The system is far from inviting for 3erd parties but there are several realities which bias america towards a two party system
What realities are these? And are those realities the cause of the two-party system, or is it that they stem from the two-party system? (In other words, are you positive that the cause-effect chain goes one way and not the other? Or even both ways?)
Mostly geographic representation. In an English-style parliamentary democracy, a party that gets 3% of the overall vote gets 3% of the legislative seats, and legislators don't have districts that they are responsible for (unless the party assigns them one after the fact). The executive branch of the government is then elected by the legislature, rather than by the mediated popular vote used in America.
American legislators, on the other hand, represent a majority mandate from the voters in their geographic district, making it much more difficult for 3rd prties to be represented - they need to actually win an election outright to get to the house or senate. While gerrymandering (redefining district boundaries due to voting patterns to make elections a foregone conclusion) has served to entrench the two parties over the years, the impetus to form two powerful parties, each reasonably likely to be able to win a slim overall majority in a given election, is built into the system.
The parliamentary system gives disproportionate clout to the minor parties in most cases, as a 51% majority of the seats is needed to elect a prime minister and thus hold power. This basically necessitates that a major party form a coalition with one or more minor parties to achieve a majority, and the minor party can use this as leverage to get its demands acted on by the government once things are up and running.
Much of the law is deliberately written to be confusing so only lawyers can decipher it. Other aspects of law make use of important terms of art that a normal human being just isn't going to know.
You could say the same of almost any group of people who need to communicate within their field. Programmers, for example. Or internet gamers, as in:
"Hell, most non-gamers don't even know the difference between latency and bandwidth, much less the difference between a quad and a railgun."
apparently lawyers can't win here at Slashdot. You use lots of legalese and it sounds like you're hiding behind it. You use plain English and you sound unprofessional.
What are lawyers supposed to sound like?
Click over to Groklaw and take a look at some of IBM's pleadings. Clear, elegant prose (mostly) readable by non-lawyers, couched in impeccably-used technical terminology when needed.
An incredible waste of bandwidth when you can do pretty much most things with pixel shaders anyway, without the round trip.
Offline 3D rendering. Or anything else involving heavy vector math. 3D animators are salivating over being able to someday throw a whole bunch of these in the system to spit out frames faster.
You need access to lots and lots of memory to handle large amounts of geometry, render-time displacement triangles, huge textures, and enormous raytracing acceleration trees, so pixel/geometry shaders on the card won't cut it (not to mention you need better/faster antialiasing than the card provides built-in for offline rendering).
The bottleneck has always been the CPU in 3D rendering, while this amazing specialized chip was sitting a few inches away on the vid card twiddling its thumbs. Soon, we'll be able to use that chip, and maybe a couple dozen of its siblings, to dramatically decrease wait times for renders.
Secondly, most birds that conservationists (and yes, we are as scientific and geeky as the average/. er) are really worried about don't live in built-up areas so the impact with glass is likely to be less of a problem.
True, but they migrate through them. The major cities of the Eastern US are on a huge flyway, for example, which is one reason there's a National Wildlife Refuge inside the New York City limits.
Of course, in a country with full conscription (and reserve duty) where everyone in the army is required to carry their weapon (rifle or SMG, not handgun) with them at all times, including when on leave, there's a hell of a lot of guns everywhere.
However, I believe the penalties for "losing" one's weapon are severe.
Re:NFL = No Fun League
on
Superbowling
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Oh well, I guess the NFL doesnt like its superbowl party being upstaged by Vegas. Now they're just taking their ball and going back to Houston. Paul Tagliabue caused lots of casinos to lose lots of money because of the NFL's childlike behavior. Hello, only so many people can go to the game! What are the rest supposed to do, wait outside and be happy they're near the game?? Paul also threatened the players with fines or possibly suspensions for "excessive celebration" during the Superbowl.
The really interesting part of this is going to be when they flex their muscles enough that news outlets notice and get annoyed. The whole "accounts of the game" thing in their copyright notice ignores the fact that the sports industry currently gets a giant advertising section in every newspaper and TV news show in the country called "The Sports Section."
If that goes away due to legal squabbling, they're in a world of hurt.
Of course, a single paper cancelling the sports section is going to lose out, but a world where the Tribune has Football and Hockey and the Gazette has Basketball and Baseball is going to have to deal with enraged fans the likes of which you haven't begun to see.
