I built my own PVR last year, but even with MyHTPC it failed the spouse test badly. So when I saw those $150 ReplayTVs for sale in Radio Shack I pounced on them. I bought two. At $150 they deliver amazingly good MPEG-2 capture so for the same price as a PVR-250 I get free guide and streaming.
Contrary to the experiences described in this article, my ReplayTVs work flawlessly. Plugged in to the home network, DHCP served them up IPs, they downloaded their info and updated their software. They use uPnP to auto-discover other ReplayTVs on the network and integrate them very well in their on-screen UI.
In fact the UI is a big win - it passes the spouse test easily. Browsing material on the base machine, from another ReplayTV, or from the PC file server is takes a single button push. The ReplayTVs handle program contention intelligently, offering to offload a conflicted recording slot to a "spare" ReplayTV on the network.
The clever Java program DVArchive uses uPnP to imitate a ReplayTV and enables you to upload, stream, or move recorded content from the auto-discovered ReplayTVs. In effect, each ReplayTV acts like a big, external MPEG-2 capture card with lots of ports and functionality.
All ReplayTVs on the network can, of course, stream from any DVArchive-equipped file server to any ReplayTV.
You can even schedule DVArchive to automatically grab recorded material from the ReplayTVs on a batch basis, providing an easy way to create large archives. I have set up some watched folders where new material gets automatically batch encoded to MPEG-4 (xvid) for archiving.
I avoided Tivo, partly because of cost, but mainly because of its incipient DRM. I was afraid I would have to expend significant effort to create a spouse-friendly PVR system but thankfully my networked ReplayTVs have obviated this requirement for a while.
I seem to remember CD burners EXISTING back in '96 but costing an incredible fortune. No one had them.
I had one - I believe it cost $400 or so, and was a 2X.
I do remember using L3Enc to encode - on a P60 a three-minute song encoded at roughly 0.2x. After a while I got a hacked Fraunhofer codec - slower but sounded better.
Nevertheless, using both work and home machines, I managed to create some 20 odd CDs full of albums and MP3s.
WinAmp was a godsend because it let me donate an MP3 CD to a friend with the WinAmp EXE and evern the most PC clueless person "got it" immediately.
I just revisited those old '95 and '96 era CDs recently... I figured it was time to back them up. Amazingly, not one of them had bit errors. Kodak Gold was a good CDR brand - even if each blank did cost $5 each in 1995.
And the MP3s still sound okay today, even compared to Lame APS settings. I think I was lucky to avoid using the Xing encoder, or one of those nasty ones with a cut-off around 15KHz or something.
you are forgetting that 70% of Earth surface is covered with water
This is quite true. Over the past 50 years there have been less than half a dozen deep submersible explorations of the deep ocean ranges. Every time someone has scrounged together resources to go take a look down there we find new lifeforms, new biological chemistries, and amazing new chemical depositions, and evidence of extraordinarily catastrophic submarine avalanches in our recent geologic past. It seems sad to me that we spend quite a lot of money exploring rocks in the sky and basically no money exploring 70% our own planet. Instead of dreaming about expensively hauling people up out of the gravity well to live in doomed colonies on sterile worlds with no ecosystems, let's start planning our own undersea cities!
JS is just the most convenient trigger. I am sure that as and when most users have JS popups blocked, popup spammers will move to using Flash, Java, and other technologies to launch new browser windows or to grab screen real estate.
Of course not. But the fungus struck across Europe, during that period and for a decade preceding it. It caused food shortages and social disruption... but not Famine. Therefore a Famine is a product of social factors, whereas those food shortages were a product of the fungus. Famine is not really a condition of the general absence of food, but instead a symptom of the incapacity of a population to pay for food at a particular time. Famine is therefore an political construct, with biology or climate as a convenient, though not essential, precursor. The Famines in Somalia and Ethiopia, for example, over the past couple of decades have had more to do with the civil wars there than the climate, which while dry has also been uncharacteristically dry throughout most of North Eastern Africa over this time.
