Ahh. Party discipline and party loyalty are quite weak in the US compared to most parliamentary democracies. This is due in great part to the fact that in the US, we don't have party slate elections. The shortcuts that that would allow via counting are thus not available to us. As such, our time-table would probably be closer to the few days than the few hours. Either way, I don't see the big deal in waiting.
One salient difference is that here in the US ballots tend not to be simple; we have elections for local, state, and national offices on the same ballot, plus local and state ballot inquiries and referendum questions in many localities. So I don't think it is quite as easy to tabulate as the Swedish ballot you describe. However, even if our ballot wouldn't take hours to tabulate, I can't imagine it would take more than a day or two.
The problem with paper is...it's slow. Don't get me wrong, I don't see that as a problem; I am of the school of thought that it is no disadvantage to take a week or so to count ballots by hand. However, the public has an expectation (cultivated as it has been by TV media, mostly) that elections are to be decided ASAP. I don't know how to ween folks off of such an expectation, esp. since there is a profit motive in minute-by-minute coverage. It is hard in the Internet age to get people to understand why everything can't be as fast as a Google search.
I'm not crazy about exit polls, either, though if done accurately enough (i.e. large enough sample sizes, unbiased methodology) should be able to provide a good indication of results quickly even with a paper ballot system.
I'm completely spitballing here, but I imagine that psychologically the image of a computer as the instrument of an election is more reassuring to people (who, by and large, use computers for many routine tasks) than paper, which conjures notions of impermanence and fragility and a history of "stuffed ballot boxes" and other shenanigans; while computers in reality may be more vulnerable to such shenanigans, they do not as easily lend to such an image, and so combined with their inner mysterious mechanics, they are more easily trusted. People, scarred by the disintegrating trustworthiness of their government, desperately want some part of the political process to place their faith in.
That the truth is not perceptible or discernible does not by itself imply that the truth does not exist. I think it a large leap from 'laws require interpretations because there are apparent ambiguities in how to apply them' to 'there is no one correct way to interpret a law'. That the calculus of competing interests, rights, and persons is too subtle for human beings to divine a definitive understanding of how it ought to be applied is simply a measure of human limitations, and not necessarily evidence of relativity in fact.
No, I'm pretty sure the scientists and engineers thought long and hard about signing on to the A-bomb project, and without them it is likely that the bomb would not have been developed by the end of WWII if at all. Feynman in his memoirs talks a great deal about this.
The 'if I don't build it, they'll just find somebody who will' idea is only true so long as it doesn't take a significant degree of inventiveness or special skills to complete. If the physicists on the A-bomb project quit, I don't think the US government would have had an easy time coming up with more physicists of the requisite caliber. As such, those scientists' moral resolve and ethical decision making were critical factors as to the question of whether the bomb would be built or not.
LOL! Yes, from the point of view of an uninterested observer, the US is the 'visiting' team in the 'game'. I meant 'home team' in the sense of 'team I am identified with', being as I am an American citizen.
In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men...
In other words, governments must be composed of human beings...
the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed...
Humans without some enforced public order are brutish and generally nasty. The establishment and maintenance of public peace is what the Founding Fathers (tm) meant by 'control', not manipulation, either crass or subtle, of a person's desires and fears, as the term is generally understood today...
...and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
Which is the part you simply ignored. In order for a government to have power enough to, ahem, *govern*, and yet be limited, some *ideals* must be made manifest to rule over the baser instincts of those *men* of which the government is ultimately composed. That is the purpose of a constitution, as a codification of principles that justify the continuity of a government so long as that government remains faithful to those principles. The idea was to establish limits upon the reach of authority by delegating specific powers to government and assuming (and later explicitly stating) that the rest were out of reach.
Governments control people just fine without a constitution. The Constitution's purpose was to delimit and control the Government, as Madison himself indicated in that passage; this was the solution to the second half of the problem that the Federalist papers were written to argue for, that a Constitution was the best way to oblige a government to control itself and yet be capable of governing in a way that the prior system (Art. of Confed.) could not.
