Approval voting is probably the best method that has a chance in hell of being adopted any time soon, and it addresses some of the most disturbing weaknesses of the current system. I'm happy with that. If you think you can get Schulze voting approved, go for it. But you're extremely misguided in advising people not to advocate approval voting, which is realistically attainable (Schulze voting is not) and a huge improvement, even if it's "broken." Remember, no method is perfect, so if we agree with you that we should not adopt a broken method, then we should not vote, period.

Let's not forget his column/blog (badscience.net).

Facebook is no more evil this week than it was last. According to the article, apps can now request access to your private info. When an app requests your ifno, you can say yes or no. If you trust facebook to implement this as stated (one poster has already tried it and found it to be as described), then what's the big deal? Apps could also just ask you for your social security number, or your credit card numbers, this just makes it easier for users who were going to be agreeable. Who cares? And if you don't trust facebook, then you don't have private information on there anyway. So again, what's the big deal? This is a complete non-story that's been escalated into some kind of scare story by people who can't read.

That's just stupid. Some people find fb useful and know how to use it safely. Frankly, anyone who falls victim to this is just a complete idiot. So yes, complete idiots should delete their accounts immediately (aso their email accounts and their phone accounts, and they should remove doors from their houses). Everyone else has nothing to worry about. I don't know why this is even news. Most people, like me, probably assumed that apps could request whatever they wanted. Apps could already just ask you for your phone number if they really wanted it.

If you're saying it's FUD that firefox users will heave to pay for a decoder, then please explain how we can legally obtain a free one.

Using OS libraries doesn't address the problem, it just means you're using a commercial OS, or a free OS with a commercial decoder installed. $.20 is indeed very reasonable, but unless they're legally compelled to maintain that price level through the 2028, I'm skeptical. Drug dealers offer an even better deal -- first one's free.

The fact that mozilla has enough cash to deal with this is irrelevant. Not everyone who might want to write software to support web standards has that kind of money. Right now, I can write a free, functional web browser if I want, and distribute it for free to whomever I like. If H.264 is adopted, I won't be able to. No one without massive capital will be able to, not for at least 17 years.

As an aside, I'm not arguing as if WebM is unencumbered. When that turns out to be a problem, I'll fault Google for failing to dodge patent potholes then. But for now, I'm willing to believe that if they say it will be BSD-licensed (or whatever), it will be.

Anything that slows or halts the transition to a standard that depends on commercialized patents is good for users. If MPEG LA has its way, everyone who uses firefox (for example) will have to buy a proprietary plug-in to use youtube. If Google has its way (which I don't like either, but for different reasons), we won't. We shouldn't allow web video to be held hostage for the next 18 years by large corporations, whether it's a single corporation or a coalition. If WebM turns out to have patent troubles, that's a separate issue -- you can't fault Google because other parties want to prevent them from making it available for free. I really don't think the phrase "open standard" has any useful meaning here. H.264 is not open in any way that helps anyone.

As an aside, I really don't care if it advances Google's agenda, unless you can describe how that agenda hurts me. My devices are going to become slightly less spiffy (not obsolete) about ten minutes faster? Who cares? Google wants to delay the transition away from flash to hurt Apple? That's fine with me -- protecting Apple is not a good reason to rush to adopt an expensive commercial product as a web standard.

Well, it's mostly just my impression, although lately it doesn't seem like a very close call. But I did once see a poster at a conference that dissected portrayals of various occupations in a broad selection of movies. It was partly tongue-in-cheek, but the end result was that in terms of negative portrayals, the leading occupation was murderer (I guess that's an occupation), and coming in at #2 was scientist.

I'm torn about this. On the one hand, it's certainly true that science is overwhelmingly portrayed in mainstream American society as evil, or at least not good, and anything that contributes to this view is upsetting. On the other hand, there are some serious structural problems with the way science is practiced that desperately need to be addressed, and when someone like John Ioannidis or Jonathan Schooler points them out, I think it's important that they be taken very seriously. These problems have especially immediate implications when we're talking about things like drug studies, but they span the sciences.

It's tempting to reconcile these opposing motivations by saying that science should handle these things in-house. But scientists don't have a good record when it comes to self-policing. So I'm not sure how to feel about articles like this. My sincere (possibly futile) hope is that these things will be reported in a way that makes it clear that improving science is a worthwhile goal, and does not imply that all previous findings are false. Note that Ioannidis's articles have some sensational titles, but the contents are much more level-headed.

