The voters in B.C. weren't just electing a new legislature on Tuesday; they were also voting in a referendum on a new electoral system - the "single transferable vote," or STV.
STV is too complex to describe briefly. Suffice it to say that it is a form of proportional representation now in use in several small places. It was almost adopted by B.C. voters in a 2005 referendum, where it fell just two percentage points short of the threshold of 60 per cent required for passage. Electoral reform advocates across Canada were hoping to breathe new life into their cause by achieving a breakthrough in B.C. this time.
Instead, B.C. voters delivered a crushing defeat to STV. Just 39 per cent of them supported the complex system, while 61 per cent opted for the first-past-the-post status quo.
Following on the heels of an even more resounding defeat for proportional representation in the 2007 referendum in Ontario, this surely should bring an end to the electoral reform movement in our country. Canadian voters in two major provinces have sent a strong message that this issue is not high on their priority list.
I only knew about this because I had to watch Ustream feeds of Hockey Night in Canada to see the Canucks-Blackhawks series, and every third ad was policital -- a lot of them being either for or against the Single Transferable Vote.
> you're seriously much better off getting a sub-$50 card now, and another sub-$50 card in a years time if you really need to.
Not if you want to drive a large monitor over DVI. The cheap cards don't have dual-link DVI, so I'm stuck driving my 23" widescreen by analog because the DVI connection won't do 2048x1152 (native resolution). I didn't realize this was a factor when I bought the monitor to replace the 20" 4:3 I stupidly broke (which worked fine over single-link DVI at 1600x1200).
I painted myself into a corner. I had a Radeon 9500 Pro, so when I upgraded motherboards I deliberately bought one with AGP so I could continue to use it. Then the Radeon died, and now I'm limited to AGP cards that are simply not being updated. I'm limping along with a GeForce 6200 because all the decent cards are PCIe.
If there are any AGP cards with dual-link DVI (preferably BOTH ports being dual-link DVI but I'll accept one DVI and one VGA), I'd love to know about them.
Restrictor plate racing is much more dangerous than racing on tracks that do not require it. The cars bunch up because there is no ability to pull away on the straightaways, and the accidents take out far more cars at once than on normal tracks. Talladega is considered a nightmare by most drivers, and even the fans (who might actually enjoy the bumping and grinding of bunched up cars) are less safe -- it's been a while, but cars or parts of cars have gone into crowds and killed people. (There have been recent incidents but the consequences were fortunately minor.) This happens largely at speed-limited tracks, because if one car lifts, another wedges right under it and sends it into the fencing above the wall.
Bunching up in compression waves is an unintended consequence of artificially restricted speeds, and it contributes to several problems beyond gridlock and multi-car pileups. Compression waves cause individual vehicles to have to constantly speed up and slow down, wasting enormous amounts of fuel and wearing out brakes (unless everyone has hybrids, in which case it mostly just eats brakes). It also leads to traffic coming to a dead stop for no apparent reason when the compression wave becomes too bunched up to allow any motion at all. Signals on highway onramps have helped with this, forcing merging traffic to be reasonably spaced rather than arriving in clusters, but ultimately the problem is that not everyone wants to (or can) go the same speed. Setting the limit unreasonably low aggravates this and makes the Sunday drivers self-righteous about being rolling roadblocks.
I think there should be a way to send anonymous messages to any vehicle owner (since it's not really feasible to ID the driver) just by knowing their license plate number. You don't get to know who they are, but you can leave them a message. It could be anything from "hang up and drive" to "your left brake light is out" to "my hovercraft is full of eels". In order to be able to read the messages, you would need to enter the numbers below the barcode already printed on your annual registration.
Make sure to include the time and date of the encounter, and the vehicle owner will probably know who the driver was.
Overall I found the South African accent to be more easily understood than Australian, and I would probably recognize it in most speakers (though not all). It is more unique than, say, the Kiwi accent which I have a hard time distinguishing from Australian spoken politely. (They do sound different at high volume levels.)
