Yes. If we were to change voting system, why choose IRV when we have much better alternatives.
I usually feel very close to the Green Party. I like their stance on many issues (not least the environment!), but the American Green Party insistence on using IRV disappoints me a lot.
American voters should use this unique opportunity to cast the alternative ballot that they will not be able to cast in November, and maybe also create new polls corresponding to other local elections in their states. It would be very interesting to see what the result would be if voters were given the opportunity to voice their true preferences.
American voters should use this unique opportunity to cast the alternative ballot that they will not be able to cast in November, and maybe also create new polls corresponding to other local elections in their states. It would be very interesting to see what the result would be if voters were given the opportunity to voice their true preferences.
I keep hearing about Quake, Doom, half-life... I had a look at their respective web sites, but it seems to me that they are all the same: aren't they all first-person shooter games? What's the difference between them?
I had a look at the page. I don't read simplified chinese well, but when one knows traditionnal chinese, it's not that difficult. The problem is that Konqueror renders the page using a Unicode font that is not complete (never had the need to correct this: I actually never noticed that the font was not complete for simplified chinese). So it's difficult for me to read when many of the key words in the sentences are rendered as little squares (character mising).
Anyhow, the download page requires to be logged in and, apparently only the owner of one of their mobile phone can register (i am not sure, I haven't tried).
The support page is a list of howtos: howto download mp3, how to configure this and that. I didn't see anything about source code.
It looks to me like the problem is that the DNS servers don't support unicode so they're using a bad implementation of it.
Why not extend dns to support unicode? That way they'd be no translation or other crap to go through.
It's not as simple as you may think. I am all for Unicode, but to use it for domain names can lead to unwanted consequences.
There already exists some intenationalized domain names in Chinese, so instead of having chopsticks.com we can have [insert chinese characters for chopsticks here].com.
The problem comes from the fact that there are tens of thousands of different Chinese characters, each of those having a different unicode code but many of those being only slight variations of each other, or even so similar than a regular Chinese reading user wouldn't notice the difference at first glance. Thus you could have two very different websites having seemingly exactly the same name in Chinese but being different nonetheless because the unicode for their names is different.
With only 26 letters and a few more characters, there has been many abuses of domain names, like www.microsoft-.com instead of www.microsoft.com (or some similar abuse), but the possibilities for abuse in chinese are almost infinite. The same would be in many European languages: many will not pay enough attention to the differences between an acute accent and a grave accent in French and might be mislead to a different site than the one they were looking for. Imagine the credit card payment page of the bank Societe Generale: with the accents written backwards, a lookalike site can be created under a domain name that looks the same. The same in Polish, with the cedillas under many of the letters or the L, with or without the bar accross it.
Technically, unicode may be feasible, but human beings cannot distinguish between the hundreds of thousands (and more!) differents letters, characters and other signs that it offers...
An anonymous readers noted that according to wired, It will be announced officialy on monday MacOSX is the third Operating System on the market, behind Microsoft Windows and GNU/Linux. The article notes that due to an impressing growth rate in rate years, the Free OS has taken over Mac OSX [... snip rest of article].
Obviously, you didn't understand the grand-parent's point.
It's nothing about covering the news or not, it's about the sensationalist headline used. "Google Considering Merger With Microsoft"??? RTFA and so far it seems that we are very far from this. When I saw the headline, I got very scared. When I RTFA, I felt relieved.
Next time, instead of reading/. , I'll take a subscription to the Daily Apple, the Sun, the Mirror or to whatever US equivalent there may be.
And in a/. fashion, I must take my leave:
You sir, are an insensitive clod (that goes for the parent and the news submitter and/. admin who didn't amend the headline.
yours truely,
Anguo esq.
(just joking: I'm just Anguo: I don't want to be modded -1 troll).
Linux was still in its infancy back then (being just a teen now), so a linux server running for ten years on ten years old hardware wouldn't give much benefit...
the project team had shot a three-minute demonstration video by attaching the camera to the front of a vehicle and driving it around the streets.
The footage was then shown to members of the public on a 4x7m wide-angle screen provoking, according to Mitani, gasps of astonishment. Some viewers even experienced nausea
The technology is probably amazing but to take the public nauseous feeling of the public as a proof is a bit far-fetched: it doesn't take a 7x4m screen showing a movie shot from a car speeding through city streets to make sensitive people sick, whatever the resolution is.
I personally feel sick playing tuxracer more than a few minutes on my 14 inch monitor, so I know how I would feel if I were watching such a movie on such a large screen, at any image resolution.
I have been receiving dozens of copies of this virus in my inbox over the last two days. They look pretty in my kmail spam folder. I usually delete spam from the folder, but they are so pretty I have decided to archive a few of them...
I read many comments by windows users who say they have used it for so many years and never had a virus, because they are sensible users who patch their OS and never open attachments...
It may be they are lucky too...
My brother wrote me yesterday to tell me that his XP box got infected and that of my father too. With both computers, he tried to reinstall XP and go straight to download the patch but, so he tells me, with both computers he got re-infected within 3 minutes of reinstalling the OS. He never got a chance nor the time to download the patch...
