Approval voting is easier to count (O(n)) than IRV (O(n!)).
You should finish reading sentences before you clip in the middle and respond to them. The system I discussed wasn't IRV/STV, it was IRV/STV without loser elimination, which in addition to being the source of the infelicities in the results of IRV/STV, is also why it is particularly bad in terms of computational complexity. In the single winner case, I'm pretty sure IRV without loser elimination is O(n^2) [any single round is O(n) and the limit on number of rounds is n]; equally important, unlike plain IRV, its summable, which allows it to be practical to do by-precinct counts and report counts rather than every individual ballot upstream without downstream communication (in the multiwinner case, you have to either transmit ballots upstream or have downstream communication to do winner elimination, but that's probably true of any multiwinner system that produces proportional rather than essentially winner-take-all results.) Anyhow, I don't think computational complexity is as important (so long as you aren't dealing with NP-complete problems) in evaluating voting systems as the validity, consistency, and meaningfulness of the ballot data, which is absolutely critical. Approval, because the same information on different ballots doesn't have a consistent meaning, is flawed on that, for me, fundamental concern.
I'm familiar with approval voting, and IMO its a lot worse than just about any half-decent preference voting system because it is less expressive and less consistent (that is, the same information on different ballots doesn't have the same meaning.) Personally, I prefer a preference system that amounts to IRV/STV (depending on whether you are talking about single or multiwinner cases) but without lowest-vote elimination, which is an unnecessary step that is the source of several of the (admittedly, often practically insignificant) problems with IRV/STV; its fairly simple both to vote and understood, but more expressive and consistent than approval.
That being said, approval would probably be a slight improvement over majority-runoff and plurality systems, though even there its a step backwards in terms of consistency.
The current AIDS drugs don't keep ANYBODY from dying. They just prolong their lives.
Um, that's all any medical treatment for anything that "keeps people from dying" actually does.
100% of all people still die, one way or another. So "keep people from dying" is, if it means anything at all, just another way of saying "prolong's people's lives".
My point is, whether you know Computer Science or not, if you don't have proof (read college education) that this stuff was at least presented to you properly, odds are that you'll have a tough time finding someone willing to pay you...
That's true, though in IT you can get a number of certifications on particular technology that may be worth more to particular jobs than having a CS degree.
(Yes, I know CS is not the same thing as IT, but a lot of the consideration in this thread has been whether CS is worth it based on prospects for IT jobs. Clearly, no one is going to give you a CS faculty position because you pass a certification exam in some aspect of IT.)
Impeachments are handled by the Senate, not the House.
Impeachment hearings happen in the House, prior to the House voting on articles of impeachment, which takes a simple majority.
It's highly unlikely that we could get the 2/3 vote required for impeachment proceedings in the Senate.
The Senate doesn't get to vote on whether impeachment proceedings happen at all, since they begin before the Senate gets involved. Once the House holds whatever impeachment hearings it wants, debates the issues, and decides to send articles of impeachment to the Senate, it requires a 2/3 vote of the Senate, after the trial of the impeachment in the Senate, to convict on the articles of impeachment, and to impose sanctions (constitutionally limited to removal from office and a permanent ban on holding any other office of trust under the United States) to go with that conviction. Whether enough votes can be found there probably depends on a lot on the public response to the hearings and charges and the substance supporting the allegations, though a narrow, at best, majority for the Democrats in the Senate means that there would have to be a strong outcry to convict.
You're entire argument hinges on the postulation that if we had multiple parties, more people would vote.
No. While some are, others are based (if you reread what I wrote before) on the idea that even with same people voting, voting systems that support multiparty systems (preference voting systems) also provide results that are more representative since they do not encourage suppressing honest preference in favor of tactical voting.
And its not a "postulation", its an inference from seeing studies of systems of government, voting behavior, etc., from democracies throughout the world.
There's obviously no way to prove this one way or the other, but I'm sure we all can look anecdotally at our own life. Of all the people I know that don't vote, by far the biggest reason is simply not liking or enjoying the political process. Some say they don't vote because they don't like either candidate, but that's not a majority of my tiny sample.
