Guy

I know you don't.. what's your point? You still contradicted yourself in your previous post. I am aware of that, and throught this thread I've explained why I disagree with both the voting method and the winning requirements. You've ignored what I've said, and gone back to square one. I've responded to your points and now you're explaining the rule of AV to me again. I know those rules. I've said before - if 30% of people vote for party A in the first round, and party A end up winning with 51% in round 3, those 21% of extra people aren't going to be true supporters of the candidate. Sure they may agree with them a little bit, but the candidate who they wanted to win who truly represented their views would be the one they voted first for. The british politics system has so many diverse partys with such differing opinion that it is hard to have a third favourite - if your first choice is labour than your third choice is hardly going to be conservative - the two are basically polar opposites. The lib-dems are also very different to both the tories and labor in many aspects. Thus, if you think about it, it's pretty hard to have a second or third choice who you truly trust to convey your opinions. Thus the candidate will only really be expressing the true views of those initial people who voted for them. Don't tell me that those 21% of people can talk to him about what they want - anyone can do that NOW using the FPTP system.

If so, is it really worth the time, effort and expense of AV? If the person who would be chosen with FPTP is also chosen with AV 95% of the time, or so you say, it's not really worth it. You've contradicted yourself.

They get counted TWICE, you said so yourself. They are counted for your first choice, and then if your first choice loose, then they are added to the second choice. The fact that you can change your vote if your party looses is just being a bad loser. Its odd, unnecessary and extremely unfair to the party who places in first in the inital choices, seeing as they have a large chance to lose now. And then in the second and third rounds of voting, you loose because your rivals had loads of people who had them as their second choice. Thus the person who came first in the first round now come second or third. Ludicrous.

Yes it does. The fact that some people have more choices counted than others do is fundamentally unfair in whatever form it manifests its self in. Of course there is chance for deadlock in FPTP. It is much more likely though with AV. As I have said before, and I will say again - you will rarely get 50% of people in any place to side with one person with one set of views. We are too diverse to assume that this is possible at all. What will happen is that the person with the third least votes in the first round will end up winning. Take a step back and think, how is this fair to everyone else who voted and only had the oppertunity to have their votes counted once? It is just punishing more popular parties who get 40-something%, which is detrimental.

Your opinion has been counted, that was your chance. Just because you don't win doesn't automatically mean that you are more important than others, and therefore have the right to have your vote transferred. Killing a monster is very different from electing MPs. Killing monsters is similar to binary, yes or no. Perhaps the end result of elections is the same, but the steps are different. So what happens if there is no clear majority after all transfers are exhausted? It is virtually impossible to find a solution that will please everybody. If people have directly contrasting views, then you will have a difficult time convincing them otherwise. If people hate a party so much, then they will not vote for them leaving the possibilities of hung constituancies due to all transfers being exhausted. These are likely. If voters do not know how AV works and think they must vote for everyone in order - ie. they cant miss some out - then their votes will still count, although it doesn't reflect their opinion. This is likely to happen because I'm guessing the british public won't fully get it. That said, I have no idea about the British public, having lived here for a short amount of time.

