Well, things would be cleaner to re-implement this time around if they had to do another rewrite, because cross-platform development is now a basically solved problem.
In 1998, getting one codebase that would work on things like various ancient Unices, "DOS-based" Windows (95/98/Me), and Mac OS 8/9 was a very difficult task. Beyond the lower-level concerns, few good libraries would work across all targets. C++ itself was a mess when trying to work across different systems and compilers- many things could not be counted on to work everywhere until some years after the first C++ standardization in 1998.
So Mozilla wrote their own 'toolkit' (kinda) and portability/compatibility stuff, their own code that did much of what the C++ standard library really ought to do, and a lot of other stuff.
With modern operating systems, modern cross-platform libraries, universal C++03 support and widespread support for most of C++11, a rewrite would be a very different story today.
Right, "broken companies" like Staples, Sports Authority, Domino's, Experian, etc etc. Oh wait, all of those are doing a heck of a lot better than they were before.
Bain took risky buys, companies that were failing, and turned a healthy number of them into successes. Not all their buys worked out but you don't blame the doctor by complaining that his patients have all been sick.
You know, Obama won the election; you can quit with the falsehoods and slander already as it doesn't serve any purpose any more.
Not only are subsidies why service is so expensive in the USA, they're why many phones don't do simple things that consumers want. Since the consumer is not the customer- the phone company is- features which matter to some consumers but which don't make the carrier any profits are left out. Carrier control is the name of the game.
As one example, cell phones in the late 90s/early 00s often had decent computer connectivity, allowing you to transfer your text messages to pc, synchronize things, etc over a serial cable. Sometimes you could install trivial programs on your phone that way too. But carriers realized that if they cut that stuff they could retain more control and squeeze a few more cents out of their customers. Want an extremely basic application on your phone? Sure, that'll be a $5/mo subscription. Want to transfer text messages to PC? Sure, buy our more expensive phone that requires a data plan. In Europe, where phones are normally unlocked and unsubsidized, that didn't happen as much.
Smartphones esp. Android have succeeded in returning some control to consumers. But the situation is still awful for feature phones and not great for non-Cyanogen smartphones. Making the consumer the MFR's customer will change things.
If they used modern H.264 and AAC encoders rather than whatever outdated VC.1 and WMA encoders they're using, they could cut that bandwidth use by a third, reducing their costs and improving the customer experience tremendously. Does anybody know why they haven't already done this?
I'm in full agreement with your first three sentences; the US gas tax definitely needs to be substantially increased, as has been said by all the more honest experts, from Steven Chu to Greg Mankiw.
But your last sentence is nuts. People do a reasonably decent job at acting in their own individual self interest. We've distorted their incentives with huge subsidies, and in those circumstances it's especially unsurprising that people choosing what makes sense for them as individuals can lead to overall outcomes that are bad for society.
We don't need to treat people as irrational, we need to change their incentives to better reflect the real social costs of their vehicle use. Then their self-interested choices will lead to better social results.
Again, your example proves my point and not yours. The second-generation (2007-present) Smart Fortwo is a 1800lb vehicle that gets surprisingly bad mileage (31/41) for how tiny and underpowered it is. My (1990?) Chevy Sprint Metro hatchback seated more people (5 vs 2), had way more cargo room, weighed 250lb less, and got better mileage (44/53). The difference is primarily in "safety" engineering geared towards unrealistic crash tests. With today's safety requirements, the closest equivalents to the Sprint now weigh 2400 lb instead of 1550.
The rest of your ranting is just silly and naive. Auto companies advertise MPG too, you know, often about as much as they advertise power. If waving a magic regulation wand made it so they could produce vehicles which were no more expensive, had performance the market would accept, still met the ridiculous crash test standards, and had twice the fuel efficiency, they'd do so in a moment without California or anybody else telling them they had to. Unless you change consumers' incentives by raising fuel taxes and change producers' engineering constraints by loosening collision requirements, you aren't going to get tremendously better MPG esp. without causing a lot of unnecessary pain.
You're completely incorrect about consumer behavior and market regulation, and your example of Nader is a fabulous example.
The Nader-inspired passenger safety craze is directly responsible for the horrendously low average MPG in the USA and all the attendant environmental and political problems. It's also responsible for increased pedestrian and cyclist fatalities (known as early as Pelzman's 1975 study) and may even make drivers less safe.
