On Sat, Nov 01, 2003 at 10:14:27PM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > It assumes the electorate is sheep. > > If you attach a non germane amendment to a GR with a stated > name, people are going to vote against it -- unless they are dumb > idiots. Is it really necessary to call people "sheep" and "dumb idiots" if they simple follow the ballot instructions as written? Let's review the final call for votes for the 4.1.5 disambiguation: In the brackets next to your most preferred choice, place a 1. Place a 2 in the brackets next to your next most preferred choice. Do not enter a number smaller than 1 or larger than 4. You may rank options equally (as long as all choices X you make fall in the range 1<= X <= 4). This tells people to vote "sincerely", i.e., to rank their sincere preferences. To vote "no, no matter what" rank "Further Discussion" as more desirable than the unacceptable choices, or you may rank the "Further Discussion" choice, and leave choices you consider unacceptable blank. Unranked choices are considered equally least desired choices, and ranked below all ranked choices. (Note: if the "Further Discussion" choice is unranked, then it is equal to all other unranked choices, if any -- no special consideration is given to the "Further Discussion" choice by the voting software). People are not told to rank ballot options they like below "Further Discussion" because they happen to be irrelevant to the issue being voted on. While the examples I've used are blatantly obvious examples of irrelevancy, it does not stand to reason that could never be more subtle irrelevant amendments proposed. > So, if there are enough people who prefer a GR, no amount of > silly amendments is going to prevent the option from reaching > majority. But that's not quite the point -- especially in the case of votes where the required majority ratio is 2:1 or 3:1. Should a GR *really* have to satisfy a majority requirement of 4:1 or 5:1 instead, thanks to the disruptive activities of a small group of developers (half a dozen)? Is that just the way the cookie crumbles, or should we try to engineer our SRP so that it works as advertised? > Of course, in your workd view, I must eb a dastardly rat all > ready to spring bunches of irrelevant amendments to any Robinson GR, > and that must be the only reason I must be arguing against the > protector against ossification. Is there a rational basis for this speculative invective somewhere? -- G. Branden Robinson | Communism is just one step on the Debian GNU/Linux | long road from capitalism to branden@debian.org | capitalism. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Russian saying
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