The ghetto-Linux analogy appears to be somewhat far-fetched. The Linux buildings are maintained rather
nicely, and nobody needs to spend any money on them.
Some of them are, some of them aren't. The ones that are maintained are often those with some corporate backing. Nothing is free, software costs developer time which is a limited resource.
If you want the Linux world to deterioate into a proprietary mass market
wasteland,
This is an obvious straw man. you don't need to chase away all the application vendors to develop a free OS.
It is sort of
the point behind the entire open source movement: free wins, proprietary loses.
No, it is not the point of the "entire open source movement". It is the point of some of the zealots within the movement, sure. Some of us however have more of a live-and-let-live attitude.
The American philosophy is one of less centralisation, there are substantial cultural and economic differences between the different reasons which is why in the context of the USA, decentralisation tends to make more sense.
If we abolished the electoral college, then we'd not have to watch this sort of spectacle again, because the margins of victory would vastly increase.
This is completely wrong. The margins of victory would increase, but so would the number of votes, so the difference between the margin of victory and the margin of error would not change that much. If a popular vote was used, you'd have Florida on a national level right now.
Maybe we don't need to abolish the electoral college completely, but what we need to do is separate the votes from the states. Have the candidates fight out over each and
every vote... Like, right now, bush'd get 13 of florida's votes and gore'd get 12 and this'd been over weeks ago.
You're kidding yourself if you believe that the problem was somehow "caused" by the electoral college. If the vote in Florida was split like that, and the votees in the other states were also split in such a manner, the two parties would be quarreling over one or two deciding electoral votes, you'd still have the same situation with both sides trying to gerrymander it their way. Even with a popular vote, the popular vote is close enough that it's be tied up in litigation (and the recounts would be somewhat more difficult !)
Not really. Each senate seat is popularly elect4ed, there's a big difference between that and having a populkar election for the entire senate. Ditto with the house of representatives -- just because you can get 99% of the vote in seat A does not mean that you can forward 48% of the vote to another party member running in seat B.
As for the "circus in florida", the problem has arisen because the election is too close (the voters may as well have voted randomly), not because the "system" is bad.
Smart" is relative. By some measures, anyone who passes law school and the bar exams is "smart". But compared to many
other thinkers in our society, Kaplan is mediocre at best, and as much admits it when he extrapolates from his own lack of
competence in these matters, to arrive at the preposterous conclusion that all judges are as ill-suited as he to rule on such
cases.
I'd say that compared to the vast majority of the slashdot drones, the guy is a f*cking genius.
Is it really his place to overturn a law based on whether or not it is constitutional ? Indeed, did the defence prepare an argument to that effect ? I would have thought that the lower courts would not strike down laws like that, and that he was proper in appraising the main question of the case -- whether or not the law was broken ( and not whether or not the law was "lawful" )
I don't know about anyone else, but I find it truly frightening that we have a candidate named Al Gore who
finds nothing wrong with pressuring a Secretary of State to ignore the law and just "do what we want".
As opposed to the republicans, who've been trying to block scrutiny of the Florida votes, by attempting to stop recounts ? IMO, the secretary of state has been acting in a partisan manner also. Both sides appear to be scrapping for the last few votes. I don't blame either side, but it seems dishonest or at least very biased) to act as though one side are the "good guys" and the other side are "evil". It's really not that simple.
And that idiot judge finds it difficult to read a statute that clearly says that "the state shall certify results by
5pm".
Are you a lawyer ? If you're not, you are not qualified to interpret the statute. IIRC, the judge upheld the deadline, but gave the secretary discretion to accept corrections to the count after the deadline.
GNOME is attractive to Inprise/Borland because of some of the design decisions that were made for the
GNOME component model. Inprise/Borland have been big proponents of CORBA for a long time (just take
a look at their web site), and Bonobo's use of CORBA makes it very attractive.
CORBA as used by GNOME is C-only (ORBit doesn't support other languages). So this probably makes it attractive to masochists (implementing OO interfaces in C is hardly "fun"). But not necessarily to Borland.
I think the KDE project will
have to start looking long and hard at how to make KParts more attractive to developers.
Kparts isn't a CORBA replacement, DCOP is. And I think it already is attractive to developers, though I would have been happier if they stuck with Mico.
uh-leeze. Listen, folks, this is the third or fourth recent high-profile Open
Source 'major production release' to dump more core than Exxon.
Solid as a rock on my box as of beta 2. Perhaps the fact that you are using a POS of a distribution which is built with a non-release, developers-only version of gcc is part of the problem.
Big company, small company, whatever. The cost of the license is negligeable compared to the cost of each developer. I'd say it's a winner if it improves developer productivity by 2% or more.
You are right that they make a lot of arbitrary choices, so one must treat the result with caution. However, it seems pretty clear that different arbitrary choices would have still produced an anomolous result for palm beach (though maybe less anomolous).
It's possible that there was an abuse of statistics (though I doubt it) but since the data is available, the republicans are (and indeed should be) free to try to reproduce similar or different numbers from the available data.
I agree. I think the other things that are wrong with his argument are that he's basing the entire argument
solely on a two-candidate election,
The US system basically does boil down to a two-candidate election because you don't have instant runoffs. Third party candidates are basically a spanner in the works of the US electoral system.
as well as thinking that any grouping by ethnicity, locale, etc would vote in
a similar fashion.
The point is not that they would, but that they might, and the system should be robust enough to withstand this.
3rd party candidates are a completely different issue -- the electoral college system does not really make things better or worse. To design a system that works with third party candidates, you really need some system of preferential voting. The most popular such systems are proportional representation and instant runoffs.
f you want people to believe your claim that Palm Beach might be genuinely different, what were
Buchanan's primary votes like in neighbouring areas in 1996? In order for your position to be defensible, they
must be significantly lower.
