Even if the electoral college was eliminated today, nothing would change the regional courting habits except a close split in a given region.
Your conclusion doesn't follow. If every vote counted equally, the candidates would spend the most time in the most populous areas, or the areas where they thought the most undecided voters lived. I think quite a lot would change. I don't really have any problem with the inner, less populous states being resource colonies - they are already dollar vaccuums for us, the high-tax-paying states. But in any case, this wasn't about state autonomy or about congressional representation, this was about the presidential election only, so your points are all pretty much off topic.
The point is that if a candidate has a 51% of the vote in a state, the candidate gets ALL of the states electoral votes, at least in all but one or two of the states where they have a proportional system. That is why nobody courts New York or Utah, not the fact that New York only has 10 times the representation of Wyoming in the electoral college. If the EC votes were assigned proportionally, candidates would have to care about New York and Utah, even if they didn't stand a chance of getting 51% of the vote in either. Or just do away with the EC entirely, or follow the other recommendations I made in my post (voter certification, for example).
A) we do let crack heads and illiterates vote for President, I don't know what you are talking about - you think the electoral college disenfranchises crackheads? B) I already said I am not a big supporter of direct democracy, did you fail to read the bottom part of my post where I suggested voter certification tests? The point of the electoral college is not to have "the elites" or "the educated" selecting the president, it's to have small shitty states get an excessive say in who becomes president, in other words, to give a bunch of cow-humping country bumpkin illiterates more voting power than the educated urbanites.
As for the poor quality of our citizenry as a whole, I couldn't agree more. At least here in the Northeast people tend to be better educated than in states where teaching evolution is banned.
Yes, I understand the historical reason behind this, you misunderstood my (rhetorical) question. I asked a question about what is wrong with doing things the other way, not that I don't understand why things are the way they are. The current system forces the candidates to pander to the whims of a minority of states, which are the 'swing states' and basically ignore the rest, rather than going around and campaigning to all the states that are big enough to matter.
Maintaining the fiction that Wyoming (insert your favorite unpopulated, irrelevant state here) is equal to New York doesn't really interest me. The states may be independent to a degree, and have their own state laws and management of certain government functions at a state level, but that doesn't mean that a small minority of the nation's population should control the presidency based on the political and historical boundaries drawn around certain state areas. We can trash the electoral college system without depriving states of any of their rights or other functions.
Should be more clear in my first paragraph - it succeeds at getting candidates to pay attention to rural areas, but fails dismally in ensuring "equality" of different areas of the country in terms of attention in the presidential campaign. Sorry for the lack of clarity.
Okay, I understand where you were coming from until you get to this gem:
The Electoral College is in place for a very specific and important reason. If America worked by direct democracy, the candidates would only have to win the huge urban areas like New York and Los Angeles in order to win the presidency.
So if the major urban areas constitute a majority of the people in the country, what the hell is wrong with their votes counting as the majority of the votes for President? The Electoral College system fails DISMALLY at doing what you suggesting - in fact, it explicitly _CAUSES_ candidates to ignore large urban areas. Bush and Kerry only come to New York and Boston for one reason: fundraising. Nobody bothers campaigning in the northeast. We barely get to see those nifty attack ads you guys in the midwest see all the time, we don't hear the local stump speeches, basically we are ignored.
I'm officially resident in Massachusetts right now (though in NYC much of the time), and because of this, my vote doesn't count. That's right, it's essentially irrelevant. Kerry may have just impressed all of the educated folks on the coasts with his excellent performance tonight, but it's the dipshits in the midwest (and Florida) who get to decide our president for us. Ya know what? I'm sick of it. We (New Yorkers) are the ones who get BLOWN THE FUCK UP when our foreign policy pisses off our allies and helps Al Qaeda recruit more terrorists.
I suffer the consequences of terrorism directly, I pay more taxes than you (again, we're speaking collectively here, not turning this into an ad hominem against the parent poster), why the FUCK doesn't my vote count equally? If a couple hundred thousand people live in the wilderness of Wyoming, and 10 million people live in NYC, and the NYC votes dominate Wyoming, do I see that as an issue just because Wyoming has more square miles? Hell no.
The only way anybody gives a crap about what I have to say is if I donate money (which I have, to the DNC and the Kerry campaign).
Now, to turn your argument back on you, if you want to argue that direct election is a bad idea because the people can't be trusted with even that modicum of direct democracy, I might be inclined to agree with you. But I would propose a solution that requires passing a basic citizenship competency test to qualify to vote as a solution and doing away with this absurd electoral college that invariably ends up giving up rural bumpkin-friendly presidents, or at least Ivy League graduates who can put on a reasonable show of bumpkin-friendliness.
OK, now please, that's being more than a bit silly. I don't mean 'forced' with a whip or stick - the fact is children are forced to read many things in school because we collectively believe as a society that education is good for children. Teaching our children to be good citizens who know how to question authority and think for themselves is a noble goal, and required reading lists aren't any more "authoritarian" than anything else in school.
In fact, I think as kids get older and are in high school they should have a lot more choices about which subjects to study, within certain guidelines, but that doesn't change my position that a strong core of every child's education should include reading Plato, Ovid, and Virgil, at least in sampler form at the later elementary or junior high school level, and in complete form in high school. Additionally, Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", probably in one of the abridged forms, and some of the other excellent historical analyses of the Roman era should be read by every American schoolchild by the time they graduate from high school.