48 years after his book, despite all the tremendous advances in engineering and materials science, instead of the average vehicle on US roads being sub-1000 lbs and getting 200MPG (very feasible to do considerably better than this for 1-2 passenger cars, c.f. the decade-old VW 1L prototype), the average vehicle is >4000 lb and gets worse than 20MPG, little better than in 1965.
Passenger collision safety involves tradeoffs- among other things, tradeoffs with performance, efficiency, cost, and the safety of others on the road. Nader refused to recognize these tradeoffs. Our current safety laws ignore these tradeoffs, and even if they took them into account, overriding consumers' preferences regarding these tradeoffs will lead to inefficient market outcomes.
If someone wants to purchase a more efficient, less expensive vehicle, the government shouldn't stop them just because it does slightly less well in collision tests. Consumers are perfectly capable of rationally choosing how much they're willing to trade guarantees of their own safety for other desiderata and vice versa.
Regulating externalities, on the other hand, is often OK. Vehicle safety requirements should be based ONLY on the damage caused in collisions to other road users (other drivers, pedestrians, cyclists) and their property. Heavier vehicles perform WORSE in such tests; we might consider having a weight-based Pigovian vehicle tax to offset the safety and pollution externalities for those heavier cars we're still willing to allow on the roads.
Providing consumers with more information is a good idea. I'm fine with performing tests and requiring companies to provide prospective buyers with that information. But requiring disclosure without regulating/prohibiting the sale of the product still allows for what I think most would call a "truly free market."
If using MS's software may brick your neighbor's PC, go ahead and hold MS to the fire. If using MS's software may brick your own computer, require testing and a warning label. But the kind of guarantees the OP seems to want to require would override consumer preferences in a way that would cripple the software industry.
Ah, but what they're bidding on is not merchandise but a government-enforced monopoly. Normal free-market rules are already out the window; you may call what you propose a free market solution but really it's a mercantilist solution. Selling letters of patent to whoever brings the most into the Crown treasury is precisely the kind of thing Adam Smith was writing to oppose in the first place.
Normally the solution is to get rid of the government-granted monopoly. But that doesn't work out so well here. We license spectrum because leaving it to the free market to figure it out would result in horrible interference and transmit power arms races -- a classical tragedy of the commons market failure.
In many market failures government won't actually manage to improve the situation. But the spectrum really is a clear case where intervention can improve social welfare-- as long as we don't get confused about the purpose of spectrum regulation and start treating it like it's a free market designed for increasing government revenue.
It's true that this is basically a "take this away from Veracity" move.
iProvo was a great idea. It was killed by politics.
The extreme right-wing folks who think there should be no public services managed to force Provo to not provide services directly ("retail model") but rather to cut corporate middlemen in on the deal ("wholesale model"). That privatized all the profits while socializing all the costs. Unsurprisingly, it failed.
Given the political realities in Utah right now, I suppose the Google Fiber deal is the best we could hope for. But we would have had something at least as good way back in 2006 if it weren't for idiotic politicians.
It's quite unlikely that you can hear the difference between the lossless original and a 160kbps lossy version from the best modern encoders (e.g. Apple's AAC encoders from the last couple years). If you can, it's going to be for just a few isolated samples tested in ideal circumstances and it won't impact the quality of your listening experience.
People who claim otherwise are either using outdated formats and encoders or they're not doing proper blind testing and their results are dominated by psychological bias.
But if you ever want to encode your music in another format, transcoding from one lossy format to another is like xeroxing xeroxed copies; you get generation loss and are more likely to hear some artifacts. Encoding from the lossless original will never have that problem.
You can think of it like this: when you buy an mp3, you own an mp3. When you buy a FLAC, you own the music- the format becomes irrelevant since you can re-encode it in any other format, past, present, or future, and have the result be just as good as if you re-purchased the music in that other format.
It's been in Chrome for a while and landed in FF with version 16 or so. Once it's enabled ("under the hood" settings in Chrome, plugins.click_to_play=true in about:config for FF) sites can't run plugins without you giving some form of explicit permission (either whitelisting a trusted site or clicking to play the plugin elsewhere).
It really should be the default. In fact, it should have been this way ever since NPAPI came on the scene back in Netscape 2.0. Countless security problems would have been much much less serious, performance problems would have been avoided, and people would have focused more on coding their sites to web standards and reduced their dependence on plugins.