Nomads had to move around to eat to get to where their food supply is.
Maybe for you nomads are people who live in yurts and eat fermented curd, but I think here you are describing a hunter-gatherer society. The United States, and its precursor European cultures, were characterised by large-scale, frequent migrations of enormous bodies of people. If that isn't nomadism, then I don't know what is.
As I mentioned, this continued tendency of USians to migrate more frequently during their lifetimes than other European-descended cultures, and to tend to travel greater distances both for daily commutes and during their migrations, marks USian culture as much further along the "continuum" away from from settled, non-nomadic cultures. Many economists refer to this as labour force mobility. The migration of black americans from the under-developed southern states into the northern states during the 20th century is a classic example of this. During this time, the US also saw massive infusions of migratory labour from abroad to specific disembarkation points, and these people and their descendents begun and are continuing a migration from both coasts into the heartland. In recent years, Latino migration from the southern borders has been accelerating.
I never considered pioneers nomads. Once a pioneer has picked their homestead, they don't typical move if they could help it.
Again your perception is open to reinterpretation. The early settlers practiced clear cutting, which led to rapid reductions in land fertility before the invasive Euro portmanteau biota could be established. That's why the Western frontier moved so quickly - many people upped stakes and moved, chasing the fertility. Similarly, your example of miners elides over the fact that when the easy seams were depleted, people moved to the next one. Entire towns were created and destroyed within decades.
So you see, the difference between a long-established nomad culture and USian culture is that many nomads used biodegradable and/or portable habitation and technology. USians tended to build less biodegradable structures that have eroded less - giving the illusion of permanence and stability.
Also, your self-description of forced migrations illustrates an important point. Most individuals within nomadic socieities do not classify themselves as willing, repeated travellers. Instead, economic and climate conditions force them to migrate periodically. Your self-described situation sounds to me identical to some descriptions I've read of Mongolian nomadic cultures, allowing for culturally specific cues. Most "nomadic" Mongoloians rarely travel more than 3 miles per day, and perhaps 200 miles during a semi-annual migration. They would consider your travels "40 mins" to Walmart (presumably between 20-40 miles) to be extreme).
And the progression from nomadic->settled is not inevitable, or given. The classic example is the Lapps of northern Europe. Until the 16th century they were a settled, agrarian society. Then advances in technology enabled themto develop an economic advantage around raindeer herding. And within a couple of generations the vast bulk of their society became nomadic, pushing further north and squeezing out the original, aboriginal inhabitants. Don't be fooled into thinking that nomadism is an "earlier" state and settled life a later state - it's a cultural reaction to socio-economic stimulus.
The rot of potatoes was biological - but the conditions for reliance on potatoes as a staple had been forced through State violence, and the Famine that ensued was poltically motivated and socially engineered.
Famines are always political - they happen during civil wars or between nations at war. They lead to profiteering on a huge scale and collectivisation - economic trends which appeal to a certain class of people.
That doesn't change the fact that the Irish were dependent on the potato. And it doesn't change the fact that when a disease came along that attacked the food that they depended on, the people starved.
You should do some research before spouting off, then admitting you know nothing. Ireland was a victim of classic Colonialism - the natives' land was forcibly seized and they were converted from self-sufficient communities into tenant farmers. They were told they had to pay "rent" to live on the land that they had formerly owned. The only way to pay this "Rent" was to grow cash crops for export. The cash crops occupied all the best land. The renters were forced to eke out a living on marginal land with non-cash crops. When the non-cash crops failed, they had no money to buy food in the form of cash crops, and in any case most of the cash crops were already pledged through forward contracts to overseas buyers, who could always outbid the renters. The remaining farmers who owned some land were forced to buy food at inflated prices, often going into debt. This caused many of their farms to be foreclosed. Famine is thus a political tool that leads to collectivisation. The British knew this in the 1940s, and Stalin knew this in the 1920s and 1930s. There's more here, if you care to educate yourself.
give me an example of any nomadic group that conquered those that used large scale agriculture after the invention of guns.