I had a very modest exposure to the classics and ancient Greek and Roman history in high school, and that was at a top private school. At the public schools I went to in elementary and junior high school, forget about it. Two of the best classes I took in college were "The Rome of Augustus" and "Alexander the Great". I remember thinking that a lot of the material is pretty accessible, and so relevant to modern life, I was amazed that more of it isn't taught at a younger age in the US.
Instead, we read great literature like "Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit" and lots of crappy books I can't really remember. Every year we had to read some damned politically correct book on how oppressed black people were 100 years ago, or how oppressed gay people are now (that trend came when I was in high school). I got it after the first 10 times. Anyway, not saying there shouldn't be modern literature or modern history in the curriculum, but it seems with the death of latin as a commonly taught subject, the educational profession also decided to kill off all the excellent, very interesting and critically important parts of ancient literature and history that are key to understanding what a democracy is, what a republic is, how the originators of these governmental forms perceived them, and how much they questioned the assumptions underlying their governments and the behavior of their fellow citizens, how often they were deluded or tricked by their leaders, and the many missteps they made in running their own society, of which their writers were often acutely aware.
Okay, I'm ranting again, but I can't stress how important this is. Most Americans would say they believe in Western liberal democracy, but as often as not they don't really understand what it is and where it came from. Our President talks of bringing freedom to the world, but I have a feeling he's never read any of the works I'm describing either (he may have read a certain book by Macchiavelli however, or at least some of his aides clearly have).
I'm amazed that this is the first person to stand up and say this publically. Because it was the first thing I said on a politics mailing list I'm on a week ago when I read the transcript of the speech. And everybody else (we all read the transcript) pretty much agreed with me that it was written at least in part by the Bush administration, more likely in full - and this is a list that has more conservatives than liberals on it.
I just assumed it would be obvious from the fact that Allawi repeated not one, but almost every catchphrase that Bush throws into all of his speeches on the "war on terror". Anyway, read the speech for yourself and see if it sounds like chunks of it came from the same speechwriters Bush uses. Mind you, I'd expect Allawi to be thankful and congratulatory, since he needs the US's continued commitment right now, but I wouldn't expect his own speechwriters to parrot back Bush's campaign slogans word-for-word.
Anyway, this doesn't come as a surprise to me, it was just much more blatant and obvious than I would have thought possible. Another poster brought up Julius Caesar, who wrote his conquered enemies speeches for them. His long lived and immensely successful successor, Caesar Augustus, was the master of running an authoritarian regime while maintaining all the dressings of the Republic, practically the inventor of political spin and authoritarianism cloaked in democracy.
Unfortunately, the analogies don't end there. Trading freedom for security under authoritarian regimes was practically pioneered by the Romans. If our schoolchildren were forced to read some of the classics, I wonder how different things might be in America today.
Let me partially answer and rephrase this question a bit. Large companies like IBM have no problem with Open Source - they are really selling something else other than software, so the software is incidental to their core business (in the case of IBM, global services). So giving it away in exchange for goodwill with the community, branding and marketing opportunities, and sometimes improvements from other contributing users or companies is a good deal for them.
Other large companies, like your average conglomerate, manufacturer, services firm, etc. have no real interest in trying to be in the software business. They want their software to just work for them, and support their normal business operations. Software is like plumbing for them, they don't get much if any competitive advantage from software itself, so again Open Source can work to their advantages.
For many projects of academic or limited commercial value, Open Source is also great. I am currently involved in one such project - for a variety of reasons (some legal, some business), I wouldn't want to sell it commercially since I am pretty sure it would cost more to do so than I would make back off of it due to its limited set of potential users, and I don't really want to support it myself anyway. Again, Open Source was a great way for me to scratch an itch and do something useful for others in the community.
The problem is it's not clear how to create value in the software space as a small software company relying purely on Open Source software. The answer is always something like "support!" This works reasonably well for a company like RedHat whose market is large and consists of many well funded companies. The other answer is to not bother with trying to be a software company, be a hardware company - like Digium, and rely on protection of your hardware IP, or goodwill of your users, to maintain profitability in your hardware business while you run the software to support it as an Open Source project. Frankly, I think this model works quite well for suitable domains, but it's a bit prone to risk - witness the fact that you can use a 10 dollar winmodem to replace a 100 dollar Digium X100P card (luckily for Digium, most of the rest of their hardware is complex enough and the market still modest enough that no cheapo clone cards have come out). Unless you are willing to use hardnosed patent litigation or other techniques to protect your hardware while you play mister nice guy in the software domain.
As far as being a small, pure software company with Open Source, forget about it. You are going to be a services company and earn money by your hourly billable work, limiting your ability to actually capitalize on wildly successful mass market software. This is sensible (from an economic incentivization perspective) only if you couldn't make money selling the product itself as closed source software, or were unable to raise the capital or not skilled enough to develop it yourself. The exceptions to this rule take advantage of the definition of Open Source and market demand - like TrollTech, who provides Open Source versions of Qt only for use in Open Source projects on Linux, using the GPL, but still charge lots of money to customers who want to use their products in commercial, closed-source projects (or under Windows). This works quite well for libraries and development tools, so if that is your domain, I can see running a small Open Source software (not services) company.
I love Open Source too, and contribute when possible to Open Source projects. But I have no problem with people working on commercial software where it makes sense. Richard Stallman can take that point of view if he wants, and there's certainly room for a limited number of purists supported by the academic realm, but the rest of us still have to live by the rules of a capitalist economy unless the AI lab wants to hire a couple hundred thousand other "researchers" to write Open Source software.
