The electoral college isn't a bug, it's a design feature. Cf The Federalist Papers.
A fundamental problem for democracy is how to keep it from degenerating into mob rule. The EC is one of those "checks and balances" mechanisms for a country that is, after all, a collection of individual states.
In its current form, the electoral college does not perform its original role of preventing mob rule. Electors vote in accordance with the popular vote of their state (this is only required by some states; but still almost never happens, as the parties pick their electors).
What ends up happening is that the electoral college just turns into a weird way of counting the popular votes, where some votes count more then others (specifically, voters in less populace states have a bigger vote; and voters in more divided states are more likely to have a meaningful vote).
Many (including myself) would argue that Donald Trump is precisly the failure mode that the electoral collage was designed to prevent.
I disagree. The fact is that Trump convinced a lot of people in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to vote for him in what Democrats thought was their "firewall". Firewall appears to be political jargon for "we can take those people's votes for granted." Former President Bill Clinton thought that strategy was insane but his concerns were dismissed. Sic transit gloria pooheads.
Realistically, Clinton was always going to carry California. If she had made fewer fundraising trips to the west coast and more campaign visits to the Rust Belt states (without calling people there "deplorables") she might have won convincingly. Instead we got an electoral college message from the Rust Belt telling CA, MA, & NY that despite their population advantage they don't get to dictate for the rest of the country. That's pretty much the way it's supposed to work.
The Federalist Papers are propaganda; the design of the electoral college -- like the per-state representation in the Senate, and the 3/5 compromise in apportionment of House seats, on top of both of which the EC rested -- was to protect slavery by overrepresenting slave states. But that's not the kind of thing you put in the marketing material.
Insofar as it was to prevent "mob rule", it was to prevent the values of the majority of voting citizens from overwhelming the particular minority that was keeping humans as chattels.
It's funny that people who have no problem treating modern campaign ads as self-serving propaganda that needs to be examined critically treat the 18th century equivalent as if it were something more noble.
The Federalist Papers (and the Anti-Federalist Papers for that matter) were public attempts to persuade people it's true. At the time they were aimed at the people of New York on the issue of ratifying the Constitution -- arguably a moot issue given that by the time New York voted 9 other states had already settled the issue.
Casting the arguments as propaganda in favor of slavery seems a reach.
The Federalist papers were trying to sell the whole Constitution -- including bits like the Electoral College and the unequal representation in both houses of Congress that were sops to the slave stakes at the expense of states like New York -- to the people of New York. Needless to say, it would have been an extremely poor sales technique to advertise that the elements that were designed to advantage themail slave states at the expense of states like New York were designed for that purpose.
It just so happened that slave states were lower in population. As slavery waned in terms of population, a mechanism to equalize this was still seen as needed.
It's funny, we expect "undo" features in our applications these days, why shouldn't the OS and indeed the entire machine's state be treated the same way?
I used to think that virtualized Windows guests would eliminate the need for wine. I have XP and Windows 7 VMs around precisely for games or the few applications I use that aren't wine-friendly. Over time my usage of wine has dropped to the occasional Play on Linux game.
But part of what makes those VMs so robust is that 1) they're normally disconnected from the internet, and 2) I have developed a habit of saving my work to a shared folder so that I can reset a machine's state to a few days previous at the slightest sign of trouble. For applications that require access to the internet, however, wine may be our last, best hope of opting out of the Cortana Empire.
Historical aside: Before VM usage took off Robert Shingledecker and friends followed that reset logic to an extreme with the Tiny Core Linux project -- every time you start your machine you load a known-good kernel and apps into RAM, use the machine, and then let anything other than your data derez at the end of the session. You can get pretty good performance with that approach on older hardware that can't support virtualization. The downside is that your application choices are limited and dated when compared to mainstream Linux distributions.
I too stopped using 'jj' because of the short delay. FWIW I've found ';l' to work well as a replacement. (For a trial period I had them both mapped to <esc> in my vimrc file.) ';l' seems a natural, but distinctive, rolling motion for me and I've never had it conflict with real-world text entry.
As I mentioned in another reply here, I'd suggest you ignore the siren call of "most recent" and just pretend it's five years ago. Use the Squeak by Example book with it's associated version of Squeak to get a basic understanding of the environment and the object system's resources.
If you prefer, there's nothing wrong with trying Pharo or one of the commercial Smalltalks available with free, non-commercial licenses. Indeed, the only variety I'd warn against is GNU Smalltalk, which treats Smalltalk as just another file-oriented member of the GNU toolchain. That approach totally misses what made Smalltalk so revolutionary for its time: a rich environment for interacting with and exploring an object system.