Everybody still gets one vote, it just changes which of their votes count. If their candidate has been knocked out, instead of them having no say, they have the chance to have their vote counted. It changes which of their votes count. So their party looses, so they get a second and third chance! In no way at all does that seem fair to others who only got one chance. It is only more complex for those who have to work it out. For the voter it is still as simple as putting an X. The system overall will be more fair with each vote having more proportional representation. More time = more money. More time also = more time, takes ages to find out who is in parliament. Without the majority vote the BNP would get no seats. the FPTP system actually benefits the BNP. In last years FPTP election, the BNP got 0 seats. If PR came into play, which the Lib Dems want (quote Clegg 'miserable compromise'), then the BNP would have 12 seats. A majority of the people in the world are starving, it doesn't mean starving is the best or most wanted option. (Ty Ian Hislop) Just because some things are less important doesn't mean the way they do things is less right. ....what? I'm not sure how you equate starving to elections. Everyone agrees that starving is bad. It's not something we choose. It's not something that can be, comparitively, easily changed. Voting systems CAN be easily changed. The fact that only 3 countries in the world choose AV, 2 of which want/are getting rid of it, shows that it simply doesn't work. Using your example, you seem to say that these 3 countries have AV because they have no choice, or something...? In other words (I'm not sure the above actually makes sense), the world says no to hunger because its bad, but there is little we can do. The world seems also to say no to av, but this is out of CHOICE, not out of bad luck. Countries could easily choose to go with AV, but the fact that there are only 3 shows that it simply doesn't work. It's like buying something that has horrible reviews, but you figure 'hmm they might be wrong. I'll try it, and be ignorant of what everyone says'. You get it and it's a broken mess. This is the same concept. Should the party receiving only 10% more votes than another receive over 200% more seats in parliament? AV gives much more proportional representation than FPTP This varies because of the size of constituancies. It is unfair to compare the number of overall votes to number of seats, because some constituancies have very small electorates, thus in PR they would have little say. I disagree. 35% may have voted for x MP, but 65% voted against them. A majority does not mean they have the support of their constituency. At least with AV, there is much more chance of the majority winner having a larger support. It is a fact of life that people don't always get what they want. 65% didn't vote against them - they just voted otherwise. Voting against someone (which is not possible in our democratic system) is very very different from not voting for someone. The same can be said for FPTP. I voted Lib dem, along with over 6 million others. A majority of our votes were wiped clean off the slate because of a small majority in our constituencies. Lib dems got 23% of the countries votes yet do not get 23% of the representation. That is unfair and should not happen in a democracy. 23% of the vote does not take into account the size of constituancies. There could be large consituancies where many people vote, say 50000 for Lib Dem. However that 50000 may be comparitively small for the electorate of that constituancy. That 50000 still counts towards overall votes for the country though. (I use 50000 as an example - I have no clue as to the size of electorate of large constituancies)

40% is a majority. But its not an OVERALL majority. 60% voted agaisnt A. No. 60% didn't vote against A, they simply voted otherwise. This goes back to my point about MPs crying and complaining because they haven't got into parliament. No it does not. You still get 1 vote and 1 vote only. When the vote is tallied if 1 party does not have 51%+ the party with fewest votes is knocked out. All votes for them are utterly discounted. All people who voted for them have their 2nd choice vote counted and so on. Nobodies vote gets counted twice in the final outcome, each person is still only having 1 vote counted in the final tally. Say Joe Bloggs votes for Party A as his first choice, Party B as his second and Party C as his third choice. His vote is counted for A, but A have a minority so are removed. The same happens for B. Thus his vote is transferred to C, and because they have a majority they win. I see what you are saying about the votes not counting, but the fact is that he has vote for his candidate and he has lost. His vote is transferred, which means he has had more of a say, he has essentially voted for two parties. Just because his first choice has gone out doesn't mean he should be allowed to vote again. I'm not sure how this can be interpreted in any form as being fair. Nobody got twice the vote. If your second choice vote is counted it is because your first chocie party has been eliminated and all those votes invalidated. Nobody said it was a simpler system; only that is does not need £250mil of counting machines, it can still easily be done by hand. The votes have been put to two parties instead of only one party, thus have been 'used' twice. This is fundamentally unfair. If this is done by hand it will take absolutely ages. Yes full PR would help the BNP. But we are not talking about PR we are talking AV. In AV minority parties will be the first ones eliminated in the road to getting overall majority. I countered this in my initial post. AV is simply a stepping stone to full PR, I refer back to Clegg saying AV is a 'miserable comproise'. This is what we are letting ourselves in for if we go to AV. Thats nothing to do with constituency link. Constituency link is about each constituencies voice being heard in parliament. If constituencies all have mps that got 51%+ vote the link is stronger as the mp speaks for over half of them. As I said before, this 51% will only come about because this MP was someones second or third choice. Thus their views aren't being shown by the MPs; their votes are only being counted by default. You can easily google last yrs election results, only around 1/3 seats were won with overall majority (51%+) Perhaps I misinterpreted that quote from Danq. MPs may not be speaking for an overall majority, but nonetheless it is undeinable that they are speaking for a majority of people. Again, the only reason MPs will end up with 51% of the vote is because it is runoff from people who didn't get their first choice. Therefore the opinions of those peoples whos votes count towards that 51% as runoff aren't being shown. Anyway, it is impossible to have one person express over 50% of peoples views. It is only a few places in which an overall majority of people agree on things. In a majority of places many people have many conflicting views, so you will be hard pressed to find places in Britain where over 50% of people agree on everything. FPTP doesn't force people to agree with things they don't agree on, as AV will seem to do. This is an utter fallacy. People can have as few choices as they like. If they have a low opinion of someone they do not include them in their choices.. Parties are eliminated before their votes are redistrubted (as I covered before). So no-ones vote counts more than once; in the final result 1 person has had 1 vote. Yes but the fact that peoples votes have the ability to be redistributed at all is almost like 'cheating'. It is unfair on those who only have the oppertunity to side with one party. Oh, and a rather important question. What happens when no clear majority is found? As I've been told - people don't have to put down a full list, they can only do one. If this is true, what happens when (and it will inevitably happen) there are only three parties remaining, where no one has any more votes or the remaning transferred votes aren't enough to bring a majority?