The European colonisation of the Americas was characterised by aggressive, nomadic invaders, armed with guns, germs, and a foreign biota, replacing native populations, most of whom were agricultural. Some of the settled agricultural socieities in the Americas numbered several million - for example the Ohio native cities were larger than any in Europe at the time. Only after the European nomads had migrated to the western plains did they finally encounter other nomadic cultures operating a rudimentary level of civlisation.
This nomadic legacy runs deep in North American culture. Even today USians are the most nomadic of all "Western" peoples - they tend to move more frequently during their lifetime, and each move is on average a greater distance, than any other European or European-descended culture.
It's a common fallacy that the Irish Famine was caused exclusively by biology and climate. External environmental factors are often necessary precursors for famine, but the real dying and social disruption happens as a result of politics and economics. There was plenty of food in Ireland but most of the people simply couldn't afford it.. and the UK Government was ideologically opposed to welfare handouts or price controls that would have enabled ordinary people to buy food. As a result, wheat and corn exports from Ireland actually rose during the "Famine.
This topic is explored at great length in Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts, where El Nino is a precursor, but Western idologies and policies led to great genocides in India, China and South America. As a matter of record, many of the former Colonial administrators who failed to care for the welfare of their charges during the 1840s in Ireland were in positions of greater authority in India during the 1870s... and similarly caused the needless deaths of tens of millions of people.
Responding to famines in pre-British India, its Moghul rulers embargoed food exports, regulated prices, distributed food for free, and relaxed tax collection. Similarly in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Chinese state managed effective famine relief and flood control systems. But the British state's occupation of India and its Opium and Arrow wars against China destroyed all these systems.
Britain's rulers took advantage of the disasters to fasten their grip even more tightly on both their formal and informal empires. They used the Indian Famine Fund to pay for their imperial wars. During the famines, they allowed merchants to export grain reserves, ended free food distribution, and maintained, or even increased, tax collection.
Viceroy Curzon said, "any Government which by indiscriminate alms-giving weakened the fibre and demoralised the self-reliance of the population, would be guilty of a public crime." The 1901 Famine Commission Report ludicrously said, "the relief distributed was excessive." The Irish called it 'famine political economy'. But there was no such parsimony in raising a War Fund for the attack on the Boers, nor in the millions spent on Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee ceremonies.
From 1757 to 1947, India's per capita income failed to improve. In the last half of the 19th century, India's income fell by 50%; life expectancy fell by 20% between 1872 and 1921; the population hardly grew. There were 17 serious famines in the 2000 years before British rule, but 31 in the 120 years of British rule. Empire, not Asia's 'immemorial' traditions, or overpopulation, kept India poor.
I do recognize what you are proposing - it's a version of proportional representation with fixed proportions. A weird kind of accelerated plurality in fact, where parties will have even more control because they will field multiple candidates.
If you use single-candidate districts you will still have vote wastage for unelected candidates. If you use multi-candidate districts you will have less under vote wastage but you will now have over-vote wastage.
So in the presidential election you can vote for Gore and Nader and Buchanan if you want (Gore would probably still win since he has the most visibility).
Take a look at the 1990 race - your assumption about Gore winning is not necessarily true because it would have depended on the ratio of Nader votes re-distributed between Bush and Gore. And transfers have a way of surprising you. But that's politics.
Without rankings, or preferences, your proposed system is neither transitive nor concordant, but merely plural. You could mend this by adopting the French system, which uses ranked voting for the first-round in Presidential elections, then selects the top two scorers to go through into a second winner-takes-all either/or election.
In regards to gerrymandering, it's effect on US elections is very overrated.
I think you're wrong. It promotes incumbency and false majorities. Overrated?
In the [Californian] November 2002 election, representatives supported by
24 percent of voters gained the power to pass laws in the legislature.