Sure, but why don't they "like" or "enjoy" the political process. I don't know about the people you know, but I often hear people say that its because of negative politics (a product of a two-party system where a negative for one major party candidate is in effect a bonus for the other major party candidate, something that is less true in a preference system, where the utility of negative campaigns that you hope drive people away from your opponent at least slightly more than they drive them away from you is largely eliminated). There's other reasons, of course, some of which are and some of which are not connected to the two party system.
Among other reasons, there's no reason to think that having 3 candidates would automatically mean that one would be better than JFKerry or GWBush.
Better for whom? Almost any candidate will be better for some of the eligible voters.
The basis of my characterization of multi-party systems is based not on some flowery glittery theory of being able to elect your Libertarian to the Presidency.
Neither is mine. I don't want a Libertarian President, I'm a Democrat (and not, despite the fact that that Party is far from perfect, for tactical reasons: I find the Democratic Party better than the existing minor parties even excluding tactical concerns.) I want an electoral system that respects the public, promotes honest rather than tactical voting, and provides reasonable results with honest balloting. That means, as I see it, preference voting for pretty much all offices, and some method of proportional representation, probably through candidate-centered (say, by Single Transferable Vote) elections in small (say around 5 member) multimember districts for some legislative elections.
It's based on the facts of how multi-party systems work around the world. Specifically, Israel, Germany, and, to a lesser extent, Great Britain.
Three parliamentary systems, one of which (the UK) uses an electoral system very close to that in the US for most elections, is hardly a good sample of "multi-party" systems.
And I think that it's no coincidence that in each of these cases there are no nationally-elected candidates. Not a single one.
None of those has any nationally, directly elected, officials but neither does the US. In the US, as in Germany, etc., the only nationally elected officials are indirectly elected by another body that is directly elected by the people and/or appointed by subordinate government bodies.
And its not a coincidence at all, its rather the norm of parliamentary as opposed to presidential (or "separation of powers") democratic systems (though the US, as a Presidential system, as noted, also lacks nationally directly-elected officers), though even there your blanket statement is a result of your rather limited selection: the Re
But much of which you can pick up without going after a degree, if you have the ambition (and talent with mathematics) to do so.
That's really true of most degrees, nevertheless, the structure of a formal academic environment helps many people to maintain the discipline to do it, often provides access to skilled instructors that make gaining understanding easier, generally increases the diversity of equipment and resources you have access to in the learning process, may, as a degree is something people often take note of, increase the material reward you get from it, and may make you eligible for additional financial assistance (which may or may not make up for the additional cost) and other benefits.
Whether those benefits are worthwhile for any particular person interested in getting an understanding of the field will, of course, vary from person to person.
One could make a fairly good argument that google has some of the best-in-class services on the web, and they know it.
And openness as far as transfers out as well as in is a good way to underline that they have the best-in-class services, because it makes services not similarly open suspect ("why are they trying to lock me in?")
Okay, look. I'm not in with the current administration either, but statistically, in the 6th year midterm elections of ANY presidency, the ruling party typically loses seats in both the house and the senate.
The Republicans in Reagan's 6th year lost 5 seats in the House. The Democrats in Clinton's 6th year "lost" -5 seats in the House. The Republicans in Bush's 6th year have lost at least 28 seats. Doesn't seem too typical.
Sure, if you go back 30+ years, you see big swings, but that doesn't really reflect politics of this generation.
Might have been (though, being both a counterinsurgency and a war with an external power, Vietnam was very different), if they'd been there a lot earlier, and 500,000 troops in Iraq immediately at the fall of Saddam's regime might have made some kind of stable, relatively US friendly, at least superficially democratic result a lot more likely.
Putting in too few troops at the start, leading to chaos, and having your troops merely serve as a symbol around which opposition crystalize, and then ramping up, though, that's pretty much a losing strategy.
Google also doesn't have much to lose by making their data portable... almost all their services are free, vs. Salesforce which has the potential to lose millions per year on some of their larger customes.
They don't stand as much to lose from any one customer leaving, but they face as much of a problem as anyone else if the same percentage of their customers choose to leave. What Google is gambling is that, if they have a good product, the reduction in the disincentive to give it a whirl that comes from people knowing up front that if they decide to leave, it will be painless will gain them more customers than easing out migration will lose them. And also that someone that has a good experience leaving one Google service may be more likely to try another Google service.