...except that a fundamental concept of copyright law is that infringers can remedy the situation to mitigate damages.
That's why website owners get cease and desist letters instead of being dragged immediately into court. Someone unintentionally infringing who makes a timely and good faith effort to stop infringing will likely not be liable for any damages at all, and certainly cannot be compelled to purchase a license for a product they are not using.
In other words, if any code even exists, once SCO shows it and it's expunged from the kernel, there's no more infringement. And no reason to buy a license.
To put it even more bluntly, SCO's licensing theory is invented out of whole cloth, and completely without precedent.
I see. With what military? The British force that got whomped at Dunkirk?
I agree that Europe collectively sat on its ass, but believe it was precisely because there wasn't a UN-like body with which to legally do something. The League of Nations was a failure at preventing WWII, and the UN was specifically designed to address those failures. It may not do things to your attention span's liking, and it's not 100% effective, but it gets things done.
But if you don't like that example (Godwin's law and all that), try the Korean War. Did the North really have to invade? Did the US really need to cross the Yalu? Did a remotely positive outcome result?
Should we have invaded Cuba in 1962 to get rid of the WMDs?
If China were to claim that the US is an imminent threat to them with our well-documented WMD programs and delivery systems, would they be justified in invading us? Why not?
And Clinton was going after Osama in the '90s, and might have gotten him if he had been able to keep it in his pants or at least not get caught.
and let's face it, if you were opposed to the war, we could find a ton of WMD's, and it still wouldn't matter. bush did not sell the war well, or even right. he simply should have said, "we don't know what he's got, he's not abiding by the UN, and we can't take a chance. he's had them in the past, he's used them, and we know he's tried to get them again. he's had terrorist ties in the past, currently funds hamas, al aqsa, and others, some who have ties to al qaida, he clearly has demonstrataed that while not an immediate threat, left unchecked we can only assume he will be. when that day comes, it will be too late." that's all he needed to say. but there'd be those that even if saddam had wmd's, and al qaida ties, would still say no war.
The tens of millions of military and civilian deaths in the second world war stand (stood?) as a powerful reminder that the world can no longer work that way. The criteria you list are applicable to many countries (Syria? Iran? Saudi Arabia?), and invading countries based on unilateral self-interest rather than international consensus has a dangerous tendency to widen the conflict (e.g. Poland 1939 or Korea 1950).
So yes, I say no war in this way no matter what's found. The damage to our nation's interests through lost friends, new enemies, and blown budgets far outweighs neutralizing a nonexistent threat (especially when N. Korea is a hell of a lot scarier). For a counterexample of how such a war can be fought without all these bad consequences, look to Bush I's build-up to Gulf War I.
Joust was a phenomenal 2D game, and I'm sure something engaging could be done with flying jousting ostriches in 3D. Actually, the first polygonal 3D game I ever played was the slightly similar-themed DragonStrike on the PC, a game that could use a remake itself.
Wizball, the profoundly strange C64 game also seems like it would make a good 3D platformer.
Some folks (employed adults without a lot of spare time, e.g.) might be willing to pay real money for advancement of their MMORPG character through the purchase of game money.
And once there's a market for game money, then game money can get you real things in the real world.
Nobody to my knowledge is suggesting that Clinton pulled those files off the FBI's network unseen - He asked for and got them from people who had authorized access to them. The fact that the request was illegal was the problem there.
That's a pretty big difference - Demanding and getting information you really shouldn't have access to versus rifling through files with no pretense of legitimate access.
Because for simple tasks where the focus is primarily on content rather than form, DTP software really slows down the workflow.
If I'm doing a page or 2, sure, I'll lay it out in a real DTP program. For writing/revising my 100+ page course packs with screenshots and illustrations, though, I simply don't have time to edit the text, import to Quark/InDesign, track down the seperately-created illustrations, and then do layout; all to end up with regular text with illustrations.
The primitive controls in Word 97 are good enough for contrast correction to make screenshots legible, it saves me a lot of time to just copy/paste or PrintScreen from the helpfile/application rather than going through photoshop and tracking filenames, and the Quark lock-in/upgrade treadmill, at least, is even more evil than Office's.
2% is 7.3 days a year. So by that formula (with its wholly invented uptime assumption), the cost of using windows at the hypothetical company is $730,000/year, or $3,650,000 over the course of the 5-year TCO study.