That the reality departs from the ideal should not be a reason to abandon the ideal or give up striving for its achievement. There have been rare moments in historical governance (both in the US and elsewhere) where a government and its constituent politicians acted in service to its people rather than to itself. To make such events the rule instead of the exception should be the goal of any people. That it is the exception simply means you and I have to work harder, but the fact that it occasionally happens means it is possible.
I am no naif, and I don't believe that ideals are easily achieved, but I *do* think that they are valuable and worth fighting for nonetheless.
Point. That's why the option I *personally* favor is 'stop playing and go home'. Means both teams get to go home to play another day. But so long as they are playing...
What was that sound? That sound was the spirit of a sports metaphor dying in agony.;)
Well, the other reason I root for the home team is I am acquainted a few of the players, and sometimes when they lose, they die. I don't want them to die, hence, I want them to win, or at least to stop playing and go home.
I'm fine with the government invading privacy just as long as they don't get to have any either.
I'm not, but it is still vaguely funny. Funny in the sense that the military is even more obsessed than the famously obsessed Federal Government (of which it is a prominent member) is with controlling information could make a mistake this stupid. Not funny in the sense that often (though not always), military secrets are secrets for good strategic or tactical reasons, and our military is at least nominally on our side. (It's like rooting for the home team.;) )
Privacy isn't supposed to be a two-way street between a citizen and their government; symmetry of relation is inappropriate. Governments by definition are in service to the public, and act on behalf of that public; thus, there are precious few acceptable reasons why any corporeal manifestation of that government can assert a reason to keep its actions from those whom it serves, whereas a private citizen is private until and unless it gives ample reason for a public agency to believe they are doing something illegally naughty. The names almost give it away. Public Government. Private Citizen.
As a citizen, I don't want my government thinking it is in some egalitarian relationship with me and my fellow citizens. The government ought to consider itself subordinate to its citizens.
And I know this is taking your joke and dragging it unkindly into unfunny territory, but the 'you show me yours, I'll show you mine' meme is, I think, destructive to any defensible notion of privacy.
...it's only a matter of time before someone notices that the right answer contradicts your deeply cherished position, and THEN how do you cling to power?
By changing your deeply cherished position. History provides many examples of people in power changing their minds in order to match their world-view with inconvenient and stubborn facts. The ones that don't inevitably got the boot (or the Guillotine). What makes this current crowd so perverse is that they relish the notion of distorting the truth in the public eye so much that honest people cannot tell reality from spin anymore; facts have become reduced to opinions in the popular view, hence the scientific world-view with its positivism and empiricism is distrusted because its conclusions are so damned objective and hence not fair.
Yeah, it would have been like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, only, instead of well-inked expressionistic characters, there would be wire-frame solid-shaded polygon monstrosities. Not what I would call filmographically compelling.
Don't get me wrong, I liked Tron (and, FWIW, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?), but CGI wasn't at the time up to the challenge of realistically modeling CG objects in a 'real' environment convincingly. That didn't even really start to happen until The Abyss. Even simple surface light-shading would have made the computers they used in making Tron choke to death. I think they made a good choice in going for a mostly CG generated world and have the live-action shots be the anomaly. For suspension-of-disbelief, I would hazard that environmental seamlessness is more important than photo-realism.
It was a reasonable, not particularly provocative, and respectfully phrased on-topic statement of opinion about the difference between the "privacy" one might reasonably expect while walking down a public street. What gives?
A person has a reasonable expectation that if they are on a street, that other people will be able to physically see them.
I would argue they do NOT have a reasonable expectation that, simply because they are walking down the street, their movements will be catalogued and recorded and placed in a database such that those movements are accessible to government/private enterprise/creepy stalkers, nor do most people believe that it is appropriate that such logs of public movements are kept about them.
That's the difference.
The disconnect is that because of distributed surveillance (i.e. the ubiquity of video cameras), it is no longer necessary to have a guy follow around the surveilled subject with a camera/pad of paper in order to form an effective record of movements, destinations, and public activities. Thus people can brush it off because it is not directed *at them* personally. The end effect is the same, however. Distributed technologies in general are scary because one of the main psychological effects of distribution is that people no longer recognize what they used to be able to recognize easily as the consequences proceeding from the action because its corporeal 'source' is diffuse.
