And how is that any different than the situation right now? Instead of the 10 most populous states, they run around to the 5 or 6 'swing' states.
The difference is that the swing states are usually different each time around, whereas the most populous states (or any demographic) will not change much from one election cycle to the next. The latter provides a more stable base for building a tyranny of the majority.
Considering that conservatives are a majority in the US right now (whether you like it or not), GOP control would be even more dominant without the electoral college. That would make the US look closer to Saudi Arabia than it does now. Is that what you want?
all of those countries with lower unemployment rates...
What are these countries with lower unempoyment of which you speak? Low unemployemnt is certainly not the rule in most of enlightened Western Europe! Or Japan!
For mp3 certainly; I have used it. Don't know about Ogg though. Amiga supports a PIPE: device so you would have to save to pipe: in the web browser and then open it in the player.
AFAIK, there are basically two ways to implement clockless designs. The simplest, in principle, is to keep track of min/max propagation delays and make sure that everything is guaranteed to settle out without any race hazards. It is a huge bookeeping job for non-trivial designs so this approach doesn't scale very well. That's why people started putting flip-flops and clocks in, to keep the combinatorial stages separated.
It is also possible, though, to make fundamental mode logic. If you feed outputs back to inputs in your combinatorial logic, you can force the outputs to cascade through certain states as the inputs change. This is much harder to analyze: the technique I learned was to draw arrows on K-maps and the most complex thing I could analyze was a circuit to detect which direction a mouse ball moved based on the phase relation of the optointerrupter signals.
It looks like these new microprocessor designs are using fundamental mode logic. I have no idea how they analyze (let alone synthesize) their designs, but it definitely isn't K-maps, that would be flippin' impossible!
The dreaded language switch. It seems like it takes me 15 minutes to fully swtich context into a foreign language. When trying to switch from Russian to German, I struggle to remember words and often get the urge to blurt out the word in Latin. It is so annoying.
So strong that, when the innkeeper in a small Baviarian town couldn't understand my fractured German, a passer-by helpfully translated my German into...uh, German.
Sure would have helped if she didn't talk so fast. No matter how much we Americans study, it is hard to be proficient when we never have a chance to practice in a natural language setting. It is counter-intutitive for non-English speakers to encounter someone struggling in their language, but most Americans encounter people limited in English proficiency often enough to have acquired a slow & halting mode.
So all ye Deutchlanderen, langsammer, fur mich, bitte?
Have you considered the possibility that we have excess brain mass simply to accelerate learning at a young age? Then as adults we just carry it around as a hedge against injury (the skull's not gonna shrink is it?). That would counter the evoultion-makes-it-impossible argument.
I should have been clearer in what I meant by insurance. Properly, insurance is a means of spreading the cost of unpredictable (but statistically chracterizable) large expenses. We buy fire insurance on our houses, but ordinary maintenence is financed differently. Health "insurance" (which should properly be called health "plans") as we see it today is a conflation true insurance, for rare but expensive treatments, with a 3rd-party payment system for smaller, more ordinary costs (prescription drugs for example). The latter exists mostly because the income tax code exempts health "plans" from gross income.
Thus the private sector comes out ahead if the administration overhead, plus the inefficiencies inherehent in a 3rd-party payment system, is less than the total income tax rate, which, with state & FICA, weighs in somewhere the 40%'s. So Kaiser-Permanente can waste almost half and still be competitive. A colossal gov't program gets the advantage of a monopsony, which can help efficiency, but doesn't get any competitive pressure, which gradually drags efficiency down (and stymies innovation). So gov't heathcare (for ordinary expenses) trades one problem (high cost in the private sector) for another (poor innovation and often poor service). The logical solution is to rationalize this perverse tax treatment, with IRA-like tax-deferred savings accounts for example.