Florida's 22nd District is 90 miles long and never more than 3 miles wide. It consists of every beach house lining Route A1A along Florida's Gold Coast from West Palm Beach to Miami Beach
Use your influence and $$$ to get us completely digital theaters. We all want to see the new movies on a crystal clear screen that isn't going to be completely degraded the 3rd and 4th time we go to see it.
Having seen both of Lucas's digital ST movies on the big screen, I have to say the quality sucks compared with 35mm, and definitely compared with 70mm. The resolution is crappy, the colours are washed out. It's like looking at a screen saver blown up. You can see staircasing on thin diagonal details, for God's sake.
Maybe the resolution of digital will improve inthe future, but for now the hype seems to me to be mainly one of reducing the front-end costs for distributors by lowering media reproduction costs.
Let people vote for whomever and how many candidates as they want. Ranking is unnecessary.
I am unclear on how your proposed system works. If I can "vote" as many times as I want, for as many candidates as I want, then how do you decide who wins?
Democrats and republicans are really by and large ideology-free, although both tend to have tendencies that lean right or left.
Have you looked at the GOP lately? Seriously though, the kind of over-arching tent approach to politics you mention is perhaps why the US is now split 50/50 in terms of political affiliation, whereas control of the executive and legislature oscillates wildly depending on the swing of 5-10% of voters "in the middle" This leaves the system open to abuse by lobbyists and special interests.
It's just that what would be minority parties aren't represented
I think both parties are minority parties. If you had a representative system, you'd see both the Dem and the GOP with around 30% each, and the remaining 40% split between several other parties. If the current system -- with both parties monopolizing all the available representation -- isn't a clearest case of unfair domination by political parties then I don't know what is.
What I would prefer is a system of either instant runoffs, or allowing people to vote for however many candidates they wish.
Then maybe you should look at the Irish system of Choice Voting. You can vote for as few candidates or as many as you wish. If you vote for only a single candidate, then your vote functions as a single plurality-style vote. If you vote for more than one candidate (using a ranking system), then your vote "transfers" accordingly as the weaker candidates are eliminated.
It acknowledges that there are two kinds of wasted votes: votes for candidates that stand little chance of winning, and votes in excess of what a winning candidate needs. Transferring these votes to their next ranked choice makes it more likely that they will actually contribute to the election of a candidate... Choice voting has a number of advantages over plurality-majority voting. It produces more accurate representation of parties in legislatures. It gives voters more choices of parties at the polls, increases voter turnout, and wastes far fewer votes. This form of PR also reduces the creation of manufactured majorities. In addition, it assures fair representation for third parties, racial minorities, and women. All votes are for individual candidates not parties, and this arrangement allows voters to cross party lines with their votes. It is also the only form of PR that can be used in nonpartisan elections.
I think we get better, but non-party oriented representation than if we used some kind of parliamentary system.
How on earth could you categorise US political representation as "non-party oriented" when there are basically just two political parties that evenly divide less than 50% of the eligible voters between themselves?
When I think of US elections, I picture enormous piles of several million votes. The first stage of counting the votes is to burn the 70% of the total pile of votes that are not for a candidate affiliated with one of the two parties that enjoys a slight lead in a particular region.
The US system produces artifical majorities of representation by minority parties. It's nothing to do with the presence or absence of a "parliamentary" system - unicameral, bicameral or even tricameral.
The central UK government, for example, uses US-style plurality voting but has a bicameral parliamentary system. However, the regional governments in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales use PR-based voting systems. So you can have one, both, or neither.
Seriously, all this fuss over changing the mechanics of the physical voting process when the electoral system itself is decrepit strikes me as fiddling while Rome burns.
There are 16.7 million addresses per square metre of the earth's surface, including the oceans. This is overkill. The world does not need more than the 4 billion addresses available with IPv4, and I challenge you to come up with an application that requires that many.
Yes, ReplayTV has time-based FWD and REV buttons, but this is a seperate function that intelligently skips forward past entire blocks of commercials until it finds the beginning of the next show segment.
