Instant Run off Elections

With the political season over and nothing left to do but the swearing in I decided to throw in my two cents. Don't leave too quickly though, I'm not going to talk about anyone. I want to talk about how to improve the electoral system.
Truthfully the American system of voting is mostly fine. I like the electoral college though we don't really use it anymore and that is a problem, but not what I am focusing on.
I'm more interested in ending the two party system. There are always going to be parties but the only thing worse than having two parties is having one.
The problem is that if you vote for anyone besides a Democrat or Republican you are casting a protest vote, because except in small local elections other parties can't hope to win. Which is where Instant Run off Elections come into play.
The basic idea is that instead of simply choosing a single person and voting for them you list the candidates in order of preference. I personally might then put the Libertarian candidate into position 1 and move down from there to the other parties.
Now since it is an instant run off election, when the votes are counted if no one has fifty percent of the vote the computers simply remove the person from the list with the least votes in position 1, it then gives those votes to the person those people listed in position 2, continuing to eliminate the candidate with the lowest vote count until someone has a majority of the votes.
It really sounds more complicated than it is, but what it does is important, allowing people to vote for who they want to rather than the person who has a chance to win.
This isn't a new idea, but it is one which is unlikely to ever see the light of day. Neither one of the two parties has any reason to change the way things are now, so if you're ever going to see republicans and democrats agree its going to be on keeping themselves in power.

What I want from Google

I've decide that the new feature I want from Google is a comparetive image search. I know the idea of searching without words is something which we haven't tried before but I think it could be useful in a variety of ways.
First though, the technology is possible. Police use facial recognition software and I have seen programs which compare how close to faces are to each other. Since the human face is far more complex than most other images we might look up those should be possible and Google already has image search.
So to why we might want it. There are many reason. Artists would be the most obvious to me. They would be able to put their own pictures into a search to see if anyone else is using their art.
It would also be fun to be able to see other pictures of places or things without trying to play the keyword guessing game, especially on places that aren't as well known.
Beyond simply finding things you already have though, if it was done well I could find art which was similar to something i like. Perhaps in the same style, or by the same artist. I might even be able to look for parts of a picture so I could take the signature from a picture and find others with the same signature.
Those are all just off the top of my head. I'm certain that once Google makes the technology people will find more uses for it, and I'm willing to let Google use this idea completely free of charge.

It's Technology not Economics

It seems that the technology news I have seen recently feels far more like business news than technology. Apple has ten percent market share, Google made a billion dollars yesterday, and Nvidia sold more video cards than someone else, but none of that matters to me. I’m not a shareholder and I don’t care if a billion other people own an Iphone, I care if mine does what I want.

So why do we spend so much time talking about money instead of technology? The simple answer is that it’s a way of keeping score, but does growing market share really mean that a product is better than its competitor? Is youtube.com really the best video sharing site, or is it just the best known? Is myspace.com even good? It must be it has market share, but then is the product actually getting worse as people leave?

Social networking is harder because you have to be where your friends are, but you can use any phone you want to call them so why not buy the Google android? It clearly has less market share, but you also don’t have to pay the apple tax, and with far more freedom to build new applications.

So what do we do about it? Technology is undoubtedly big business and if Yahoo is going to go out of business I want to know, but can’t we agree that we should discuss good products and good ideas without the need to discuss how much money they are making, or at least leave the question of profitability to the end of the conversation?

So beginning the conversation with technology rather than business I love my TiVo, my IPod, my Vizio HDTV and my Xbox 360, though I’m a little less enthusiastic about the Playstation 3, which is mostly a blue-ray player at the moment, and the Wii, and I don’t even own a cell phone (though that is more because of service plans and a desire to not be bothered with phone calls than the technology itself).

What technology do you use every day and do you care how much money the company who makes it earned last quarter?