While Zinni was a successful officer, without the benefit of later hindsight it's hard to credit his tactical/operational skills, as he was Director for Operations for the Unified Task Force in Somalia...I don't think the Black Hawk Down incident was a credit to stunning operational brilliance.
Since Zinni, IIRC, originated the request for additional armor and other support that Colin Powell relayed and Secretary of Defense Les Aspin denied, which resulted in the lack of capacity that produced that fiasco, I don't think it reflects poorly on Zinni, as much as on the Secretary of Defense—who was, quite rightly, sacked, and not years down the line.
Does anyone think that had someone else been in charge they would have brought western style democracy to Iraq?
Someone else might have given Bush competent advice on the real prospects facing an invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, rather than pushing for a plan with less troops for the aftermath than the people with expertise in the field said would be necessary to have any chance of maintaining order.
Whether that would have effected Bush's decisionmaking is, of course, difficult to know.
We'd have Presidents elected with 25-30% of the popular vote. How does that make our government more representative?
Well, first, because we already have mere plurality winners elected, both to the Presidency (Clinton '92 and, I believe, '96, plus certainly Bush '00, just for the most recent ones) and lesser offices, so that's not a new feature. OTOH, a electoral system which favored multiple parties rather than allowing them to be relevant as occasional quirks in the system would, necessarily, involve something beyond first place votes, likely a preference voting system, which would make it much more likely that a candidate would have a clear majority preference over each competing candidate (even if they did not secure a majority of the vote), and where they didn't, something establishing a priority beyond a mere plurality of the first place preferences. So this would be an improvement.
Also, its quite likely that such a system which didn't punish honest voting when preferences don't align with the major party would mean more people actually participating, which also makes the system more representative.
Also, it would make ballot results more credible as honest results, rather than endlessly debated as wins as the result of "spoilers" and "tactical voting", as spoiler effects would be minimized and most of the incentive for tactical voting removed.
There are only two solutions to that. One, is a 2-stage election w/ a runoff. In which case you're still, in effect, given 2 choices. It's no more likely for, say, a Green to be elected thru this system than it is thru our existing system.
The other solution is a coalition government like in Israel. That would mean the end of the imperial presidency and it's not going to happen in America.
Well, no, you could have a preference voting system using IRV or any number of other single-winner preference systems nationally, or you could construct a system to direct electoral votes to be cast as preference votes based on preference voting in the population, or lots of other ways.
You've missed lots of options, including those that most directly address the problem identified.
No matter how you put it, I don't think a President that 75% of the people didn't vote for is a good thing.
But that happens regularly now, with the combination of low turnout and bare majority or plurality winners. That are system achieves that result by discouraging voters and suppressing turnouts doesn't make it better than one that has the same number of people voting for the winner with more eligible people voting.
False. Adult and cord stem cells have actually yielded results, unlike embryonic stem cells.
This is simply false, or at the very least requires a bizarre and tendentious definition of "results". The ESC-derived therapy currently in human clinical trials, a late stage of research that requires quite a lot of "research results" first, is evidence of this.
Embyronic stem cells are such an issue because unlike the other kinds of stem cell research, the fact it yields no results means it has no financial backers, so scientists want to push for federal funding from the government.
False, again. There has been, as well as public investment, considerable private investment in embryonic stem cell research, as indicated here: "Embryonic stem cells show great therapeutic potential but stir controversy because human embryos must be destroyed to retrieve them. State and private investments have recently driven the field to new heights of activity, but political deadlocks have made federal oversight all but nonexistent."
Okay, disregard him. The other Democrats are still conservative Democrats.
By and large, no, neither the old nor the new Democrats in Congress are. sure, a few of each group are, but the majority of the new and the old are not.
Apparently you didn't pay attention. Most of the new seats are anti-gay marriage Democrats, pro-gun Democrats, and anti-abortion Democrats. These guys are going to clash with Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco ideals.
Yes, actually, I did, and too more than just a few that were profiled on TV because the media wanted to focus on the South because the question of the Republicans retaining their hold their promised to make an interesting storyline one way or the other. Apparently, you didn't pay much attention (and you probably don't have much idea about Nancy Pelosi's ideals besides GOP scare-tactic talking points.)
