No need for clear ballot boxes. You know they aren't pre-stuffed because the observers from each party are on hand as the boxes are assembled. (keeps it cheap as you can use cardboard for ballot boxes)
I like simple paper election systems, but there are also
chain-of-custody issues you're skipping over here.
One year in San Francisco, the coast guard found the lids of ballot boxes floating
around in the bay.
US elections baffle me. You use optical scanners? We use humans.
Wait... you mean you wait for the votes to be
counted... by hand?
We insist on instant gratification in these parts.
It's much more exciting to get the race results immediately.
Optical scan ballots are a nice compromise: instant results and
they leave a paper trail. Unfortunately, getting them to
check that paper trail is always a hard problem, and
they won't leave enough time in the schedule to investigate any
reports of irregularities-- every election there's some weird
shit going down, and they go "Oops, outta time! Gotta certify
this one now!"
Then everyone forgets about it, and pretends nothing happened
(what, don't you believe in Democracy? What a sore
loser), and the underlying issues are ignored until two weeks
before the next election, and the MSM runs some generic "will there be
problems??" stories when it's way too late to actually deal with
the problems.
And the problems are only just toned down slightly,
they're never actually fixed, because that would be
un-American. Or something.
To end on a "positive" note: it all comes down to the
state-level Secretary of State office, which barely anyone pays
attention to: if you have a Democrat in that office, there's a
chance that you'll have a reasonable election system in your
state. At least in the short term... there's nothing magic about
Brand D: the Democrats get subverted in places where they win
consistently.
They can also be pretty dumb about some things: in some places
vote-by-mail is popular now because it increases turnout. The
first time they get in upset, they're going to be shocked that
everyone is worried there was some sort of mail fraud hack, and
they don't have any good way of assuring people that didn't
happen.
Google results are skewed by bloggers linking to articles they agree with. Libs have been using that for years to bias Google Search and Google News.
Google could fix it if they wanted, but their CEO is a Clinton staffer so that won't happen
Thankfully Fox has just released their new search engine[1], so you
have a "fair and balanced" bubble you can crawl into.
[1] That's a joke. I hope.
My complaint about google search results is that they stopped being useful sometime ago: I did a search on "election recount" a few days ago, and didn't find anything but fluffy news stories, most of which were out of date. A friend had to tell me about a post about it at the dailykos, and that piece had some links to the information I was looking for.
Though now, when you search on that phrase you get a link to the guardian UK story that went up yesterday, and a new piece at vox: once the pack starts chasing it, *then* it shows up in google...
if you don't want to wait for the pack, then you've got to know where to look, and you might as well skip google and try to go straight there.
And taking it from the other side, the economy has historically
done better when Democrats are in office, and the red states that
keep indulging in conservative doctrine are perennially in the
toilet.
If you wave your arms hard enough you can try to prove there's no
meaning in that correlation, but it's pretty clear that the
idea that conservatives are good for business has no evidence
behind it.
Really, they're not good for much of anything, and haven't been for
many decades.
...perennially oblivious to the midwestern distaste for snotty
liberal know-it-alls presuming to be our intellectual betters...
Right, what we need to do is be more polite, just
like conservatives. Perhaps we could get Limbaugh to teach a seminar.
We could also get lessons in whining about how insulted we
are, too.
...while demanding ever-more tax dollars...
The blue states subsidize the red. And what's really expensive
is tough guys standing tall and flexing armies.
Win elections much?
Yeah, like the last one. Popular vote. Too bad we don't do
democracy so much these days.
Gotta hand it to you guys on the
gerrymandering and voter suppression tactics... when reality's
bias isn't going your way, you know what to do about it.
I like the audio recordings of the entire "Book of Urantia" in a
computer generated Robot Voice, like for example "The Paradise Sons of God" from "The Central and Superuniverses":
https://archive.org/download/U...
Over in BSD-land, it is very rare indeed because they're basically allergic to adding new features in a bug fix.
It could be I'm a natural-born BSD-user, and I just don't know
it.
It's got to be the worst thing about the modern software scene:
"You've got to accept automatic upgrades for the security fixes!