I am sure that my brother didn't open any attachment with any fucking v***us (oops, I meant f***ing virus) within three minutes of installing XP.
There must be something right that virus writers are doing... and MS must be doing something wrong.
Meanwhile, POPFile carries on marking those nice looking emails as viruses which Kmail then happily filters out of my way...
My God! Combine this with the new EU draft on Standard English... and you get a recipee for communication disaster...
The European Commission has announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the EU, rather than German, which was the other contender. Her Majesty's Government conceded that English spelling had room for improvement and has therefore accepted a five-year phasing in of "Euro-English".
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make sivil servants jump for joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of the "k", which should klear up some konfusion and allow one key less on keyboards.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f", making words like "fotograf" 20% shorter.
In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of the silent "e" is disgrasful.
By the fourth yer, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".
During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters. After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis and everivun vil find it ezi to understand ech ozer. ZE DREM VIL FINALI COM TRU !
It reminds me of the project to get the Brits to drive on the right side of the road (instead of the wrong side). The white paper called for a progressive implementation of the new directive. On the first year, only trucks and busses would have to drive on the other side of the road, and if the move is successful, cars would follow suit the following year.
"Remove wrapper, open mouth, insert muffin, eat."
Instructions on the packaging for a muffin at a 7-11.
I forgot to say that I am not really sure they meant to imply to insert the muffin in the now open mouth. They could have made this point a bit clearer.
Come on! Stop bashing SCO, and try to understand what is it exactly that they are talking about...
They say that there are MILLIONS (with an S) of infringing lines of code.
Moreover, they claim that the GPL is void and that copyright law only allows for one copy only.
Knowing that there may be around 18 millions linux users, it is obvious that they are talking about ONE line of highly essential code replicated millions of times in healthy computers (i.e. running linux) around the globe.
Now stop bashing SCO, will you, or I'll mod you down, all of you!
Slashdot Mirror
OSU Open Source Lab: Drupal's future home, here:
http://osuosl.org/
The list of project they already host is impressive:
http://osuosl.org/about/collaborators
A:.
--
http://www.gnosis-usa.com/
Revolutionary Psychology, White Tantrism, Dream Yoga...
http://www.reuniting.info/
Intimate Relationships, peace and harmony in the couple.
I usually feel very close to the Green Party. I like their stance on many issues (not least the environment!), but the American Green Party insistence on using IRV disappoints me a lot.
We do need a better voting method like Approval and Condorcet, but Instant Runoff Voting is not a good system.
Unfortunately, Cobb puts politics before policies, nice talk before issues. When told about the problems with IRV, he replied that good luck, go out and organize, but IRV is the only alternative voting method that has a base of support, so that what he's going to push.
That's why I ended up endorsing Libertarian candidate Badnarik instead, because Badnarik supports Approval (so he told Slashodt last week).
Whatever your opinion after either set of debates, why not express your opinion like you never have before...
In the weeks leading up to the Presidential elections, many Slashdot users as well as some third party candidates (Badnarik) have advocated the use of better voting systems such as Instant Runoff Voting, Approval Voting and Condorcet Voting. There is a new web site which has just started a worldwide campaign to promote such alternatives, and it has just come up with an unexpected endorsement for the US 2004 election. What's much more interesting is a new service which is, as far as I am aware, unique on the web: a MOD of the popular software phpBB allows users not only to post messages like on any other Bulletin Board, but also to create their own polls, with their own choice of candidates, using a variety of voting methods. Users can thus create their own polls, cast their ballots and talk about the results all in the same forum.
American voters should use this unique opportunity to cast the alternative ballot that they will not be able to cast in November, and maybe also create new polls corresponding to other local elections in their states. It would be very interesting to see what the result would be if voters were given the opportunity to voice their true preferences.
Well, this article submission was too much (or not enough) pro-whomever for their taste:
In the weeks leading up to the Presidential elections, many Slashdot users as well as some third party candidates (Badnarik) have advocated the use of better voting systems such as Instant Runoff Voting, Approval Voting and Condorcet Voting. There is a new web site which has just started a worldwide campaign to promote such alternatives, and it has just come up with an unexpected endorsement for the US 2004 election. What's much more interesting is a new service which is, as far as I am aware, unique on the web: a MOD of the popular software phpBB allows users not only to post messages like on any other Bulletin Board, but also to create their own polls, with their own choice of candidates, using a variety of voting methods. Users can thus create their own polls, cast their ballots and talk about the results all in the same forum.
American voters should use this unique opportunity to cast the alternative ballot that they will not be able to cast in November, and maybe also create new polls corresponding to other local elections in their states. It would be very interesting to see what the result would be if voters were given the opportunity to voice their true preferences.
IRV is certainly not the best solution.
For other alternatives such as Approval and Condorcet, look here.
Also, you don't need to wait for Kerry/Bush to get elected to cast a Condorcet or Approval ballot!.
You can vote right here, using Approval voting.
There are more Condorcet and Approval polls going on here.
(register)
More about alternative election methods will be posted in the next few weeks here
Thank you Barbarian for your detailed reply.
I think I will buy one of those linux ports to suit my system.
