| Tuesday, November
21, 2000
Sir,
Scott believed that the size of his
"registry" was 30 MB and growing, but this is not correct. The
number he saw by looking at "WinKey+Pause | User Profiles" was
the size of his "user profile", not the registry.
The size of any files in his "My
Documents" folder would be included in this number and other
applications keep per-user data in the user profile. As an example,
Outlook keeps the .pst files in the user profile. So, the size of the user
profile can be very large while the registry is still quite small. As an
example, on my own Win2k system my user profile is 665MB but my registry
is only 17MB.
So Scott has nothing to worry about!
John Sloan
And the Final Denouement
Steve got it right - I was interpreting the
"System Properties | User Profiles" tab as the size of the
registry. I knew that the registry was made up of hives, but I assumed
(there the problem... right there) that the User Profiles tab indicated
the "total size" of the registry including all the different
hives.
In fact, I had several extremely large database
files in the My Documents directory, and when I deleted them, the size of
my profile dropped to 6.8 MB, and I haven't cleaned out the rest of the
junk in there, yet.
So, chalk one up for the good guys! I was thinking I
was going to have to wipe and reinstall Win2K, and that usually sets me
back a week or more. Now I'm not going to have to do that, so I'm pretty
happy.
Hope you feel better!
-= Scott =-
Dear Mr. Pournelle:
I've enjoyed your posts on IntellectualCapitol.com,
but that e-zine seems to have declined since being acquired by
SpeakOut.com. Is there another forum where your work and that of other
former IC columnists can be found?
Geoffrey E. Fagan Broadband Office Sales
Engineer
PS: I thought you might like to know that you are my
favorite author (fave book = Oath of Fealty) and have strongly influenced
my personal philosophy through you essays. If I realize any of my dreams
in the fields of science or science fiction, I will owe my success in some
measure to your inspiration.
The new owners of IC have not invited me to participate;
indeed I do not believe I have heard from them in any way. They have bought
the non-exclusive right to the material I wrote for the previous magazine
and are entitled to leave my stuff up. I have thought of asking them to take
my name off the masthead, but that would be a fair amount of work for them,
and would make it harder for those who want to find my past material to do
so, so I have done nothing. I also don't read IC any more, but that's
largely because I am not in it. As to where I should be doing
those monthly formal essays on the state of the world I have not decided.
One temptation is to write them up and send them email to subscribers as a
kind of bonus. It will be an interesting test to see (1)
how many subscribers read this and say something, and (2) how many new
subscribers I get who cite this possibility as the reason for subscribing.
To subscribe.
Following is from a subscriber. My
reply is I fear a bit long, but that is my privilege:
Dear Dr. Pournelle:
I'd appreciate the opportunity to rant from your
soapbox.
First an apology: to make my biases clear, I've
always been what they call a "yellow dog" Democrat: i.e., given
a choice between any Republican and a yellow dog, I'd pick the dog 10
times out of 10. This time I almost didn't do that. I finally voted for
Gore in the (possibly vain) hope that four more years of the Drug Wars
would be less damaging under him than under Bush.
Beyond that, the differences between the two
candidates' abilities to defend the interests of the Republic and the
liberties of the people do not amount to the value of a can of cold spit,
in my opinion. The general dearth of statesmanlike behavior from either
since Election Day should suffice to prove that. No reasonable person can
possibly maintain that their positions are not purely matters of political
convenience, which would not be reversed if the shoe were on the other
foot.
Having said that, I believe that Bush is guilty of
more despicable behavior that Gore. His policy has been to railroad the
results on the pretext that the matter must be decided quickly. There are
reasons why we have a delay of almost six weeks between the popular
election and the voting by the Presidential electors. Surely one such
reason is to allow for disputes about the selection of electors.
Are there reasonable grounds for such a dispute in
Florida? I believe the answer must be "yes." In fact, I argue
that the result in Florida is a tie.
Consider that an election is an insturment for
measuring public opinion. Like all real insturments, its accuracy and
precision are imperfect. How imperfect? I don't know, but I suspect that
the precision is not better than two significant figures. If I'm right
about that, the 0.16% difference between the two candidates' vote totals
is rather less than a fifth as large as the smallest measurable victory
margin.
Now, with regard to the recounts, it should be
observed that automated counting procedures are not the paragons of
accuracy that James Baker would have us think. If the news organizations
are to be believed, one could feed Palm Beach County's ballots through the
machines however many times one wanted, never getting the same results
twice. Again, there are reasons why the law allows for manual counting of
ballots. One wonders, if the current circumstances don't justify a
recount, what would?
Not that I expect the recounts to give either side
the 6,000 or so vote lead it would take to make measurable victory.
Probably the fairest resolution at this point would be for the winner to
be decided by a coin toss.
n.b. It appears that military absentee ballots are
not being rejected on narrow technical grounds. In particular, the absence
of postmarks on ballots coming from military posts apparently is not being
used as a pretext to reject them.
