Not many other countries take the idea of federalism to the degree that the US has. The federal model protects the rights of citizens. The EC balances the concerns of States vs the concerns of people in a singular office, just as the two houses of Congress do this for a multi-seat body. It may not be a perfect balance between the two concerns, but you cannot eliminate the validity of State concerns in the federal government. Since the 17th Amendment we've already seen growth in the power of the central government that has eroded the freedoms of citizens.
At least he has to win 11 States. In a purely popular contest, a candidate could carry Massachusetts unanimously, and his opponent could get every other State by a margin of 100 votes. The Massachusetts winner would win only 1 State but be president of all 50. We could argue forever about what the right balance is between being the president of the people and being the president of the States, but the EC is an attempt in the right direction.
These are holy days for a large segment of the population. Many would therefore not be able to vote. Or they might simply use that time for something more important than politics, like spending time with family.
In fact, this is why election day is a Tuesday - in recognition that Sunday was a worship day, and that many people might need a day of travel (in the 18th century) to get to the polls.
Because running up the totals in a few large States does not prove that you'll be the best president of all 50 States. States are different, geographically and socially, and have different concerns. Thus being able to carry a large-ish number of the States is also a good criterion for being president. The Electoral College does an admirable job of balancing these two concerns. The federal nature of the US is one of its greatest strengths.
Gah, my libXft isn't new enough. *grumble* Yup/yum won't work. When's YDL 4.0 going to be available to download? Hope it works on my beige G3. I've been happy with Blackbox and IceWM in the past but have heard good things about WindowMaker so I thought I'd give it a shot. Where can I download libXft?
The \. crowd is probably loathe to admit it, but good things still come when you are paid to do them. Don't get me wrong, I love OSS, and actually submitted my first patch to a project today. But I don't mind paying, and there's nothing wrong with asking to be paid, for something superior to the rest of the pack.
Instead, vote for one of the smaller parties - if they receive 5% of the vote, then their funding is increased, and they may be able to work on something good in your area.
Or, you could vote for someone with principles, who doesn't believe you should be forced to fund him (through tax dollars) if you don't agree with him, and will refuse to accept matching funds even if he should reach the 5% qualification limit. There are two suchcandidates for president this year.
"To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical." - Thomas Jefferson
BTW, what sort of coding experience do you have? We need pretty much everything--engine, networking, UI, etc. Do you know anything about coding for Carbon or Cocoa? The engine is in C and C++, if that's relevant.
Mainly web development (which is about as far from event-driven GUI stuff as is possible - my college roomie veldrane is the game programmer). C, C++, J2EE. A little ASP thrown in. I always wanted to develop on the Mac, but never had time to dig into it. Finally sold my old (unused) dev tools about two years ago. Of course, my new OS X Mac has all the dev tools a guy could want.
I do own Irix and NetBSD boxen, though, if contributions of native builds on those platforms would be of interest. How hard has it been to build on multiple platforms?
There is a project called "Marathon|Rampancy" to port the maps/sprites to Unreal Tournament, which is probably what you were thinking of.
Probably...
There were builds for classic, but they haven't really been kept up.
And since I sold my copy of CodeWarrior, I wouldn't be able to do it anymore.
Sweeeeeeeet. I will give it a try (hopefully soon). It may convince me to give you guys a hand.;) What kind of help (specifically) are you looking for? If you have a help-wanted page, a link is fine.
For some reason I thought this big Marathon rework was a port to a different game engine, so you had to buy that game to play it with. Maybe that was a different project I'd read about once.
to use various SDL libraries, enabling native play on Linux, Win32, hell, BeOS, as well as X-based play on OS X.
I have no idea what SDL is or why this is significant. I've never programmed GUIs except baby Java stuff in class.
The OS X carbon port is different branch of the code, and actually the primary one being maintained.
Cool. That's the one I probably want to try then. I assume the backend stuff is still the same though, so it can network play with the Lin/Win/etc people?