Next time you check that calendar, you may want to take note that elections are in November, not January of 2008
Um, yeah, which is why I said that the Democratic majority that takes office in January 2007 will last a little under 1 year before "2008 rolls around", but closer to 22 months if, by that phrase, you meant the elections in November.
and that new seats don't caucus until the beginning of the year afterward.
Which isn't really relevant unless by "by the time 2008 rolls around" you meant "by the time January 2009 rolls around", which would be a particularly bizarre use of the phrase.
In either case, none of the factors you pointed to, in any case, should make you wonder how long the Democratic majority will last "by the time 2008 rolls around", whatever you meant by that, since any of those can be answered by looking at a calendar without any wondering.
Perhaps you mean to say that it makes you wonder how long that majority would last after the 2008 elections, which would make some sense.
No, its simple preference voting. "Instant run-off" is one way of counting preference ballots, but its not the only one, and not all of them are close analogs of any kind of "runoff" election, except that most of the popular ones, for obvious reasons, reduce to simple majority where there is a majority 1st-place preference.
only cord blood and adult stem cells have ever yielded any research results
False. Embryonic stem cell research has yielded quite a bit of "research results", including a therapy in clinical trials. The other sources you refer to have been used longer, are more easily available, and are more understood with more research done, that's true, but its also understood that they appear to have limitations as to what they can do that make it easier to acheive certain results with them, but limit the scope of what can be done.
There are two factions in the Democratic party--the ultra-left anti-war guys, and the "new blood" Democrats who got elected last night who are anti-abortion, pro-gun, and in some cases, pro-Iraq War (Lieberman).
Lieberman's been in the party and in the Senate for years, he's not "new blood" by any stretch, and yet he's your example of a "new blood" Democrat. Further, most of the Democratic pickups were liberals displacing moderate Democrats in left-leaning parts of the country, though, yes, a few were more moderate to conservative Democrats in right-leaning parts of the country. Of course, the Democratic Party has had moderate and conservative members for years, this election didn't increase the proportion.
So not only will we have a stalled government between them and Bush, but a stalled Democratic party. It makes one wonder how long the Democratic majority will last by the time 2008 rolls around.
From being sworn in January to the beginning of 2008, almost 1 year. Not much to wonder about there, its simple math. If you mean the November elections in 2008, closer to 22 months. Nothing much to wonder about if you can read a calendar.
It's a shame that we live in a matter of state where people have to say "don't vote for the candidate you support because it splits the vote, and in turn the guy both of us oppose will win". You should pick who you want, based on your criteria, and let the chips fall where they may.
Yes, you should, and we should have an electoral system where non-tactical voting doesn't have significant perverse practical consequences. But, until we do have such a system, you're going to have plenty of people pointing to the real consequences of naive voting. If you don't want to hear that, you ought to work toward fixing the electoral system so that what they are saying isn't true, rather than complaining that people point out the truth too much.
Speaking of, why does the Green Party get so much support as opposed to the Libertarians (which from what I can tell, seem much more "mainstream" in that if you asked someone their thoughts, would probably fall in line with them)?
Because while most people believe in broad abstract outline what the libertarians claim to believe (low taxes, restrict government to essential functions), when the rubber meets the roads on real concrete policy choices, they tend to differ with libertarians and fall closer to some other party on which functions are essential, how taxes should be distributed, etc.
The number of humans that the Pentagon can afford to employ with adequate skill in the languages it wants to target are inadequate to process all the channels of information it would like to filter for potentially interesting information, further, the more humans know what information is being looked for (and what is flagged), the greater the security risk.
Wouldnt the original audio need to be stored as well, for evidential reasons?
The Department of Defense isn't particularly interested in evidence. Indeed, in many cases once they have the information they need to make a decision and the decision is made, it seems they'd be happier if the underlying original data was irretrievably lost to prevent any after-the-fact criticism of either their decisions or their methods.
Seems likely to be very useful for specifically what they suggest it is for (flagging potentially interesting material for further review by human analysts, a kind of time-saving filtering device for the limited pool of translators available.)