There are other ways to do it, and other problems that need solved like physician licensure that blocks entry into the profession, inflating costs. And there are confounding factors like how to properly account for externalized costs. An MRI is an expensive piece of equipment, so gov't programs try to keep a deep backlog of appointments on it. That way you can serve more people with fewer machines, saving money. But when people have to take a time off to travel to their MRI appointment, that is a cost that doesn't appear on the books. A private-sector MRI operator won't only try to minimize costs, but also maximize revenue. I would pay $100 extra to not have to take a day off work or travel 500 miles for an MRI appt. So in this case higher medical costs are a good thing, because that $100 is cheaper than some other external cost. I touch on a lot of issues briefly here, but hey, this is just a/. post!
That's the regular predictable costs. True insurance, however is fairly easily marketized, using actuarial principles known since the 17th century. Gov't insurance, if FEMA is any guide, is always under pressure to levy premia at below-true-actuarial rates, and then require tax-paid bailouts when insovlency hits. So you are paying for those oceanfront Hampton properties, because tax money effectively insures them against nature's fury.
But at least one rich dude is kind enough to thank you for it.
...or at least not pro-Kerry comments being modded down?
It's that "not pro-Kerry" factor that is so annoying, and it has been going on here for weeks. I while back I took the time explain what motivated the Swifties to oppose Kerry, why his actions appeared so baleful to that group, but never saying I agreed with any of it. The original poster actually thanked me for my rational response, but some hot-head moderator modded it down along with (apparently) every other non-pro-Kerry post in the vicinity.
Sure is hard to have a rational conversation when you can't even explain what you disagree with. Anything outside of regurgitated Kerry propoganda is a mod-down target.
I do have a seemingly perpetual invite to meta-mod. So I suppose I am partly to blame for these abuses.
Those are only the tax increases he has promised. The OP'er may be expecting other, unpromised taxes. (And not without reason--it is a logical consequence of criticizing deficits while proposing lots of helathcare spending.)
I don't remember hearing in 2000, "If elected, I promise to invade Iraq with 320,000 troops," but we got it anyway...
Kerry supports a cap on insurance payout: $30,000.01 and up is covered by government. This effectively reduces how much you pay for your insurance premium each year.
And then clearly the the excess beyond $30,000 comes out of thin air. All this does is subtitute a tax program for high-deductible insurance. That type of insurance is already affordable (less than 10% of a major medical if I remember correctly). And given the perverse effects of FEMA property insurance, I would humbly suggest that the world is a better place when the feds stay out of the insurance business.
Who modded this insightful? Informative maybe (for the bit about $30,000), but who needs to read that post to realize that Kerry is claiming his taxes won't hit the midlle class (or that war costs money)? It's only been on the news all flippin' summer!
When I looked, the market quotes indicated 55% probability Bush would win (the popular vote. anyhow). Though Bush is judged to have a better chance of getting better than 52% of the vote, that's still only about 1 in 5. (Kerry is pegged at 1 in 7 for the same feat.) So the futures market doesn't say anything we don't already know: The outcome is pretty much a coin flip as far as anyone knows, and is likely to be close.
True enough on FPTP. But the US electoral system further stymies 3rd parties with ballot acess laws and such. The secret ballot reforms in the 19th century made ballot access such an issue. Before then, to get on the ballot, all a party had to do was, well, print some ballots and distribute them. The last new party to become sucessful was the Republicans. Ballot access has since closed the door.
If that isn't ironic enough for you, put this in your pipe and smoke it....
In their greed for power, the incumbents have passed incumbent-protection acts, under the guise of campaign finance laws. Since the principal way for challengers to beat incumbents is to outspend them (by an average of 2 to 1), and because politcal parties are often the source of this money, campaign finance laws are emasculating the political parties. Think about it: An incumbent GOP senator has more to fear from the Democratic party (who can fund a challenger) than he does from any Democrat senator, and vice versa.
Witness the rise of 527's. These are becoming politcal parties in all but name. The next step in the evolution is for 527's to print voter guides to take into the voting booth (cf. 19th century pre-preinted ballots). The next step after that is for major 527's to organize coalitions and pool endorsments (with backroom deals and campaign money being distributed). In the end, the major parties will be shell organizations, forced to nominate whomever the 527's endorse.