Furthermore, A1 now supports hi-res substitute textures, of which there are many, as well as providing limited support for replacing sprites with 3D models.
I'll have to check out the site from home, a lot of this is probably already explained there, so I appreciate your time to post it for the slashdot crowd (like me). Are these optional from within the game configuration? Do you just drop in a different data file? How's that done?
A1 is not networkable with the original games.
Is there a build for the classic MacOS? If not, I probably don't have to bother keeping my old Macs around (which was the original point of this thread).
Again, if you have FAQs explaining this stuff, links are fine. I'll try to follow up on all this from home sometime when game sites aren't blocked.
I'd love to be able to help, but my time is consumed already. Hooda thunk that a wife/kids/house would take so much time?
Since I can't get to any of the sites now because of this darn corporate web filter...Aleph One (slick name by the way - chuckles from this math geek) is an OSS implementation of the Marathon's game engine? Made more multi-platform, so I can play natively in OS X? Still using original data files, so I can play all the existing scenarios? Still networkable with those playing the original Marathons? I don't know any of the features, but it sounds pretty cool.
Was any Marathon ever internet-aware, or was it strictly LAN? Dang it's been too long since I've played!
Dillo crashes immediately when I tried it. I wanted to try a graphical browser on my 16MHz box just for kicks. But I guess I'll stick with Links in text mode.
Re:So, can you hook up a Mac via a serial connecti
on
Netatalk 2.0.0 Released
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· Score: 3, Informative
Also, if you could find one of those bridges, you could put the Mac on your network via its serial port. If your other devices spoke AppleTalk, you might have a solution. Using netatalk on the Linux box to translate and route print jobs? You can find these bridges on eBay, though they tend to go for a bit more than I really wanted to pay. There's actually one there right now, ending today.
Like I've said, I may be talking out of my butt here. Networking and low-level protocol stuff really is not a strength of mine.
Re:So, can you hook up a Mac via a serial connecti
on
Netatalk 2.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
So the Linux box would capture the print job and then do something with it? I'd love to help, but this kind of thing (serial protocols, etc) is outside my bailiwick. I'll point you to the MaX list at LEM though. That's where I ask all these sorts of questions, since it involves *n*x. Signal to noise there is very high, which is nice.
ABC News is reporting that anthropologists have found the skeletal remains of seven hobbit sized hominids.
Obviously these were the eastern people that the Blue Wizards were sent to.
Also found were bones of [...] miniature elephants.
I thought oliphaunts were supposed to be huge?!
Re:So, can you hook up a Mac via a serial connecti
on
Netatalk 2.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
IIRC (so don't take this for gospel):
AppleTalk over serial == LocalTalk,
AppleTalk over ethernet == EtherTalk,
AppleTalk over token ring == TokenTalk.
You'd need something to convert the physical layer to get the IIsi online though. I bought a relatively rare LT/EN bridge by lurking on a Mac list several months ago. Now I've got my ancient LaserWriter 4/600 (serial connection only) on my network, and Panther prints to it just fine.
Dr. Paul is only one I know of that's consistently pro-America and pro-liberty. There are a few others that are good on their pet issues. Tancredo on immigration reform, for instance.
And no chance of winning, so he's not really a choice, even if he's on the ballot.
The presidency is not a horse race. The winner is not a foregone conclusion with voters "placing bets". Your vote decides the outcome. If you and your friends and their friends vote for Badnarik, then he will win, just as assuredly as Kerry would win if you vote for him or Bush if you vote for him. If you don't vote for what you believe, you'll never get what you want. It's not as if Bush/Kerry is going to pay more attention to what you say since you voted for him - he'll just be laughing all the way to the White House.
I'm all for the protection of the rights of the minority, but that isn't the same as letting the minority have a bigger say in how the country is run than the majority.