Sometimes it works very well, sometimes it just skips until a station identifier. But it usually beats the fixed-time skip button.
I have one of the older ReplayTVs that has the auto (ie, no button) skip feature as well, so it's nice to be able to choose from three ways to avoid adverts without jumping through obscure remote control ritual magic hoops like on the Tivo.
Question: What MP3 player works with Napster?
Answer: Ummmm....
The Samsung Napster player, of course! I note this player is a close relative of the iPod, being also based on the PortalPlayer PP5002 chipset, which, as a matter of course, natively supports WMA.
Realtime encoding to MP3 and (by Summer 2003) WMA
Realtime decoding of MP3, WMA, AAC, and ACELP(R).NET formats
I don't see what all the fuss is about. The iPod's chipset already supports WMA, it's just Apple that have recompiled the PortalPlayer OS to remove the WMA support. I'd bet supporting WMA is as easy as changing a compile flag and shipping a firmware revision.
Realtime encoding to MP3 and (by Summer 2003) WMA
Realtime decoding of MP3, WMA, AAC, and ACELP(R).NET formats
Slashdot Mirror
I built my own PVR last year, but even with MyHTPC it failed the spouse test badly. So when I saw those $150 ReplayTVs for sale in Radio Shack I pounced on them. I bought two. At $150 they deliver amazingly good MPEG-2 capture so for the same price as a PVR-250 I get free guide and streaming.
Contrary to the experiences described in this article, my ReplayTVs work flawlessly. Plugged in to the home network, DHCP served them up IPs, they downloaded their info and updated their software. They use uPnP to auto-discover other ReplayTVs on the network and integrate them very well in their on-screen UI.
In fact the UI is a big win - it passes the spouse test easily. Browsing material on the base machine, from another ReplayTV, or from the PC file server is takes a single button push. The ReplayTVs handle program contention intelligently, offering to offload a conflicted recording slot to a "spare" ReplayTV on the network.
The clever Java program DVArchive uses uPnP to imitate a ReplayTV and enables you to upload, stream, or move recorded content from the auto-discovered ReplayTVs. In effect, each ReplayTV acts like a big, external MPEG-2 capture card with lots of ports and functionality.
All ReplayTVs on the network can, of course, stream from any DVArchive-equipped file server to any ReplayTV.
You can even schedule DVArchive to automatically grab recorded material from the ReplayTVs on a batch basis, providing an easy way to create large archives. I have set up some watched folders where new material gets automatically batch encoded to MPEG-4 (xvid) for archiving.
There's a big user community associated with DVArchive.
All in all I am very satisfied with my ReplayTV setup. It is totally integrated into my home media setup (1 TB RAID-5 file server) and works effortlessly. The ReplayTVs automatically skip adverts (works pretty well) and there's an active between ReplayTV units. Useful if you want to pick up a season half-way through.
I avoided Tivo, partly because of cost, but mainly because of its incipient DRM. I was afraid I would have to expend significant effort to create a spouse-friendly PVR system but thankfully my networked ReplayTVs have obviated this requirement for a while.
I seem to remember CD burners EXISTING back in '96 but costing an incredible fortune. No one had them.
I had one - I believe it cost $400 or so, and was a 2X.
I do remember using L3Enc to encode - on a P60 a three-minute song encoded at roughly 0.2x. After a while I got a hacked Fraunhofer codec - slower but sounded better.
Nevertheless, using both work and home machines, I managed to create some 20 odd CDs full of albums and MP3s.
WinAmp was a godsend because it let me donate an MP3 CD to a friend with the WinAmp EXE and evern the most PC clueless person "got it" immediately.
I just revisited those old '95 and '96 era CDs recently... I figured it was time to back them up. Amazingly, not one of them had bit errors. Kodak Gold was a good CDR brand - even if each blank did cost $5 each in 1995.
And the MP3s still sound okay today, even compared to Lame APS settings. I think I was lucky to avoid using the Xing encoder, or one of those nasty ones with a cut-off around 15KHz or something.