Tammany Hall all over again. Thanks McCain-Feingold...for nothing.
The best man who (a) has enough political history that people feel they know what they are getting (whatever his other faults, you do know what you are getting) and (b) is willing to take the job where his name, and all his family members, get dragged through the mud by political opponents. Citizen legislators and citizen executives are one of those ideas that seem to work well on a smaller scale, but for governemnts that rule over millions, it looks like we are stuck with professional politicians.
Unless, of course, we get a radically different system of voting. If you chose 50 people at random to be candidates, and 1,000 others at random to be electors, then we could see citizen presidents.
Dude, you missed the perfect opportunity for a HHGTTG reference. Ballmer's numbers are computed using restaurant math. We all know how math that adds up everywhere else never seems to add up correctly when splitting the tab.
A similar analogy can be made for motorcyclists. Though they are a minority of road traffic, they are still a large enough group to resist incompatible road features like grooved pavement & unnecessary guard rails.
Here is a case in point: US vehicle regulations limit the max brightness of daytime running lamps; this helps keep daytime motorcycle headlamps more conspicuous. Canadian vehicles, however, run DRL's at full headlamp brightness. I suspect that a lower number of motorcyclists (because of the shorter riding season there) contributes to his difference in the regulations.
The automated worms buzzing about the net can't do that (not yet anyhow) so having a separate root account reduces the number of attackers by a factor of about a bazillion. Also, that procedure gives the defender a period of time to detect the break-in. So really critical sites (like e-gold.com) who doubtless have a full time staff scanning & patching have time to defeat the attack before its privelege can escalate.
My Amiga with 50 MHz 68030 (about 25% slower than a 486-100) played MP3's quite handily (even in 1998). But then, she is helped by a smarter sound chip than what would be found in a 486 PC. And a better OS and more media-friendly architecture generally.
Recently-built Neuros units don't require a firmware upgrade to play.ogg anymore. Linux support through the command-line "positron" program, and a few others I haven't tried.
A tapedeck adapter won't work in my car. It spits the tape back out and displays the message, "Broken Tape." A misfeature if there ever was one. I got a Neuros, which plays ogg and has a built-in FM transmitter.
Wouldn't it have been cheaper, easier, & better to get a different PCMCIA wireless card? That's what I did with my wife's laptop, in which case XP was hosing the wireless dirvers on the native hardware.
It is sorta counter-intuitive, I suppose, to throw away and replace hardware, rather than simply re-configuring software. But that is sorta the whole point of this conversation. Hardware is cheap.
The cost of both hardware and software are mostly fixed costs. But hardware is cheaper because it is standardized. Software is always changing (which is why we call it soft) so there is more development cost per sale.
This is partly because that is what user want, up-to-date software. But these days it is also a result of forced upgrades.
True, the low Swiss crime rate does not prove that firearm ownership deters crime. (It fails to support the principal pro-gun argument.) However, it does prove that firearm ownership does not necessarily create high crime, by being a counterexample. (It destroys the principal anti-gun argument).
By itself, the original post is too short to ascertain which he was driving at, though the context of preceding posts make it look like he was, in fact, drawing the too-strong conclusion.
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But iirc, in 1976 CA was a swing state (maybe 1988 too). Ford and Carter were all over it, while the midwest was ignored.
The difference is that the swing states are usually different each time around, whereas the most populous states (or any demographic) will not change much from one election cycle to the next. The latter provides a more stable base for building a tyranny of the majority.
Considering that conservatives are a majority in the US right now (whether you like it or not), GOP control would be even more dominant without the electoral college. That would make the US look closer to Saudi Arabia than it does now. Is that what you want?
What are these countries with lower unempoyment of which you speak? Low unemployemnt is certainly not the rule in most of enlightened Western Europe! Or Japan!
For mp3 certainly; I have used it. Don't know about Ogg though. Amiga supports a PIPE: device so you would have to save to pipe: in the web browser and then open it in the player.