Slashdot Mirror
What realities are these? And are those realities the cause of the two-party system, or is it that they stem from the two-party system? (In other words, are you positive that the cause-effect chain goes one way and not the other? Or even both ways?)
Mostly geographic representation. In an English-style parliamentary democracy, a party that gets 3% of the overall vote gets 3% of the legislative seats, and legislators don't have districts that they are responsible for (unless the party assigns them one after the fact). The executive branch of the government is then elected by the legislature, rather than by the mediated popular vote used in America.
American legislators, on the other hand, represent a majority mandate from the voters in their geographic district, making it much more difficult for 3rd prties to be represented - they need to actually win an election outright to get to the house or senate. While gerrymandering (redefining district boundaries due to voting patterns to make elections a foregone conclusion) has served to entrench the two parties over the years, the impetus to form two powerful parties, each reasonably likely to be able to win a slim overall majority in a given election, is built into the system.
The parliamentary system gives disproportionate clout to the minor parties in most cases, as a 51% majority of the seats is needed to elect a prime minister and thus hold power. This basically necessitates that a major party form a coalition with one or more minor parties to achieve a majority, and the minor party can use this as leverage to get its demands acted on by the government once things are up and running.
You could say the same of almost any group of people who need to communicate within their field. Programmers, for example. Or internet gamers, as in:
"Hell, most non-gamers don't even know the difference between latency and bandwidth, much less the difference between a quad and a railgun."
What are lawyers supposed to sound like?
Click over to Groklaw and take a look at some of IBM's pleadings. Clear, elegant prose (mostly) readable by non-lawyers, couched in impeccably-used technical terminology when needed.
Offline 3D rendering. Or anything else involving heavy vector math. 3D animators are salivating over being able to someday throw a whole bunch of these in the system to spit out frames faster.
You need access to lots and lots of memory to handle large amounts of geometry, render-time displacement triangles, huge textures, and enormous raytracing acceleration trees, so pixel/geometry shaders on the card won't cut it (not to mention you need better/faster antialiasing than the card provides built-in for offline rendering).
The bottleneck has always been the CPU in 3D rendering, while this amazing specialized chip was sitting a few inches away on the vid card twiddling its thumbs. Soon, we'll be able to use that chip, and maybe a couple dozen of its siblings, to dramatically decrease wait times for renders.
Yeah, it's not like there's 6 decades worth of NTSC-resolution footage owned by every media company in the world lying around.
It's not like hundreds of thousands of 1/2"/Beta/D1/Digibeta cameras, edit suites, and broadcast setups are out there.
It's not like consumers won't give up being able to view their NTSC home movies so they can watch sports in 1080i.
God damn MS for supporting lobbyists who insist on backwards-compatibility being part of the HDTV standard.
Greedy Assholes.
note to pedants: by NTSC, I mean NTSC/PAL/SECAM
True, but they migrate through them. The major cities of the Eastern US are on a huge flyway, for example, which is one reason there's a National Wildlife Refuge inside the New York City limits.
However, I believe the penalties for "losing" one's weapon are severe.
The really interesting part of this is going to be when they flex their muscles enough that news outlets notice and get annoyed. The whole "accounts of the game" thing in their copyright notice ignores the fact that the sports industry currently gets a giant advertising section in every newspaper and TV news show in the country called "The Sports Section."
If that goes away due to legal squabbling, they're in a world of hurt. Of course, a single paper cancelling the sports section is going to lose out, but a world where the Tribune has Football and Hockey and the Gazette has Basketball and Baseball is going to have to deal with enraged fans the likes of which you haven't begun to see.
How is knowing you're being invaded a deterrent to invasion?
"Hey! You in the tank! I see you!"
...except that a fundamental concept of copyright law is that infringers can remedy the situation to mitigate damages.
That's why website owners get cease and desist letters instead of being dragged immediately into court. Someone unintentionally infringing who makes a timely and good faith effort to stop infringing will likely not be liable for any damages at all, and certainly cannot be compelled to purchase a license for a product they are not using.
In other words, if any code even exists, once SCO shows it and it's expunged from the kernel, there's no more infringement. And no reason to buy a license.
To put it even more bluntly, SCO's licensing theory is invented out of whole cloth, and completely without precedent.
Ever heard of Ralph Nader?
I especially like the fishing lure that says 'harmful if swallowed.'