Would you stop trolling, already? There are some things I feel insecure about in this world, but one of them is not my sexual preference. In any case, like I said, only somebody not from New York would even suggest that seeing a musical implies that you are gay.
I pointed this out for the benefit of the many uncultured geeks on Slashdot. It would be their loss if they visit New York and don't see a musical because they think it's 'gay' when in fact chicks generally dig it.
As for me, I'll just go back to taking it up the rear here, since you've so smartly called me out on my homosexual lifestyle.
Uhh, I brought a chick to the Producers, what part of that didn't you understand? Would you like me to describe in detail the rest of the evening, after she came back to my apartment?
In any case, it's obvious you're not from New York, since you don't seem to understand that A) most people who can afford to go to the theater at least once in a while and B) taking a girl to a 10 dollar movie, vs. taking her to a 100 dollar Broadway show - what do you think is more likely to get you laid?
I'm not sure if you realize this, but Mel Brooks recently turned his old Producers movie into the most financially successful (and one of the funniest) Broadway shows ever. I paid an ungodly sum for two Orchestra seats, not once but twice, during the recent "revival" of the Nathan Lane/Matthew Broadrick casting, once to bring my mother and once a lady friend.
Anyway, the point is that while much of his work in the 90s was pure crap, his career can now officially be considered back off life support.
A) iTMS doesn't sign up artists directly, they sign up the labels and resell their music, paying them 77 cents out of the dollar. B) Magnatune doesn't really try to sign established artists, they appeal to independent artists, or artists in non-mainstream genres, and they apparently have substantially more artists interested in being listed than they want to list - they are being selective, trying to pick good music, focusing on niches where they think they have a chance of getting traction.
Magnatune is trying to be a niche online record label, not a catch-all retailer selling music as a loss leader for their music player devices, so comparing them directly is pretty meaningless. Does Magnatune have issues with their marketing and PR? Absolutely, but I'm not sure that the fact that they let you listen to high quality streams before you buy has anything to do with their issues (it's not really payment optional, they just let you choose your payment amount between 5 and 20 dollars for an album, I believe, with 8 being the recommended amount).
If the problem is just exposure of the artists and the Magnatune site, that's a fixable problem and doesn't fundmentally disprove their model (which I see as high quality, DRM-free tracks for a reasonable price per album, with free full song previews). In any case, I think the jury's still out on this one, but there's plenty of room for an iTunes and a Magnatune to coexist out there (in fact, iTunes is going to be doing a deal with Magnatune in the near future to promote some of their artists in exchange for time-limited exclusives to sell their new albums).
While I understand where you are coming from, let me present the parts of his arguments that do seem to hold water to me.
1. The Semantic Web (or rather, ontology construction and construction of relationships between your local ontology and other ontologies) is complicated and time consuming, and require you deciphering lots of other people's stuff to connect your stuff to it. Ultimately the success of any new technology, especially one that requires widespread adoption to be useful, must be easy enough to adopt that people adopt it. RSS, HTML and other successful technologies allow you to focus your effort on the local endeavour and don't require tons of formalized, structured organization of data, which runs somewhat counter to human nature. They are thus substantially less labor intensive to implement, and have therefore been taken up quite rapidly. This argument I consider to be perfectly valid and fairly strong.
2. Trust of ontological data is a critical issue because lots of false assertions and mediocre data will inevitably creep into a large, distributed "semantic web". This is a problem with the web currently, and you definitely have to take everything you read with a grain of salt, trust certain sources more than others, and so on. I think this argument holds some water, but I think this problem is addressable.
Personally, I think it will ultimately be easier to implement something like Cyc to build structured knowledge networks from information in human grokkable form. The internal representation of a Cyc-like machine will probably look quite similar to the semantic web, including the ability to adjust world view, evaluate source material reliability, etc. Getting a machine to build this knowledge representation, despite all the ambiguities of human expression, is more likely to succeed and be useful to humanity (IMHO) than getting lots of humans to interact with computers and technology in a structured, logical fashion. This is not to say that there aren't applications where structured ontological data would work well.
I particularly like the idea of auto-translation between different structured data formats, but I do agree with Clay that it's more likely that businesses will construct isolated "island" ontologies (such as a specific XML schema for describing formatted data) and deal with translation to other formats on an ad-hoc basis, for simple resource allocation and cost reasons.
Your argument (pro) seems to rely on the idea that tools will make things easier. I can't help but think of 4GL programming, SQL and attempts to make programming accessible to "average" people. The fact is good tools make things easier, but only certain people or people trained to do so can really think in a structured, logical fashion and express that in a way that a computer understands. No efforts to handwave away that issue to "tools" has ever succeeded. Tools can help, but they are not a panacea. HTML is so successful and widespread because it's simple to edit, as it only requires basic visual thinking to understand - and tools let you skip the intermediate step and edit the visual representation directly.
The concept of editing semantic information is fundamentally not so simple, because humans don't formalize their thinking about relationships on a day-to-day basis. Like visual mapping tools for XML, they may make things slightly easier, but I wouldn't expect any magic. Like I said, I think that we will ultimately end up there, but I believe it will be approached from the other direction.
The communist economic system has been dead for years. Communism, the economic system, was a failed experiment that relies on humans not exhibiting certain characteristics that are fundamental to their nature, whether you believe that's a good thing or a bad thing. Communism, the political system, is essentially centrally controlled totalitarian nationalism, couched in the "revolutionary" verbiage of Marxism. China had this in common with the former Soviet Union, and other still-operating communist regimes (Cuba, etc.).