It is also possible, though, to make fundamental mode logic. If you feed outputs back to inputs in your combinatorial logic, you can force the outputs to cascade through certain states as the inputs change. This is much harder to analyze: the technique I learned was to draw arrows on K-maps and the most complex thing I could analyze was a circuit to detect which direction a mouse ball moved based on the phase relation of the optointerrupter signals.
It looks like these new microprocessor designs are using fundamental mode logic. I have no idea how they analyze (let alone synthesize) their designs, but it definitely isn't K-maps, that would be flippin' impossible!
The dreaded language switch. It seems like it takes me 15 minutes to fully swtich context into a foreign language. When trying to switch from Russian to German, I struggle to remember words and often get the urge to blurt out the word in Latin. It is so annoying.
the Bavarian dialect is so strong...
So strong that, when the innkeeper in a small Baviarian town couldn't understand my fractured German, a passer-by helpfully translated my German into...uh, German.
Sure would have helped if she didn't talk so fast. No matter how much we Americans study, it is hard to be proficient when we never have a chance to practice in a natural language setting. It is counter-intutitive for non-English speakers to encounter someone struggling in their language, but most Americans encounter people limited in English proficiency often enough to have acquired a slow & halting mode.
So all ye Deutchlanderen, langsammer, fur mich, bitte?Have you considered the possibility that we have excess brain mass simply to accelerate learning at a young age? Then as adults we just carry it around as a hedge against injury (the skull's not gonna shrink is it?). That would counter the evoultion-makes-it-impossible argument.
Thus the private sector comes out ahead if the administration overhead, plus the inefficiencies inherehent in a 3rd-party payment system, is less than the total income tax rate, which, with state & FICA, weighs in somewhere the 40%'s. So Kaiser-Permanente can waste almost half and still be competitive. A colossal gov't program gets the advantage of a monopsony, which can help efficiency, but doesn't get any competitive pressure, which gradually drags efficiency down (and stymies innovation). So gov't heathcare (for ordinary expenses) trades one problem (high cost in the private sector) for another (poor innovation and often poor service). The logical solution is to rationalize this perverse tax treatment, with IRA-like tax-deferred savings accounts for example.
There are other ways to do it, and other problems that need solved like physician licensure that blocks entry into the profession, inflating costs. And there are confounding factors like how to properly account for externalized costs. An MRI is an expensive piece of equipment, so gov't programs try to keep a deep backlog of appointments on it. That way you can serve more people with fewer machines, saving money. But when people have to take a time off to travel to their MRI appointment, that is a cost that doesn't appear on the books. A private-sector MRI operator won't only try to minimize costs, but also maximize revenue. I would pay $100 extra to not have to take a day off work or travel 500 miles for an MRI appt. So in this case higher medical costs are a good thing, because that $100 is cheaper than some other external cost. I touch on a lot of issues briefly here, but hey, this is just a /. post!
That's the regular predictable costs. True insurance, however is fairly easily marketized, using actuarial principles known since the 17th century. Gov't insurance, if FEMA is any guide, is always under pressure to levy premia at below-true-actuarial rates, and then require tax-paid bailouts when insovlency hits. So you are paying for those oceanfront Hampton properties, because tax money effectively insures them against nature's fury.
But at least one rich dude is kind enough to thank you for it.
It's that "not pro-Kerry" factor that is so annoying, and it has been going on here for weeks. I while back I took the time explain what motivated the Swifties to oppose Kerry, why his actions appeared so baleful to that group, but never saying I agreed with any of it. The original poster actually thanked me for my rational response, but some hot-head moderator modded it down along with (apparently) every other non-pro-Kerry post in the vicinity.
Sure is hard to have a rational conversation when you can't even explain what you disagree with. Anything outside of regurgitated Kerry propoganda is a mod-down target.
I do have a seemingly perpetual invite to meta-mod. So I suppose I am partly to blame for these abuses.