Everyone is irresponsible occasionally, and it's far from irrational to be irresponsible in this case. For the entirety of my life, I've never been surprised by a gas-powered car sneaking up on me, because they're noisy.

You're also making a very bizarre and patently false assumption that pedestrians always know when to look. Perhaps you're only familiar with urban living? When I take my dog or my child for a walk, I need to know whenever a car is coming up behind me -- not just when I'm crossing a street, or at well-defined checkpoints, but on a continual basis. It's just not reasonable to tell me that I should continually swivel my head around every time I take a walk. Right now, when I hear a car coming up behind me, I turn around, decide if the driver is a threat, and take appropriate action. Fortunately, the most erratic drivers in my neighborhood don't drive electric cars yet. But that will change.

It's nonsense to say that tire noise is sufficient. Tire noise is quieter than engine noise, so if you rely entirely on tire noise, there will be circumstances (wind, distant lawnmower noises, etc.) in which the tire noise is not audible and engine noise would be. The bottom line is that making cars quieter violates reasonable expectations. Everyone who's grown up with cars knows how to tell the difference between a car coming, no car coming, and can't-tell. If you put a lot of cars out there that are much quieter than the quietest cars previously on the road, then people will inevitably sometimes think there's no car coming when in fact they can't tell.

Also, it sounds like you've never had a pedestrian jump out in front of you from behind a parked car. It's easy to show that you can be driving 20km/hr and have no chance whatsoever of avoiding a pedestrian if they happen to run out just at the wrong time. Some of those pedestrians were going to get hit no matter what, but some of them might have heard engine noise.

The issue here isn't protecting people who act unreasonably, it's protecting people who act reasonably.

It's not an arms race. Once the cars are loud enough to hear on a quiet street, nobody needs them to get any louder. The problem is that everyone on the planet has grown up in an environment in which relative quiet means no car is coming. It doesn't matter one bit if the car sounds are drowned out. Nobody steps out into the street without looking just because it's really noisy and they can't tell if a car's coming or not. People used to do that, but they're all dead now.

Tire noise is not always audible, certainly not above a light wind if the street is dry. Everyone who lives in the suburbs and goes for a walk occasionally knows this. Electric cars can make useful noises without being anywhere near as noisy as gas-powered cars.

The issue here is not requiring everything that might hurt you to carry a warning. The issue is whether or not it's okay to have things that have carried warnings for the entire lifetime of everyone now living to suddenly stop doing so. It's not.

Bicycle riders can indeed hurt you, but (a) they tend to be less fatal than cars when they strike pedestrians; (b) bicyclists are aware of the fact that they're inaudible (in fact, many have bells or horns); and (c) nobody on this planet has grown up in an environment in which bicycles always make loud noises. Should we be worried about defective noise makers on cars? Probably not if they're as rare as defective steering, defective drivers, etc.

Some guy who lives in the Sahara gets a dog, decides to put in a fence, digs a hole, cuts through a cable, and boom -- no electricity for half the world.

Most people, as they get older, find it harder to get into new games, new music, new movies, new food, new sports, new friends, etc. Getting into new stuff takes effort, uninterrupted time, attention span, and a certain kind of ignorance that comes with youth and that lets you see warmed-over crap as exciting and fresh. You eventually reach an age at which it's hard to find anything that seems genuinely worth your excitement; you get jaded . It doesn't work that way for everyone in every arena, but that's generally how it goes.

Asking why we can't do three-digit multiplication quickly even though our brains is complex is sort of like asking why a toaster can't tell you ratios of voltages even though it has resistors in it. It's the difference between what a machine does and how it works. Brains are fabulously complex, but one thing they weren't built for is three-digit multiplication. Does the brain "know" how to do multiplication really really fast? Yes, of course, there are all kinds of things going on in the brain that involve multiplication. Does it know how to do it with numbers that come in through the ears, and spew the answer out through your mouth? No, brains weren't built to do that. They were, however, built (so to speak) to do much more complicated (but different) things, like recognizing threats and understanding spoken language.

I don't know how good the router analogy will turn out to be, but it's not exactly breaking news that some things need attended, more-or-less serial processing, and that mental arithmetic is one of them. The things that don't need as much attention are things that are evolutionarily old and more or less built-in. Extremely overlearned tasks can fake it sometimes. Guys like Hal Pashler and Stan Dehaene are always making progress into understanding how and why these things work, but the idea of processing bottlenecks in cognitive function is very old. The router analogy is probably a bad one, because it's unlikely that the brain's router lives in any very specific place. It's more likely a property of how the brain adapts to tasks it wasn't designed for.