A quick example rebuts this - we've all seen the videos where a rocket is launched by Hezbullah, and then later an Israeli airstrike hits.
What does such a strike achieve? The attackers have left long before the retaliation - Katyusha rocket launchers are trailer mounted bits of wire, essentially, with very little left after launch, (like an used LAW) and can be driven away very quickly. Israeli counterattacks typically aim for the nearest building to the launch site, but of course, hezbullah isn't dumb enough to launch from right outside their base (the Israelis have said as much).
So, the only targets that can be hit by such an attack are either empty buildings, or buildings with innocent civilians in them. Israel surely knows this. So why do they attack, if not to deliberately target and terrorise the civilian population? (into preventing Hezbullah attacks from their neighbourhood, I suppose)
Giving warning doesn't really help, either. Would it really make a difference if Hezbullah asked the Israelis to evacuate Haifa? When target areas become as broad as 'Southern Lebanon', or 'Southern Beirut', or 'All vehicles travelling on open roads', or 'All vehicles crossing the Lebanon-Syria border', then the line between humanitarian warnings and psychological warfare becomes very thin indeed.
Most of the islamofascists don't really give a rat's ass about Israel, they just make a convenient whipping boy to stir up unrest and support for the cause.
But if Israel is a convenient whipping boy and helps stir up support, then surely their support cares about Israel? I mean, why would they use Israel to stir up support if their recruits don't give a rat's ass about it, and only care about the material success of the West? They can't simultaneously care about Israel and not care about Israel.
No, you can't get around this, because if it's built into the keyboard, then it's a hardware thing, and any software based solution will be insufficient.
But really, this whole issue is stupid. Built into the keyboard? WTF? If you allow a hostile agent to install hardware in your computer, then having a keylogger is the least of your worries. Where's the alarmist article about the possibility of keyboards with built in hand grenades?
The system is also overcomplicated by far - for one, you are relying on people using telnet and remote desktop, which most home users do not. What advantages, if at all, does this tech hold over just modulating in delays with conventional traffic (e.g. HTTP requests)? Or other known systems of steganography? And don't forget that telnet is unencrypted in any case.
That mathematically cannot be the case - there is an equal probability of a minority being masked by a majority in a state system as there is of them being elevated into a swing position - it's just simple logic, as structually, the system is ignorant of who groups are or how large they are.
Let's use an analogy - our basic data in an election is a map of the nation, covered with red and blue dots. Each dot represents a specific individual, and the dot's colour represents how he or she votes.
An electoral college system, then, applies a mosiac photoshop filter to this map - it drops boundaries pseudo-randomly onto the map (because state boundaries were not drawn up to accentuate or suppress specific minorities, and minorities and majorities are equally free to play the system, hence averaging out the effects.) and displays the new map as patches of colour based on the most common in each patch.
On average, the result we get is equivalent to the result in the original. But what we do get that is new is a probability distribution of representations for each demographic - instead of having a single spike focused on how populous it is, we have a distribution with the same average. So what we get is an unpredictable system where random chance decides whether you are under or over-represented. This is not fair.
Put it another way, from our starting raw data of dots on a map, a PR based system works with that map. You can add whatever rules you want to that map, you can manipulate it using whatever rules you require - you can even generate a algorithm that emphasises minorities as you seem to want, such as drawing up hypothetical optimal state boundaries for such an effect. An electoral college system, however, applies the mosiac filter, and throws away the original data. Whatever algorithm you apply to it afterwards in your assignment of electoral college points is irrelevant - what you are doing is trying to make a decision with less information.
The benefits of cheating are too large once half or so of the electoral votes are in the agreement. The benefits of defecting, or threatening to defect, become large, because suddenly the votes become bargaining chips, useful to extract concessions from the other states. This makes it effectively impossible to get to all 50 agreeing anyhow; the more people in the agreement before it gets to 50, the larger the spoiler effect.
You don't need all 50 to agree - a few powerful states is enough. Even if that group isn't a majority, getting that block would pretty much assure victory.
As for defecting, remember that defecting would result in a situation where the majority of the country in terms of population are cheated of the result they would have recieved. The consequences and mechanics of that is equivalent to an existing president 'defecting' out of the democratic process when he fails to win a second term, or a state 'defecting' out of giving a representative result in the electoral college system when a politically opposing candidate would win. Of course, for the system to work, there needs to be an implicit trust in those who run it, but really, no more trust than is required in the current system.
My complaint about this isn't that it doesn't work, but that it would work too well. There is a good reason why there's a body of constitutional laws, and a major change like this should not be implemented in such a way as to short circuit the constitutional process.
