A third party vote says "this person votes, even if their guy can't win. Maybe, if you had beliefs and policy closer to the third party this person voted for, you would have that vote as well, and likely several others representing people like this one, who share those beliefs but didn't even feel enfranchised".

In this way, a third party vote matters massively, because it actually influences what the main parties will do- they want more votes, and you are providing them a helpful guide to get one.

The most dangerous thing in modern politics is the "safe zone". A major party candidate from a fully safe place can sponsor bills that are nationally reviled, even disliked within their own party, without any fear of reprisal, as they won't personally lose the votes. Because the main party guys sitting back WANT thees nationally reviled bills, they will avoid allowing any others in the same party to run against them. These safe zones are how the central party leaders get their will enforced- if a part of the map is guaranteed to vote red (or blue), and you are the red (or blue) chief, YOU have the power over that politician's career- if they stop obeying you, you can run another guy against him and make him lose the primary (aka, the real election), and they know that.

Parts of the nation that always vote the same are the least enfranchised parts of the nation, because their politicians only care about pleasing the party. In contested areas, the party has to run an actual candidate, who is not beholden to the party. As the nation becomes polarized, there are more safe spots, and less contested spots. That helps red (and blue) party elites, and hurts everyone else.

Both Republocrats and Demicans win elections, and Republocrats always have the "we're the underdog, the Demicans have all the money and influence behind the scenes". Obviously, the Demicans think the same about the Republocrats. But the both win, and they both lose, and they both have just ludicrous amounts of money trying to buy that influence.

It's true that Republicans and Democrats do have different strengths when it comes to financing campaigns and manipulating the public, but they both do the both of those things at a literally professional level, year in and year out. It's definitely not fair to assume that one party has some crazy shadow wing that the other one lacks.

In Canada though, all those time zones matter. In the US, the eastern and central time zone matter, mountain some of the time, and pacific never fucking ever.

Here, lemme give you some advance results for 2016 election.

1)- Idaho, Wyoming, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Lousiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Utah will all vote Republican. Alaska is Republican. Moose joke.

2)- Washington, Oregon, and California (the entire "left coast") will all vote Democrat. So will the northeast, including Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware. Hawai'i is also fullblue.

There's others that are pretty safe bets, but these absolutely WILL vote the way I stated above, without any exceptions. The leftmost timezone is irrelevant for determining the presidency, because you can file those votes already, and while there's a ton of electoral votes in the eastern and central timezones that are going to go one way or the other for sure, as a time zone, things are still unpredictable.

This decline in polls is VERY welcome. In fact, it's about the only way democracy will have a chance going forward.

The old style poll was democratic in nature: Do you believe in god? What car do you like? Why do you buy that brand of TV?

This was used without excess interpretation, and made available. Pollsters were sure to get a decent response rate, they were sure to get data that was statistically relevant, etc.

This gave polls a magic power: people believed they were true.

Where power goes, corruption follows.

Modern polls:

1)- Hardly ever list their rate of response.
This little trick allows the pollster to get what he wants his poll to say. It also can make for wildly sensational polls in general.

2)- Often is a form of advertisement or political mindfuck.
Ex: Are you Christian? Who will you be voting for in the next election?
Asking the questions in this order makes you more likely to vote for a candidate you perceive as more in line with the FIRST question. So if the first question is about God, you will be (statistically) more likely to actually vote, and more likely to vote for a Republican. No, no, you say, Reasons. First, you are quite possibly incorrect. Second, even if you are correct in saying that this can't possibly effect YOU, just pretend that it DOES effect everyone else, including those you know and love. They wouldn't do it if it did not literally make votes out of nothing.

3)- Way too meta, fuck that noise.
Current polls are often done with a bunch of other questions whose actual goals are to assess the level of corporate threat from different demographics and locations. You could think you are answering questions about kitchen cleaning products, but in reality many of the questions are just there as smoke screen (and no one cares about the thought or time you spend on them), and the "real" questions are to determine the level of political savy of a certain area, the likelihood of a future lawsuit, etc.

4)- Clearly not a civil service.
Polls used to be perceived something like a civil service- the companies, who have a responsibility to make the world a better place (this was not so long ago a thing- before the court decision saying that corporations had to act to maximize profits for shareholders), would get information on how to trade off reliability, quality, and cost, to make your life better. The politicians, always interested in Democracy, would figure out how to better represent people. The scientists, always interested in metrics, would figure out what you wanted and research in that direction. I don't know how true this actually was, but that was the PERCEPTION. Even if you don't keep up with all the psych tricks that any profitable or powerfocussed entity is employing, everyone sort of knows that no one is taking their opinions and making a better world for everyone- they are figuring out where you aren't looking so they can slash the pound of flesh with less of a fight.
This used to be a census. Now, it's intel.

