming prohibitively expensive since you can always RAID two or more together. Now, with laptops, and low power devices that's rarely an option so I could definitely see a huge disconnect between performance desktop HDs and laptop drives
You bring up a really good point. This would be a important thing to find out before we send an interstellar mission or a probe to some of the closest stars. An electromagnetic barrier, or even a small force like that could nudge the craft in the wrong direction and spell disaster for a mission. You'd hate to be millions of miles out, with the minimum amount of fuel, and suddenly realize you're going in the wrong direction
N. Korea Blast
There have been a lot of psychological studies on this phenomena of estimating. Rather, it falls under the broad categories of Judgement and Decision-Making studies. For instance, try this example from a study (Tversky, Kahneman 1974):
Quickly estimate in less than 5 seconds the answer to this multiplication problem:
8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1
When this question was asked of a different group of people only in reverse (ie. 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8), people estimated significantly lower than the first group did. For the first group the median estimate was 2250. For the second, the median estimate was only 512!! (The actual answer is 40320 if you are wondering)
The explanation for this is what is called a Framing Effect, which basically means that the way in which the question is asked (or the answers are presented) influences how we respond.
Some other common effects...
-People tend to be overconfident in their responses, which leads us to make poor decisions. ("I'm 80% sure this is correct.")
-Another is Illusory Correlation in which our expectations keep us from judging events and people objectively. (for example, We assume that tall people are good at basketball.)
-We tend to not instinctively believe in statistics... (ie, if we flip a coin 9 times and it comes up Heads, we tend to assume the probability for the next toss being Tails as being more than 50%) Lotteries work this way too, because we overestimate our chances of winning.
-And finally, we show a hindsight bias; that things make perfect sense after the fact.
A good textbook on these topics is Sternberg's "Coginitive Pyschology"
I have to agree with you there. I love talk radio and really wish that more NPR stations would cut out their hours of classical music. I'd much rather see two separate stations than to have them assume that the audience of NPR shows are automatically classical music fans. Put on a BBC stream or something if they don't have anything better to play
I've heard somewhere though, that pretty soon our signals will be on such narrow bands and so directional that we will probably stop leaking most of the broadcast radiation we do now. Which I guess in your scenario would be a good one... give us time to advance a little further technologically before we're heard again
Not to mention the time involved for those rocks to travel interstellar distances. The radio signals will get there at the speed of light. Assuming the rocks don't vaporize along the way, by the time they arrive anywhere, we're talking millions->billions of years later... by which time if we haven't gone extinct, surely we will have already acheived interstellar travel.
If you are unfortunate enough to be robbed, you'll at least have a list to give the police.
On the other hand, people tend to borrow a lot of things in college like movies and games. Sometimes even without your permission (ie if a roomate borrows or loans out your stuff to a friend). When things are out of your sight for a long time, if you're anything like me, you'll tend to forget about them, and never get them back. So if I could do it all over again, I'd definitely keep better track of the stuff I had.
By the time the copyright got to 21 years it'd be over a million dollars to renew it, which would strongly encourage people to just let it go to the public domain. This way would also protect small time inventors/writers, since even at 7 years, it's only $64 to renew.
The thing that scares me though, if Lucas did end up doing that, I can just see him writing a hokey script along the lines of Star trek 8 (first contact)
Heck, if she could set up the camera, she wouldn't even need to go to class. (unless the teacher required active participation)
Do a google search, or go to one of these online deal websites and it's not too hard to find offers for free magazines out there. Of course some of them do ask for survey-type information when you sign up, so if you're uncomfortable about that you might be out of luck... but I have come across quite a few that only need the name/address to send it to
Parent brings up a good point; these problems started at O'Hare when American airlines basically moved its hub (and many of the connections) from St. Louis to Chicago. United saw this and increased their flights to Chicago to stay competitive with American. Add that to the summer storms that go through the midwest, runways that cross each other, and the increasing number of smaller planes, and it has turned out to be a recipe for disaster there.
The english language is constantly evolving, and will continue to. Words get used in different ways, and over time will come to mean different things. Trying to read something in Old English is near impossible, and that was still in use less than 1000 years ago. In the last few hundred years our grammar (the way we construct sentences) has changed, along with the meanings of many many words. Ever seen the marks in a dictionary that denote an archaic definition of a word? A good number of those definitions were in common use at the turn of the century.