I'd rather have no one hold such powers, than to allow my local governor to be able to turn into a regional dictator.
And besides, we are talking about state divisions in deciding elections, not state divisions in deciding legislative power. The requirements for one and the other are different - hence my title. For legislative power, we want to divide things up. For electoral voting, I argue that it is in fact advantageous to open things up, so that the guy in power has to persuade more people, and so has more accountability.
That's exactly what they're there for: to keep political power divided into constituent parts.
And in a PR system, where we have effectively a massive electoral college where each has a population of 1, political power is divided even further? Your argument is just fiddling with words, and doesn't at all justify the existence of such a granular system.
I don't see how having proportional representation would mean that politicans will be unable to canvass in terms of local concerns. After all, local concerns hardly remain constant at the state level - they can vary from city to city, community to community. In turn, the new system would encourage politicans to focus on differences within states, instead of relying on local mob rule in 'safe' states to win the day.
Again, what is centralised about proportional representation? Why would opening up representation to the masked non-majority make people all suddenly want big federal government? There is nothing centralised at all about it - it forces parties to define their strategies demographically and tailor policies on a far more flexible level. Mass appeals aren't going to be the order of the day - statewide crude mass appeals are already the order of the day because minorities are unrepresented, and the great thing about PR is that it gives such minorities the overall mass that they can't be ignored, and so mass appeals simply won't work.
To answer your second question, why should I not have the right to do something because a majority of you on a whim decide to outlaw it? Don't think of things like murder (which no one has the righ to do), think of things like not being a Christian.
So, what if a state decides to do it? I find it more comfortable thinking that a national majority of several million would be required to make such a change, instead of a local majority of a few thousand.
It may be easier to vote out my governer, but it is also easier to vote in a bastard in his place. I, for one, want a government that is restrained by the inertia of having to persuade a nation. I don't want a state government that can implement horrific policies at the drop of a hat.
But I don't see this at all - how are state divisions meant to prevent mob rule?
From my direction, the opposite seems true - state divisions encourage mob rule. This is because to have a majority totally mask the wishes of a minority, it is not neccessary in a states system to swamp the entire national voting structure, but merely to achieve a local advantage. Likewise, the states system effectively suppresses low density, geographically homogeneous groupings because they will never be able to achieve an ascendency in any single division.
Electoral college systems have nothing to do with decentralising power - rather, it is proportional representation systems that do so, because all individuals will have equal power. What electoral college systems do is to provide local centers of power at the time of an election - that is all. Nothing says that you can't have a system that electorally disregards state divisions, but allows states autonomy at a local level in terms of legislation.
Even if you believe that rural areas should be given greater emphasis than urban areas, the electoral college system is a bad way to achieve that result. If you want that, why not just apply a multiplier to votes recieved from rural regions? In such a case, PR would be capable of more fine-grained control, since you would not have to unfairly reduce the power of certain rural populations just because their state also contains a city. And if we categorise by such objective means, we will be able to have an electoral system that adjusts somewhat automatically, without triggering the partisan fighting that crude manual decisions involve.
The Electoral College gives a greater weight to smaller states - so they liked it and decided to join our "Union." This is still a good idea.
So, which small state do we want to join the union?
Another reason that we shouldn't do away with it is that this country is not a "democracy."
That's a statement, not a reason. And the fact is, having an electoral college doesn't stop us being run by whims - in fact, instead of having an averaged out whim over the entire country, which encourages stability, we get run by the whim of smaller swing states, which are much more volatile.
Yes, it is somewhat about keeping the "people" from electing the President, but in a good way.;^)
That means that we have intentionally crafted a system in which each state gets a certain minimum representation, both in Congress and in selecting a president.
Even if nobody lived in them?
Surely it is more reasonable to deal out political power by the number of people who vote, instead of by artificial divisions of state? Why should living in a heavily populated state with a disproportionately small electoral college count mean that your voice matter less?
People deserve voices more than abstract lines in the sand do.
Really, all this represents is a way to getting in Proportional Representation via the back door, with all the advantages and disadvantages that PR provides - and in a way that can bypass any wingeing states/parties who might complain about reductions to their political importance.
Not to say that this is a bad idea, but just to note that it's only the method here that is new, not the end result.
Enh. That doesn't exactly follow. Racists typically would in fact emphasise the black dominating the white image - it fits into their idea of the minorities oppressing the majority white population. All three of the images promote the 'race war' idea that is pretty much emblematic of racists, as well as coincidentally scoring the cat-fight angle vs feminists.