Bunk. Bing is just one of DDG's search providers. When you search from DDG and it uses Bing's API to provide some of its results, the only information Bing gets is a query text, sent from DDG's servers. Nothing about your ip/location, user agent, cookies, search history, or anything else gets transmitted to Bing's servers.
Even if you assume Bing is maximally evil, there's awfully little they can do to personally identify you out of a stream of millions of totally anonymous query texts being sent from DDG's servers.
DuckDuckGo has made a whole host of guarantees that they will never track you, collect personal info, etc. They've built their entire brand around these guarantees. (Their billboard slogan is "Google tracks you. We don't.") You don't have to simply trust their goodwill; their self-interest will enforce this too. If they broke their guarantees, their company would lose its reputation very quickly, their brand would soon be worthless, and they'd likely be vulnerable to a host of lawsuits.
Google, on the other hand, freely admits that they do collect and use such information. You have to read the fine print and look around to get a better idea about how they plan to use that info, and they won't tell you at all about the unintended ways this info gets used (here's DuckDuckGo's page about that).
Well, though the input versatility and the accuracy may need work, by having it translate into two of the three most-spoken languages they're at least a step ahead of Professor Farnsworth.
IE really has come a very very long way since v7, and has gone from being a totally backwards abomination that impedes progress and gives webmasters nightmares to being a mostly OK browser. Outside of royalty-free codec support (which everyone knew MS would drag their feet on) there's only one way that its backwardness still impacts me: MathML.
Gecko-based browsers have had native support for over a decade (enabled by default starting with Mozilla milestone 0.9.9). Safari has had native support for a year and a half, and Chrome is finally about to release its first version with native support. But IE only has access via a third-party plugin. Worse, the plugin was broken with the release of IE9. A year ago, the developer made a "preview release" version of the plugin that's supposed to work with IE 9, but it's buggy and inconsistent and hasn't been updated.
It's frustrating that almost 15 years after MathML was standardized we've still got browser developers dragging their feet.
You're right; I forgot that Florida isn't being counted in Obama's EV total. But adding any other state to what I stated above would do the job; my point still holds.
For instance, 21K votes in NH also switching would have done it. Still less than 0.13% of the national vote required to switch.
(yes, I made a typo in my previous post, this isn't 0.014%)
Yes, only squeaked by. Almost 120 million people voted. If around 130,000 of those - ~50K in VA, ~55K in OH, and ~25K in Florida - had switched to Romney, the outcome would have been a Romney presidency. That's less than 1.5% of VA, less than 1.1% of OH, less than 0.4% of FL, and less than 0.011% of the national vote.
I'm so glad you didn't vote. Uneducated people shouldn't vote.
You know, every time I hear this, from people on both sides of the political spectrum, the very clear subtext is "... and anybody who disagrees with me is uneducated."
In my state, we've had so much single-party dominance that a lot of elections are really determined in caucus and convention meetings, without even a primary. It's unbelievable how many people I hear saying this is a good thing because it keeps "uneducated" people from deciding elections. When confronted with poll data that shows that their choices, along with the state legislature's, often aren't at all representative of the public, they just say "well, they just don't know any better." It takes tremendous arrogance to think you should control the political system because you're one of the "educated elite" while your neighbors' voices should count for nothing.
I agree that people need to do more to become informed rather than going to the polls and hitting the "straight-party ticket" button without even knowing the names of who they've just voted for. I don't agree with Cito's view of the EC, and I think his apparent apathy about state and local issues, though common, amounts to a shirking of civic responsibility.
But that doesn't mean I think it's good that he become totally disengaged from the process of political dialogue and participation, and it doesn't mean that you or anyone is right to dismiss his views or the importance of his participation.
I don't sympathize with those who say there's a need to start injecting patients with lethal drugs (or going out of our way to give people the opportunity to kill themselves that way). But I definitely do support people's ability to choose to refuse medical support and/or treatment - including food and water. Without that support, a natural death follows within a week or two.
Death by dehydration is much more peaceful and less painful than you'd think, esp. with a bit of palliative care. It's less traumatic and painful than many euthanasia techniques. Yes, it's slower than assisted suicide, but a couple of weeks of that is far from the "years of acute suffering without dignity" that euthanasia advocates wax grandiloquent about, and I don't think we should be in the business of causing quick deaths. Anyone who is unwilling to face a few days of dehydration before death really should reconsider whether their desire for death is sufficiently strong to act on.