After using iTunes for a bit I'd be hard pressed to use any other music software.
Your sad but temporary state of ignorance no doubt proceeds from the fact that you haven't yet tried Media Center.
you are forgetting that 70% of Earth surface is covered with water
This is quite true. Over the past 50 years there have been less than half a dozen deep submersible explorations of the deep ocean ranges. Every time someone has scrounged together resources to go take a look down there we find new lifeforms, new biological chemistries, and amazing new chemical depositions, and evidence of extraordinarily catastrophic submarine avalanches in our recent geologic past. It seems sad to me that we spend quite a lot of money exploring rocks in the sky and basically no money exploring 70% our own planet. Instead of dreaming about expensively hauling people up out of the gravity well to live in doomed colonies on sterile worlds with no ecosystems, let's start planning our own undersea cities!
JS is just the most convenient trigger. I am sure that as and when most users have JS popups blocked, popup spammers will move to using Flash, Java, and other technologies to launch new browser windows or to grab screen real estate.
The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
Reminds me of Caligula ordering his army to fight back the incoming tide.
Canute . Caligula was the sister fucker.
Is the blight actually irrelevant to the famine?
Of course not. But the fungus struck across Europe, during that period and for a decade preceding it. It caused food shortages and social disruption... but not Famine. Therefore a Famine is a product of social factors, whereas those food shortages were a product of the fungus. Famine is not really a condition of the general absence of food, but instead a symptom of the incapacity of a population to pay for food at a particular time. Famine is therefore an political construct, with biology or climate as a convenient, though not essential, precursor. The Famines in Somalia and Ethiopia, for example, over the past couple of decades have had more to do with the civil wars there than the climate, which while dry has also been uncharacteristically dry throughout most of North Eastern Africa over this time.
Nomads had to move around to eat to get to where their food supply is.
Maybe for you nomads are people who live in yurts and eat fermented curd, but I think here you are describing a hunter-gatherer society. The United States, and its precursor European cultures, were characterised by large-scale, frequent migrations of enormous bodies of people. If that isn't nomadism, then I don't know what is.
As I mentioned, this continued tendency of USians to migrate more frequently during their lifetimes than other European-descended cultures, and to tend to travel greater distances both for daily commutes and during their migrations, marks USian culture as much further along the "continuum" away from from settled, non-nomadic cultures. Many economists refer to this as labour force mobility. The migration of black americans from the under-developed southern states into the northern states during the 20th century is a classic example of this. During this time, the US also saw massive infusions of migratory labour from abroad to specific disembarkation points, and these people and their descendents begun and are continuing a migration from both coasts into the heartland. In recent years, Latino migration from the southern borders has been accelerating.
I never considered pioneers nomads. Once a pioneer has picked their homestead, they don't typical move if they could help it.
Again your perception is open to reinterpretation. The early settlers practiced clear cutting, which led to rapid reductions in land fertility before the invasive Euro portmanteau biota could be established. That's why the Western frontier moved so quickly - many people upped stakes and moved, chasing the fertility. Similarly, your example of miners elides over the fact that when the easy seams were depleted, people moved to the next one. Entire towns were created and destroyed within decades.
So you see, the difference between a long-established nomad culture and USian culture is that many nomads used biodegradable and/or portable habitation and technology. USians tended to build less biodegradable structures that have eroded less - giving the illusion of permanence and stability.
Also, your self-description of forced migrations illustrates an important point. Most individuals within nomadic socieities do not classify themselves as willing, repeated travellers. Instead, economic and climate conditions force them to migrate periodically. Your self-described situation sounds to me identical to some descriptions I've read of Mongolian nomadic cultures, allowing for culturally specific cues. Most "nomadic" Mongoloians rarely travel more than 3 miles per day, and perhaps 200 miles during a semi-annual migration. They would consider your travels "40 mins" to Walmart (presumably between 20-40 miles) to be extreme).