Pollsters can fuck right off. With some exceptions- actual science still needs polls, and that's sad for them, but they are a rounding error in the giant race to "solve the democracy problem" that companies face (they don't like you voting elsewhere with your dollars) and that politicians face (they don't like that elections are not safe and determined in their favor).

It is rational to avoid polls, unless you are in possession of expert knowledge of the poll taker's integrity- never the case.

All that will happen is that the claim will be entirely divorced from the contents. If this happens, homeopathic stuff becomes an alluring online business- make up a name (that you can copyright), do the homeopath shuffle to produce a substance chemically identical to water (because it IS just water after that many "remove 90%, fill with water, shake" steps)... and don't make any claims.

Then another website just so happens to map your trademarked names to the supposed whatever the fuck a 100x mixture of semen and bug brains is supposed to work on. The believers still buy their potions, but the pharmacists likely can't be the ones doing the mixing.

Now, that's in the US. in the countries where it's basically paid for by the government as part of a national health care plan, these changes will only be positive- you'll still be able to buy your placebo, but not have the rest of the citizenry pay for it. Hell, that'll probably increase the "efficacy" of it, if you have to pay for it yourself...

Are you suggesting poisoning people? That seems absurd.

Also, what poisons? Keep in mind your poisons have to have a long enough life, penetrate the entire horn of a living creature without harming it (likely impossible), and in your BEST case scenario, end up hurting actual people. Plus the fact that, to be effective, the poisons would have to be unfilterable / unbindable, an unlikely situation.

It's not just morally dubious, it's overall just evil. But unlike most evil plans, it doesn't help anyone, not even the rhinos.

Not if the prosthetic horn was visibly and obviously not a real rhino horn (to the poachers and also to those giving it to them).

Given that a rhino can absolutely live without its horn... why not farm them? They wouldn't be cheap to farm, but I absolutely don't buy the cheap counterargument of "it would create demand". As long as your rhino farmers aren't some massive conglomerate trying to increase demand (ex, tobacco industry) but instead offering the "real deal" at prices that, while still expensive, could put men who risk their lives and are in some cases willing to kill to get their rhino horn cash, into different jobs completely...

Another piece is that, by virtue of having such a risk/reward setup that encourages killing or maiming the rhino so as to have a lower chance of being caught, the current system does not do quite as much to discourage the harm of rhinos as it could. A setup that, to a rational poacher, would make it worth their while to remove a horn and leave the animal healthy, would do a great deal here. An example might be that, if caught harvesting, the poacher is fined but gets to keep some fraction of the horn- but only if the animal is (not counting the horn mutilation) unharmed, with the existing stringent punishments for a poacher caught in the hack-and-slash situation.

Obviously, the ideal solution would be a twofold combination of, an artificial rhino horn that is indistinguishable and essentially the same biologically as the horn (thus undercutting the market, and also satisfying whatever mages need these for spell components or whatever), and a system that protects the existing rhinos more absolutely than the current one. This is partially a good effort towards the first (but doesn't seem to satisfy the 'artificial rhino horn' for the consumers, who will inevitably evolve more sophisticated tests), and the second is already the main attempt at protection... but it doesn't seem able to solve the problem for the desperate poachers, who are still faced with a good enough rate of return for their risk (solving the problem in this case being raising their risk to near unity).

Overall:
It's an interesting idea, but ultimately I have a lot of doubts. In order for it to work, they need to make the product that they advertise, put in place a linkage to the existing illicit rhino traders, a dubious path, especially if some believe that the rhino really IS magical or whatever, and finally, have a solid enough solution in place that a lab can't simply detect their forgery with ease, thus rendering their fake product low value, while ALSO apparently convincing the rhino preservationists that this is all a good idea (generally not possible: they'll give you a story about how it will create demand for genuine rhino parts)....

It seems they have well educated if misguided western opponents who don't want to legitimize the trade, armed and desperate southern opponents who want to poach to feed their families, and wealthy and essentially religious eastern opponents who will jump through hoops to ensure that the Horn Must Flow so they can drink their immortality soup or cast their blizzard spells or whatever. That's a lot of enemies... and before the fact that they could have cash flow issues, and have nothing else to fall back on.

Risky investment indeed!