Nor is it true that there is no racism issue in Holland - there is certainly a strong religion one, and it flows from the Theo van Gogh case and so on, and this sort of thing tends to flow into racism as well.
In the end, can anyone truly suggest that the reaction to the ads wasn't exactly what was intended?
Correction - OTPs are unbreakable if the pads used are cryptographically random - i.e. there's no obvious structure in the original pad. If OTPs are generated naively, using, say, a standard computer Linear Congruential Generator, then they aren't very secure at all. (For Linear Generators, you can look at serial correlations that are violated, and hence figure out what changes have been applied to the pad.)
That doesn't neccessarily follow - many of the more interesting storylines in any media were based on ideas with more complexity and ambiguity than WWII - and arguably, the more interesting stories about WWII were focused on the struggles on the Eastern Front, between one evil dictator and another, slightly less evil one.
I think the main problem with Vietnam games is simpler than that - terrain. Vietnam was focused on foilage dense landscapes, which game designers and game engines just do not handle that well. WWII had wide terrains where the player can (a) be wowed by the panoramic view, and (b) see clearly where they need to go and do.
Wait a minute here... Is this actually a scam in the first place? 419 scams usually do not involve work on behalf of the scammer, nor a case where they send product *first* and expect to be paid.
Is there any chance that our website owner had just cheated the one honest artist in Nigeria? Perhaps the second email was in fact *not* sent by the first, but by a friend of the first who had been told of the opportunity by another who didn't see the target as a good one. (After all, the first reply did request that
If you know of an artist who could benefit from our financial help and who would be prepared to produce work for us to sell or promote then please do let me know.
It seems quite plausible that emailer number 1 took this statement at its word, and actually found one such artist. In any case, hasn't our 'anti-scammer' just managed to punish a clearly legitimately talented guy for trying to go straight? I wouldn't be surprised if our artist would really now turn to 419 scamming, given the impression of Westerners he now has, and the way in which his talent appears clearly un-appreciated.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess 9/11 had nothing to do with the decision to invade Iraq, either.
A quick example rebuts this - we've all seen the videos where a rocket is launched by Hezbullah, and then later an Israeli airstrike hits.
What does such a strike achieve? The attackers have left long before the retaliation - Katyusha rocket launchers are trailer mounted bits of wire, essentially, with very little left after launch, (like an used LAW) and can be driven away very quickly. Israeli counterattacks typically aim for the nearest building to the launch site, but of course, hezbullah isn't dumb enough to launch from right outside their base (the Israelis have said as much).
So, the only targets that can be hit by such an attack are either empty buildings, or buildings with innocent civilians in them. Israel surely knows this. So why do they attack, if not to deliberately target and terrorise the civilian population? (into preventing Hezbullah attacks from their neighbourhood, I suppose)
Giving warning doesn't really help, either. Would it really make a difference if Hezbullah asked the Israelis to evacuate Haifa? When target areas become as broad as 'Southern Lebanon', or 'Southern Beirut', or 'All vehicles travelling on open roads', or 'All vehicles crossing the Lebanon-Syria border', then the line between humanitarian warnings and psychological warfare becomes very thin indeed.
Because this sentence doesn't really work.
Most of the islamofascists don't really give a rat's ass about Israel, they just make a convenient whipping boy to stir up unrest and support for the cause.
But if Israel is a convenient whipping boy and helps stir up support, then surely their support cares about Israel? I mean, why would they use Israel to stir up support if their recruits don't give a rat's ass about it, and only care about the material success of the West? They can't simultaneously care about Israel and not care about Israel.
No, you can't get around this, because if it's built into the keyboard, then it's a hardware thing, and any software based solution will be insufficient.
But really, this whole issue is stupid. Built into the keyboard? WTF? If you allow a hostile agent to install hardware in your computer, then having a keylogger is the least of your worries. Where's the alarmist article about the possibility of keyboards with built in hand grenades?
The system is also overcomplicated by far - for one, you are relying on people using telnet and remote desktop, which most home users do not. What advantages, if at all, does this tech hold over just modulating in delays with conventional traffic (e.g. HTTP requests)? Or other known systems of steganography? And don't forget that telnet is unencrypted in any case.
Actually, Menezes wasn't even carrying a backpack.
Actually, it's Chileans, so, it's more friend of my friend's enemy's friend is my enemy.
In Soviet Russia, there are secret police.
In the New Ameria, the secret police are there.
That mathematically cannot be the case - there is an equal probability of a minority being masked by a majority in a state system as there is of them being elevated into a swing position - it's just simple logic, as structually, the system is ignorant of who groups are or how large they are.