I was working on a laptop of a guy from South Africa, and asked if he had the install floppies for some software (yeah it was a while ago). He replied that the machine doesn't use floppies. I grabbed a 3.5" disk off his desk and said "it doesn't?", to which he replied "OH! That's not a floppy, that's a stiffy!"
After I got done chuckling and explaining what "stiffy" means in American slang, we had no problems. Their word is perfectly logical, it just wasn't what I was expecting. Sort of like Americans using "fanny" to refer to the backside, while in the rest of the English-speaking world it generally refers to female genitalia.
First, make a designer bag that looks great. Then make a laptop that fits in that bag and has no glaring weaknesses. It could be just mediocre in a whole lot of ways, it just has to not suck. Then offer both the bag and the laptop in a ton of custom colors/skins/whatever. Most importantly, MAKE TO ORDER.
By having them made to order and using netbook-grade components, you could maintain a decent profit margin (each one is a "custom job"), and if the marketing campaign goes completely bust, you aren't stuck with a bunch of stock to dump on Woot or Overstock. If one particular setup sells well, maybe it would pay to get ahead of the game and stock a few -- or make the shells so interchangeable that they can be quickly converted to whatever is ordered. Sell the shells too! The Acer Aspire One comes in a variety of colors, but they're all black on the inside. That sounds like factory-swappable shells to me.
Women who don't fit the stereotype, or for whom this just doesn't quite hit the mark, will continue to buy regular laptops (since I assume these won't REPLACE any existing product). What harm is done?
If Dell isn't smart enough to catch this boat, someone will. I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be Acer or Asus.
Encourage the book pirates -- seed the torrents yourself and help reduce Global Warming. Then you can take tax credits on all those carbon offsets you earned!
What good is the SysRq key? Repurpose it as a way for the user to say "please assign more system resources to whatever is in the foreground". If this can be done by clocking up, great. If the CPU is maxed out, then bump up the priority of the process. If there's nothing left to give, then the system beeps or throws a "tough shit, you bought the $100 computer" dialog box.
It does not seem like fundamentally new technology is necessary for us to be able to tell the computer it's lagging unacceptably. That doesn't necessarily mean it will be able to DO anything about it, but at least we can vent.
How long did it take to develop it this far? A good estimate of the time remaining would be four times that long (in man-hours, not calendar time). The general rule is that the last 20% of a job takes 80% of the time.
This would not have worked for one simple reason -- there were only TWO BOMBS AVAILABLE. It would be many months before more would have been made. There were none to spare on "warning shots".
It could be argued that the second bomb should have been deferred to see if the first one alone would have the desired effect (surrender), but the second bomb wasn't so much to break Japan as it was to intimidate the USSR. That's the real crime -- that Japan had to pay for a pissing match between two allies.
The person who sent me the care package initially wanted to send a single, unopened bottle, but when I could not tell him exactly what I wanted he decided the care package was more appropriate. Some small number (two or three) may as well have been squirrel piss, and ended up dumped after two tastes (one without water and one with). My review of those was typically "What is this shit?"
Still I learned that age is not necessarily a good indicator of quality when comparing two different distilleries (though within a single distillery, it usually is). Also, blends tend toward the mediocre but are rarely awful, while single malts are all over the map. The "winner" in both absolute preference and in bang for the buck turned out to be The Balvine, 12 year. It was not a whole lot better than some of the 18 year varieties I've tasted (then and since), but it's half the price. I still like Laphroaig when I want to taste the ground where the barley was grown and the peat was dried, but it's not something I would drink on a regular basis (and a bottle spoils once opened).
I have since added a desirable characteristic to my list -- whether water changes the character or not. Sometimes it does (Laphroaig, The Balvine), and sometimes it doesn't (Glenfiddich, Jura Superstition). I think it is a good thing when it does, as it allows two different tastes from the same, already opened bottle, depending on mood. It's not a deal breaker, especially if it's going to be consumed before oxygen can wreck the contents, so a bottle of Glenfiddich 12 is fine for taking to a party. If I do take a single-malt to a party, I ALSO take a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label or similar. That way if I see someone making a mixed drink out of the single malt I can ask that they use the other stuff.