Oops, did we just change your entire UI? Well you know,
consistent user experience! Everyone loves it-- *except for you*."
"I left it in the car" will easily get you through any overcrowded, underpaided security checkpoint.
I was wondering about that. I don't carry one of those things at
all, and I was wondering if they'd even let me in if I didn't
have a phone to lock. This could be the long-expected time when
you're no longer regarded as a human being if you don't have a
mobile phone.
(Concert security checkpoints vary much with time and place--
you may very well get to deal with a power-tripping moron that's
hoping for a job with the TSA.)
My prediction would be people carrying second phones, or dummy
phones, to give the gate staff something to put in their funny
pouches.
And if the dummy phones were cheap enough, you could throw
them away with the pouch to protest the policy...
And the word "successfully" in this context suggests that a
cracker has hijacked the control system of a nuclear power
plant. Actually the news appears to be that someone got some
data from a lab that works with tritium.
So: EditorDavid is either a fear-mongering anti-nuclear fanatic,
or a fear-mongering yellow journalist hustling for clicks--
why exactly am I reading this site?
The "Han Unification" hack does have it's problems (often exaggerated,
but still there there), but I wouldn't say that that's the real problem:
I think you're right about needing metadata for every string, and
the real question in my mind is why isn't that part of unicode
itself? There used to be a way to embed locale hints in the
text, but that was deprecated with Unicode 5. WTF? What exactly
were they thinking?
There's another issue I don't get at all, which is why doesn't
someone out there (like say, google's web fonts?) index fonts
according to the codepoints they cover? Then you could do things
like check the content you need to display, and make sure you've
specified fonts that cover the entire range you're working with.
(Or perhaps even better: wouldn't it be cool if the *browser*
automatically supplied default fonts if the specified fonts
couldn't handle it? Then no more tofu!).
The really important thing though is to remove the menu pad at
the top and hide everything under a hamburger icon. You need to
add more clicks to every operation so the user gets to feel like
they're doing something, see?
You're skipping the main social effect I anticipate: when people
can spend their commute time watching television, people willing
to spend two hours a day in a car will be willing to up that to
four or five. What a wondeful, sprawl-enabled future we can look
forward to in the United States of Suburban. Number one in
per-capita energy consumption, now and forever. (However long
that is.)
And if you're looking for an entrepreneurial opportunity, get
started on automotive porta-potty attachments.
To calibrate this result, I'd like to know what percentage of
drivers currently say they're watching the road, but
actually are not.
I'm usually out on bike, and there's a definite pattern: when
someone passes me too close, I look to my left... and see someone
staring down at a phone.
I gave PaleMoon a serious try recently, and while I thought it
was okay, I found it much more memory intensive than modern
Firefox, and lately I've been using Iceweasel (though that's just
an alias for what's effectively LTS Firefox). Using PaleMoon
reminded me that not all of the recent changes to Firefox
were stupid and useless, sometime around 2010 there was a genuine
improvement in memory handling, where you could reduce Firefox's
memory usage by closing a lot of tabs. With PaleMoon, I was back
to watching the memory use rachet upwards, with nothing much to
do about it except re-start.
But I do appreciate that the PaleMoon project is out there, and
it's true if this latest Firefox ReallyCoolMajorUpgrade turns out
to be the usual we-know-better-than-those-pesky-users debacle, I
appreciate having something around I know is at least useable.
Browser speed has always struck me as slightly irrelevant
Have you ever tried to do manual edits in the location window? You
hit backspace five times and then wait a second for firefox to
catch-up. How is that possible? It's just editing text.
But for best results, you need to run a green magic marker around
the rim.
Seriously, if you want to compare to the vinyl wars, the real
take-away is human beings like what ever they like, and it's
possible to do something that's technically "better" that
nevertheless has a negative subjective-impact... (myself, I
couldn't care less if the "warm" sound I think I hear on vinyl is
just surface noise effects-- if I like noisey better than clean,
give me noisey).
One hopes that they've got this covered in their tests, by using
subjective response data to calibrate their techniques...
Right. Time to attack. You can lead the ground troops.