There's the obvious answer, which is that dogs are different than sheep, and so probably present different hurdles in a prospective cloning process. Also, more specifically, it may provide more info about dogs and their development; it might, for example, help suss out just how much of a dog's olfactory acumen is due to genetic factors as opposed to epigenetic factors and learned (e.g. trained) behaviors.
And then there is the "hasn't been done this way before" chic which is highly attractive in experimental science when it is productive. If sheep have already been done, then dogs are going to cause people to pay greater attention than 'just another sheep'.
Perhaps the point is not to create dogs by the time-honored 'most efficient method possible'. Perhaps the point is to highlight the advanced nature of Korea's biotech industry to court foreign interest/investment/prestige and possibly to attract further talent. Cloning dogs may not be the best way to produce dogs, but perfecting mammal cloning techniques (and the undoubtedly several spin-off discoveries and technologies which one would expect to accompany such research) requires some in situ experimentation, I would imagine.
Whether your movements are surveilled or not, if a country's society is that petty and partisan I'd rather not live there.
Prepare to live on Mars, my friend. That is, at least until the Mars base gets set up. Then you'll have to move again. Humans are petty, tribal, territorial creatures. What was that story by Dr. Seuss about the people with the stars on their stomachs?
Moving beyond the point that this has to be the most purely dick move I have ever heard of, isn't a live performance of a song written by someone else a cover? Isn't a cover a derivative work protected by law? I mean, Weird Al does derivative performances that copy nearly exactly the music of some artists (he usually alters only the lyrics) and every time he does a M. Jackson song he gets sued by MJ, and he always wins. What's the difference here?
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh. Party discipline and party loyalty are quite weak in the US compared to most parliamentary democracies. This is due in great part to the fact that in the US, we don't have party slate elections. The shortcuts that that would allow via counting are thus not available to us. As such, our time-table would probably be closer to the few days than the few hours. Either way, I don't see the big deal in waiting.
One salient difference is that here in the US ballots tend not to be simple; we have elections for local, state, and national offices on the same ballot, plus local and state ballot inquiries and referendum questions in many localities. So I don't think it is quite as easy to tabulate as the Swedish ballot you describe. However, even if our ballot wouldn't take hours to tabulate, I can't imagine it would take more than a day or two.
The problem with paper is...it's slow. Don't get me wrong, I don't see that as a problem; I am of the school of thought that it is no disadvantage to take a week or so to count ballots by hand. However, the public has an expectation (cultivated as it has been by TV media, mostly) that elections are to be decided ASAP. I don't know how to ween folks off of such an expectation, esp. since there is a profit motive in minute-by-minute coverage. It is hard in the Internet age to get people to understand why everything can't be as fast as a Google search.
I'm not crazy about exit polls, either, though if done accurately enough (i.e. large enough sample sizes, unbiased methodology) should be able to provide a good indication of results quickly even with a paper ballot system.
I'm completely spitballing here, but I imagine that psychologically the image of a computer as the instrument of an election is more reassuring to people (who, by and large, use computers for many routine tasks) than paper, which conjures notions of impermanence and fragility and a history of "stuffed ballot boxes" and other shenanigans; while computers in reality may be more vulnerable to such shenanigans, they do not as easily lend to such an image, and so combined with their inner mysterious mechanics, they are more easily trusted. People, scarred by the disintegrating trustworthiness of their government, desperately want some part of the political process to place their faith in.
It's funny. Laugh.
If I'm not mistaken, GP was arguing that Benny Hinn, et al. 's arguments were the Strawmen, not yours.
That the truth is not perceptible or discernible does not by itself imply that the truth does not exist. I think it a large leap from 'laws require interpretations because there are apparent ambiguities in how to apply them' to 'there is no one correct way to interpret a law'. That the calculus of competing interests, rights, and persons is too subtle for human beings to divine a definitive understanding of how it ought to be applied is simply a measure of human limitations, and not necessarily evidence of relativity in fact.