Some of the cool kids at Smalltalk High forked Squeak to create Pharo back in 2008 and that's where a lot of the recent developer energy has gone. But rapid development has its costs: Pharo 5.0 has just come out while the site offers the "latest" Pharo by Example [1] with a 2009 copyright date. It also offers a link to a Pharo 1.x image you can download so the programming environment and book text will match up. (In fairness, there is also an online group effort to update the text to match the 5.0 release [2], but how successful that is you'll have to judge for yourself.)
I'm slightly biased toward the original Squeak group, but there the situation is at least as bad. Even though Squeak 5.1 is the most recent software, the Squeak by Example book (same author) is another case where you're best served by downloading an older version that matches the book.
That said, using a book with an older version isn't a bad choice. I used to have several wine bottles on my linux box for different vintages of Squeak. Among other things, this allowed me to immediately contrast two Squeak environments to see what, if anything, had changed in the last few years for a particular aspect of the systems.
Personally, I'd suggest people first start by pretending it's five years ago and trying the Squeak by Example [3] book and corresponding Squeak image. Once you understand the basics of that material, load the latest Squeak and start exploring. You'll be able to find the occasional enlightening video on specific Smalltalk topics by searching YouTube for Lawson English and jarober videos, but I'd strongly suggest the old school approach of skimming/reading the material of the Squeak Beginner's mailing list [4] and subscribing to it. I still get the digests in my mailbox and it was interesting to read the progress over the last few months of one beginner's project to manipulate imported spreadsheet information. Some of the answers provided clues to environment resources that even some of the pros had forgotten about.
Well, it's restricted to educational uses, so I don't anticipate a lot of pressure from Indian textbook authors on this one. The specific case seems to stem from professors suggesting students read various sections of different texts and the copying service preparing collections of those reading assignments for various courses.
It's a broader interpretation than the US version of Fair Use, obviously, but it seems to me the High Court judge had a good point that copyright must serve the public's interests as well as the publisher's.
> The specific case seems to stem from professors suggesting students read various sections of different texts and the copying service preparing collections of those reading assignments for various courses.
Actually, in Australia universities are permitted to do the same thing, as long as it's not the whole book (e.g. a chapter relevant to the week's lecture). So that seems more understandable than photocopying entire books.
No other text editor has as many developers working on
plugins than VIM. Virtually anything that exists in
another text editor which isn’t mouse driven has some
very popular, very supported, very documented plugin
you can use.
And the Vim equivalent of org mode is what again? I'm a Steve Litt fan, but Vim Outliner isn't even in the same league as org mode.
As a Vim user of many years I still believe it to be superior to emacs when it comes to editing text. That said, emacs is a vastly superior programming environment. And like many people I find org mode to be indispensible.
Happily, these things aren't either/or situations. I still use Vim for quick text editing tasks, but for other matters evil+org mode lets me have the best of both worlds.
This is one of those historic artifacts, like the Mother of All Demos, that really brings home the sense of possibilities that people had for computers a couple of generations back.
Back in 1995 MIT had a symposium with computing luminaries talking about the impact his essay had on them. When I realized that people like Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee, and Alan Kay gave talks, I realized this was someone that I should have known about. Videos of the presentations are still up at the Internet Archive and Engelbart's site has a list of the relevant links: http://www.dougengelbart.org/events/vannevar-bush-symposium....
Engelbart's site also has a PDF of his marked up copy of the essay from his SRI days.
In chess below the master level tactics will dominate. How do you get really good at tactics? Not just by playing lots of chess, but by consistently devoting effort to studying tactics via printed collections of positions and/or tactics training software.
As to becoming great, after years of running chess camps for young players IM Greg Shahade formed his somewhat famous hypothesis:
There is one very reliable sign to how much potential and how strong a young chess
player is or is going to be, and it’s probably not what most people would think.
It’s not how quickly a student solves tactics or sees combinations (although
these two things always seem to be correlated with the main point of this article).
It’s not the student’s positional understanding. It’s not even how much they
claim to study chess.
Instead it is “How likely is this student to recognize a famous game/position
and know the players involved?” [1]
As one data point illustrating Shadade's point, the current world champion seems to be a whiz at what ordinary people would consider chess trivia. [2] Carlsen's comment:
"I like chess, I like chess books. You'd be surprised – I do read
as much chess as I can."
A fundamental problem for democracy is how to keep it from degenerating into mob rule. The EC is one of those "checks and balances" mechanisms for a country that is, after all, a collection of individual states.