But beyond that, I wouldn't give too much faith in any kind of mechanical translation as particularly reliable on its own except on narrow kinds of material. It conceivably might work for strictly literal usages, or for fairly stable idiomatic uses, but unless you have frequent collection and incorporation of usage data from every culture and subculture that may be a source of translated material, its going to fail, sometimes subtly and sometimes spectacularly, for a lot of idiom. Similarly, even within the same language, different groups using it will have different idiomatic uses that sometimes will produce different or opposing meanings for similar usages, which will require accurate identification of the source at more than just the language level to get correct results from. There's a lot of evolving cultural context that informs the use of language...
The two-party system is NOT part of the American way.
Its been a feature of American government practically since the adoption of the Constitution, and is readily predictable from the combination of Constitutional structure and the kind of voting and districts used from the beginning (admittedly, the latter portions are not Constitutional requirements, and could be changed, but certainly have been generally as the founders envisioned.) The two-party system pretty clearly is part of the "American way" even if it wasn't part of the founders vision (and whether something like it was or wasn't may not be answered the same for each of the founders.)
The strangehold of the two party system is what gets all kind of bad politicians - from both sides - to get elected without having real positions on issues, and then to pass laws that suck because it's politicially infeasible to vote against your party. It didn't use to be that way.
I think that mistakes the source of the problem, the two party system isn't what causes that it is simply another way of stating that effect: the cause is the use of majority-runoff and plurality elections in single member districts for legislative elections combined with the usual rule of winner-take-all statewide elections of multi-seat slates of Presidential electors.
But our government was founded on the policy of it being hard to get anything done.
True of the Articles of Confederation, less true of the system under the Constitution, which was largely a result of the perception that that whole "make it hard to get anything done" idea had been taken way too far.
The increasing number of independent votes helps finance independent parties, helps establish their creditibility with voters (most of whom have the reverse of the submitter's position - they don't want to "waste" their vote - people hate voting for a loser) and generally gives them an increasing chance to win some elections
The only thing that is going to give currently-minor parties (they are no more "independent" than the majors) a reasonable chance of winning more than the occasional office is radical reform of electoral systems, which is probably going to have to be led by a citizen initiative in some state which allows them, or total collapse of a major party (which will just allow one minor party to replace one major party, as the Republicans effectively did when the Whigs collapsed.)
Most of the spam blocking systems depend upon IP addresses.
With IPv6, there are (effectively) an unlimited number of IP addresses available for spammers.
So, we'll have to block spam smarter (or, more likely, "allow mail" smarter, based on some kind of trust system.) But we've need that for a long time anyway, and IP address-based blocking doesn't really stop anywhere near enough spam.
Except then, when they decide they don't like OOo (just because it is unfamiliar), they'll decide that it is Linux's fault. So, they should switch to Linux but keep using MS office.
From the screenshots I've seen of Office 2007, OOo 2.0 will probably be more immediately familiar to most Office 2003 (and previous) users than Office 2007.
Slashdot Mirror
You should finish reading sentences before you clip in the middle and respond to them. The system I discussed wasn't IRV/STV, it was IRV/STV without loser elimination, which in addition to being the source of the infelicities in the results of IRV/STV, is also why it is particularly bad in terms of computational complexity. In the single winner case, I'm pretty sure IRV without loser elimination is O(n^2) [any single round is O(n) and the limit on number of rounds is n]; equally important, unlike plain IRV, its summable, which allows it to be practical to do by-precinct counts and report counts rather than every individual ballot upstream without downstream communication (in the multiwinner case, you have to either transmit ballots upstream or have downstream communication to do winner elimination, but that's probably true of any multiwinner system that produces proportional rather than essentially winner-take-all results.) Anyhow, I don't think computational complexity is as important (so long as you aren't dealing with NP-complete problems) in evaluating voting systems as the validity, consistency, and meaningfulness of the ballot data, which is absolutely critical. Approval, because the same information on different ballots doesn't have a consistent meaning, is flawed on that, for me, fundamental concern.
I'm familiar with approval voting, and IMO its a lot worse than just about any half-decent preference voting system because it is less expressive and less consistent (that is, the same information on different ballots doesn't have the same meaning.) Personally, I prefer a preference system that amounts to IRV/STV (depending on whether you are talking about single or multiwinner cases) but without lowest-vote elimination, which is an unnecessary step that is the source of several of the (admittedly, often practically insignificant) problems with IRV/STV; its fairly simple both to vote and understood, but more expressive and consistent than approval.