No, I'm pretty sure the scientists and engineers thought long and hard about signing on to the A-bomb project, and without them it is likely that the bomb would not have been developed by the end of WWII if at all. Feynman in his memoirs talks a great deal about this.
The 'if I don't build it, they'll just find somebody who will' idea is only true so long as it doesn't take a significant degree of inventiveness or special skills to complete. If the physicists on the A-bomb project quit, I don't think the US government would have had an easy time coming up with more physicists of the requisite caliber. As such, those scientists' moral resolve and ethical decision making were critical factors as to the question of whether the bomb would be built or not.
LOL! Yes, from the point of view of an uninterested observer, the US is the 'visiting' team in the 'game'. I meant 'home team' in the sense of 'team I am identified with', being as I am an American citizen.
Many US jurisdictions do it this way. I live in Rhode Island, and we use the 'complete the arrow, scan ballot sheet' system; it works alright.
Way to ignore most of the sentence. Let's review:
In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men...
In other words, governments must be composed of human beings...
the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed...
Humans without some enforced public order are brutish and generally nasty. The establishment and maintenance of public peace is what the Founding Fathers (tm) meant by 'control', not manipulation, either crass or subtle, of a person's desires and fears, as the term is generally understood today...
Which is the part you simply ignored. In order for a government to have power enough to, ahem, *govern*, and yet be limited, some *ideals* must be made manifest to rule over the baser instincts of those *men* of which the government is ultimately composed. That is the purpose of a constitution, as a codification of principles that justify the continuity of a government so long as that government remains faithful to those principles. The idea was to establish limits upon the reach of authority by delegating specific powers to government and assuming (and later explicitly stating) that the rest were out of reach.
Governments control people just fine without a constitution. The Constitution's purpose was to delimit and control the Government, as Madison himself indicated in that passage; this was the solution to the second half of the problem that the Federalist papers were written to argue for, that a Constitution was the best way to oblige a government to control itself and yet be capable of governing in a way that the prior system (Art. of Confed.) could not.
That the reality departs from the ideal should not be a reason to abandon the ideal or give up striving for its achievement. There have been rare moments in historical governance (both in the US and elsewhere) where a government and its constituent politicians acted in service to its people rather than to itself. To make such events the rule instead of the exception should be the goal of any people. That it is the exception simply means you and I have to work harder, but the fact that it occasionally happens means it is possible.
I am no naif, and I don't believe that ideals are easily achieved, but I *do* think that they are valuable and worth fighting for nonetheless.
Point. That's why the option I *personally* favor is 'stop playing and go home'. Means both teams get to go home to play another day. But so long as they are playing...
What was that sound? That sound was the spirit of a sports metaphor dying in agony. ;)
Well, the other reason I root for the home team is I am acquainted a few of the players, and sometimes when they lose, they die. I don't want them to die, hence, I want them to win, or at least to stop playing and go home.
I'm fine with the government invading privacy just as long as they don't get to have any either.
I'm not, but it is still vaguely funny. Funny in the sense that the military is even more obsessed than the famously obsessed Federal Government (of which it is a prominent member) is with controlling information could make a mistake this stupid. Not funny in the sense that often (though not always), military secrets are secrets for good strategic or tactical reasons, and our military is at least nominally on our side. (It's like rooting for the home team. ;) )
Privacy isn't supposed to be a two-way street between a citizen and their government; symmetry of relation is inappropriate. Governments by definition are in service to the public, and act on behalf of that public; thus, there are precious few acceptable reasons why any corporeal manifestation of that government can assert a reason to keep its actions from those whom it serves, whereas a private citizen is private until and unless it gives ample reason for a public agency to believe they are doing something illegally naughty. The names almost give it away. Public Government. Private Citizen.
As a citizen, I don't want my government thinking it is in some egalitarian relationship with me and my fellow citizens. The government ought to consider itself subordinate to its citizens.
And I know this is taking your joke and dragging it unkindly into unfunny territory, but the 'you show me yours, I'll show you mine' meme is, I think, destructive to any defensible notion of privacy.