The simple fact is the English language is constantly evolving, and there's not much you can do to stop it. "She is *married* to her college sweetheart" "He is *married* to his work." "This is the *marriage* of many ideas." All are in common usage now, probably in that order. Who knows what will happen in the next hundred years, perhaps the word marriage will only mean "the union of people/ideas" or something along those lines.
Like all the all the other dictionary zealots out there, you can go on all you want about how according to Encarta (or whatever other end all source you choose) that someone is wrong...but in the end it's the common usage that will prevail, not the definitions that you seem to be "married" to. The English language makes progress just like any other type of technology.
After having read the book, I didn't think the movie was too bad. But, I would definitely agree they did a horrible job explaining what in the world was going on... I think I would have been completely lost if I didn't already know the story. I dunno, maybe all the rain at the beginning lulled me into a stupor
Yeah no doubt, when I read that I was like "Wow, they should post that into Wikipedia instead of here". But I do have to say that it was more of an interesting read than the actual Wikpedia Article on the ancient olympics
That being said I think the only sane way to believe in creation is to accept that God created a universe/world that works on its own, period. And the key to life working is evolution. So if you're going to believe God created the world 10,000 years ago, you have to accept that He created a world in the middle of its life cycle with no evidence to the contrary.
In nerd terms this would be like if you sent a save game file to a friend, and they were able to start off at that point, even though they didn't actually play the game from the beginning on their computer. Heh, then maybe we are one big saved game from another universe.
But regardless of what you do believe, please remember that the bible as it is today was compiled from a large number of sources in the 4th century by men. This doesn't necessarily mean it's not true, but it does leave room open for debate.
2. Another related feature might be to preload all your frequently visited sites (with a couple links deep) so that you can take them with you in the car or on a plane.
3. On a more ambitious note have a visual way of noting what type of web page you are looking at (such as, make the tab a different color, or the border of the page, or even the link itself). You could have blogs turn RED, news sites BLUE, commercial sites YELLOW, etc... This would definitely be useful to determine whether a site is even worth visiting at a glance.
Does anyone happen to know if NASA actually has one of those?
First let me start of by saying, I love the idea of public transportation, and that this was a great *idea* Unfortunately this light rail line is wrought with major problems in its implementation.
-First of all, the tracks are laid right into the street. Not only has it been causing massive traffic congestion but often times the train itself has to wait for traffic lights! They should have elevated it or buried it.
-Stations: There are WAY too many stations. Obviously there was some lobbying going on by the downtown businesses because there is a freaking stop every 2 blocks!! It is literally faster to walk. The NYC subway stops are a more sensible 10 blocks or more away from each other for the most part.
-Furthermore, most of these stations are OUTDOORS with NO ENCLOSED SPACE. Let me remind you this is a state with 6 months of winter, and subzero temperatures are very common. And none of them match up with the skyway system here (an excellent way to get around in the winter btw).
-It doesn't connect to anything important...yet. They are working on the connections to the airport and the Mall of America, but those will not be done until Dec. 04.
That 96000 total is extremely deceptive in that after the weekend when it was no longer FREE, the attendance dropped like a rock. The peak attendance on these trains was something like 14 people at a time. On a monday morning during rush hour. Not suprising considering how inefficient they are. The bus system is much the same here.
My hope is that they take this stretch of the line as a lesson in what not to do, and instead try to model it off of other major cities with successful public transit.
Unfortunately with the metered service, they consider using the DSL connection as "using the phone". So for every minute you are using the dsl, they charge you that 1cent a minute or whatever the price may be. This is all on top of a $10 a month base fee, and all the associated taxes (almost another $10).
So basically you would end up spending more having the metered line. But now since a voice connection is no longer a requirement for dsl, I imagine things may have changed. For the record comcast does the same thing regarding cable here. $10 extra for not having cable tv (which is exactly what their limited basic service costs- go figure). The difference though is that neither one of these options (either dsl or cable) has any yearly contracts. In fact, I haven't heard of any lengthy contracts in a long time outside of cell phones. That's here in the midwest so things might be different on the coasts
Then we don't have to even waste a 1/4th of the earth for crop production. I guess those fusion power plants better be ready though