I mean really, it should be obvious by now- if Microsoft is willing to jump through hoops to prevent you from disabling auto-update, then it must be VERY much in your interest to disable auto-update. It must be super in your best interest if they are willing to try to shut it off. They wouldn't take away that if you weren't gonna need it real bad in the near future.

http://www.howtogeek.com/21916...

I mean, it's an announced negafeature already. You have to get one of the non-home versions to do this. What version do all these "free" upgrades give you? The one where you can't turn off their binaries, advertisements, and whatever the fuck else they think is good for you to have.

Interestingly, several of the mobile games I'm playing right now have a facebook login feature. This is for the obvious reasons- they want me to spam people for them- but the bigger problem is, most of these games don't have a reasonable way to get BACK my account if something happens to my phone data.

So I'm absolutely considering creating a facebook account for exactly this reason. Since I don't have a real facebook, and don't want one, I've been trying to figure out the odds that someone could get my account locked / deleted (and presumably my game data too).

It's a poor set of choices if you actually want to play these set of games at all.

The problem is when a business comes into a space, "embraces and extends" the standard, and makes themselves the gatekeepers of something they have no business having a fucking fence around in the first place.

A business charges for services or goods or something, someone who takes all your shit and charges you to use it is something else entirely.

My concern is this: only the more expensive ("pro") versions will let you control your upgrades. Upgrades are pretty filthy- routinely booting you out of games, crashing stuff you need to have happen, messing up everything- and disabling that and only doing it when YOU want is a pretty big deal.

More importantly, making this a "premium only" feature means that, once you have 10, your choices are
1- Take exactly the upgrades they want on your machine, when they want it, forever,
2- Some kind of hack
3- Pay for the upper version to get basic admin rights on your machine back

But that's what a "premium only" feature means- what does it imply?

Combined with all the "get 10 for free" crap we see going around (on top of the fact that 10 will become a mandatory pack-in on most hardware and essentially all laptops), and we see a Microsoft that is absolutely desperate to get you away from a Windows box you have full control over, and onto one that THEY control... and that means they see forsee a great deal of profit for doing that.

Exactly what else will get patched into 10? What's on their upgrade cycle? Everyone with a free copy of 10 gets to find out what the price they actually paid was later... just give them a little time.

The latest 7 patch puts an advertisement for a product on your box- the 10 button. I'd hazard a guess that this won't be the only time you have advertisements spamming your GUI in the near future. Just look at the X-Box interface for a preview of "check this shit out bro".

I could be wrong. I hope I am. But I'll wait a few months to see if it is good, and then I'll buy the premium version that keeps my admin control, and if I'm wrong I'm out a bit of cash, but if I'm right, I'll be able to use my PC without whatever the hell this mandatory software injection scheme they have is... maybe.

Or I stay on 7. Which appears to have only gotten better with time, based on Microsoft's devout refusal to produce a version that isn't garbage.

You sound like a psychopath.

Literally, I mean. You literally sound like a psychopath.

...so did you just fulfill a destiny created by Steve Ballmer?

"...about a guy who is neither a genius nor a hero, nor a great inventor, he just did a very good job over a long period of time in a difficult role as technical leader..."

Lets talk about this for a sec.

Does he have to be a genius? Can he really not be a hero to those of us that admire strong leadership and a huge "get it done" mentality in a world where everyone is too busy navel gazing to solve problems? And what is really meant by "invention"?

Lastly, why is someone who does a very good job in a difficult role as a technical leader, qualified by "just"?

" Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, or Bill Joy"

Did I shit talk these badasses?

Let me break it down:

Linus just started doing. He got shit from all directions, and kept doing. "Experts" came and told him why he would fail, making predictions that all were wrong, and he kept doing. He's still doing, *right this second*. He didn't sit around making excuses about how he's not Dennis Ritchie- he did. And he did well.

The best things are when he walks into a thread and tells everyone that they are wrong, and then just keeps going. Sometimes he doesn't care- he didn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. He could code faster than people could bitch, he could integrate faster than people could debate, and that made a working product.

Maybe there's no genius in that. But there is immense effort, and a willingness to be stubborn even when it cost him.

" but every so often he acts like a total d**k"

Ya, I file those under "the good parts".

"That kind of remark could get someone fired from a tech company."

The fact that most companies couldn't deal with someone like Linus is a huge weakness of most companies. It's their loss. In the interest of removing conflict, they expunge productivity and creativity. What do you think Linus would say upon thinking about the fact that his amazing rants would get him fired? Think he cries about it?

I mean, I don't think so.