Obviously I did not get any squirrel urine, though undrinkable is undrinkable and a few of them were.
This might well encourage companies to invest in R&D, or expanded operations, or anything else that looks unprofitable on paper but has impact far beyond the next quarter. Instead of paying out dividends and seeing 20% or 30% evaporate in the process, it may be better to keep profits down, provided the money is used wisely. In effect they are taxing themselves so someone else doesn't do it for them. If profits are only a few percent of revenue, it isn't too hard to post a small profit or loss by deliberately increasing expenses.
I am not arguing that this would be a bad thing, but I do not think it is the intended result. Worse, it might just serve to funnel MORE money to the people at the top, if they decide to spend on "human resources" (ie, themselves). As with so many things, care should be taken both before and after implementation to keep it from backfiring.
As a gift for newgrouping a Usenet group (alt.archery.traditional, if I remember correctly), I was once sent a scotch whisky care package. In it were twelve baby food jars that were numbered but otherwise not labeled. Only after I had sampled each and given my opinion was I told what each one was. I do not know that you have twelve varieties at your disposal, but this was an enlightening experience for me and could possibly be for some of your friends as well.
I did school photography for a while, and PV Peninsula was one of my assignments. While they gave us lots of space to work and lots of parental assistance (more like chaperonage), the kids were a bunch of fucking snobs. The parents wouldn't lift a finger to move any gear (even if it meant they'd get out the door quicker), that's just "not what they do". I won't say it was awful. Nobody got assaulted or anything, there were no pile-ups in the parking lot, and nobody accused any of us of doing anything improper. I did fuck up my knee, but that could have happened at any school. But I contrast this with the job at Dorsey high school.
Dorsey is not known for being in a particularly good neighborhood, and we sorta got corralled into a tiny space where there was only room for three camera rigs at a time (as opposed to the eight we were using at Peninsula). But the kids were nice, the parents were not "above" moving a piece of gear now and then, or even helping us load our cars after the shoot, and they made a point of seeing to it that we got lunch. Some of us were not too pleased to be assigned to Dorsey, and took the job with reservations. Then we got there, and everything went so well that every member of the crew said "send us back tomorrow".
It took me a while, but I realized the difference. The Peninsula kids are there trying to live up to their parents' inflated expectations. Most of them are not particularly happy. The kids at Dorsey, on the other hand, have lots of opportunity to get themselves in trouble, but they don't. They're in school because they WANT to be. And that makes all the difference.
Manual means it isn't done by robot. It doesn't mean the guy doing it can't have a hydraulic pallet jack, or other means of gaining mechanical advantage on the load he's moving and lifting.
Say they damp what would have been a Category 5 storm aimed at New Orleans. They succeed at damping it down to a Category 3, but it slams into Galveston instead because it no longer has the energy to make the northward turn. Who is liable for the damage done to Galveston and Houston?
Barring new laws holding them harmless from such scenarios, I don't think this will get off the ground for this very reason. No matter where they divert a storm, someone gains and someone loses (though not in a zero-sum manner).
You know, most people who go to the garden supply store and claim to be growing "tomatoes" are actually growing a completely different kind of consumable. Could this lead to fully automated pot farms?
I think the theory is that using a proxy reduces the likelihood of getting caught. Thus, when they DO catch someone, they must sentence more harshly for all the other people (and other offenses by the same person) that went undetected. Not that 25% is likely to be much of a deterrent, but that is probably the rationalization of the idea.
Some of the sheepskin documents survive; but the unimportant ones (as determined by the people of the day) are mostly gone, having been discarded.
Not discarded. Scraped and re-used. It's called a palimpsest. Just like erasing photos from your digital camera when you're on vacation, rather than offloading them to a computer.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently where it's offered, it isn't selling. From http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/633960:
I only knew about this because I had to watch Ustream feeds of Hockey Night in Canada to see the Canucks-Blackhawks series, and every third ad was policital -- a lot of them being either for or against the Single Transferable Vote.