Actually, yes, it is letting them have a bigger say. If 75% say "we want X, even if that hurts the 25%" then protecting the rights of that 25% means they have an absolute veto - they are actually more than 3x as powerful.
What would happen if 95% of all Americans lived in cities? Would the 5% of rural voters still get 50% of the representation?
That's impossible. Even if 95% of the people are concentrated in 6 States, they are going to have about 426 votes. The rest get only 112. Yes, it's skewed, but not to the degree you think. Just because people in small population districts are a minority (almost by definition of "small population district") doesn't mean their concerns can be ignored. But in a pure democracy, a 95:5 ratio would make them pretty unimportant. I'm glad that protection of minorities is built into the system.
What would happen if 95% of all Americans lived in cities? [...] That would mean rural voters have 20 times the influence as urban voters.
First, it's a misconception that the EC only helps "rural voters". Connecticut and Iowa both have 7 EC votes and therefore roughly equal populations, but the "ruralness" of Connecticut is in doubt.
Second, where are these cities? If they're all concentrated in the same states they are now (see my point above) then yes you'll probably see a widening of this supposed EC gap. That's not necessarily so, though. Even in this extreme example, your "rural" voters have only a 5x, not 20x, advantage. And if you look at it strictly as designed, the people have pretty similar voting power. Some of that "power" belongs to the States as political entities. This is part of being a federal republic.
Third, we are a federation of 50 "free and independent states". Why shouldn't one state have equal standing to any other in some ways? Should China dictate to everyone else at the UN just because it has the most people? (Barring for the moment any discussion of the UN's legitimacy.) No, that's ridiculous. As equally as possible, 436 votes are distributed between 51 regions by population. The other 102 votes are distributed equally between the 51. This is perfectly in keeping with the federal design that we have, treating every state equally yet respecting the fact that some states have more people than others.
I am left wondering why geographical boundries should determine representation [as opposed to religion or race]
Why not? I don't want to be seen primarily as part of a racial/gender/religious/whatever bloc. I am an individual. Where I happen to live is partly a result of chance (where I was born) and partly by choice (where I moved to). Geographic boundaries are therefore fairly neutral to "classification". Class/race/gender politics are already bitterly divisive. We need to move away from that, not entrench it further.
On the logic that minority groups should have equal representation, they should get their representation boosted, right?
That is not the primary logic, though that is a secondary effect of the design. Some minority groups (religious, racial) happen to be concentrated geographically. The EC's districted approach means that in certain districts they are a significant force. The presidential candidate cannot ignore their concerns if he wants to win those districts. He has to have broad-based support.
It's been shown that voting by districts gives voters greater power, so the EC is a good thing. As long as State interests as well as popular interests must be represented in the singular office of the Chief Executive, any population imbalance between States will cause the pro
I don't think there's anything wrong with making candidates fight it out a district at a time. Better to break it down to smaller units, so that candidates can't run up the tally in one part of a state and ignore the rest. Same argument for why we look at state results rather than having a nation-wide popular vote. That's part of the reason the EC is designed as it is.
Some states have constitutional requirements against gerrymandering. I've heard that Iowa's are particularly good.
Here's my idea - the "other scheme" I alluded to earlier. It's a mixed district/proportional scheme that stands on the underlying assumptions of our government's design to determine how it works.
OK,/.ers -- tell me *why* PR is *not* a better solution than 'ranking' systems.
Because it doesn't work with single-seat offices. It doesn't work well with bodies that serve staggered terms, like the Senate. Also, PR is not an either/or proposition to changing the voting system. PR is about representation, IRV/Condorcet/etc are about voting. They could be used in conjunction, or not.
Ratification takes 3/4 majority. I still can't for the life of me understand how the 17th Amendment ever passed. There are people that claim irregularities regarding it; maybe there is a grain of truth to what they are saying.
Nobody is perfect, thus everybody is somewhat "evil". To be perfectly true to that ideal, you could never vote for anyone.