Even in places where physician-assisted suicide is legal, studies have shown that when presented with the option more patients choose to forgo nutrition and die naturally (one example study in Oregon- "Terminally Ill Choose Fasting Over M.D.-Assisted Suicide", Psychiatric News).
For many people involved in euthanasia/ assisted suicide debates, the core issue is the distinction between choosing not to take actions to continue to sustain life and choosing to take actions to end life. Unless you wrap it in lots of euphemisms (like the title of the act under discussion) most people will voice moral objections to the latter. But even the Catholic Church recognizes that there's a point at which food and water are no longer providing a real benefit and using them is no longer morally obligatory. They and others will loudly disagree with each other about when that point comes, but we should be able to agree that individuals should be able to make that decision for themselves.
Unfortunately, both extremes of the euthanasia/assisted suicide debate have made efforts to keep people from seeing this as a real option, and while courts have usually upheld terminal patients' right to refuse food, water, feeding tubes, IVs, etc., there have been some poor laws and precedents that have muddied the waters somewhat. We ought to work to clear the legal waters, the misconceptions, and the disinformation.
We also ought to strongly encourage all adults to take some time thinking about these kinds of things and come up with a living will. Dealing with these kinds of questions after somebody who never made their intentions clear beforehand becomes unable to make the decision on their own inevitably leads to morally messy and personally nasty disagreements.
Much more meat rather than sensationalist filler. After just a couple issues you'll be thanking Newsweek for stopping their presses and thus convincing you to move on.
<gmaxwell> 1960: "I have a great idea! lets have every person in the country carry a radio tracking beacon!" "That'll never fly!" 2012: "I can has TWO iphones??"
Slashdot Mirror
Well, things would be cleaner to re-implement this time around if they had to do another rewrite, because cross-platform development is now a basically solved problem.
In 1998, getting one codebase that would work on things like various ancient Unices, "DOS-based" Windows (95/98/Me), and Mac OS 8/9 was a very difficult task. Beyond the lower-level concerns, few good libraries would work across all targets. C++ itself was a mess when trying to work across different systems and compilers- many things could not be counted on to work everywhere until some years after the first C++ standardization in 1998.
So Mozilla wrote their own 'toolkit' (kinda) and portability/compatibility stuff, their own code that did much of what the C++ standard library really ought to do, and a lot of other stuff.
With modern operating systems, modern cross-platform libraries, universal C++03 support and widespread support for most of C++11, a rewrite would be a very different story today.
Right, "broken companies" like Staples, Sports Authority, Domino's, Experian, etc etc. Oh wait, all of those are doing a heck of a lot better than they were before.
Bain took risky buys, companies that were failing, and turned a healthy number of them into successes. Not all their buys worked out but you don't blame the doctor by complaining that his patients have all been sick.
You know, Obama won the election; you can quit with the falsehoods and slander already as it doesn't serve any purpose any more.
Not only are subsidies why service is so expensive in the USA, they're why many phones don't do simple things that consumers want. Since the consumer is not the customer- the phone company is- features which matter to some consumers but which don't make the carrier any profits are left out. Carrier control is the name of the game.
As one example, cell phones in the late 90s/early 00s often had decent computer connectivity, allowing you to transfer your text messages to pc, synchronize things, etc over a serial cable. Sometimes you could install trivial programs on your phone that way too. But carriers realized that if they cut that stuff they could retain more control and squeeze a few more cents out of their customers. Want an extremely basic application on your phone? Sure, that'll be a $5/mo subscription. Want to transfer text messages to PC? Sure, buy our more expensive phone that requires a data plan. In Europe, where phones are normally unlocked and unsubsidized, that didn't happen as much.
Smartphones esp. Android have succeeded in returning some control to consumers. But the situation is still awful for feature phones and not great for non-Cyanogen smartphones. Making the consumer the MFR's customer will change things.
BTW I believe their streams for iOS, PS3, etc are h.264 these days, but their desktop Silverlight player still uses VC-1 last I heard.