And the progression from nomadic->settled is not inevitable, or given. The classic example is the Lapps of northern Europe. Until the 16th century they were a settled, agrarian society. Then advances in technology enabled themto develop an economic advantage around raindeer herding. And within a couple of generations the vast bulk of their society became nomadic, pushing further north and squeezing out the original, aboriginal inhabitants. Don't be fooled into thinking that nomadism is an "earlier" state and settled life a later state - it's a cultural reaction to socio-economic stimulus.
+5 insightful? Hardly.
The rot of potatoes was biological - but the conditions for reliance on potatoes as a staple had been forced through State violence, and the Famine that ensued was poltically motivated and socially engineered.
Famines are always political - they happen during civil wars or between nations at war. They lead to profiteering on a huge scale and collectivisation - economic trends which appeal to a certain class of people.
That doesn't change the fact that the Irish were dependent on the potato. And it doesn't change the fact that when a disease came along that attacked the food that they depended on, the people starved.
You should do some research before spouting off, then admitting you know nothing. Ireland was a victim of classic Colonialism - the natives' land was forcibly seized and they were converted from self-sufficient communities into tenant farmers. They were told they had to pay "rent" to live on the land that they had formerly owned. The only way to pay this "Rent" was to grow cash crops for export. The cash crops occupied all the best land. The renters were forced to eke out a living on marginal land with non-cash crops. When the non-cash crops failed, they had no money to buy food in the form of cash crops, and in any case most of the cash crops were already pledged through forward contracts to overseas buyers, who could always outbid the renters. The remaining farmers who owned some land were forced to buy food at inflated prices, often going into debt. This caused many of their farms to be foreclosed. Famine is thus a political tool that leads to collectivisation. The British knew this in the 1940s, and Stalin knew this in the 1920s and 1930s. There's more here, if you care to educate yourself.
My vote is for large scale corporate farming.
What is the Meatrix?
give me an example of any nomadic group that conquered those that used large scale agriculture after the invention of guns.
The European colonisation of the Americas was characterised by aggressive, nomadic invaders, armed with guns, germs, and a foreign biota, replacing native populations, most of whom were agricultural. Some of the settled agricultural socieities in the Americas numbered several million - for example the Ohio native cities were larger than any in Europe at the time. Only after the European nomads had migrated to the western plains did they finally encounter other nomadic cultures operating a rudimentary level of civlisation.
This nomadic legacy runs deep in North American culture. Even today USians are the most nomadic of all "Western" peoples - they tend to move more frequently during their lifetime, and each move is on average a greater distance, than any other European or European-descended culture.
This topic is explored at great length in Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts , where El Nino is a precursor, but Western idologies and policies led to great genocides in India, China and South America. As a matter of record, many of the former Colonial administrators who failed to care for the welfare of their charges during the 1840s in Ireland were in positions of greater authority in India during the 1870s... and similarly caused the needless deaths of tens of millions of people.
I do recognize what you are proposing - it's a version of proportional representation with fixed proportions. A weird kind of accelerated plurality in fact, where parties will have even more control because they will field multiple candidates.
If you use single-candidate districts you will still have vote wastage for unelected candidates. If you use multi-candidate districts you will have less under vote wastage but you will now have over-vote wastage.
So in the presidential election you can vote for Gore and Nader and Buchanan if you want (Gore would probably still win since he has the most visibility).
As an aside, here's a blow-by-blow of how Ireland's last two Presidential elections worked. Single office, multiple candidates. Choice voting, instant runoff mechanism.
Take a look at the 1990 race - your assumption about Gore winning is not necessarily true because it would have depended on the ratio of Nader votes re-distributed between Bush and Gore. And transfers have a way of surprising you. But that's politics.
In regards to gerrymandering, it's effect on US elections is very overrated.
I think you're wrong. It promotes incumbency and false majorities. Overrated? Here's a quick'n'dirty guide to gerrymandering.
My personal favourite case of gerrymandering?