A binding "none of the above" vote puts minor parties at a disadvantage. They don't have as many qualified members to put on the ballot. Not only is it hard for them to get on in the first place and run an effective campaign with the media bias, NOTA would marginalize them right out of the running.
If you don't like either of the two major parties, then vote for one of the other options. They do exist.
You are right. Under IRV the two major parties are safe until/unless a third party becomes a true major force...because they'll always get eliminated in an early runoff stage.
Condorcet solves this problem by not having runoffs - all preferences get evaluated and have equal influence on the result. In your one-dimensional example (with the Libertarians back in as a "middle" position) the Libertarians likely end up winning as the best compromise between the 5. In the multi-dimensional real world, the results could be much more dynamic.
IRV is not a boost for 3rd parties, it is only an illusion of being so. Condorcet is the fairest voting system I've come across, and I've done quite a bit of reading on the subject since 2000.
Slashdot Mirror
Not many other countries take the idea of federalism to the degree that the US has. The federal model protects the rights of citizens. The EC balances the concerns of States vs the concerns of people in a singular office, just as the two houses of Congress do this for a multi-seat body. It may not be a perfect balance between the two concerns, but you cannot eliminate the validity of State concerns in the federal government. Since the 17th Amendment we've already seen growth in the power of the central government that has eroded the freedoms of citizens.
At least he has to win 11 States. In a purely popular contest, a candidate could carry Massachusetts unanimously, and his opponent could get every other State by a margin of 100 votes. The Massachusetts winner would win only 1 State but be president of all 50. We could argue forever about what the right balance is between being the president of the people and being the president of the States, but the EC is an attempt in the right direction.
These are holy days for a large segment of the population. Many would therefore not be able to vote. Or they might simply use that time for something more important than politics, like spending time with family.
In fact, this is why election day is a Tuesday - in recognition that Sunday was a worship day, and that many people might need a day of travel (in the 18th century) to get to the polls.
Because running up the totals in a few large States does not prove that you'll be the best president of all 50 States. States are different, geographically and socially, and have different concerns. Thus being able to carry a large-ish number of the States is also a good criterion for being president. The Electoral College does an admirable job of balancing these two concerns. The federal nature of the US is one of its greatest strengths.
Gah, my libXft isn't new enough. *grumble* Yup/yum won't work. When's YDL 4.0 going to be available to download? Hope it works on my beige G3. I've been happy with Blackbox and IceWM in the past but have heard good things about WindowMaker so I thought I'd give it a shot. Where can I download libXft?
The \. crowd is probably loathe to admit it, but good things still come when you are paid to do them. Don't get me wrong, I love OSS, and actually submitted my first patch to a project today. But I don't mind paying, and there's nothing wrong with asking to be paid, for something superior to the rest of the pack.
Like it would really have been any different if it had been Democrats. Well, maybe the DNC would have already filed a suit by now...
Or, you could vote for someone with principles, who doesn't believe you should be forced to fund him (through tax dollars) if you don't agree with him, and will refuse to accept matching funds even if he should reach the 5% qualification limit. There are two such candidates for president this year.
"To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical." - Thomas Jefferson
Less platform dependency is generally a good thing. :) I'll try to give it a whirl and post on the dev list how it goes.
Mainly web development (which is about as far from event-driven GUI stuff as is possible - my college roomie veldrane is the game programmer). C, C++, J2EE. A little ASP thrown in. I always wanted to develop on the Mac, but never had time to dig into it. Finally sold my old (unused) dev tools about two years ago. Of course, my new OS X Mac has all the dev tools a guy could want.
I do own Irix and NetBSD boxen, though, if contributions of native builds on those platforms would be of interest. How hard has it been to build on multiple platforms?
Probably...
And since I sold my copy of CodeWarrior, I wouldn't be able to do it anymore.
Sweeeeeeeet. I will give it a try (hopefully soon). It may convince me to give you guys a hand. ;) What kind of help (specifically) are you looking for? If you have a help-wanted page, a link is fine.