If they used modern H.264 and AAC encoders rather than whatever outdated VC.1 and WMA encoders they're using, they could cut that bandwidth use by a third, reducing their costs and improving the customer experience tremendously. Does anybody know why they haven't already done this?
I'm in full agreement with your first three sentences; the US gas tax definitely needs to be substantially increased, as has been said by all the more honest experts, from Steven Chu to Greg Mankiw.
But your last sentence is nuts. People do a reasonably decent job at acting in their own individual self interest. We've distorted their incentives with huge subsidies, and in those circumstances it's especially unsurprising that people choosing what makes sense for them as individuals can lead to overall outcomes that are bad for society.
We don't need to treat people as irrational, we need to change their incentives to better reflect the real social costs of their vehicle use. Then their self-interested choices will lead to better social results.
Again, your example proves my point and not yours. The second-generation (2007-present) Smart Fortwo is a 1800lb vehicle that gets surprisingly bad mileage (31/41) for how tiny and underpowered it is. My (1990?) Chevy Sprint Metro hatchback seated more people (5 vs 2), had way more cargo room, weighed 250lb less, and got better mileage (44/53). The difference is primarily in "safety" engineering geared towards unrealistic crash tests. With today's safety requirements, the closest equivalents to the Sprint now weigh 2400 lb instead of 1550.
The rest of your ranting is just silly and naive. Auto companies advertise MPG too, you know, often about as much as they advertise power. If waving a magic regulation wand made it so they could produce vehicles which were no more expensive, had performance the market would accept, still met the ridiculous crash test standards, and had twice the fuel efficiency, they'd do so in a moment without California or anybody else telling them they had to. Unless you change consumers' incentives by raising fuel taxes and change producers' engineering constraints by loosening collision requirements, you aren't going to get tremendously better MPG esp. without causing a lot of unnecessary pain.
You're completely incorrect about consumer behavior and market regulation, and your example of Nader is a fabulous example.
The Nader-inspired passenger safety craze is directly responsible for the horrendously low average MPG in the USA and all the attendant environmental and political problems. It's also responsible for increased pedestrian and cyclist fatalities (known as early as Pelzman's 1975 study) and may even make drivers less safe.
48 years after his book, despite all the tremendous advances in engineering and materials science, instead of the average vehicle on US roads being sub-1000 lbs and getting 200MPG (very feasible to do considerably better than this for 1-2 passenger cars, c.f. the decade-old VW 1L prototype), the average vehicle is >4000 lb and gets worse than 20MPG, little better than in 1965.
The reason is a curb weight arms race caused by our absurd safety standards. The main way to meet crash test standards when faced with heavy vehicles is to increase your vehicle's weight.
Passenger collision safety involves tradeoffs- among other things, tradeoffs with performance, efficiency, cost, and the safety of others on the road. Nader refused to recognize these tradeoffs. Our current safety laws ignore these tradeoffs, and even if they took them into account, overriding consumers' preferences regarding these tradeoffs will lead to inefficient market outcomes.
If someone wants to purchase a more efficient, less expensive vehicle, the government shouldn't stop them just because it does slightly less well in collision tests. Consumers are perfectly capable of rationally choosing how much they're willing to trade guarantees of their own safety for other desiderata and vice versa.
Regulating externalities, on the other hand, is often OK. Vehicle safety requirements should be based ONLY on the damage caused in collisions to other road users (other drivers, pedestrians, cyclists) and their property. Heavier vehicles perform WORSE in such tests; we might consider having a weight-based Pigovian vehicle tax to offset the safety and pollution externalities for those heavier cars we're still willing to allow on the roads.
Providing consumers with more information is a good idea. I'm fine with performing tests and requiring companies to provide prospective buyers with that information. But requiring disclosure without regulating/prohibiting the sale of the product still allows for what I think most would call a "truly free market."
If using MS's software may brick your neighbor's PC, go ahead and hold MS to the fire. If using MS's software may brick your own computer, require testing and a warning label. But the kind of guarantees the OP seems to want to require would override consumer preferences in a way that would cripple the software industry.
Ah, but what they're bidding on is not merchandise but a government-enforced monopoly. Normal free-market rules are already out the window; you may call what you propose a free market solution but really it's a mercantilist solution. Selling letters of patent to whoever brings the most into the Crown treasury is precisely the kind of thing Adam Smith was writing to oppose in the first place.
