Get your facts straight. Two party systems are an outgrowth of a one-vote-per-voter system, the number of parties and voting system have nothing to do with the strength of democracy, and we don't even live in a democracy - it might be at best a 'representative democracy', but it is functionally more like a republic. None of that is my opinion, just poly-sci 101 and the math behind voting systems.

In a one-vote-per-voter system, a vote for a third party erodes support the the most closely aligned major party - thus all 3rd parties are necessarily fringe. Pick a different voting system, get a different result. Any of the more complicated voting systems have common results where 'compromise candidates' (i.e. middle ground) will win out. You don't just get the more moderate sounding candidate from the two extremes.

What does all of this have to do with music? Everything. The #1 selling song at Christmas is... just the most commonly purchased song. You vote with your wallet. You are not limited to one vote, or one song. If you cared, and had enough cash, you could make most any song the #1 selling song.

What happened here is that a minority of people like crappy pop, and they buy whatever the latest crappy pop is. The vast majority of the population buys music they actually like, but their 'votes' get diluted among all different genres of music. Most of the time, it doesn't matter, because good music and popularity are only slightly correlated, and may in fact be anti-correlated if you happen to dig the indie scene. Once per year, though, someone does a big press release about how crappy-pop-du-jour is outselling everything else. It may only account for a tiny fraction of total sales, but it is the #1 single. People got tired of it, and shouted it down, which they could do by picking a compromise - RATM.

Everyone who wanted *anything other* than crappy pop used one 'vote' on that song, and Bob's your uncle. That didn't change what else they went and bought - it just skewed the stats about #1 singles in an attempt to make certain advertisers STFU.

You can do that when buying music - the cost of one extra 'vote' is low enough that people who are pissed at Simon are happy to spend a bit to spike his wheel. You could do with voting for politicians, too - all you have to do is make it so that a compromise vote doesn't hurt your 'main party' candidate. Voila - 3rd parties start showing up with moderate views, the wackos still get left out of the final picture, and pretty soon, you get people voting on the merits of a candidate instead of their party affiliations and campaign promises you know they are going to break anyway. You'll still have a small number of dominate parties, but you'll have real 3rd, 4th and 5th options, and an overall decrease in cognitive dissonance among politicians.

And less crappy pop music. Or not, but one can hope.

The problem isn't the lack of paid overtime. The salary reflects the job, and it rather all averages out... as long as you're responsible for your work, your mistakes, and the work and mistakes of any subordinates you might have.

Where this model breaks is when you become accountable for the mistakes of others who are not your subordinates, but your peers.

IOW, you think you can enjoy the long weekend, because your work is on track. But no! Doofus-peer screwed up really badly, and is too dumb to fix it by the Tuesday deadline, so you get to play hero... without remuneration. That part rather sucks. The worst part is you realize that if it isn't fixed, the company can suffer, and hence you will suffer, through no fault of your own. So, refusing is rather like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Then there are shops where bugs are assigned to those who have demonstrated an ability to fix them quickly... and where any bug you fix is presumed to be a mistake YOU made, and therefore reflects badly on you come review time. A certain company in Redmond is notorious for this -- the skill greatest rewarded is not good work, or an ability to fix the mistakes of others, but the ability to deflect work to others.

I once worked in a place where, after a full day, had to pull an all-nighter to fix someone else's screw up. Well, the job was done, I left around noon, and got docked a half a day vacation for doing so.

Not all shops are like that, of course, and I'm quite pleased about where I work now. But, enough are that it's off-putting. Combine the presumption that the good will fix the work of the bad with incomes that attract the incompetent and management that often can't tell the difference, and it can be a recipe for a real sweatshop. The only solution is to keep one's eyes open for better employment in such circumstances.

Agreed. MMOs are basically copying from each other, because it's risky to try something new. They all want to be the next WoW, rather than just wanting to make enough money to stay in business. So aim for the lowest common denominator. In a real role playing game, many or most players are quite happy with a skill or point based system instead of classes, but in MMO players want to keep score and know who's better than who. They also want to be able to look at someone and decide quickly if they're worthy of joining their group or not. So being able to say "I'm a level 37 Foozle" attracts a lot of players, and the strategy component (these really aren't RPGs) means players want to be able to think like "we need 2 warriors, 1 enchanter, 1 archer, and 1 medic". These are old ideas that were outdated in early 80s, and yet they survive.