By changing your deeply cherished position. History provides many examples of people in power changing their minds in order to match their world-view with inconvenient and stubborn facts. The ones that don't inevitably got the boot (or the Guillotine). What makes this current crowd so perverse is that they relish the notion of distorting the truth in the public eye so much that honest people cannot tell reality from spin anymore; facts have become reduced to opinions in the popular view, hence the scientific world-view with its positivism and empiricism is distrusted because its conclusions are so damned objective and hence not fair.
Yeah, it would have been like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, only, instead of well-inked expressionistic characters, there would be wire-frame solid-shaded polygon monstrosities. Not what I would call filmographically compelling.
Don't get me wrong, I liked Tron (and, FWIW, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?), but CGI wasn't at the time up to the challenge of realistically modeling CG objects in a 'real' environment convincingly. That didn't even really start to happen until The Abyss. Even simple surface light-shading would have made the computers they used in making Tron choke to death. I think they made a good choice in going for a mostly CG generated world and have the live-action shots be the anomaly. For suspension-of-disbelief, I would hazard that environmental seamlessness is more important than photo-realism.
It was a reasonable, not particularly provocative, and respectfully phrased on-topic statement of opinion about the difference between the "privacy" one might reasonably expect while walking down a public street. What gives?
A person has a reasonable expectation that if they are on a street, that other people will be able to physically see them.
I would argue they do NOT have a reasonable expectation that, simply because they are walking down the street, their movements will be catalogued and recorded and placed in a database such that those movements are accessible to government/private enterprise/creepy stalkers, nor do most people believe that it is appropriate that such logs of public movements are kept about them.
That's the difference.
The disconnect is that because of distributed surveillance (i.e. the ubiquity of video cameras), it is no longer necessary to have a guy follow around the surveilled subject with a camera/pad of paper in order to form an effective record of movements, destinations, and public activities. Thus people can brush it off because it is not directed *at them* personally. The end effect is the same, however. Distributed technologies in general are scary because one of the main psychological effects of distribution is that people no longer recognize what they used to be able to recognize easily as the consequences proceeding from the action because its corporeal 'source' is diffuse.
There's the obvious answer, which is that dogs are different than sheep, and so probably present different hurdles in a prospective cloning process. Also, more specifically, it may provide more info about dogs and their development; it might, for example, help suss out just how much of a dog's olfactory acumen is due to genetic factors as opposed to epigenetic factors and learned (e.g. trained) behaviors.
And then there is the "hasn't been done this way before" chic which is highly attractive in experimental science when it is productive. If sheep have already been done, then dogs are going to cause people to pay greater attention than 'just another sheep'.
Perhaps the point is not to create dogs by the time-honored 'most efficient method possible'. Perhaps the point is to highlight the advanced nature of Korea's biotech industry to court foreign interest/investment/prestige and possibly to attract further talent. Cloning dogs may not be the best way to produce dogs, but perfecting mammal cloning techniques (and the undoubtedly several spin-off discoveries and technologies which one would expect to accompany such research) requires some in situ experimentation, I would imagine.
Are you sure you aren't conflating recursion and fire? I did once, and my attempts to pop the stack did no good.
The. Best. Computer. Science. Joke. Ever!
Ah! Recursion burns!
Whether your movements are surveilled or not, if a country's society is that petty and partisan I'd rather not live there.
Prepare to live on Mars, my friend. That is, at least until the Mars base gets set up. Then you'll have to move again. Humans are petty, tribal, territorial creatures. What was that story by Dr. Seuss about the people with the stars on their stomachs?
That is a clever analogy and as clear an explanation as I have heard on the topic. Wish I had mod points for you, but this will have to do:
MOD PARENT UP.
Please.
Moving beyond the point that this has to be the most purely dick move I have ever heard of, isn't a live performance of a song written by someone else a cover? Isn't a cover a derivative work protected by law? I mean, Weird Al does derivative performances that copy nearly exactly the music of some artists (he usually alters only the lyrics) and every time he does a M. Jackson song he gets sued by MJ, and he always wins. What's the difference here?