Kill everybody - Skrillex. Love it, but there really isn't enough bass ;-; I love bass

Are you trying to tell me that if A gets 40%, B gets 35% and C gets 25%, then A is not in a majority? This goes against the fundamental ideas behind democracy. 1 person, 1 vote. You are simeltaniously saying (lower down in your post) that people don't get two votes, yet the way that AV works is that some votes are counted twice, three times or even four or five times. This means that one single person gets more than one vote. Often, people have a strong allegiance to one party, and really don't care for any of the others. If someone picks candidate A, it means that they want candidate A to be MP. It doesn't mean they want either candidate A, B, or C to get in. AV is a lot more complicated than FPTP, thus more expensive. With FPTP, votes have to be counted once and only once. Whichever candidate has a cross next to their name is the one with one extra vote. With AV, vote counters have to count up the first choices, and in the event that no candidate has over 50% (which is extremely likely), then some peoples votes have to be counted again, thus twice. TWICE. Thus some people get to vote twice. That is basically saying 'If you vote for a popular party, those who vote for less popular parties will have more voting power'. This is an unarguably more complex system than a simple FPTP vote. I don't know about AV, but a full PR system would benefit the BNP. A PR system is really what Cleggy wants - he himself called AV a 'miserable compromise'. Last election they got 563,743 votes out of 29,653,638, as a percentage 1.9%. Source. Out of 650 seats, the BNP thus would have got 12. I'm not saying this is a bad thing in theory - anyone has the right to stand. That's not to say I endorse the BNP in any way, shape or form. I'm just countering your point. Looking at those results, it appears minor parties got seats. This is because the majority of people in their area voted for them because they represent the feeling of the people the most. AV would destroy this concept. Sorry to break the news to you - businesses, charities and trade unions aren't quite as big or important as the UK government. The end goal for political parties is different to the end goal of a nationwide election, thus perhaps AV is better for their goals. You don't talk about the other countries that use it. Those are Australia, Papua New Ginuea and Fiji. 6/10 people in Australia want to get rid of it (is that a clear enough majority for you?). In Fiji they also want to get rid of it. That leaves Papua New Guinea. So, 1 out of 192 countries in the world. Shows just how well AV works, doesn't it? As I said before, do you not agree that if person A gets more votes than both person B and C, they have a majority? People make a decision on what party they want to vote for and they stick to that. When you start putting down second, third and fourth choices, you are simply choosing the lesser of the remaning evils, so to speak. So, in other words, you get more than one vote. Your vote has already been counted if you vote for a minority party, and it is being counted AGAIN once your vote is carried on. I'm not sure if you have noticed, but tensions are running high between Cameron and Cleggy because they have such differing views. Until you give me any kind of proof for this, I'm going to go ahead and take this as your opinion. People have 'actually voted' for the people who stand as MPs today. What you are saying that, by process of elimination, more people end up voting for the same person. This person can be someones third or fourth choice. This is not them voting for who they want, this is them voting for someone who they have low opinion of. Therefore they don't care about what they do, because to all intents and purposes, their choice of candidate has lost. The alternative vote system seems fundamentally wrong because the opinion of some people counts more than others. To me, it seems like a bunch of politicians whining that they don't get their own way. You just have to accept that sometimes, you loose. I think this picture illustrates it beautifully:

I'll write up my thoughts later, but I'm irked by the fact that the first post is in no way any kind of debate, it's just a one sided argument. I'd be fine if someone started a 'NO to AV' thread (no not me - I can't even vote), but this is such an incredibly biased start of any kind of debate. It's not even a debate - we're just being told what appears to be the truth (and, as with all politics, this 'truth' is from one perspective). Moreover, OP is a moderator.