This system of authoritarian control always goes hand-in-hand with the economic system called communism because if people aren't carefully controlled, they won't do the things necessary to make communism function. The problem of course is that the people farther up the control ladder still don't actually behave with some magical utilitarian insight to the common good, they behave like normal humans, with rational self-interest. There are also none of the checks and balances on power that less authoritarian government systems generally feature, so some truly amazing and gross violations of human rights have become associated with Communism.
In any case, the idea that communism (your economic system) could actually function without authoritarianism is pretty laughable. Who will manage the factors of production and allocate human resources without central control? Why would the best of the best in every discipline stay in your country if they could leave for another country, unless they receive better treatment, housing, vehicles, service, etc. than other people? How do you have communism without a one-party system - would it not invariably be chaotic, since a change of government means a change of the entire plan of allocation of economic resources?
I know that many European countries (Italy, for example) have "communist parties", but in truth these parties could never implement their communist ideals without doing the above things, which they'll never get a chance to do since they never control more than a small minority of their government's elected positions.
Has anybody ever actually had the supposed editor-on-duty respond when they pointed out it was a dupe? Not saying it never happens, but the couple of times I tried to let them know (before I let my subscription lapse), it didn't do anything, and I always hear other people complaining about having the same experience.
Tell me again what those subscriptions are supposed to get me?
The right to see stories before everyone else so you can email the editors and tell them that it's a dupe - only to have your email ignored and see the story posted anyway?
Re:The logistics of building the Death Star
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Star Wars Minutiae
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· Score: 5, Funny
Dear Mr. Lucas,
You are welcome to create new races of aliens to populate your Star Wars universe. In fact, we welcome you to. And we don't even mind if you want to flesh out your backstory with these creatures... well some of us do, but they are zealots, so never mind them.
But if we catch you splicing in Geonosian construction workers in the DVD Extra Special Superpak release next year, we will be waiting for you at Skywalker Ranch with pitchforks and shotguns.
We don't have high crime rates or long commutes in New York, assuming you live in a decent neighborhood in Manhattan - crime rates are generally pretty low and many people live where they can walk or hop a ten or fifteen minute subway ride to work. If you live a crappy neighborhood, or live in parts of the outer boroughs, then you are correct about crime rates and commutes, and I guess the rents and mortgages would still be much higher than you are used to. New York is the greatest city in the world to live in IF you can afford to live the right lifestyle here. If you can't, it is one of the worst places to live. Basically, you either need to have made your money elsewhere or work in finance, advertising or if you're a doctor, lawyer or other high-end service profession. Otherwise, you're probably better off living somewhere that offers better tradeoffs between cost and lifestyle.
I don't think trying to define a new architecture was inherently dumb. It's just that other efforts have defined a new architecture AND kept backwards compatibility with only relatively minor tradeoffs. As several people have pointed out also, the x86 opcodes are translated on the fly by modern processors to one or more internal opcodes - so in a sense the solution was keep the crufty interface the same and rebuild from scratch underneath the hood.
The IA64 architecture also apparently makes certain broken assumptions. In any case, the market reality is different now - it's now slightly-broken but clean and very expensive IA64 architecture vs. slightly-messy but functionally working and inexpensive AMD64 architecture. If they were price comparable and IA64 offered superior performance, I'm sure you'd be hearing everybody saying "yah! See we told you we wanted a new architecture!".
I still hope that some day the legacy support will be phased out. Maybe offer a cleaner interface to the CPU in the form of a new instruction set somehow cleanly separated from the opcode translation phase to encourage development on top of a newer, cleaner interface. But hey, sometimes worse is better. Or better is worse is better. Oh nevermind.
Depends on your tastes. Some of it is right up my alley, but YMMV. I usually find an album to buy from them every month or two when I go searching thorugh the site. In fact, I generally find that the probability of the songs and the artists in each category being good for their respective styles is pretty good. There are indeed some really weird things that are definitely not to my tastes, but even then I can usually see more musical merit in it than your average pop song.
There is no system that can overcome fundamental human biological programming. And what you are describing is basic self/other identification that seems to be hardwired into humans, combined with deeply ingrained social perceptions that can't be legislated away. And it's not just black/white, it's good teeth/bad teeth, attractive/ugly, and many other visual cues that humans respond to.
There is no way to make humans assess other humans in a void from their physical appearance, other than by concealing their physical appearance entirely. And if you are going to do that, you really ought to do the same to all the witnesses, since it would be rather unfair otherwise. Oh and while you are at it, maybe you shouldn't let the jury see the lawyers or judge either.
So you are basically proposing that the jury should be handed a written transcript of the proceedings and decide guilt from that? Maybe the transcripts should be edited too while we're at it to remove nonstandard language usage and other racial or social class giveaways. How about just an edited list of all defense arguments and motions and prosecution arguments and motions. And you think THAT will give us more fair and just decisions that the system we have now? And now what about bias in the summarizer or editor, how do you avoid that?
Face it, we are humans not machines. The system you seem to suggest would be favored by neither prosecution nor defense, since it's not clear it's possible to form juries capable of doing what you ask. And if you rid the system of juries entirely, you still have judges or some other fallible human being making decisions of guilt or innocence.
I am not saying that no improvement could be made to the system that would provide better oversight, review, guidance to juries, etc., but setting a standard that avoids all bias or emotional response is simply impossible, when questions of guilt and innocence are subjective at the end of the day, and a function of society's desire to protect itself from dangerous, unwanted elements.