Let's use an analogy - our basic data in an election is a map of the nation, covered with red and blue dots. Each dot represents a specific individual, and the dot's colour represents how he or she votes.
An electoral college system, then, applies a mosiac photoshop filter to this map - it drops boundaries pseudo-randomly onto the map (because state boundaries were not drawn up to accentuate or suppress specific minorities, and minorities and majorities are equally free to play the system, hence averaging out the effects.) and displays the new map as patches of colour based on the most common in each patch.
On average, the result we get is equivalent to the result in the original. But what we do get that is new is a probability distribution of representations for each demographic - instead of having a single spike focused on how populous it is, we have a distribution with the same average. So what we get is an unpredictable system where random chance decides whether you are under or over-represented. This is not fair.
Put it another way, from our starting raw data of dots on a map, a PR based system works with that map. You can add whatever rules you want to that map, you can manipulate it using whatever rules you require - you can even generate a algorithm that emphasises minorities as you seem to want, such as drawing up hypothetical optimal state boundaries for such an effect. An electoral college system, however, applies the mosiac filter, and throws away the original data. Whatever algorithm you apply to it afterwards in your assignment of electoral college points is irrelevant - what you are doing is trying to make a decision with less information.
And isn't that kinda silly?
The benefits of cheating are too large once half or so of the electoral votes are in the agreement. The benefits of defecting, or threatening to defect, become large, because suddenly the votes become bargaining chips, useful to extract concessions from the other states. This makes it effectively impossible to get to all 50 agreeing anyhow; the more people in the agreement before it gets to 50, the larger the spoiler effect.
You don't need all 50 to agree - a few powerful states is enough. Even if that group isn't a majority, getting that block would pretty much assure victory.
As for defecting, remember that defecting would result in a situation where the majority of the country in terms of population are cheated of the result they would have recieved. The consequences and mechanics of that is equivalent to an existing president 'defecting' out of the democratic process when he fails to win a second term, or a state 'defecting' out of giving a representative result in the electoral college system when a politically opposing candidate would win. Of course, for the system to work, there needs to be an implicit trust in those who run it, but really, no more trust than is required in the current system.
My complaint about this isn't that it doesn't work, but that it would work too well. There is a good reason why there's a body of constitutional laws, and a major change like this should not be implemented in such a way as to short circuit the constitutional process.
I'd rather have no one hold such powers, than to allow my local governor to be able to turn into a regional dictator.
And besides, we are talking about state divisions in deciding elections, not state divisions in deciding legislative power. The requirements for one and the other are different - hence my title. For legislative power, we want to divide things up. For electoral voting, I argue that it is in fact advantageous to open things up, so that the guy in power has to persuade more people, and so has more accountability.
Kindly address my point please.
That's exactly what they're there for: to keep political power divided into constituent parts.
And in a PR system, where we have effectively a massive electoral college where each has a population of 1, political power is divided even further? Your argument is just fiddling with words, and doesn't at all justify the existence of such a granular system.
I don't see how having proportional representation would mean that politicans will be unable to canvass in terms of local concerns. After all, local concerns hardly remain constant at the state level - they can vary from city to city, community to community. In turn, the new system would encourage politicans to focus on differences within states, instead of relying on local mob rule in 'safe' states to win the day.
Again, what is centralised about proportional representation? Why would opening up representation to the masked non-majority make people all suddenly want big federal government? There is nothing centralised at all about it - it forces parties to define their strategies demographically and tailor policies on a far more flexible level. Mass appeals aren't going to be the order of the day - statewide crude mass appeals are already the order of the day because minorities are unrepresented, and the great thing about PR is that it gives such minorities the overall mass that they can't be ignored, and so mass appeals simply won't work.
To answer your second question, why should I not have the right to do something because a majority of you on a whim decide to outlaw it? Don't think of things like murder (which no one has the righ to do), think of things like not being a Christian.
So, what if a state decides to do it? I find it more comfortable thinking that a national majority of several million would be required to make such a change, instead of a local majority of a few thousand.
It may be easier to vote out my governer, but it is also easier to vote in a bastard in his place. I, for one, want a government that is restrained by the inertia of having to persuade a nation. I don't want a state government that can implement horrific policies at the drop of a hat.
But I don't see this at all - how are state divisions meant to prevent mob rule?
From my direction, the opposite seems true - state divisions encourage mob rule. This is because to have a majority totally mask the wishes of a minority, it is not neccessary in a states system to swamp the entire national voting structure, but merely to achieve a local advantage. Likewise, the states system effectively suppresses low density, geographically homogeneous groupings because they will never be able to achieve an ascendency in any single division.