That being said, approval would probably be a slight improvement over majority-runoff and plurality systems, though even there its a step backwards in terms of consistency.
That's true, though in IT you can get a number of certifications on particular technology that may be worth more to particular jobs than having a CS degree.
(Yes, I know CS is not the same thing as IT, but a lot of the consideration in this thread has been whether CS is worth it based on prospects for IT jobs. Clearly, no one is going to give you a CS faculty position because you pass a certification exam in some aspect of IT.)
Impeachment hearings happen in the House, prior to the House voting on articles of impeachment, which takes a simple majority.
The Senate doesn't get to vote on whether impeachment proceedings happen at all, since they begin before the Senate gets involved. Once the House holds whatever impeachment hearings it wants, debates the issues, and decides to send articles of impeachment to the Senate, it requires a 2/3 vote of the Senate, after the trial of the impeachment in the Senate, to convict on the articles of impeachment, and to impose sanctions (constitutionally limited to removal from office and a permanent ban on holding any other office of trust under the United States) to go with that conviction. Whether enough votes can be found there probably depends on a lot on the public response to the hearings and charges and the substance supporting the allegations, though a narrow, at best, majority for the Democrats in the Senate means that there would have to be a strong outcry to convict.
No. While some are, others are based (if you reread what I wrote before) on the idea that even with same people voting, voting systems that support multiparty systems (preference voting systems) also provide results that are more representative since they do not encourage suppressing honest preference in favor of tactical voting.
And its not a "postulation", its an inference from seeing studies of systems of government, voting behavior, etc., from democracies throughout the world.
Sure, but why don't they "like" or "enjoy" the political process. I don't know about the people you know, but I often hear people say that its because of negative politics (a product of a two-party system where a negative for one major party candidate is in effect a bonus for the other major party candidate, something that is less true in a preference system, where the utility of negative campaigns that you hope drive people away from your opponent at least slightly more than they drive them away from you is largely eliminated). There's other reasons, of course, some of which are and some of which are not connected to the two party system.
Better for whom? Almost any candidate will be better for some of the eligible voters.
Neither is mine. I don't want a Libertarian President, I'm a Democrat (and not, despite the fact that that Party is far from perfect, for tactical reasons: I find the Democratic Party better than the existing minor parties even excluding tactical concerns.) I want an electoral system that respects the public, promotes honest rather than tactical voting, and provides reasonable results with honest balloting. That means, as I see it, preference voting for pretty much all offices, and some method of proportional representation, probably through candidate-centered (say, by Single Transferable Vote) elections in small (say around 5 member) multimember districts for some legislative elections.
Three parliamentary systems, one of which (the UK) uses an electoral system very close to that in the US for most elections, is hardly a good sample of "multi-party" systems.
None of those has any nationally, directly elected, officials but neither does the US. In the US, as in Germany, etc., the only nationally elected officials are indirectly elected by another body that is directly elected by the people and/or appointed by subordinate government bodies.
And its not a coincidence at all, its rather the norm of parliamentary as opposed to presidential (or "separation of powers") democratic systems (though the US, as a Presidential system, as noted, also lacks nationally directly-elected officers), though even there your blanket statement is a result of your rather limited selection: the Re
That's really true of most degrees, nevertheless, the structure of a formal academic environment helps many people to maintain the discipline to do it, often provides access to skilled instructors that make gaining understanding easier, generally increases the diversity of equipment and resources you have access to in the learning process, may, as a degree is something people often take note of, increase the material reward you get from it, and may make you eligible for additional financial assistance (which may or may not make up for the additional cost) and other benefits.
Whether those benefits are worthwhile for any particular person interested in getting an understanding of the field will, of course, vary from person to person.
And openness as far as transfers out as well as in is a good way to underline that they have the best-in-class services, because it makes services not similarly open suspect ("why are they trying to lock me in?")
Yes, you can pardon someone before they are charged as, notably, Ford did for Nixon.
The Republicans in Reagan's 6th year lost 5 seats in the House. The Democrats in Clinton's 6th year "lost" -5 seats in the House. The Republicans in Bush's 6th year have lost at least 28 seats. Doesn't seem too typical.