Here's an idea: why don't we let them figure out that they've
been killing themselves with air pollution, and they really need
to clean up their act. It could be they'll even start doing some
pilot plants to do research into nuclear technology where the
United States has dropped the ball. Oh, and it could be they'll
start playing around with manufacturing photovoltaics as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I like simple paper election systems, but there are also chain-of-custody issues you're skipping over here.
One year in San Francisco, the coast guard found the lids of ballot boxes floating around in the bay.
Wait... you mean you wait for the votes to be counted... by hand?
We insist on instant gratification in these parts. It's much more exciting to get the race results immediately.
Optical scan ballots are a nice compromise: instant results and they leave a paper trail. Unfortunately, getting them to check that paper trail is always a hard problem, and they won't leave enough time in the schedule to investigate any reports of irregularities-- every election there's some weird shit going down, and they go "Oops, outta time! Gotta certify this one now!"
Then everyone forgets about it, and pretends nothing happened (what, don't you believe in Democracy? What a sore loser), and the underlying issues are ignored until two weeks before the next election, and the MSM runs some generic "will there be problems??" stories when it's way too late to actually deal with the problems.
And the problems are only just toned down slightly, they're never actually fixed, because that would be un-American. Or something.
To end on a "positive" note: it all comes down to the state-level Secretary of State office, which barely anyone pays attention to: if you have a Democrat in that office, there's a chance that you'll have a reasonable election system in your state. At least in the short term... there's nothing magic about Brand D: the Democrats get subverted in places where they win consistently.
They can also be pretty dumb about some things: in some places vote-by-mail is popular now because it increases turnout. The first time they get in upset, they're going to be shocked that everyone is worried there was some sort of mail fraud hack, and they don't have any good way of assuring people that didn't happen.
Thankfully Fox has just released their new search engine[1], so you have a "fair and balanced" bubble you can crawl into.
[1] That's a joke. I hope.
And if black people try to do it, suddenly laws are passed against open carry. (See Oakland and the Black Panthers.)
My complaint about google search results is that they stopped being useful sometime ago: I did a search on "election recount" a few days ago, and didn't find anything but fluffy news stories, most of which were out of date. A friend had to tell me about a post about it at the dailykos, and that piece had some links to the information I was looking for.
Though now, when you search on that phrase you get a link to the guardian UK story that went up yesterday, and a new piece at vox: once the pack starts chasing it, *then* it shows up in google... if you don't want to wait for the pack, then you've got to know where to look, and you might as well skip google and try to go straight there.
And taking it from the other side, the economy has historically done better when Democrats are in office, and the red states that keep indulging in conservative doctrine are perennially in the toilet.
If you wave your arms hard enough you can try to prove there's no meaning in that correlation, but it's pretty clear that the idea that conservatives are good for business has no evidence behind it.
Really, they're not good for much of anything, and haven't been for many decades.
Right, what we need to do is be more polite, just like conservatives. Perhaps we could get Limbaugh to teach a seminar.
We could also get lessons in whining about how insulted we are, too.
The blue states subsidize the red. And what's really expensive is tough guys standing tall and flexing armies.
Yeah, like the last one. Popular vote. Too bad we don't do democracy so much these days.
Gotta hand it to you guys on the gerrymandering and voter suppression tactics... when reality's bias isn't going your way, you know what to do about it.
Something positive: it sounds like they haven't broken every single extension (yet), and I feel good about switching to PaleMoon if they do.
Studies show a positive correlation between studies of social media and junk science--
I like the audio recordings of the entire "Book of Urantia" in a computer generated Robot Voice, like for example "The Paradise Sons of God" from "The Central and Superuniverses": https://archive.org/download/U...
It could be I'm a natural-born BSD-user, and I just don't know it.
It's got to be the worst thing about the modern software scene: "You've got to accept automatic upgrades for the security fixes! Oops, did we just change your entire UI? Well you know, consistent user experience! Everyone loves it-- *except for you*."
I was wondering about that. I don't carry one of those things at all, and I was wondering if they'd even let me in if I didn't have a phone to lock. This could be the long-expected time when you're no longer regarded as a human being if you don't have a mobile phone.