Mal-2
> you're seriously much better off getting a sub-$50 card now, and another sub-$50 card in a years time if you really need to.
Not if you want to drive a large monitor over DVI. The cheap cards don't have dual-link DVI, so I'm stuck driving my 23" widescreen by analog because the DVI connection won't do 2048x1152 (native resolution). I didn't realize this was a factor when I bought the monitor to replace the 20" 4:3 I stupidly broke (which worked fine over single-link DVI at 1600x1200).
I painted myself into a corner. I had a Radeon 9500 Pro, so when I upgraded motherboards I deliberately bought one with AGP so I could continue to use it. Then the Radeon died, and now I'm limited to AGP cards that are simply not being updated. I'm limping along with a GeForce 6200 because all the decent cards are PCIe.
If there are any AGP cards with dual-link DVI (preferably BOTH ports being dual-link DVI but I'll accept one DVI and one VGA), I'd love to know about them.
Mal-2
Restrictor plate racing is much more dangerous than racing on tracks that do not require it. The cars bunch up because there is no ability to pull away on the straightaways, and the accidents take out far more cars at once than on normal tracks. Talladega is considered a nightmare by most drivers, and even the fans (who might actually enjoy the bumping and grinding of bunched up cars) are less safe -- it's been a while, but cars or parts of cars have gone into crowds and killed people. (There have been recent incidents but the consequences were fortunately minor.) This happens largely at speed-limited tracks, because if one car lifts, another wedges right under it and sends it into the fencing above the wall.
Bunching up in compression waves is an unintended consequence of artificially restricted speeds, and it contributes to several problems beyond gridlock and multi-car pileups. Compression waves cause individual vehicles to have to constantly speed up and slow down, wasting enormous amounts of fuel and wearing out brakes (unless everyone has hybrids, in which case it mostly just eats brakes). It also leads to traffic coming to a dead stop for no apparent reason when the compression wave becomes too bunched up to allow any motion at all. Signals on highway onramps have helped with this, forcing merging traffic to be reasonably spaced rather than arriving in clusters, but ultimately the problem is that not everyone wants to (or can) go the same speed. Setting the limit unreasonably low aggravates this and makes the Sunday drivers self-righteous about being rolling roadblocks.
Mal-2
I think there should be a way to send anonymous messages to any vehicle owner (since it's not really feasible to ID the driver) just by knowing their license plate number. You don't get to know who they are, but you can leave them a message. It could be anything from "hang up and drive" to "your left brake light is out" to "my hovercraft is full of eels". In order to be able to read the messages, you would need to enter the numbers below the barcode already printed on your annual registration.
Make sure to include the time and date of the encounter, and the vehicle owner will probably know who the driver was.
Mal-2
Overall I found the South African accent to be more easily understood than Australian, and I would probably recognize it in most speakers (though not all). It is more unique than, say, the Kiwi accent which I have a hard time distinguishing from Australian spoken politely. (They do sound different at high volume levels.)
Mal-2
One incident I had that still amuses me greatly:
I was working on a laptop of a guy from South Africa, and asked if he had the install floppies for some software (yeah it was a while ago). He replied that the machine doesn't use floppies. I grabbed a 3.5" disk off his desk and said "it doesn't?", to which he replied "OH! That's not a floppy, that's a stiffy!"
After I got done chuckling and explaining what "stiffy" means in American slang, we had no problems. Their word is perfectly logical, it just wasn't what I was expecting. Sort of like Americans using "fanny" to refer to the backside, while in the rest of the English-speaking world it generally refers to female genitalia.
Mal-2
> To buy a pair of equally useful magnets from hardware stores costs nearly as much as a drive.
Have you tried Parts Express? Unless you're paying two bucks a drive and consider your teardown time to be free, it's awful hard to beat these prices.