Wade L. Scholine
The news media have been making a
point of saying that since the Democrats took a huge public popularity hit
by excluding the military ballots, they have rescinded their decision. Those
aren't my words, or even those of the only Republican newscaster I know.
Whatever the reason, we can rejoice.
Regarding hand recounts: most states
have laws regarding partially punched ballots. In California as I understand
it, one corner punched is NOT counted as a punch; two or three are. This is
set by law beforehand, and is the criterion to be used in a hand recount. Given
some explicit criterion such as that, a hand recount, while tedious, can
be somewhat more accurate than simply running the ballots through the
machine again. (Running them through the machine the first time probably
got rid of the chads hanging by one corner anyway, so they'll be counted
the second time.) It is
when the rules keep changing that the matter seems unfair. When one party
on election night sends fifty lawyers, each asking for a remedy more
extreme than the last, and the counting rules change daily, that matters
become serious. In every election I have been involved in -- and at one
time I did campaign management so I have been through a few -- the results
of a recount merely confirm what happened before. The winner wins a little
bigger in precincts that he won in the first place. This is reasonable,
and assumes equal intelligence among voters in both parties. If we assume
that one party is more likely to make mistakes than the other, then it's
possible that a new count will change things in that party's favor. The
question then is how far do we go in trying to divine intentions? It
may be obvious to some that a "dimpled" ballot is one that a
voter intended to punch but did not; but the fact is that the voter did
not punch that slot. He may have changed his mind. He may have been unable
to follow instructions. Someone else may have "dimpled" the
ballot, it being a lot easier to "dimple" one than to actually
make a punch (assuming that one is being watched). What is not obvious to
reasonable people is that this vote ought to count. It
has become clear that on any set of rules that would have been agreed to
before the election, there will not be enough votes to overcome Bush's
lead. I know of no one, no one at all, who seriously proposed that
"dimples" should be counted -- not even in the first day after
the election was that proposed. It is not a rule that would have been
agreed to before the election. As
to the "butterfly ballot", that WAS agreed to by ALL parties
BEFORE the election. This is unambiguous since it was designed by a
Democrat and circulated among all parties, and samples were mailed to the
voters. No one objected then, as no one objected when the same kind of
ballot was used in other elections. Perhaps it is faulty and perhaps it
should be changed, but the changes must be agreed to before an election,
not in order to decide an election already held. And
that, I think, is the rule to apply on "pregnant chad" and
"dimpled chad" ballots. Most states have rules regarding hand
counts, and while they differ over "one corner torn" --
California does not count them, some states do -- I think no legislature
ever voted to count "dimpled chad"; and proposing to do that
now, after two manual recounts failed to yield enough votes to give Mr.
Gore a victory, will not be seen as fair by the losers, and probably not
be seen as fair by the winners. And that is what is really at stake: a
Republic can exist only so long as the losers are willing to lose and the
winners to win. Mary Beard,
widow of Charles Austin Beard, has written an little-noticed book on what
happened to the Roman Republic. In her view -- and in mine -- the real
collapse came when winning the Consulship and the title of First Citizen (Princeps)
was equivalent to the mastery of the world. The losers were no longer safe
from the winners. If one did not win, one had little to nothing. We have
not yet come to that point; but we have made the office of President far
too important in our domestic lives. We can live with conferring the
mastery of the world on a President; it does not affect OUR lives. Whether
the rest of the world will be content to let us do that without their
getting a vote I cannot say. But
we cannot continue to invest the President with extraordinary powers, with
commanding an army of investigators who can use the machinery of justice
to dig up dirt on political opponents, who can have a disgraced private
detective in the White House with access to a thousand FBI files on most
of the president's political opponents; who can with Executive Orders
bankrupt half the firms in the land, who can encourage lawsuits and
investigations, who wants and often gets the power for his agents to tap
telephones without going to the telephone company so that the only people
who have ever seen the warrant are -- the agents themselves. That is
power that should not be given to ANYONE of ANY Party. But
it has been given, and when the stakes get high enough the losers decline
to lose the game, and will contest it by other rules. The danger of
excluding the Army votes was that the Army might think itself deprived of
a legitimate say in the outcome. The danger of having any great number of
the populace believe that the government is no longer legitimate, but
merely a regime like Fascism or National Socialism is extreme. I
would be prepared to accept the outcome of this election if decided by any
set of rules agreed to before the election. It looked for a while as if
that were going to happen. Now I don't know. It may all be moot anyway:
apparently the hand counts aren't producing the results Gore hoped for,
while the absentee ballots did produce the results Bush hoped for. If so
the question is moot, the election will be "close" but decided
in a way consistent with what was agreed to before the election, and I
think all will be well. Thank
you for your letter. I doubt I will be saying much more on this subject.
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