Thats the thing - i changed the plugs to how they were before. Tomorrow ill try seeing what happens when front panel audio internal connections (im not sure if i made internal clear in my op) are unplugged.

I just completed a new build for a friend today, specs: Powercolor 5750 1GB MSI 870-C45 motherboard AMD Athlon II X3 450 Samsung Spinpoint F3 500GB Windows 7 home premium x64 500W Antec Basiq PSU 4GB RAM What happend is that I turned it on, all fine, installed windows with a couple of hiccups, but it was fine in the end. Installed all of the drivers perfectly fine, did multiple restarts - all seemed to be going well. I noticed the front panel audio output was not working, so I switched sound on the motherboard from the AC '97 to the HD audio plug. This is where the problems start. The system started randomly freezing, not displaying any errors or anything - just freezing. I first thought this was a graphics error, so I deleted and reinstalled the graphics drivers. Still, the same problem. To troubleshoot, I played music while playing an animation - both stopped at the same time (so I guess not a graphics error). Now I'm stuck. Is the motherboard faulty or something? It seems odd that the problem started when changing the audio for the front panel. Any help would be very greatly appreciated. Would it be worth reinstalling windows? I have the OEM disk which I ordered, but it only has one license and I've activated the currently installed copy online already. Will I be able to reinstall windows, if theres nothing else I can do? Thanks so much. edit: on the board, there are 4 LEDs. I think these are for error codes? During runtime, LED1 is on, and LED2,3,4 are either off. When it's frozen, all 4 LEDs are on. Unfortunately I can't remember how they were when it was running fine.

Ahem.. Apple store. I would be wary about buying stuff from there - they have a massive reputation for over-over-over pricing stuff. Buying one from any third party site and then formatting to the mac filesystem (can't remember what it is off the top of my head) will work absolutely fine.

As Killerred said, most if not all hard drives will be fine - you will just have to format it to a mac filesystem. I can vouch for lambda tek - awesome website, even if some items have little detail.

In an upcoming version of IPB I think there's supposed to be a "like" feature coming out :P Is that similar to a +rep button, ie. board wide, or is it per post? I'd quite like to see that kind of thing as a forum-wide thing.

I think PoorLepRecon was talking about having a way of uploading to tinypic/imageshack within tif so you don't have to go to the sites themselves. If this is what you're talking about, this would be 100% awesome and helpful.

After all of this time having my friends telling me PSN is much better, I seem to be fine on xbox live.. anyway sucks to those who get personal data stolen.

Whether or not the Royal family are worth having is a pretty futile discussion - the Royals have been part of Britains national identity for a very long time, and thus anything to do with them is a pretty big deal. Whether you like it or not, this is the truth.

Kinda hard not to watch it, living in England and all..

This sounds like a good idea :thumbup:. What would be awesome is if a GE thing was integrated, so it could work out how much profit you would make for x timespan if you sold everything now. Also an option for letting the favour go down 1% or whatever it is per day, for those who don't top up favour every day :-w

And on top of that, I think its a yearly subscription of some ludicrously high price seems to be an apple pricing habit Out of interest, how would the script get the information for progress? Through the toolbar?

To be honest, I feel the website design it's self is a little old and outdated. Perhaps a guess function for the search box, or a more forgiving search function - you can type something slightly wrong and it will not give you any results. edit - being able to customise you see might be something to consider, just save cookies (i assume).

Tip.It item DB entry

Not sure where that android app gets the data from, I presume it uses elements of the official toolbar its self, otherwise I can't think of a way it would get the information.

I don't get it... Nikoliai reminded OP to back up the files on the laptop, and you're being somewhat hypocritical by scolding those who do not offer such advice (even though he did), and then not offering the advice yourself. OP, I don't know if you've managed to boot from the USB, but you need to mount the iso in a certain way in order that the USB is bootable. Go here, scroll to section #2 and select USB, then 'Show me how'. IIRC you have to format the USB stick to FAT, not FAT32.