Mal-2
First, make a designer bag that looks great. Then make a laptop that fits in that bag and has no glaring weaknesses. It could be just mediocre in a whole lot of ways, it just has to not suck. Then offer both the bag and the laptop in a ton of custom colors/skins/whatever. Most importantly, MAKE TO ORDER.
By having them made to order and using netbook-grade components, you could maintain a decent profit margin (each one is a "custom job"), and if the marketing campaign goes completely bust, you aren't stuck with a bunch of stock to dump on Woot or Overstock. If one particular setup sells well, maybe it would pay to get ahead of the game and stock a few -- or make the shells so interchangeable that they can be quickly converted to whatever is ordered. Sell the shells too! The Acer Aspire One comes in a variety of colors, but they're all black on the inside. That sounds like factory-swappable shells to me.
Women who don't fit the stereotype, or for whom this just doesn't quite hit the mark, will continue to buy regular laptops (since I assume these won't REPLACE any existing product). What harm is done?
If Dell isn't smart enough to catch this boat, someone will. I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be Acer or Asus.
Mal-2
Encourage the book pirates -- seed the torrents yourself and help reduce Global Warming. Then you can take tax credits on all those carbon offsets you earned!
Mal-2
> Show a naturopathic practice that was once widely used, then found to be ineffective and therfore discarded.
Bloodletting.
Mal-2
Yes, screw e-books, because Text-To-Speech works so well with paper books.
Paper may be the alternative for now, and there are no issues regarding resale, lending, and so forth. But the feature set is somewhat lacking.
Mal-2
Ctrl-PrtSc or Alt-PrtSc depending on whether I want the entire desktop or just the single application. I don't use SysRq *alone*.
Mal-2
What good is the SysRq key? Repurpose it as a way for the user to say "please assign more system resources to whatever is in the foreground". If this can be done by clocking up, great. If the CPU is maxed out, then bump up the priority of the process. If there's nothing left to give, then the system beeps or throws a "tough shit, you bought the $100 computer" dialog box.
It does not seem like fundamentally new technology is necessary for us to be able to tell the computer it's lagging unacceptably. That doesn't necessarily mean it will be able to DO anything about it, but at least we can vent.
Mal-2
Because it's easier, cheaper, and more sanitary than storing old newspapers. Why did people hoard newspapers?
Mal-2
How long did it take to develop it this far? A good estimate of the time remaining would be four times that long (in man-hours, not calendar time). The general rule is that the last 20% of a job takes 80% of the time.
Mal-2
This would not have worked for one simple reason -- there were only TWO BOMBS AVAILABLE. It would be many months before more would have been made. There were none to spare on "warning shots".
It could be argued that the second bomb should have been deferred to see if the first one alone would have the desired effect (surrender), but the second bomb wasn't so much to break Japan as it was to intimidate the USSR. That's the real crime -- that Japan had to pay for a pissing match between two allies.
Mal-2
The person who sent me the care package initially wanted to send a single, unopened bottle, but when I could not tell him exactly what I wanted he decided the care package was more appropriate. Some small number (two or three) may as well have been squirrel piss, and ended up dumped after two tastes (one without water and one with). My review of those was typically "What is this shit?"
Still I learned that age is not necessarily a good indicator of quality when comparing two different distilleries (though within a single distillery, it usually is). Also, blends tend toward the mediocre but are rarely awful, while single malts are all over the map. The "winner" in both absolute preference and in bang for the buck turned out to be The Balvine, 12 year. It was not a whole lot better than some of the 18 year varieties I've tasted (then and since), but it's half the price. I still like Laphroaig when I want to taste the ground where the barley was grown and the peat was dried, but it's not something I would drink on a regular basis (and a bottle spoils once opened).
I have since added a desirable characteristic to my list -- whether water changes the character or not. Sometimes it does (Laphroaig, The Balvine), and sometimes it doesn't (Glenfiddich, Jura Superstition). I think it is a good thing when it does, as it allows two different tastes from the same, already opened bottle, depending on mood. It's not a deal breaker, especially if it's going to be consumed before oxygen can wreck the contents, so a bottle of Glenfiddich 12 is fine for taking to a party. If I do take a single-malt to a party, I ALSO take a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label or similar. That way if I see someone making a mixed drink out of the single malt I can ask that they use the other stuff.