For some reason I thought this big Marathon rework was a port to a different game engine, so you had to buy that game to play it with. Maybe that was a different project I'd read about once.
I have no idea what SDL is or why this is significant. I've never programmed GUIs except baby Java stuff in class.
Cool. That's the one I probably want to try then. I assume the backend stuff is still the same though, so it can network play with the Lin/Win/etc people?
I'll have to check out the site from home, a lot of this is probably already explained there, so I appreciate your time to post it for the slashdot crowd (like me). Are these optional from within the game configuration? Do you just drop in a different data file? How's that done?
Is there a build for the classic MacOS? If not, I probably don't have to bother keeping my old Macs around (which was the original point of this thread).
Again, if you have FAQs explaining this stuff, links are fine. I'll try to follow up on all this from home sometime when game sites aren't blocked.
I'd love to be able to help, but my time is consumed already. Hooda thunk that a wife/kids/house would take so much time?
Since I can't get to any of the sites now because of this darn corporate web filter...Aleph One (slick name by the way - chuckles from this math geek) is an OSS implementation of the Marathon's game engine? Made more multi-platform, so I can play natively in OS X? Still using original data files, so I can play all the existing scenarios? Still networkable with those playing the original Marathons? I don't know any of the features, but it sounds pretty cool.
Was any Marathon ever internet-aware, or was it strictly LAN? Dang it's been too long since I've played!
Dillo crashes immediately when I tried it. I wanted to try a graphical browser on my 16MHz box just for kicks. But I guess I'll stick with Links in text mode.
Also, if you could find one of those bridges, you could put the Mac on your network via its serial port. If your other devices spoke AppleTalk, you might have a solution. Using netatalk on the Linux box to translate and route print jobs? You can find these bridges on eBay, though they tend to go for a bit more than I really wanted to pay. There's actually one there right now, ending today.
Like I've said, I may be talking out of my butt here. Networking and low-level protocol stuff really is not a strength of mine.
So the Linux box would capture the print job and then do something with it? I'd love to help, but this kind of thing (serial protocols, etc) is outside my bailiwick. I'll point you to the MaX list at LEM though. That's where I ask all these sorts of questions, since it involves *n*x. Signal to noise there is very high, which is nice.
Obviously these were the eastern people that the Blue Wizards were sent to.
I thought oliphaunts were supposed to be huge?!
IIRC (so don't take this for gospel):
AppleTalk over serial == LocalTalk,
AppleTalk over ethernet == EtherTalk,
AppleTalk over token ring == TokenTalk.
You'd need something to convert the physical layer to get the IIsi online though. I bought a relatively rare LT/EN bridge by lurking on a Mac list several months ago. Now I've got my ancient LaserWriter 4/600 (serial connection only) on my network, and Panther prints to it just fine.
Dr. Paul is only one I know of that's consistently pro-America and pro-liberty. There are a few others that are good on their pet issues. Tancredo on immigration reform, for instance.
The presidency is not a horse race. The winner is not a foregone conclusion with voters "placing bets". Your vote decides the outcome. If you and your friends and their friends vote for Badnarik, then he will win, just as assuredly as Kerry would win if you vote for him or Bush if you vote for him. If you don't vote for what you believe, you'll never get what you want. It's not as if Bush/Kerry is going to pay more attention to what you say since you voted for him - he'll just be laughing all the way to the White House.
PS You want Condorcet, not IRV.
Actually, yes, it is letting them have a bigger say. If 75% say "we want X, even if that hurts the 25%" then protecting the rights of that 25% means they have an absolute veto - they are actually more than 3x as powerful.
That's impossible. Even if 95% of the people are concentrated in 6 States, they are going to have about 426 votes. The rest get only 112. Yes, it's skewed, but not to the degree you think. Just because people in small population districts are a minority (almost by definition of "small population district") doesn't mean their concerns can be ignored. But in a pure democracy, a 95:5 ratio would make them pretty unimportant. I'm glad that protection of minorities is built into the system.