Those are only the tax increases he has promised. The OP'er may be expecting other, unpromised taxes. (And not without reason--it is a logical consequence of criticizing deficits while proposing lots of helathcare spending.)
I don't remember hearing in 2000, "If elected, I promise to invade Iraq with 320,000 troops," but we got it anyway...
Kerry supports a cap on insurance payout: $30,000.01 and up is covered by government. This effectively reduces how much you pay for your insurance premium each year.
And then clearly the the excess beyond $30,000 comes out of thin air. All this does is subtitute a tax program for high-deductible insurance. That type of insurance is already affordable (less than 10% of a major medical if I remember correctly). And given the perverse effects of FEMA property insurance, I would humbly suggest that the world is a better place when the feds stay out of the insurance business.
Who modded this insightful? Informative maybe (for the bit about $30,000), but who needs to read that post to realize that Kerry is claiming his taxes won't hit the midlle class (or that war costs money)? It's only been on the news all flippin' summer!
You didn't think Kerry had it sewn up, did you?
If that isn't ironic enough for you, put this in your pipe and smoke it....
In their greed for power, the incumbents have passed incumbent-protection acts, under the guise of campaign finance laws. Since the principal way for challengers to beat incumbents is to outspend them (by an average of 2 to 1), and because politcal parties are often the source of this money, campaign finance laws are emasculating the political parties. Think about it: An incumbent GOP senator has more to fear from the Democratic party (who can fund a challenger) than he does from any Democrat senator, and vice versa.
Witness the rise of 527's. These are becoming politcal parties in all but name. The next step in the evolution is for 527's to print voter guides to take into the voting booth (cf. 19th century pre-preinted ballots). The next step after that is for major 527's to organize coalitions and pool endorsments (with backroom deals and campaign money being distributed). In the end, the major parties will be shell organizations, forced to nominate whomever the 527's endorse.
Tammany Hall all over again. Thanks McCain-Feingold...for nothing.
Unless, of course, we get a radically different system of voting. If you chose 50 people at random to be candidates, and 1,000 others at random to be electors, then we could see citizen presidents.
Dude, you missed the perfect opportunity for a HHGTTG reference. Ballmer's numbers are computed using restaurant math. We all know how math that adds up everywhere else never seems to add up correctly when splitting the tab.
Here is a case in point: US vehicle regulations limit the max brightness of daytime running lamps; this helps keep daytime motorcycle headlamps more conspicuous. Canadian vehicles, however, run DRL's at full headlamp brightness. I suspect that a lower number of motorcyclists (because of the shorter riding season there) contributes to his difference in the regulations.
So can we say they are ahead of Macintosh now?
The automated worms buzzing about the net can't do that (not yet anyhow) so having a separate root account reduces the number of attackers by a factor of about a bazillion. Also, that procedure gives the defender a period of time to detect the break-in. So really critical sites (like e-gold.com) who doubtless have a full time staff scanning & patching have time to defeat the attack before its privelege can escalate.
My Amiga with 50 MHz 68030 (about 25% slower than a 486-100) played MP3's quite handily (even in 1998). But then, she is helped by a smarter sound chip than what would be found in a 486 PC. And a better OS and more media-friendly architecture generally.
Recently-built Neuros units don't require a firmware upgrade to play .ogg anymore. Linux support through the command-line "positron" program, and a few others I haven't tried.
A tapedeck adapter won't work in my car. It spits the tape back out and displays the message, "Broken Tape." A misfeature if there ever was one. I got a Neuros, which plays ogg and has a built-in FM transmitter.
It is sorta counter-intuitive, I suppose, to throw away and replace hardware, rather than simply re-configuring software. But that is sorta the whole point of this conversation. Hardware is cheap.
This is partly because that is what user want, up-to-date software. But these days it is also a result of forced upgrades.
Subtract one bazillion karma points for actually knowing the price of a Britney CD.
By itself, the original post is too short to ascertain which he was driving at, though the context of preceding posts make it look like he was, in fact, drawing the too-strong conclusion.