Normally the solution is to get rid of the government-granted monopoly. But that doesn't work out so well here. We license spectrum because leaving it to the free market to figure it out would result in horrible interference and transmit power arms races -- a classical tragedy of the commons market failure.
In many market failures government won't actually manage to improve the situation. But the spectrum really is a clear case where intervention can improve social welfare-- as long as we don't get confused about the purpose of spectrum regulation and start treating it like it's a free market designed for increasing government revenue.
It's true that this is basically a "take this away from Veracity" move.
iProvo was a great idea. It was killed by politics.
The extreme right-wing folks who think there should be no public services managed to force Provo to not provide services directly ("retail model") but rather to cut corporate middlemen in on the deal ("wholesale model"). That privatized all the profits while socializing all the costs. Unsurprisingly, it failed.
Given the political realities in Utah right now, I suppose the Google Fiber deal is the best we could hope for. But we would have had something at least as good way back in 2006 if it weren't for idiotic politicians.
It's quite unlikely that you can hear the difference between the lossless original and a 160kbps lossy version from the best modern encoders (e.g. Apple's AAC encoders from the last couple years). If you can, it's going to be for just a few isolated samples tested in ideal circumstances and it won't impact the quality of your listening experience.
People who claim otherwise are either using outdated formats and encoders or they're not doing proper blind testing and their results are dominated by psychological bias.
But if you ever want to encode your music in another format, transcoding from one lossy format to another is like xeroxing xeroxed copies; you get generation loss and are more likely to hear some artifacts. Encoding from the lossless original will never have that problem.
You can think of it like this: when you buy an mp3, you own an mp3. When you buy a FLAC, you own the music- the format becomes irrelevant since you can re-encode it in any other format, past, present, or future, and have the result be just as good as if you re-purchased the music in that other format.
Betteridge's law of headlines.
You mean if I give someone 800 megabytes of unique personally identifying information, they might be able to personally identify me?
Shocking!
It's been in Chrome for a while and landed in FF with version 16 or so. Once it's enabled ("under the hood" settings in Chrome, plugins.click_to_play=true in about:config for FF) sites can't run plugins without you giving some form of explicit permission (either whitelisting a trusted site or clicking to play the plugin elsewhere).
It really should be the default. In fact, it should have been this way ever since NPAPI came on the scene back in Netscape 2.0. Countless security problems would have been much much less serious, performance problems would have been avoided, and people would have focused more on coding their sites to web standards and reduced their dependence on plugins.
Bunk. Bing is just one of DDG's search providers. When you search from DDG and it uses Bing's API to provide some of its results, the only information Bing gets is a query text, sent from DDG's servers. Nothing about your ip/location, user agent, cookies, search history, or anything else gets transmitted to Bing's servers.
Even if you assume Bing is maximally evil, there's awfully little they can do to personally identify you out of a stream of millions of totally anonymous query texts being sent from DDG's servers.
DuckDuckGo has made a whole host of guarantees that they will never track you, collect personal info, etc. They've built their entire brand around these guarantees. (Their billboard slogan is "Google tracks you. We don't.") You don't have to simply trust their goodwill; their self-interest will enforce this too. If they broke their guarantees, their company would lose its reputation very quickly, their brand would soon be worthless, and they'd likely be vulnerable to a host of lawsuits.
Google, on the other hand, freely admits that they do collect and use such information. You have to read the fine print and look around to get a better idea about how they plan to use that info, and they won't tell you at all about the unintended ways this info gets used (here's DuckDuckGo's page about that).
There's no way that can be right!
Well, though the input versatility and the accuracy may need work, by having it translate into two of the three most-spoken languages they're at least a step ahead of Professor Farnsworth.
IE really has come a very very long way since v7, and has gone from being a totally backwards abomination that impedes progress and gives webmasters nightmares to being a mostly OK browser. Outside of royalty-free codec support (which everyone knew MS would drag their feet on) there's only one way that its backwardness still impacts me: MathML.
Gecko-based browsers have had native support for over a decade (enabled by default starting with Mozilla milestone 0.9.9). Safari has had native support for a year and a half, and Chrome is finally about to release its first version with native support. But IE only has access via a third-party plugin. Worse, the plugin was broken with the release of IE9. A year ago, the developer made a "preview release" version of the plugin that's supposed to work with IE 9, but it's buggy and inconsistent and hasn't been updated.