Obviously I did not get any squirrel urine, though undrinkable is undrinkable and a few of them were.
Mal-2
This might well encourage companies to invest in R&D, or expanded operations, or anything else that looks unprofitable on paper but has impact far beyond the next quarter. Instead of paying out dividends and seeing 20% or 30% evaporate in the process, it may be better to keep profits down, provided the money is used wisely. In effect they are taxing themselves so someone else doesn't do it for them. If profits are only a few percent of revenue, it isn't too hard to post a small profit or loss by deliberately increasing expenses.
I am not arguing that this would be a bad thing, but I do not think it is the intended result. Worse, it might just serve to funnel MORE money to the people at the top, if they decide to spend on "human resources" (ie, themselves). As with so many things, care should be taken both before and after implementation to keep it from backfiring.
Mal-2
As a gift for newgrouping a Usenet group (alt.archery.traditional, if I remember correctly), I was once sent a scotch whisky care package. In it were twelve baby food jars that were numbered but otherwise not labeled. Only after I had sampled each and given my opinion was I told what each one was. I do not know that you have twelve varieties at your disposal, but this was an enlightening experience for me and could possibly be for some of your friends as well.
Mal-2
PV Peninsula! No wonder she hated the place.
I did school photography for a while, and PV Peninsula was one of my assignments. While they gave us lots of space to work and lots of parental assistance (more like chaperonage), the kids were a bunch of fucking snobs. The parents wouldn't lift a finger to move any gear (even if it meant they'd get out the door quicker), that's just "not what they do". I won't say it was awful. Nobody got assaulted or anything, there were no pile-ups in the parking lot, and nobody accused any of us of doing anything improper. I did fuck up my knee, but that could have happened at any school. But I contrast this with the job at Dorsey high school.
Dorsey is not known for being in a particularly good neighborhood, and we sorta got corralled into a tiny space where there was only room for three camera rigs at a time (as opposed to the eight we were using at Peninsula). But the kids were nice, the parents were not "above" moving a piece of gear now and then, or even helping us load our cars after the shoot, and they made a point of seeing to it that we got lunch. Some of us were not too pleased to be assigned to Dorsey, and took the job with reservations. Then we got there, and everything went so well that every member of the crew said "send us back tomorrow".
It took me a while, but I realized the difference. The Peninsula kids are there trying to live up to their parents' inflated expectations. Most of them are not particularly happy. The kids at Dorsey, on the other hand, have lots of opportunity to get themselves in trouble, but they don't. They're in school because they WANT to be. And that makes all the difference.
Manual means it isn't done by robot. It doesn't mean the guy doing it can't have a hydraulic pallet jack, or other means of gaining mechanical advantage on the load he's moving and lifting.
Mal-2
Say they damp what would have been a Category 5 storm aimed at New Orleans. They succeed at damping it down to a Category 3, but it slams into Galveston instead because it no longer has the energy to make the northward turn. Who is liable for the damage done to Galveston and Houston?
Barring new laws holding them harmless from such scenarios, I don't think this will get off the ground for this very reason. No matter where they divert a storm, someone gains and someone loses (though not in a zero-sum manner).
Mal-2
You know, most people who go to the garden supply store and claim to be growing "tomatoes" are actually growing a completely different kind of consumable. Could this lead to fully automated pot farms?
Mal-2
I think the theory is that using a proxy reduces the likelihood of getting caught. Thus, when they DO catch someone, they must sentence more harshly for all the other people (and other offenses by the same person) that went undetected. Not that 25% is likely to be much of a deterrent, but that is probably the rationalization of the idea.
Mal-2
Not discarded. Scraped and re-used. It's called a palimpsest. Just like erasing photos from your digital camera when you're on vacation, rather than offloading them to a computer.
Mal-2