As for the rich/poor issue, what do you propose? Everybody gets a public defender? That's like imposing a social health care system with no ability to opt out. Yes it's "fair", but it's very far from a utilitarian optimality. Likewise, such a system might be more "fair" (i.e. random - do you get a good public defender or not), but it's sure to administer less justice on the whole than our current system.
I know it's unusual but I actually did - apparently you failed to, however. True there was also a couple sentence bit at the end about another study that has confirmed that language acquisition is similar in all children regardless of language or culture. But the article is still mostly about Nicaraguan Sign Language and how it provides evidence of a biological blueprint for language. This is old news since this evidence had already been well studied as of 1995. I'm sure there was original research done here that will be addressed in the article in Science, but the overall gist in this news piece is old hat.
This news is so old, it's discussed in Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct" published in 1995, which I've just been reading. He cites this as one of many examples establishing a biological basis for language. He specifically discusses the fact that a limited, pidgin sign language was originally developed by adults, but that the children who came to the school and learned it in their critical early years developed it independently into a full-fledged, grammatical language with all the subtlety and nuance of other sign languages and spoken languages. The grammatical usage of the language would essentially appear to come out of nowhere, including things like rules for establishing case and sentence word roles and the like that weren't built into the original sign language. And that the grammatical rules became rapidly consistent within the young deaf population.
The only conflicting stories you probably heard would be employee vs. independent contractor - it is generally assumed that a salaried employees works are works for hire regardless of explicit contractual stipulations, but the presumption is generally the opposite for independent contractors.
In general, because of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid , 490 U.S. 730 (1989), a party who hires an independent contractor to do software development work should have a written agreement with the contractor providing that the result of the contractor's efforts will be owned by the hiring party.
While there are exceptions to that rule, the exception requires proving several points which fundamentally are at odds with the legal classification of independent contractor, basically only if you can show that the programmer in question was doing nothing but rote mechanical implementation and there was no creative work being done by them. Even then use of this precedent is questionable, because of the rather complicated nature of the case involved.
In any case, point settled, the guy says it wasn't the same code so assuming he's being truthful, the copyright issues are indeed irrevelant.
Slashdot Mirror
Your conclusion doesn't follow. If every vote counted equally, the candidates would spend the most time in the most populous areas, or the areas where they thought the most undecided voters lived. I think quite a lot would change. I don't really have any problem with the inner, less populous states being resource colonies - they are already dollar vaccuums for us, the high-tax-paying states. But in any case, this wasn't about state autonomy or about congressional representation, this was about the presidential election only, so your points are all pretty much off topic.
The point is that if a candidate has a 51% of the vote in a state, the candidate gets ALL of the states electoral votes, at least in all but one or two of the states where they have a proportional system. That is why nobody courts New York or Utah, not the fact that New York only has 10 times the representation of Wyoming in the electoral college. If the EC votes were assigned proportionally, candidates would have to care about New York and Utah, even if they didn't stand a chance of getting 51% of the vote in either. Or just do away with the EC entirely, or follow the other recommendations I made in my post (voter certification, for example).
As for the poor quality of our citizenry as a whole, I couldn't agree more. At least here in the Northeast people tend to be better educated than in states where teaching evolution is banned.
Maintaining the fiction that Wyoming (insert your favorite unpopulated, irrelevant state here) is equal to New York doesn't really interest me. The states may be independent to a degree, and have their own state laws and management of certain government functions at a state level, but that doesn't mean that a small minority of the nation's population should control the presidency based on the political and historical boundaries drawn around certain state areas. We can trash the electoral college system without depriving states of any of their rights or other functions.
Should be more clear in my first paragraph - it succeeds at getting candidates to pay attention to rural areas, but fails dismally in ensuring "equality" of different areas of the country in terms of attention in the presidential campaign. Sorry for the lack of clarity.
The Electoral College is in place for a very specific and important reason. If America worked by direct democracy, the candidates would only have to win the huge urban areas like New York and Los Angeles in order to win the presidency.
So if the major urban areas constitute a majority of the people in the country, what the hell is wrong with their votes counting as the majority of the votes for President? The Electoral College system fails DISMALLY at doing what you suggesting - in fact, it explicitly _CAUSES_ candidates to ignore large urban areas. Bush and Kerry only come to New York and Boston for one reason: fundraising. Nobody bothers campaigning in the northeast. We barely get to see those nifty attack ads you guys in the midwest see all the time, we don't hear the local stump speeches, basically we are ignored.
I'm officially resident in Massachusetts right now (though in NYC much of the time), and because of this, my vote doesn't count. That's right, it's essentially irrelevant. Kerry may have just impressed all of the educated folks on the coasts with his excellent performance tonight, but it's the dipshits in the midwest (and Florida) who get to decide our president for us. Ya know what? I'm sick of it. We (New Yorkers) are the ones who get BLOWN THE FUCK UP when our foreign policy pisses off our allies and helps Al Qaeda recruit more terrorists.
I suffer the consequences of terrorism directly, I pay more taxes than you (again, we're speaking collectively here, not turning this into an ad hominem against the parent poster), why the FUCK doesn't my vote count equally? If a couple hundred thousand people live in the wilderness of Wyoming, and 10 million people live in NYC, and the NYC votes dominate Wyoming, do I see that as an issue just because Wyoming has more square miles? Hell no.
The only way anybody gives a crap about what I have to say is if I donate money (which I have, to the DNC and the Kerry campaign).
