Some thoughts

I was watching X-Play tonight and had a thought. People should be able to rate each other like we do games and other such facets of entertainment. However, instead of using a 5 or 10 point system, we should use a 2 point system. My reasoning being, on a 2 point system, it's easy to know when you've been wronged. If someone hands you a 1 out of 2, you know it's time to kick some ass. But if someone gives you a 2... well... you really don't know if you've just been insulted with mediocrity or given god-like status by a stranger. It becomes a guessing game; far more interesting than anything we currently have.

More importantly, this thought brought me to realize why we only have two real political parties (sorry outsiders, it's the truth). As the number of political parties grows, it becomes increasingly obvious who the loser really was. With two, unfortunately, it's nearly impossible to see without accurate count, who the losing team was. To give this a little more credance, let's observe the three party situation:

We can show that the loser in a three party situation can have no more than 1/3 of the votes (if we don't consider ties, it's actually less than 1/3). It's easy to see this by considering if the loser got more than 1/3. This implies second place took more than 1/3 (or else they were actually the loser), however this contradicts the fact that the winner must have more votes than second place, which is no longer possible when over 2/3 of the votes are taken.

Now, if we're this third party loser... well, we have a clear defeat on our record. *There was a statement here that wasn't right. Let it be known that a half assed proof of mathematics is no proof at all.* With two parties, however, we can have a win by a margin of just two votes (there must be a loss of at least 5 votes in a three party system with no ties), creating a blur between whether the loser is really the loser or not. In other words, it gives second place the opportunity to say "well, chalk it up to voter no-shows" or "electronic voting was a failure before it's conception". It's not so easy to do so when a loss is by a double count of votes. Surely we all agree that a loss is a loss, but somehow politics can turn a loss into something other than a loss. We've all seen this division in people, so you can't deny it.

So what does this mean? Some rhetoricical statement about cowards and their fear of failure running our country? Perhaps a stab at the very structure of American democracy? Beats me, chief... I just found it to be some interesting numbers.

Oh... and one last thing. Does anyone know where I can find an english description of the CPL? Perhaps some kind of GPL vs CPL discussion? I don't speak lawyerese but on certain obscure canadian holidays, and it doesn't appear there are any coming for the next few centuries. Thanks.