It's frustrating that almost 15 years after MathML was standardized we've still got browser developers dragging their feet.
You're right; I forgot that Florida isn't being counted in Obama's EV total. But adding any other state to what I stated above would do the job; my point still holds.
For instance, 21K votes in NH also switching would have done it. Still less than 0.13% of the national vote required to switch.
(yes, I made a typo in my previous post, this isn't 0.014%)
Yes, only squeaked by. Almost 120 million people voted. If around 130,000 of those - ~50K in VA, ~55K in OH, and ~25K in Florida - had switched to Romney, the outcome would have been a Romney presidency. That's less than 1.5% of VA, less than 1.1% of OH, less than 0.4% of FL, and less than 0.011% of the national vote.
Nate Silver tried hard to correct your misconception:
And a close election is what we had. That the outcome could be predicted with fairly good certainty doesn't mean it wasn't close.
You know, every time I hear this, from people on both sides of the political spectrum, the very clear subtext is "... and anybody who disagrees with me is uneducated."
In my state, we've had so much single-party dominance that a lot of elections are really determined in caucus and convention meetings, without even a primary. It's unbelievable how many people I hear saying this is a good thing because it keeps "uneducated" people from deciding elections. When confronted with poll data that shows that their choices, along with the state legislature's, often aren't at all representative of the public, they just say "well, they just don't know any better." It takes tremendous arrogance to think you should control the political system because you're one of the "educated elite" while your neighbors' voices should count for nothing.
I agree that people need to do more to become informed rather than going to the polls and hitting the "straight-party ticket" button without even knowing the names of who they've just voted for. I don't agree with Cito's view of the EC, and I think his apparent apathy about state and local issues, though common, amounts to a shirking of civic responsibility.
But that doesn't mean I think it's good that he become totally disengaged from the process of political dialogue and participation, and it doesn't mean that you or anyone is right to dismiss his views or the importance of his participation.
I don't sympathize with those who say there's a need to start injecting patients with lethal drugs (or going out of our way to give people the opportunity to kill themselves that way). But I definitely do support people's ability to choose to refuse medical support and/or treatment - including food and water. Without that support, a natural death follows within a week or two.
Death by dehydration is much more peaceful and less painful than you'd think, esp. with a bit of palliative care. It's less traumatic and painful than many euthanasia techniques. Yes, it's slower than assisted suicide, but a couple of weeks of that is far from the "years of acute suffering without dignity" that euthanasia advocates wax grandiloquent about, and I don't think we should be in the business of causing quick deaths. Anyone who is unwilling to face a few days of dehydration before death really should reconsider whether their desire for death is sufficiently strong to act on.
Even in places where physician-assisted suicide is legal, studies have shown that when presented with the option more patients choose to forgo nutrition and die naturally (one example study in Oregon- "Terminally Ill Choose Fasting Over M.D.-Assisted Suicide", Psychiatric News).
For many people involved in euthanasia/ assisted suicide debates, the core issue is the distinction between choosing not to take actions to continue to sustain life and choosing to take actions to end life. Unless you wrap it in lots of euphemisms (like the title of the act under discussion) most people will voice moral objections to the latter. But even the Catholic Church recognizes that there's a point at which food and water are no longer providing a real benefit and using them is no longer morally obligatory. They and others will loudly disagree with each other about when that point comes, but we should be able to agree that individuals should be able to make that decision for themselves.
Unfortunately, both extremes of the euthanasia/assisted suicide debate have made efforts to keep people from seeing this as a real option, and while courts have usually upheld terminal patients' right to refuse food, water, feeding tubes, IVs, etc., there have been some poor laws and precedents that have muddied the waters somewhat. We ought to work to clear the legal waters, the misconceptions, and the disinformation.
We also ought to strongly encourage all adults to take some time thinking about these kinds of things and come up with a living will. Dealing with these kinds of questions after somebody who never made their intentions clear beforehand becomes unable to make the decision on their own inevitably leads to morally messy and personally nasty disagreements.
Much more meat rather than sensationalist filler. After just a couple issues you'll be thanking Newsweek for stopping their presses and thus convincing you to move on.
<gmaxwell> 1960: "I have a great idea! lets have every person in the country carry a radio tracking beacon!" "That'll never fly!" 2012: "I can has TWO iphones??"