.
This shows that Buchanan's results in Palm beach were indeed an anomoly
A better solution still IMO is instant runoffs. Basically, you vote
1->Buchanan 2->Bush, 3->Gore 4->Nader
The (1) votes are counted. At this stage someone (suppose Buchanan) is coming dead last. So Buchanan's votes redistributed based on who the Buchanan voters placed at (2). Whoever is winning on the two-(leading)-party-preferred test wins. IMO this is a fairer way to do things, and you avouid having the voters jump through hoops to circumvent a flawed system (for example, "vote swapping")
Using a popular vote would also help the other parties. People would worry less about ?wasting? their vote
because their state is a close race.
Nonsense. A popular vote doesn't really address the problem, because votes for Nader would still be "votes for Bush".
A sensible way to address the problem would be to introduce instant runoffs, or some other means of redistributing votes from defeated third party candidates.
I don't see how it can be "work for hire" if the student is not getting paid for the work! I mean, typically, what happens in grad school is that the PhD students are awarded stipends for their TA positions. When they are awarded fellowships, the fellowships are often awarded by someone from outside the university. In fact at several schools the students have to pay fees.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of them are, some of them aren't. The ones that are maintained are often those with some corporate backing. Nothing is free, software costs developer time which is a limited resource.
If you want the Linux world to deterioate into a proprietary mass market wasteland,
This is an obvious straw man. you don't need to chase away all the application vendors to develop a free OS.
No, it is not the point of the "entire open source movement". It is the point of some of the zealots within the movement, sure. Some of us however have more of a live-and-let-live attitude.
The American philosophy is one of less centralisation, there are substantial cultural and economic differences between the different reasons which is why in the context of the USA, decentralisation tends to make more sense.
This is completely wrong. The margins of victory would increase, but so would the number of votes, so the difference between the margin of victory and the margin of error would not change that much. If a popular vote was used, you'd have Florida on a national level right now.
You're kidding yourself if you believe that the problem was somehow "caused" by the electoral college. If the vote in Florida was split like that, and the votees in the other states were also split in such a manner, the two parties would be quarreling over one or two deciding electoral votes, you'd still have the same situation with both sides trying to gerrymander it their way. Even with a popular vote, the popular vote is close enough that it's be tied up in litigation (and the recounts would be somewhat more difficult !)
Not really. Each senate seat is popularly elect4ed, there's a big difference between that and having a populkar election for the entire senate. Ditto with the house of representatives -- just because you can get 99% of the vote in seat A does not mean that you can forward 48% of the vote to another party member running in seat B.
As for the "circus in florida", the problem has arisen because the election is too close (the voters may as well have voted randomly), not because the "system" is bad.
I believe that for the most part (exceptions are anti-discrimination laws), the market handles it.
Hahahaha ... that's a good one. You are joking, right ? The Chinese and Indian students have a very low return rate.
I'd say that compared to the vast majority of the slashdot drones, the guy is a f*cking genius.
Is it really his place to overturn a law based on whether or not it is constitutional ? Indeed, did the defence prepare an argument to that effect ? I would have thought that the lower courts would not strike down laws like that, and that he was proper in appraising the main question of the case -- whether or not the law was broken ( and not whether or not the law was "lawful" )
Sorry, only the usable bindings count. An alpha binding certainly doesn't count.
As opposed to the republicans, who've been trying to block scrutiny of the Florida votes, by attempting to stop recounts ? IMO, the secretary of state has been acting in a partisan manner also. Both sides appear to be scrapping for the last few votes. I don't blame either side, but it seems dishonest or at least very biased) to act as though one side are the "good guys" and the other side are "evil". It's really not that simple.
And that idiot judge finds it difficult to read a statute that clearly says that "the state shall certify results by 5pm".
Are you a lawyer ? If you're not, you are not qualified to interpret the statute. IIRC, the judge upheld the deadline, but gave the secretary discretion to accept corrections to the count after the deadline.
CORBA as used by GNOME is C-only (ORBit doesn't support other languages). So this probably makes it attractive to masochists (implementing OO interfaces in C is hardly "fun"). But not necessarily to Borland.
I think the KDE project will have to start looking long and hard at how to make KParts more attractive to developers.
Kparts isn't a CORBA replacement, DCOP is. And I think it already is attractive to developers, though I would have been happier if they stuck with Mico.
Solid as a rock on my box as of beta 2. Perhaps the fact that you are using a POS of a distribution which is built with a non-release, developers-only version of gcc is part of the problem.
Look at the URL I posted and tell me whether or not that's a freak result.
It's possible that there was an abuse of statistics (though I doubt it) but since the data is available, the republicans are (and indeed should be) free to try to reproduce similar or different numbers from the available data.
The US system basically does boil down to a two-candidate election because you don't have instant runoffs. Third party candidates are basically a spanner in the works of the US electoral system.
as well as thinking that any grouping by ethnicity, locale, etc would vote in a similar fashion.
The point is not that they would, but that they might, and the system should be robust enough to withstand this.
This shows that Buchanan's results in Palm beach were indeed an anomoly
2->Bush,
3->Gore
4->Nader
The (1) votes are counted. At this stage someone (suppose Buchanan) is coming dead last. So Buchanan's votes redistributed based on who the Buchanan voters placed at (2). Whoever is winning on the two-(leading)-party-preferred test wins. IMO this is a fairer way to do things, and you avouid having the voters jump through hoops to circumvent a flawed system (for example, "vote swapping")
Nonsense. A popular vote doesn't really address the problem, because votes for Nader would still be "votes for Bush".
A sensible way to address the problem would be to introduce instant runoffs, or some other means of redistributing votes from defeated third party candidates.