Now, to turn your argument back on you, if you want to argue that direct election is a bad idea because the people can't be trusted with even that modicum of direct democracy, I might be inclined to agree with you. But I would propose a solution that requires passing a basic citizenship competency test to qualify to vote as a solution and doing away with this absurd electoral college that invariably ends up giving up rural bumpkin-friendly presidents, or at least Ivy League graduates who can put on a reasonable show of bumpkin-friendliness.
In fact, I think as kids get older and are in high school they should have a lot more choices about which subjects to study, within certain guidelines, but that doesn't change my position that a strong core of every child's education should include reading Plato, Ovid, and Virgil, at least in sampler form at the later elementary or junior high school level, and in complete form in high school. Additionally, Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", probably in one of the abridged forms, and some of the other excellent historical analyses of the Roman era should be read by every American schoolchild by the time they graduate from high school.
I had a very modest exposure to the classics and ancient Greek and Roman history in high school, and that was at a top private school. At the public schools I went to in elementary and junior high school, forget about it. Two of the best classes I took in college were "The Rome of Augustus" and "Alexander the Great". I remember thinking that a lot of the material is pretty accessible, and so relevant to modern life, I was amazed that more of it isn't taught at a younger age in the US.
Instead, we read great literature like "Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit" and lots of crappy books I can't really remember. Every year we had to read some damned politically correct book on how oppressed black people were 100 years ago, or how oppressed gay people are now (that trend came when I was in high school). I got it after the first 10 times. Anyway, not saying there shouldn't be modern literature or modern history in the curriculum, but it seems with the death of latin as a commonly taught subject, the educational profession also decided to kill off all the excellent, very interesting and critically important parts of ancient literature and history that are key to understanding what a democracy is, what a republic is, how the originators of these governmental forms perceived them, and how much they questioned the assumptions underlying their governments and the behavior of their fellow citizens, how often they were deluded or tricked by their leaders, and the many missteps they made in running their own society, of which their writers were often acutely aware.
Okay, I'm ranting again, but I can't stress how important this is. Most Americans would say they believe in Western liberal democracy, but as often as not they don't really understand what it is and where it came from. Our President talks of bringing freedom to the world, but I have a feeling he's never read any of the works I'm describing either (he may have read a certain book by Macchiavelli however, or at least some of his aides clearly have).
I just assumed it would be obvious from the fact that Allawi repeated not one, but almost every catchphrase that Bush throws into all of his speeches on the "war on terror". Anyway, read the speech for yourself and see if it sounds like chunks of it came from the same speechwriters Bush uses. Mind you, I'd expect Allawi to be thankful and congratulatory, since he needs the US's continued commitment right now, but I wouldn't expect his own speechwriters to parrot back Bush's campaign slogans word-for-word.
Anyway, this doesn't come as a surprise to me, it was just much more blatant and obvious than I would have thought possible. Another poster brought up Julius Caesar, who wrote his conquered enemies speeches for them. His long lived and immensely successful successor, Caesar Augustus, was the master of running an authoritarian regime while maintaining all the dressings of the Republic, practically the inventor of political spin and authoritarianism cloaked in democracy.
Unfortunately, the analogies don't end there. Trading freedom for security under authoritarian regimes was practically pioneered by the Romans. If our schoolchildren were forced to read some of the classics, I wonder how different things might be in America today.
Other large companies, like your average conglomerate, manufacturer, services firm, etc. have no real interest in trying to be in the software business. They want their software to just work for them, and support their normal business operations. Software is like plumbing for them, they don't get much if any competitive advantage from software itself, so again Open Source can work to their advantages.
For many projects of academic or limited commercial value, Open Source is also great. I am currently involved in one such project - for a variety of reasons (some legal, some business), I wouldn't want to sell it commercially since I am pretty sure it would cost more to do so than I would make back off of it due to its limited set of potential users, and I don't really want to support it myself anyway. Again, Open Source was a great way for me to scratch an itch and do something useful for others in the community.
The problem is it's not clear how to create value in the software space as a small software company relying purely on Open Source software. The answer is always something like "support!" This works reasonably well for a company like RedHat whose market is large and consists of many well funded companies. The other answer is to not bother with trying to be a software company, be a hardware company - like Digium, and rely on protection of your hardware IP, or goodwill of your users, to maintain profitability in your hardware business while you run the software to support it as an Open Source project. Frankly, I think this model works quite well for suitable domains, but it's a bit prone to risk - witness the fact that you can use a 10 dollar winmodem to replace a 100 dollar Digium X100P card (luckily for Digium, most of the rest of their hardware is complex enough and the market still modest enough that no cheapo clone cards have come out). Unless you are willing to use hardnosed patent litigation or other techniques to protect your hardware while you play mister nice guy in the software domain.
As far as being a small, pure software company with Open Source, forget about it. You are going to be a services company and earn money by your hourly billable work, limiting your ability to actually capitalize on wildly successful mass market software. This is sensible (from an economic incentivization perspective) only if you couldn't make money selling the product itself as closed source software, or were unable to raise the capital or not skilled enough to develop it yourself. The exceptions to this rule take advantage of the definition of Open Source and market demand - like TrollTech, who provides Open Source versions of Qt only for use in Open Source projects on Linux, using the GPL, but still charge lots of money to customers who want to use their products in commercial, closed-source projects (or under Windows). This works quite well for libraries and development tools, so if that is your domain, I can see running a small Open Source software (not services) company.