Sure, if you go back 30+ years, you see big swings, but that doesn't really reflect politics of this generation.
They don't stand as much to lose from any one customer leaving, but they face as much of a problem as anyone else if the same percentage of their customers choose to leave. What Google is gambling is that, if they have a good product, the reduction in the disincentive to give it a whirl that comes from people knowing up front that if they decide to leave, it will be painless will gain them more customers than easing out migration will lose them. And also that someone that has a good experience leaving one Google service may be more likely to try another Google service.
Since Zinni, IIRC, originated the request for additional armor and other support that Colin Powell relayed and Secretary of Defense Les Aspin denied, which resulted in the lack of capacity that produced that fiasco, I don't think it reflects poorly on Zinni, as much as on the Secretary of Defense—who was, quite rightly, sacked, and not years down the line.
Well, first, because we already have mere plurality winners elected, both to the Presidency (Clinton '92 and, I believe, '96, plus certainly Bush '00, just for the most recent ones) and lesser offices, so that's not a new feature. OTOH, a electoral system which favored multiple parties rather than allowing them to be relevant as occasional quirks in the system would, necessarily, involve something beyond first place votes, likely a preference voting system, which would make it much more likely that a candidate would have a clear majority preference over each competing candidate (even if they did not secure a majority of the vote), and where they didn't, something establishing a priority beyond a mere plurality of the first place preferences. So this would be an improvement.
Also, its quite likely that such a system which didn't punish honest voting when preferences don't align with the major party would mean more people actually participating, which also makes the system more representative.
Also, it would make ballot results more credible as honest results, rather than endlessly debated as wins as the result of "spoilers" and "tactical voting", as spoiler effects would be minimized and most of the incentive for tactical voting removed.
Well, no, you could have a preference voting system using IRV or any number of other single-winner preference systems nationally, or you could construct a system to direct electoral votes to be cast as preference votes based on preference voting in the population, or lots of other ways.
You've missed lots of options, including those that most directly address the problem identified.
But that happens regularly now, with the combination of low turnout and bare majority or plurality winners. That are system achieves that result by discouraging voters and suppressing turnouts doesn't make it better than one that has the same number of people voting for the winner with more eligible people voting.
This is simply false, or at the very least requires a bizarre and tendentious definition of "results". The ESC-derived therapy currently in human clinical trials, a late stage of research that requires quite a lot of "research results" first, is evidence of this.
False, again. There has been, as well as public investment, considerable private investment in embryonic stem cell research, as indicated here: "Embryonic stem cells show great therapeutic potential but stir controversy because human embryos must be destroyed to retrieve them. State and private investments have recently driven the field to new heights of activity, but political deadlocks have made federal oversight all but nonexistent."
By and large, no, neither the old nor the new Democrats in Congress are. sure, a few of each group are, but the majority of the new and the old are not.
Yes, actually, I did, and too more than just a few that were profiled on TV because the media wanted to focus on the South because the question of the Republicans retaining their hold their promised to make an interesting storyline one way or the other. Apparently, you didn't pay much attention (and you probably don't have much idea about Nancy Pelosi's ideals besides GOP scare-tactic talking points.)
Um, yeah, which is why I said that the Democratic majority that takes office in January 2007 will last a little under 1 year before "2008 rolls around", but closer to 22 months if, by that phrase, you meant the elections in November.
Which isn't really relevant unless by "by the time 2008 rolls around" you meant "by the time January 2009 rolls around", which would be a particularly bizarre use of the phrase.
In either case, none of the factors you pointed to, in any case, should make you wonder how long the Democratic majority will last "by the time 2008 rolls around", whatever you meant by that, since any of those can be answered by looking at a calendar without any wondering.
Perhaps you mean to say that it makes you wonder how long that majority would last after the 2008 elections, which would make some sense.
No, its simple preference voting. "Instant run-off" is one way of counting preference ballots, but its not the only one, and not all of them are close analogs of any kind of "runoff" election, except that most of the popular ones, for obvious reasons, reduce to simple majority where there is a majority 1st-place preference.
