Archive for December, 2011

Election methods illustrated

Monday, December 5th, 2011

Before more abominable people drop out, making this even less interesting:

Approval Candidate
Y 99 1 Johnson
Y 70 2 Paul
Y 60 3 X Huntsman
20 Gingrich
10 Romney
2 Perry
1 Bachmann
0 Santorum

Notes:

  • My preference for voting systems expressed left to right, for GOP nomination candidates, top to bottom.
  • A preferential system could involve ranking all candidates, but it seems the most common implementation has voters rank their top 3.
  • I prefer and/or futarchy to any of the listed methods in many democratic contexts, but will consider them beyond the pale for just this post.
  • Candidate preference largely based on impression (I haven’t studied any of them closely) of “foreign policy” because that’s where the U.S. President can make a huge impact. I’d be happy to also consider positions on executive power, though I have even less data on that, and have no hope, considering that Obama and Biden had some of the better positions on that in 2008 and their administration’s record is abominable.
  • I a former New Mexico governor in 2008 as well. What are the chances the current NM governor will turn out not to be an imperialist torturer and run in 2016?
  • Paul is embarrassing, which shows just how bad the field is.
  • Huntsman is the only acceptable candidate that is in theory electable.
  • The rest advocate torture and are clearly militarists and nationalists who put the world in grave danger.
  • I prefer Gingrich to the other torturers because his administration would be wracked by scandal, hopefully enough to damage the imperial presidency.
  • I prefer Romney to the theocrats because as a religious minority, he isn’t likely to be one.

Rolling bugfree‽

Sunday, December 4th, 2011

Since September 26 I’ve been exclusively using Firefox Nightly builds. I noticed an annoying bug a few days ago. It was gone the next day. It occurred to me that I hadn’t noticed any other bugs. For months prior, I had used Firefox Aurora (roughly alpha) and don’t recall any bugs.

Since October 15 I’ve been using Debian Testing on my main computer. No problems.

For years prior, I had been using Ubuntu, and upgrading shortly after they released an alpha of their next six-month release. Years ago, such upgrades would always break something. I upgraded an older computer to the just released Ubuntu 12.04 alpha. Nothing broke.

In recent memory, final releases desktop software would often crash. Now, there are as many “issues” as ever, but they seem to be desired enhancements, not bugs. The only buggy application I can recall running on my own computer in the last year is PiTiVi, but that is just immature.

Firefox and Debian (and the many applications packaged with Debian) probably aren’t unique. I hope most people have the relatively bug-free existence that I do.

Has desktop software actually gotten more stable over the last 5-10 years? Has anyone quantified this? If there’s anything to it, what are the causes? Implementation of continuous integration testing? Application stagnation (nothing left to do but fix bugs — doubt it!)? A mysterious Flynn Effect for software? Or perhaps I’m unadventurous or delusional?