I see. With what military? The British force that got whomped at Dunkirk? I agree that Europe collectively sat on its ass, but believe it was precisely because there wasn't a UN-like body with which to legally do something. The League of Nations was a failure at preventing WWII, and the UN was specifically designed to address those failures. It may not do things to your attention span's liking, and it's not 100% effective, but it gets things done. But if you don't like that example (Godwin's law and all that), try the Korean War. Did the North really have to invade? Did the US really need to cross the Yalu? Did a remotely positive outcome result? Should we have invaded Cuba in 1962 to get rid of the WMDs? If China were to claim that the US is an imminent threat to them with our well-documented WMD programs and delivery systems, would they be justified in invading us? Why not? And Clinton was going after Osama in the '90s, and might have gotten him if he had been able to keep it in his pants or at least not get caught.
and let's face it, if you were opposed to the war, we could find a ton of WMD's, and it still wouldn't matter. bush did not sell the war well, or even right. he simply should have said, "we don't know what he's got, he's not abiding by the UN, and we can't take a chance. he's had them in the past, he's used them, and we know he's tried to get them again. he's had terrorist ties in the past, currently funds hamas, al aqsa, and others, some who have ties to al qaida, he clearly has demonstrataed that while not an immediate threat, left unchecked we can only assume he will be. when that day comes, it will be too late." that's all he needed to say. but there'd be those that even if saddam had wmd's, and al qaida ties, would still say no war.
The tens of millions of military and civilian deaths in the second world war stand (stood?) as a powerful reminder that the world can no longer work that way. The criteria you list are applicable to many countries (Syria? Iran? Saudi Arabia?), and invading countries based on unilateral self-interest rather than international consensus has a dangerous tendency to widen the conflict (e.g. Poland 1939 or Korea 1950).
So yes, I say no war in this way no matter what's found. The damage to our nation's interests through lost friends, new enemies, and blown budgets far outweighs neutralizing a nonexistent threat (especially when N. Korea is a hell of a lot scarier). For a counterexample of how such a war can be fought without all these bad consequences, look to Bush I's build-up to Gulf War I.
...but with which one can you easily make back the money you spent on it? Hint - 'pro gaming' doesn't count.
...so you could say that, um, DBUS ran over DCOP? Tragic.
And that game is likely either Tetris or Ms. Pac-Man.
Joust was a phenomenal 2D game, and I'm sure something engaging could be done with flying jousting ostriches in 3D. Actually, the first polygonal 3D game I ever played was the slightly similar-themed DragonStrike on the PC, a game that could use a remake itself.
Wizball, the profoundly strange C64 game also seems like it would make a good 3D platformer.
Some folks (employed adults without a lot of spare time, e.g.) might be willing to pay real money for advancement of their MMORPG character through the purchase of game money. And once there's a market for game money, then game money can get you real things in the real world.
This is not copyright infringment. This is espionage. Take the P2P glasses off.
Nobody to my knowledge is suggesting that Clinton pulled those files off the FBI's network unseen - He asked for and got them from people who had authorized access to them. The fact that the request was illegal was the problem there.
That's a pretty big difference - Demanding and getting information you really shouldn't have access to versus rifling through files with no pretense of legitimate access.
Nevermind Apple, merrily rubbing their faces in how easy it is for a for-profit company to do exactly the same thing.
Do you have any recollection of how freaking long it took for Apple to easily and merrily get Pink^WTaligent^WCopland^WRhapsody^WOSX out the door?
Because for simple tasks where the focus is primarily on content rather than form, DTP software really slows down the workflow.
If I'm doing a page or 2, sure, I'll lay it out in a real DTP program. For writing/revising my 100+ page course packs with screenshots and illustrations, though, I simply don't have time to edit the text, import to Quark/InDesign, track down the seperately-created illustrations, and then do layout; all to end up with regular text with illustrations.
The primitive controls in Word 97 are good enough for contrast correction to make screenshots legible, it saves me a lot of time to just copy/paste or PrintScreen from the helpfile/application rather than going through photoshop and tracking filenames, and the Quark lock-in/upgrade treadmill, at least, is even more evil than Office's.
I am sure that before the last Giant Reptile slipped into extinction it made a loud noise as well.
"Holy shit! That meteor's enormou..."
2% is 7.3 days a year. So by that formula (with its wholly invented uptime assumption), the cost of using windows at the hypothetical company is $730,000/year, or $3,650,000 over the course of the 5-year TCO study.