I love Open Source too, and contribute when possible to Open Source projects. But I have no problem with people working on commercial software where it makes sense. Richard Stallman can take that point of view if he wants, and there's certainly room for a limited number of purists supported by the academic realm, but the rest of us still have to live by the rules of a capitalist economy unless the AI lab wants to hire a couple hundred thousand other "researchers" to write Open Source software.
I pointed this out for the benefit of the many uncultured geeks on Slashdot. It would be their loss if they visit New York and don't see a musical because they think it's 'gay' when in fact chicks generally dig it.
As for me, I'll just go back to taking it up the rear here, since you've so smartly called me out on my homosexual lifestyle.
In any case, it's obvious you're not from New York, since you don't seem to understand that A) most people who can afford to go to the theater at least once in a while and B) taking a girl to a 10 dollar movie, vs. taking her to a 100 dollar Broadway show - what do you think is more likely to get you laid?
That's good, but my post wasn't in reply to yours. :)
Anyway, the point is that while much of his work in the 90s was pure crap, his career can now officially be considered back off life support.
Magnatune is trying to be a niche online record label, not a catch-all retailer selling music as a loss leader for their music player devices, so comparing them directly is pretty meaningless. Does Magnatune have issues with their marketing and PR? Absolutely, but I'm not sure that the fact that they let you listen to high quality streams before you buy has anything to do with their issues (it's not really payment optional, they just let you choose your payment amount between 5 and 20 dollars for an album, I believe, with 8 being the recommended amount).
If the problem is just exposure of the artists and the Magnatune site, that's a fixable problem and doesn't fundmentally disprove their model (which I see as high quality, DRM-free tracks for a reasonable price per album, with free full song previews). In any case, I think the jury's still out on this one, but there's plenty of room for an iTunes and a Magnatune to coexist out there (in fact, iTunes is going to be doing a deal with Magnatune in the near future to promote some of their artists in exchange for time-limited exclusives to sell their new albums).
1. The Semantic Web (or rather, ontology construction and construction of relationships between your local ontology and other ontologies) is complicated and time consuming, and require you deciphering lots of other people's stuff to connect your stuff to it. Ultimately the success of any new technology, especially one that requires widespread adoption to be useful, must be easy enough to adopt that people adopt it. RSS, HTML and other successful technologies allow you to focus your effort on the local endeavour and don't require tons of formalized, structured organization of data, which runs somewhat counter to human nature. They are thus substantially less labor intensive to implement, and have therefore been taken up quite rapidly. This argument I consider to be perfectly valid and fairly strong.
2. Trust of ontological data is a critical issue because lots of false assertions and mediocre data will inevitably creep into a large, distributed "semantic web". This is a problem with the web currently, and you definitely have to take everything you read with a grain of salt, trust certain sources more than others, and so on. I think this argument holds some water, but I think this problem is addressable.
Personally, I think it will ultimately be easier to implement something like Cyc to build structured knowledge networks from information in human grokkable form. The internal representation of a Cyc-like machine will probably look quite similar to the semantic web, including the ability to adjust world view, evaluate source material reliability, etc. Getting a machine to build this knowledge representation, despite all the ambiguities of human expression, is more likely to succeed and be useful to humanity (IMHO) than getting lots of humans to interact with computers and technology in a structured, logical fashion. This is not to say that there aren't applications where structured ontological data would work well.
I particularly like the idea of auto-translation between different structured data formats, but I do agree with Clay that it's more likely that businesses will construct isolated "island" ontologies (such as a specific XML schema for describing formatted data) and deal with translation to other formats on an ad-hoc basis, for simple resource allocation and cost reasons.
Your argument (pro) seems to rely on the idea that tools will make things easier. I can't help but think of 4GL programming, SQL and attempts to make programming accessible to "average" people. The fact is good tools make things easier, but only certain people or people trained to do so can really think in a structured, logical fashion and express that in a way that a computer understands. No efforts to handwave away that issue to "tools" has ever succeeded. Tools can help, but they are not a panacea. HTML is so successful and widespread because it's simple to edit, as it only requires basic visual thinking to understand - and tools let you skip the intermediate step and edit the visual representation directly.
The concept of editing semantic information is fundamentally not so simple, because humans don't formalize their thinking about relationships on a day-to-day basis. Like visual mapping tools for XML, they may make things slightly easier, but I wouldn't expect any magic. Like I said, I think that we will ultimately end up there, but I believe it will be approached from the other direction.
This system of authoritarian control always goes hand-in-hand with the economic system called communism because if people aren't carefully controlled, they won't do the things necessary to make communism function. The problem of course is that the people farther up the control ladder still don't actually behave with some magical utilitarian insight to the common good, they behave like normal humans, with rational self-interest. There are also none of the checks and balances on power that less authoritarian government systems generally feature, so some truly amazing and gross violations of human rights have become associated with Communism.
In any case, the idea that communism (your economic system) could actually function without authoritarianism is pretty laughable. Who will manage the factors of production and allocate human resources without central control? Why would the best of the best in every discipline stay in your country if they could leave for another country, unless they receive better treatment, housing, vehicles, service, etc. than other people? How do you have communism without a one-party system - would it not invariably be chaotic, since a change of government means a change of the entire plan of allocation of economic resources?
I know that many European countries (Italy, for example) have "communist parties", but in truth these parties could never implement their communist ideals without doing the above things, which they'll never get a chance to do since they never control more than a small minority of their government's elected positions.
Has anybody ever actually had the supposed editor-on-duty respond when they pointed out it was a dupe? Not saying it never happens, but the couple of times I tried to let them know (before I let my subscription lapse), it didn't do anything, and I always hear other people complaining about having the same experience.
