this was the first time my jurisdiction made use of electronic voting booths and frankly it bothered me. right before i went into my booth there was a guy behind the machines tinkering with them and i had to wait for him to get done before i could go in. i pushed a bunch of buttons and cute little lights lit up the candidates i choose. then i pushed "cast vote" and therew as a beep and that was it. what is to insure that my votes don't conveniently dissappear if i have failed to vote for an "acceptable" candidate? as i was leaving the guy who had been tinkering said to the old lady that helps you sign the book when you come in "yup, everything is working fine." he's not allowed to know who i voted for while i was voting. how can he insure that the votes i cast were landing in the right spot electonically? maybe a lot of non-tech literate people have unquestioning faith in technology but i'm not sure that anyone who truelly understands what was going on with the voting equipment was within a 20 mile radius of the voting station i visited today.
To paraphrase a statement in the article:
The word "e-mail" certainly evolved because some programmer was either too lazy or too ignorant to correctly type "electronic mail" in the first place.
Now that I communicate more by keyboard than by spoken word I am all for the elimination of any and all superfluous keystrokes. The meanings of "email" and "e-mail" are equally apparent. The sheer decrease in worker efficiency due to Wired News' adoption of this policy should be cause for lament by shareholders the world over.
I have, unfortunately, been forced to lower myself and include a number of extra keystrokes in the e-mail, for fear you may be unable to understand. Including hyphens, quotes, italics and capitalization I have made at least 29 unnecessary keystrokes. You have received this communication 29 keystrokes later than you otherwise would have.
Slashdot Mirror
where is the logic in this "annoy our potential customers" line of thought?
this was the first time my jurisdiction made use of electronic voting booths and frankly it bothered me. right before i went into my booth there was a guy behind the machines tinkering with them and i had to wait for him to get done before i could go in. i pushed a bunch of buttons and cute little lights lit up the candidates i choose. then i pushed "cast vote" and therew as a beep and that was it. what is to insure that my votes don't conveniently dissappear if i have failed to vote for an "acceptable" candidate? as i was leaving the guy who had been tinkering said to the old lady that helps you sign the book when you come in "yup, everything is working fine." he's not allowed to know who i voted for while i was voting. how can he insure that the votes i cast were landing in the right spot electonically? maybe a lot of non-tech literate people have unquestioning faith in technology but i'm not sure that anyone who truelly understands what was going on with the voting equipment was within a 20 mile radius of the voting station i visited today.
To paraphrase a statement in the article: The word "e-mail" certainly evolved because some programmer was either too lazy or too ignorant to correctly type "electronic mail" in the first place.
Now that I communicate more by keyboard than by spoken word I am all for the elimination of any and all superfluous keystrokes. The meanings of "email" and "e-mail" are equally apparent. The sheer decrease in worker efficiency due to Wired News' adoption of this policy should be cause for lament by shareholders the world over.
I have, unfortunately, been forced to lower myself and include a number of extra keystrokes in the e-mail, for fear you may be unable to understand. Including hyphens, quotes, italics and capitalization I have made at least 29 unnecessary keystrokes. You have received this communication 29 keystrokes later than you otherwise would have.