Use your influence and $$$ to get us completely digital theaters. We all want to see the new movies on a crystal clear screen that isn't going to be completely degraded the 3rd and 4th time we go to see it.
Having seen both of Lucas's digital ST movies on the big screen, I have to say the quality sucks compared with 35mm, and definitely compared with 70mm. The resolution is crappy, the colours are washed out. It's like looking at a screen saver blown up. You can see staircasing on thin diagonal details, for God's sake.
Maybe the resolution of digital will improve inthe future, but for now the hype seems to me to be mainly one of reducing the front-end costs for distributors by lowering media reproduction costs.
Let people vote for whomever and how many candidates as they want. Ranking is unnecessary.
I am unclear on how your proposed system works. If I can "vote" as many times as I want, for as many candidates as I want, then how do you decide who wins?
Vote Early, Vote Often? What you really want in an ideal voting system is a way to maximise concordance and transitivity. In the US, with blatant gerrymandering, these two aims are absolutely frustrated.
Have you looked at the GOP lately? Seriously though, the kind of over-arching tent approach to politics you mention is perhaps why the US is now split 50/50 in terms of political affiliation, whereas control of the executive and legislature oscillates wildly depending on the swing of 5-10% of voters "in the middle" This leaves the system open to abuse by lobbyists and special interests.
It's just that what would be minority parties aren't represented
I think both parties are minority parties. If you had a representative system, you'd see both the Dem and the GOP with around 30% each, and the remaining 40% split between several other parties. If the current system -- with both parties monopolizing all the available representation -- isn't a clearest case of unfair domination by political parties then I don't know what is.
What I would prefer is a system of either instant runoffs, or allowing people to vote for however many candidates they wish.
Then maybe you should look at the Irish system of Choice Voting. You can vote for as few candidates or as many as you wish. If you vote for only a single candidate, then your vote functions as a single plurality-style vote. If you vote for more than one candidate (using a ranking system), then your vote "transfers" accordingly as the weaker candidates are eliminated.
I think we get better, but non-party oriented representation than if we used some kind of parliamentary system.
How on earth could you categorise US political representation as "non-party oriented" when there are basically just two political parties that evenly divide less than 50% of the eligible voters between themselves?
When I think of US elections, I picture enormous piles of several million votes. The first stage of counting the votes is to burn the 70% of the total pile of votes that are not for a candidate affiliated with one of the two parties that enjoys a slight lead in a particular region.
The US system produces artifical majorities of representation by minority parties. It's nothing to do with the presence or absence of a "parliamentary" system - unicameral, bicameral or even tricameral.
The central UK government, for example, uses US-style plurality voting but has a bicameral parliamentary system. However, the regional governments in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales use PR-based voting systems. So you can have one, both, or neither.
I also hear nobody else seriously contemplates voting machines, they all still use that old, primitive, slightly-more-reliable paper-ballot system.
Yes, and most of the world's advanced democracies use fair voting systems where a majority of voters decide who will elect them - rather than the US's 19th century UK-derived broken system of plurality voting where a minority of voters dominate the representation and an adversarial, bipolar political system is systematically reproduced.
Seriously, all this fuss over changing the mechanics of the physical voting process when the electoral system itself is decrepit strikes me as fiddling while Rome burns.
There are 16.7 million addresses per square metre of the earth's surface, including the oceans. This is overkill. The world does not need more than the 4 billion addresses available with IPv4, and I challenge you to come up with an application that requires that many.
Smart Dust .
TiVo has 30-second skip as well
Yes, ReplayTV has time-based FWD and REV buttons, but this is a seperate function that intelligently skips forward past entire blocks of commercials until it finds the beginning of the next show segment.
Sometimes it works very well, sometimes it just skips until a station identifier. But it usually beats the fixed-time skip button.
I have one of the older ReplayTVs that has the auto (ie, no button) skip feature as well, so it's nice to be able to choose from three ways to avoid adverts without jumping through obscure remote control ritual magic hoops like on the Tivo.