(Concert security checkpoints vary much with time and place-- you may very well get to deal with a power-tripping moron that's hoping for a job with the TSA.)
My prediction would be people carrying second phones, or dummy phones, to give the gate staff something to put in their funny pouches.
And if the dummy phones were cheap enough, you could throw them away with the pouch to protest the policy...
And the word "successfully" in this context suggests that a cracker has hijacked the control system of a nuclear power plant. Actually the news appears to be that someone got some data from a lab that works with tritium. So: EditorDavid is either a fear-mongering anti-nuclear fanatic, or a fear-mongering yellow journalist hustling for clicks-- why exactly am I reading this site?
Real programmers avoid using MySQL.
The "Han Unification" hack does have it's problems (often exaggerated, but still there there), but I wouldn't say that that's the real problem: I think you're right about needing metadata for every string, and the real question in my mind is why isn't that part of unicode itself? There used to be a way to embed locale hints in the text, but that was deprecated with Unicode 5. WTF? What exactly were they thinking?
There's another issue I don't get at all, which is why doesn't someone out there (like say, google's web fonts?) index fonts according to the codepoints they cover? Then you could do things like check the content you need to display, and make sure you've specified fonts that cover the entire range you're working with. (Or perhaps even better: wouldn't it be cool if the *browser* automatically supplied default fonts if the specified fonts couldn't handle it? Then no more tofu!).
The really important thing though is to remove the menu pad at the top and hide everything under a hamburger icon. You need to add more clicks to every operation so the user gets to feel like they're doing something, see?
You're skipping the main social effect I anticipate: when people can spend their commute time watching television, people willing to spend two hours a day in a car will be willing to up that to four or five. What a wondeful, sprawl-enabled future we can look forward to in the United States of Suburban. Number one in per-capita energy consumption, now and forever. (However long that is.)
And if you're looking for an entrepreneurial opportunity, get started on automotive porta-potty attachments.
To calibrate this result, I'd like to know what percentage of drivers currently say they're watching the road, but actually are not.
I'm usually out on bike, and there's a definite pattern: when someone passes me too close, I look to my left... and see someone staring down at a phone.
I gave PaleMoon a serious try recently, and while I thought it was okay, I found it much more memory intensive than modern Firefox, and lately I've been using Iceweasel (though that's just an alias for what's effectively LTS Firefox). Using PaleMoon reminded me that not all of the recent changes to Firefox were stupid and useless, sometime around 2010 there was a genuine improvement in memory handling, where you could reduce Firefox's memory usage by closing a lot of tabs. With PaleMoon, I was back to watching the memory use rachet upwards, with nothing much to do about it except re-start.
But I do appreciate that the PaleMoon project is out there, and it's true if this latest Firefox ReallyCoolMajorUpgrade turns out to be the usual we-know-better-than-those-pesky-users debacle, I appreciate having something around I know is at least useable.
Whenever anyone really wants to screw you over, they always say "Security!".
Have you ever tried to do manual edits in the location window? You hit backspace five times and then wait a second for firefox to catch-up. How is that possible? It's just editing text.
sssh...
They're having fun.
But for best results, you need to run a green magic marker around the rim.
Seriously, if you want to compare to the vinyl wars, the real take-away is human beings like what ever they like, and it's possible to do something that's technically "better" that nevertheless has a negative subjective-impact... (myself, I couldn't care less if the "warm" sound I think I hear on vinyl is just surface noise effects-- if I like noisey better than clean, give me noisey).
One hopes that they've got this covered in their tests, by using subjective response data to calibrate their techniques...
And if you'd bothered to finish reading the post, you would see that he did look it up, and gave us a link, and a one-sentence summary.
Accusing someone for being lazy when you can't read four sentences may be a new low in internet history.
Right. Time to attack. You can lead the ground troops.
Here's an idea: why don't we let them figure out that they've been killing themselves with air pollution, and they really need to clean up their act. It could be they'll even start doing some pilot plants to do research into nuclear technology where the United States has dropped the ball. Oh, and it could be they'll start playing around with manufacturing photovoltaics as well.
Try envisioning an economic boom from a massive economic stimulus from an infrastructure build-up on a scale comparable to the WWII effort.