A lot of this is marketing. It's easier to market something that's familiar to the masses than to craft something for a niche market.

"Spend this on flu research" is OK. "Give this to Company X to build a research center in District Y to maybe do some flu research" is not.

So Israeli security forces aren't just acting like stormtroopers, they're shooting like them, too!

Ever since I saw the pictures of the w5 star forming region in the soul nebula, I've found myself eager to learn more about the birth of stars.
Also, let me be the first to say this thread is useless without pics.

Well, all users that don't care or don't understand are going to pick one of the first 5 browsers. The other 7 are going to be initially hidden and no one who doesn't care is going to bother scrolling down. (Ok, "no one" is a little strong. I'm sure there are some people who will do it).

Actually, I have a feeling most of the users who don't know what they're doing will look for "Internet" and find "Microsoft INTERNET Explorer".

Uberdork: "Now if only we could get them to ship Windows with a choice to use bash."

I was with 3 other people for dinner the other night, none of them geeks in ANY way... When ebooks came up, 2 of them had heard the Kindle 1984 story and it gave them the willies. "They can just delete my stuff?"

Based on this massive sample I will say that Joe Public may be more aware of the problem than we give him credit for.

I was under the impression that DVD-A releases had virtually stopped. SACD is limited to Jazz and Classical, with just a few artists outside of those genres ocassionaly doing something.

So I would bet the opposite.

This upsets the customer. I know it sounds completely back-asswards, but most people would rather be blocked for an hour, told why they are blocked, and told to change, and then resume their normal speeds, as opposed to NOT getting a warning, having speeds decrease what they are paying for, and are left alone and angry to the point where they will go somewhere else.

I guess it's cheaper to sacrifice 5% of revenue than to have to undertake a network upgrade.

This mentality is part of why the U.S. lags so much in broadband.

(1) If noscript has an exploit (which is unlikely to be exploited anyway given the limited target population), do you really think a windows update or real time antivirus is really going to be able to catch it faster/better?

(2) Malicious jpegs (AFAIK) were patched 5 years ago (i.e. covered in service packs since)

Nvidia's entire 19x series of drivers have consistently been a problem with fallout 3, ranging from stuttering to BSOD's. I recommend installing the WHQL Release 186. I never had bluescreens, but it stuttered like mad til I reverted to 186. Got a few graphical glitches in complex geometry (clipping mostly) but they were minor and the smoothness was worth it. I'll give this to nvidia, at least they do make the earlier drivers easily available.

Now if someone could tell me which drivers will play nice with both Dragon Age and Anno 1404... Don't tell me, ATI, right?

Actually, no. The disaster happened because a test was carried out less experienced night operators who did every don't in the manual trying to follow a test procedure they did not understand. The last straw was removing more control rods completely from the core than was permitted for any reason in an attempt to brute force their way past xenon poisoning rather than scrubbing the test and allowing the iodine and xenon to decay before attempting to increase output as the manual required. At that point the reactor was in an extremely unstable condition.

They then made matters worse by reducing the coolant flow to the point that voids formed in the core (the reduced flow was part of the test procedure). In that particular reactor design, voids increase the reaction rate. That taken together DID "burn off" the xenon and suddenly the reacter was way over it's design limits. Compounding the problem, the tips of the control rods were inert but displace water (effectively a void), so when they tried to scram the reactor it exploded instead.

During all of this, several safety systems that would have scramed the reactor in time were manually disabled.

Put another way, they started with an intrinsically dangerous reactor design (not permitted in the U.S.), overrode a number of safety systems, mis-handled the power level, then attempted to recover by performing an absolutely prohibited operation. Finally now that the reactor was in an incredibly precarious state they further provoked disaster by performing an experimental test procedure (whose carefully planned pre-conditions were not in any way met).

Notably, the reactor went prompt critical rather than supercritical as a nuclear weapon would. The explosive yield was about a ton of TNT (compared to 10 kilotons for a small weapon).

So, unsurprisingly it shows that it's a bad idea to have insufficiently trained operators overide safety mechanisms and then ignore every rule in the book in order to carry out an experiment on a dangerously designed nuclear reactor. Particularly in a bureaucratic culture where supervisors would be more upset by a scheduled test being scrubbed than they would be at safety procedures being ignored. A deliberate plan to cause a disaster couldn't have come up with a better procedure.