Blessings,
Anguo
Also, which ones is better supported in Linux?
Thanks.
Anyhow, the download page requires to be logged in and, apparently only the owner of one of their mobile phone can register (i am not sure, I haven't tried).
The support page is a list of howtos: howto download mp3, how to configure this and that. I didn't see anything about source code.
It's not as simple as you may think. I am all for Unicode, but to use it for domain names can lead to unwanted consequences.
There already exists some intenationalized domain names in Chinese, so instead of having chopsticks.com we can have [insert chinese characters for chopsticks here].com.
The problem comes from the fact that there are tens of thousands of different Chinese characters, each of those having a different unicode code but many of those being only slight variations of each other, or even so similar than a regular Chinese reading user wouldn't notice the difference at first glance. Thus you could have two very different websites having seemingly exactly the same name in Chinese but being different nonetheless because the unicode for their names is different.
With only 26 letters and a few more characters, there has been many abuses of domain names, like www.microsoft-.com instead of www.microsoft.com (or some similar abuse), but the possibilities for abuse in chinese are almost infinite. The same would be in many European languages: many will not pay enough attention to the differences between an acute accent and a grave accent in French and might be mislead to a different site than the one they were looking for. Imagine the credit card payment page of the bank Societe Generale: with the accents written backwards, a lookalike site can be created under a domain name that looks the same. The same in Polish, with the cedillas under many of the letters or the L, with or without the bar accross it.
Technically, unicode may be feasible, but human beings cannot distinguish between the hundreds of thousands (and more!) differents letters, characters and other signs that it offers...
I did preview but I missed that one... [grrr\]
An anonymous readers noted that according to wired, It will be announced officialy on monday MacOSX is the third Operating System on the market, behind Microsoft Windows and GNU/Linux. The article notes that due to an impressing growth rate in rate years, the Free OS has taken over Mac OSX [... snip rest of article].
It's nothing about covering the news or not, it's about the sensationalist headline used. "Google Considering Merger With Microsoft"??? RTFA and so far it seems that we are very far from this. When I saw the headline, I got very scared. When I RTFA, I felt relieved.
Next time, instead of reading /. , I'll take a subscription to the Daily Apple, the Sun, the Mirror or to whatever US equivalent there may be.
And in a /. fashion, I must take my leave:
You sir, are an insensitive clod (that goes for the parent and the news submitter and /. admin who didn't amend the headline.
yours truely,
Anguo esq.
(just joking: I'm just Anguo: I don't want to be modded -1 troll).
Linux was still in its infancy back then (being just a teen now), so a linux server running for ten years on ten years old hardware wouldn't give much benefit...
The technology is probably amazing but to take the public nauseous feeling of the public as a proof is a bit far-fetched: it doesn't take a 7x4m screen showing a movie shot from a car speeding through city streets to make sensitive people sick, whatever the resolution is.
I personally feel sick playing tuxracer more than a few minutes on my 14 inch monitor, so I know how I would feel if I were watching such a movie on such a large screen, at any image resolution.
Thanks :-), I have forwarded the information to him.
I have been receiving dozens of copies of this virus in my inbox over the last two days. They look pretty in my kmail spam folder. I usually delete spam from the folder, but they are so pretty I have decided to archive a few of them...
I read many comments by windows users who say they have used it for so many years and never had a virus, because they are sensible users who patch their OS and never open attachments...
It may be they are lucky too...
My brother wrote me yesterday to tell me that his XP box got infected and that of my father too. With both computers, he tried to reinstall XP and go straight to download the patch but, so he tells me, with both computers he got re-infected within 3 minutes of reinstalling the OS. He never got a chance nor the time to download the patch...
I am sure that my brother didn't open any attachment with any fucking v***us (oops, I meant f***ing virus) within three minutes of installing XP.
There must be something right that virus writers are doing... and MS must be doing something wrong.
Meanwhile, POPFile carries on marking those nice looking emails as viruses which Kmail then happily filters out of my way...
It reminds me of the project to get the Brits to drive on the right side of the road (instead of the wrong side). The white paper called for a progressive implementation of the new directive. On the first year, only trucks and busses would have to drive on the other side of the road, and if the move is successful, cars would follow suit the following year.
Well, it's a good opportunity to send Bruce Willis up there so that he can prove that this is all nonsense and that HE got it right.
"Remove wrapper, open mouth, insert muffin, eat."
Instructions on the packaging for a muffin at a 7-11.
RTFA
Quick, what's 40% of 1725 votes (at last count)?
Well, we do have European elections at the same time, to elect our MEPs.
In any case, there are maybe more people voting in the USA than in any EU country, but there are also much more people available to count the votes...
Come on! Stop bashing SCO, and try to understand what is it exactly that they are talking about...
They say that there are MILLIONS (with an S) of infringing lines of code.
Moreover, they claim that the GPL is void and that copyright law only allows for one copy only.
Knowing that there may be around 18 millions linux users, it is obvious that they are talking about ONE line of highly essential code replicated millions of times in healthy computers (i.e. running linux) around the globe.
Now stop bashing SCO, will you, or I'll mod you down, all of you!