First, it's a misconception that the EC only helps "rural voters". Connecticut and Iowa both have 7 EC votes and therefore roughly equal populations, but the "ruralness" of Connecticut is in doubt.
Second, where are these cities? If they're all concentrated in the same states they are now (see my point above) then yes you'll probably see a widening of this supposed EC gap. That's not necessarily so, though. Even in this extreme example, your "rural" voters have only a 5x, not 20x, advantage. And if you look at it strictly as designed, the people have pretty similar voting power. Some of that "power" belongs to the States as political entities. This is part of being a federal republic.
Third, we are a federation of 50 "free and independent states". Why shouldn't one state have equal standing to any other in some ways? Should China dictate to everyone else at the UN just because it has the most people? (Barring for the moment any discussion of the UN's legitimacy.) No, that's ridiculous. As equally as possible, 436 votes are distributed between 51 regions by population. The other 102 votes are distributed equally between the 51. This is perfectly in keeping with the federal design that we have, treating every state equally yet respecting the fact that some states have more people than others.
Why not? I don't want to be seen primarily as part of a racial/gender/religious/whatever bloc. I am an individual. Where I happen to live is partly a result of chance (where I was born) and partly by choice (where I moved to). Geographic boundaries are therefore fairly neutral to "classification". Class/race/gender politics are already bitterly divisive. We need to move away from that, not entrench it further.
That is not the primary logic, though that is a secondary effect of the design. Some minority groups (religious, racial) happen to be concentrated geographically. The EC's districted approach means that in certain districts they are a significant force. The presidential candidate cannot ignore their concerns if he wants to win those districts. He has to have broad-based support.
It's been shown that voting by districts gives voters greater power, so the EC is a good thing. As long as State interests as well as popular interests must be represented in the singular office of the Chief Executive, any population imbalance between States will cause the pro
I don't think there's anything wrong with making candidates fight it out a district at a time. Better to break it down to smaller units, so that candidates can't run up the tally in one part of a state and ignore the rest. Same argument for why we look at state results rather than having a nation-wide popular vote. That's part of the reason the EC is designed as it is.
Some states have constitutional requirements against gerrymandering. I've heard that Iowa's are particularly good.
Here's my idea - the "other scheme" I alluded to earlier. It's a mixed district/proportional scheme that stands on the underlying assumptions of our government's design to determine how it works.
Because it doesn't work with single-seat offices. It doesn't work well with bodies that serve staggered terms, like the Senate. Also, PR is not an either/or proposition to changing the voting system. PR is about representation, IRV/Condorcet/etc are about voting. They could be used in conjunction, or not.
Ratification takes 3/4 majority. I still can't for the life of me understand how the 17th Amendment ever passed. There are people that claim irregularities regarding it; maybe there is a grain of truth to what they are saying.
Nobody is perfect, thus everybody is somewhat "evil". To be perfectly true to that ideal, you could never vote for anyone.
A binding "none of the above" vote puts minor parties at a disadvantage. They don't have as many qualified members to put on the ballot. Not only is it hard for them to get on in the first place and run an effective campaign with the media bias, NOTA would marginalize them right out of the running.
If you don't like either of the two major parties, then vote for one of the other options. They do exist.
You are right. Under IRV the two major parties are safe until/unless a third party becomes a true major force...because they'll always get eliminated in an early runoff stage.
Condorcet solves this problem by not having runoffs - all preferences get evaluated and have equal influence on the result. In your one-dimensional example (with the Libertarians back in as a "middle" position) the Libertarians likely end up winning as the best compromise between the 5. In the multi-dimensional real world, the results could be much more dynamic.
IRV is not a boost for 3rd parties, it is only an illusion of being so. Condorcet is the fairest voting system I've come across, and I've done quite a bit of reading on the subject since 2000.