Tell me again what those subscriptions are supposed to get me?
The right to see stories before everyone else so you can email the editors and tell them that it's a dupe - only to have your email ignored and see the story posted anyway?
Dear Mr. Lucas,
You are welcome to create new races of aliens to populate your Star Wars universe. In fact, we welcome you to. And we don't even mind if you want to flesh out your backstory with these creatures... well some of us do, but they are zealots, so never mind them.
But if we catch you splicing in Geonosian construction workers in the DVD Extra Special Superpak release next year, we will be waiting for you at Skywalker Ranch with pitchforks and shotguns.
Sincerely,
Your fans
We don't have high crime rates or long commutes in New York, assuming you live in a decent neighborhood in Manhattan - crime rates are generally pretty low and many people live where they can walk or hop a ten or fifteen minute subway ride to work. If you live a crappy neighborhood, or live in parts of the outer boroughs, then you are correct about crime rates and commutes, and I guess the rents and mortgages would still be much higher than you are used to. New York is the greatest city in the world to live in IF you can afford to live the right lifestyle here. If you can't, it is one of the worst places to live. Basically, you either need to have made your money elsewhere or work in finance, advertising or if you're a doctor, lawyer or other high-end service profession. Otherwise, you're probably better off living somewhere that offers better tradeoffs between cost and lifestyle.
The IA64 architecture also apparently makes certain broken assumptions. In any case, the market reality is different now - it's now slightly-broken but clean and very expensive IA64 architecture vs. slightly-messy but functionally working and inexpensive AMD64 architecture. If they were price comparable and IA64 offered superior performance, I'm sure you'd be hearing everybody saying "yah! See we told you we wanted a new architecture!".
I still hope that some day the legacy support will be phased out. Maybe offer a cleaner interface to the CPU in the form of a new instruction set somehow cleanly separated from the opcode translation phase to encourage development on top of a newer, cleaner interface. But hey, sometimes worse is better. Or better is worse is better. Oh nevermind.
Depends on your tastes. Some of it is right up my alley, but YMMV. I usually find an album to buy from them every month or two when I go searching thorugh the site. In fact, I generally find that the probability of the songs and the artists in each category being good for their respective styles is pretty good. There are indeed some really weird things that are definitely not to my tastes, but even then I can usually see more musical merit in it than your average pop song.
There is no way to make humans assess other humans in a void from their physical appearance, other than by concealing their physical appearance entirely. And if you are going to do that, you really ought to do the same to all the witnesses, since it would be rather unfair otherwise. Oh and while you are at it, maybe you shouldn't let the jury see the lawyers or judge either.
So you are basically proposing that the jury should be handed a written transcript of the proceedings and decide guilt from that? Maybe the transcripts should be edited too while we're at it to remove nonstandard language usage and other racial or social class giveaways. How about just an edited list of all defense arguments and motions and prosecution arguments and motions. And you think THAT will give us more fair and just decisions that the system we have now? And now what about bias in the summarizer or editor, how do you avoid that?
Face it, we are humans not machines. The system you seem to suggest would be favored by neither prosecution nor defense, since it's not clear it's possible to form juries capable of doing what you ask. And if you rid the system of juries entirely, you still have judges or some other fallible human being making decisions of guilt or innocence.
I am not saying that no improvement could be made to the system that would provide better oversight, review, guidance to juries, etc., but setting a standard that avoids all bias or emotional response is simply impossible, when questions of guilt and innocence are subjective at the end of the day, and a function of society's desire to protect itself from dangerous, unwanted elements.
As for the rich/poor issue, what do you propose? Everybody gets a public defender? That's like imposing a social health care system with no ability to opt out. Yes it's "fair", but it's very far from a utilitarian optimality. Likewise, such a system might be more "fair" (i.e. random - do you get a good public defender or not), but it's sure to administer less justice on the whole than our current system.
I know it's unusual but I actually did - apparently you failed to, however. True there was also a couple sentence bit at the end about another study that has confirmed that language acquisition is similar in all children regardless of language or culture. But the article is still mostly about Nicaraguan Sign Language and how it provides evidence of a biological blueprint for language. This is old news since this evidence had already been well studied as of 1995. I'm sure there was original research done here that will be addressed in the article in Science, but the overall gist in this news piece is old hat.
This news is so old, it's discussed in Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct" published in 1995, which I've just been reading. He cites this as one of many examples establishing a biological basis for language. He specifically discusses the fact that a limited, pidgin sign language was originally developed by adults, but that the children who came to the school and learned it in their critical early years developed it independently into a full-fledged, grammatical language with all the subtlety and nuance of other sign languages and spoken languages. The grammatical usage of the language would essentially appear to come out of nowhere, including things like rules for establishing case and sentence word roles and the like that weren't built into the original sign language. And that the grammatical rules became rapidly consistent within the young deaf population.
In general, because of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid , 490 U.S. 730 (1989), a party who hires an independent contractor to do software development work should have a written agreement with the contractor providing that the result of the contractor's efforts will be owned by the hiring party.
While there are exceptions to that rule, the exception requires proving several points which fundamentally are at odds with the legal classification of independent contractor, basically only if you can show that the programmer in question was doing nothing but rote mechanical implementation and there was no creative work being done by them. Even then use of this precedent is questionable, because of the rather complicated nature of the case involved.
In any case, point settled, the guy says it wasn't the same code so assuming he's being truthful, the copyright issues are indeed irrevelant.