Electoral college systems have nothing to do with decentralising power - rather, it is proportional representation systems that do so, because all individuals will have equal power. What electoral college systems do is to provide local centers of power at the time of an election - that is all. Nothing says that you can't have a system that electorally disregards state divisions, but allows states autonomy at a local level in terms of legislation.
Even if you believe that rural areas should be given greater emphasis than urban areas, the electoral college system is a bad way to achieve that result. If you want that, why not just apply a multiplier to votes recieved from rural regions? In such a case, PR would be capable of more fine-grained control, since you would not have to unfairly reduce the power of certain rural populations just because their state also contains a city. And if we categorise by such objective means, we will be able to have an electoral system that adjusts somewhat automatically, without triggering the partisan fighting that crude manual decisions involve.
The Electoral College gives a greater weight to smaller states - so they liked it and decided to join our "Union." This is still a good idea.
;^)
So, which small state do we want to join the union?
Another reason that we shouldn't do away with it is that this country is not a "democracy."
That's a statement, not a reason. And the fact is, having an electoral college doesn't stop us being run by whims - in fact, instead of having an averaged out whim over the entire country, which encourages stability, we get run by the whim of smaller swing states, which are much more volatile.
Yes, it is somewhat about keeping the "people" from electing the President, but in a good way.
A good way that elected Bush.
That means that we have intentionally crafted a system in which each state gets a certain minimum representation, both in Congress and in selecting a president.
Even if nobody lived in them?
Surely it is more reasonable to deal out political power by the number of people who vote, instead of by artificial divisions of state? Why should living in a heavily populated state with a disproportionately small electoral college count mean that your voice matter less?
People deserve voices more than abstract lines in the sand do.
Really, all this represents is a way to getting in Proportional Representation via the back door, with all the advantages and disadvantages that PR provides - and in a way that can bypass any wingeing states/parties who might complain about reductions to their political importance.
Not to say that this is a bad idea, but just to note that it's only the method here that is new, not the end result.
Way to miss the point, bud.
I suspect that this situation will last as long as it takes until Nintendo realises it can make more money selling AC power packs or docking chargers.
No kidding, I submitted this as Space Shuttle Likely To Explode, Taking Earth With It.
Enh. That doesn't exactly follow. Racists typically would in fact emphasise the black dominating the white image - it fits into their idea of the minorities oppressing the majority white population. All three of the images promote the 'race war' idea that is pretty much emblematic of racists, as well as coincidentally scoring the cat-fight angle vs feminists.
Nor is it true that there is no racism issue in Holland - there is certainly a strong religion one, and it flows from the Theo van Gogh case and so on, and this sort of thing tends to flow into racism as well.
In the end, can anyone truly suggest that the reaction to the ads wasn't exactly what was intended?
I'm sorry, but due to National Security reasons, we cannot reveal that information.
Correction - OTPs are unbreakable if the pads used are cryptographically random - i.e. there's no obvious structure in the original pad. If OTPs are generated naively, using, say, a standard computer Linear Congruential Generator, then they aren't very secure at all. (For Linear Generators, you can look at serial correlations that are violated, and hence figure out what changes have been applied to the pad.)
That doesn't neccessarily follow - many of the more interesting storylines in any media were based on ideas with more complexity and ambiguity than WWII - and arguably, the more interesting stories about WWII were focused on the struggles on the Eastern Front, between one evil dictator and another, slightly less evil one.
I think the main problem with Vietnam games is simpler than that - terrain. Vietnam was focused on foilage dense landscapes, which game designers and game engines just do not handle that well. WWII had wide terrains where the player can (a) be wowed by the panoramic view, and (b) see clearly where they need to go and do.
Wait a minute here... Is this actually a scam in the first place? 419 scams usually do not involve work on behalf of the scammer, nor a case where they send product *first* and expect to be paid.
Is there any chance that our website owner had just cheated the one honest artist in Nigeria? Perhaps the second email was in fact *not* sent by the first, but by a friend of the first who had been told of the opportunity by another who didn't see the target as a good one. (After all, the first reply did request that
If you know of an artist who could benefit from our financial help and who would be prepared to produce work for us to sell or promote then please do let me know.
It seems quite plausible that emailer number 1 took this statement at its word, and actually found one such artist. In any case, hasn't our 'anti-scammer' just managed to punish a clearly legitimately talented guy for trying to go straight? I wouldn't be surprised if our artist would really now turn to 419 scamming, given the impression of Westerners he now has, and the way in which his talent appears clearly un-appreciated.