False. Embryonic stem cell research has yielded quite a bit of "research results", including a therapy in clinical trials. The other sources you refer to have been used longer, are more easily available, and are more understood with more research done, that's true, but its also understood that they appear to have limitations as to what they can do that make it easier to acheive certain results with them, but limit the scope of what can be done.
Lieberman's been in the party and in the Senate for years, he's not "new blood" by any stretch, and yet he's your example of a "new blood" Democrat. Further, most of the Democratic pickups were liberals displacing moderate Democrats in left-leaning parts of the country, though, yes, a few were more moderate to conservative Democrats in right-leaning parts of the country. Of course, the Democratic Party has had moderate and conservative members for years, this election didn't increase the proportion.
From being sworn in January to the beginning of 2008, almost 1 year. Not much to wonder about there, its simple math. If you mean the November elections in 2008, closer to 22 months. Nothing much to wonder about if you can read a calendar.
Yes, you should, and we should have an electoral system where non-tactical voting doesn't have significant perverse practical consequences. But, until we do have such a system, you're going to have plenty of people pointing to the real consequences of naive voting. If you don't want to hear that, you ought to work toward fixing the electoral system so that what they are saying isn't true, rather than complaining that people point out the truth too much.
Because while most people believe in broad abstract outline what the libertarians claim to believe (low taxes, restrict government to essential functions), when the rubber meets the roads on real concrete policy choices, they tend to differ with libertarians and fall closer to some other party on which functions are essential, how taxes should be distributed, etc.
The number of humans that the Pentagon can afford to employ with adequate skill in the languages it wants to target are inadequate to process all the channels of information it would like to filter for potentially interesting information, further, the more humans know what information is being looked for (and what is flagged), the greater the security risk.
The Department of Defense isn't particularly interested in evidence. Indeed, in many cases once they have the information they need to make a decision and the decision is made, it seems they'd be happier if the underlying original data was irretrievably lost to prevent any after-the-fact criticism of either their decisions or their methods.
Seems likely to be very useful for specifically what they suggest it is for (flagging potentially interesting material for further review by human analysts, a kind of time-saving filtering device for the limited pool of translators available.)
But beyond that, I wouldn't give too much faith in any kind of mechanical translation as particularly reliable on its own except on narrow kinds of material. It conceivably might work for strictly literal usages, or for fairly stable idiomatic uses, but unless you have frequent collection and incorporation of usage data from every culture and subculture that may be a source of translated material, its going to fail, sometimes subtly and sometimes spectacularly, for a lot of idiom. Similarly, even within the same language, different groups using it will have different idiomatic uses that sometimes will produce different or opposing meanings for similar usages, which will require accurate identification of the source at more than just the language level to get correct results from. There's a lot of evolving cultural context that informs the use of language...
Its been a feature of American government practically since the adoption of the Constitution, and is readily predictable from the combination of Constitutional structure and the kind of voting and districts used from the beginning (admittedly, the latter portions are not Constitutional requirements, and could be changed, but certainly have been generally as the founders envisioned.) The two-party system pretty clearly is part of the "American way" even if it wasn't part of the founders vision (and whether something like it was or wasn't may not be answered the same for each of the founders.)
I think that mistakes the source of the problem, the two party system isn't what causes that it is simply another way of stating that effect: the cause is the use of majority-runoff and plurality elections in single member districts for legislative elections combined with the usual rule of winner-take-all statewide elections of multi-seat slates of Presidential electors.
True of the Articles of Confederation, less true of the system under the Constitution, which was largely a result of the perception that that whole "make it hard to get anything done" idea had been taken way too far.
The only thing that is going to give currently-minor parties (they are no more "independent" than the majors) a reasonable chance of winning more than the occasional office is radical reform of electoral systems, which is probably going to have to be led by a citizen initiative in some state which allows them, or total collapse of a major party (which will just allow one minor party to replace one major party, as the Republicans effectively did when the Whigs collapsed.)
So, we'll have to block spam smarter (or, more likely, "allow mail" smarter, based on some kind of trust system.) But we've need that for a long time anyway, and IP address-based blocking doesn't really stop anywhere near enough spam.
From the screenshots I've seen of Office 2007, OOo 2.0 will probably be more immediately familiar to most Office 2003 (and previous) users than Office 2007.