It's not a question of whether people thing CDDL is Free or not. There are "zealots" like Stallman who think that both GPL v2 and GPL v3 are free. But he would be the first to say you can't include GPL v3 code, like a future relicensed version of the Solaris kernel, in GPL v2 code, like the Linux kernel.
And I think most people will agree with you that Fuse isn't good enough. But at the moment, there are only two options: complete reimplementation from the ground up, and Fuse. Fuse is easiest.
Because most people in civilised societies realise that playing with trams is a bad idea that could cause death? I don't know how the remote control system of trams here in Melbourne work, but I do know if you have a long enough metal bar with the right height/width you could do the same as this guy did --- yet tmk it's never happened.
Can't you click two fingers at once? like for scrolling, but you let go straight away. I know that's how I used my MacBook when it had Mac OS X on it. I probably enabled an option somewhere, but I couldn't tell you where...
With my MacBook, my biggest complaint about the design is that the USB etc. ports are all on the lefthand side. This means you lose half the cable on a mouse if you're righthanded, like I am. So it's not all bad for you lefties!
But... Swiss keyboards are physically different from US keyboards (European layouts have funkily shaped (and easily-missed) enter keys, whereas US keyboards typically have a key a little less wide than the right-hand shift, but otherwise the same); what's one extra difference between friends? And even if they weren't, why should US keyboards be limited by limitations in Swiss keyboards? It's clearly not as if the Swiss decided that US keyboards were good enough for them.
I bought a second-hand SUN Type 5c keyboard ages ago, took off all the keys and gave them a wash. Being incredibly lazy, I put the keys back on only as I needed them. To this day, there's only two keys I haven't put back on: the blank key where escape normally is that sends no signal; and the Insert key. And in spite of being a computer geek, when I've been using someone else's keyboard and accidentally hit the insert key, they've usually had to tell me what's happened and how to fix it; I've completely forgotton.
I bind the Menu key on my normal keyboards to "Compose", which lets me type combinations and get diacritical letters and special characters; so if I feel like spelling "cafe" properly, I type c-a-f-compose-e-' and get café. Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to duplicate this functionality in Windows or the Mac. The closest they get is dead keys (so that instead of typing c-a-n-'-t to get "can't", you have to type c-a-n-'-space-t) and alt-gr combinations so that you have nonce combinations you usually have to look up each time you want to use them.
As for numlock, isn't it cool to be able to flash the numlock, capslock and scroll lock leds? or am I just still too immature to be let into the Real World?
Can we just start making keyboards without caps lock? It'd be easier. Or, hey, maybe we could put a little screw in it...
You can buy keyboards without caps lock; or at least, with the caps lock key hidden away to the side. Sun keyboards with the "UNIX" layout switch capslock and control; after an initial adaptation period, you never hit it accidentally. They also move the Escape and Backspace keys nearer to the homerow so they're easier to access, at the espace of puting `~ where backspace normally is. The only disadvantage these keyboards have is that there's no right-hand control key.
The Happy Hacking keyboard is a small-sized keyboard without a dedicated caps-lock key; its layout is based on Sun Type 4 keyboards, so it's generally a subset of the Sun keyboards (which are currently up to Type 7). Unfortunately, most models have no cursor keys.
No, what I really want is a laptop without a capslock key, or one in a less annoying spot. I gather the XO puts control next to A, but it was never for sale in Australia.
*confusion* How on earth can it be considered kosher in freedom-loving America for a state government to meddle in the affairs of an independent group that happens to involve itself in federal politics? Does this only apply to the Democrats and Republicans, or are the Greens and Libertarians and whoever else might happen to have primaries similarly required to hold them before anyone else?
Your point No. 2 reminds me of a requirement in the Australian Constitution on who can stand as candidates to the Commonwealth Parliament. Basically, anyone employed in an office of profit under the Crown (i.e. employed by a state or federal government) is ineligible. The reason of course is that by being employed by the government, they may be biased against the interest of better government. (I don't personally understand who it means members of the executive can be parliamentarians, but that's clearly another matter.)
Now, I can understand why it makes a difference for parliamentarians. I can even understand (altho I disagree) why someone might want to exclude dole-bludgers from voting.[*] But I don't think it's fair on others. Many thousands of people are employed by the government in same way shape or form, a lot in forms even most minimalist governments will want to retain. You effectively disenfranchise one of the largest groups of employed people there are. Now, some of these people could just as effectively be employed by the private sector, but for others, the public sector is the single most effective way to deliver these services (such as the public transport, a convincing argument against I have not found). Why should people who do us all a favor by choosing to be employed by the government be disenfranchised? Additionally, many people employed by private companies will also be (partially) funded. They will not have chosen to be employed by the government, and might not even be aware of it. Should they be disenfranchised?
[*] Personally, I think people on the dole are the most likely to know what the needs of such people are, and should be entitled to express their opinion. No matter what methods we use to deal with the unemployed (the dole, private charity handouts, debtors prisons,...), there's always going to be some people who won't do anything, and people who could excel if they had just a little bit more help. At least with the dole we can ensure they have the opportunity to live in humane, even if difficult, conditions.
"Retrofitted"? I don't understand what you mean here. All you do to get Optional Preferential Voting (OPV) is say "you only need to number as many boxes are there are seats to fill".
OPV with both multi-member and single-member electorates is not exotic. It's used in a number of Australian states. As soon as one major party realises that the other major party is getting a lot of preferences from a minor party, they do what Queensland Labor did and launch a "Just vote one" campaign. Voila: Instant FPTP, just using a vertical line instead of two diagonal ones.
In any case, I think your major point is that single-member STV is not all that great a system, and it's well taken. I do wish Australians weren't brainwashed to believe that since we have a slightly better electoral system than America's, we've reached the peak. There's a long way up to go before we should be happy. Sure, we can be proud of achievements we made way back in the 1910s and 1940s, but it's time for more reform.
Point is by requiring us to express an opinion, even if we don't have one, it becomes a government requirement for us to think a particular way. It then goes from being a good law (which a requirement to submit a ballot, completed in private would be) to being a bad, 1984 one. The only factor which makes it bearable is that it's illegal to enforce it.
(It's also worth noting that at least the Victorian electoral law requires that any method to vote must allow a user to cast an informal ballot. IOW, the law requires that a voter should be able to break a bad law.)
Preferential voting is a plurality system. It's slightly more likely than FPTP to elect independent candidates, I gather, but... the UK and Canada have multi-party systems in their lower house. Yet it's major news in Australia (at least to us election geeks) that the Greens came second (i.e. lost) in the seat of Melbourne! Add to that the fact that the National Party — little more than a branch of the Liberal Party — gets represented quite well in Parliament yet it gets about half the vote of the Greens, who are completely unrepresented in the lower house!
It's quite clear that Australia suffers from the exact same problem as America does. The only solution will be a true proportional-style voting system in the lower houses (and for Tasmania to increase the size of their parliament again so it's slightly more representative than your average local council in Victoria).
Parent poster is wrong and spreading misinformation. Please mod him down.
Voting is compulsory. It is illegal to leave your ballot blank or deliberately invalidate it. It is also illegal for anyone to know that you've done that, but that doesn't change the law — you arerequired to vote. Go read it. Similarly, there is no law that requires you to attent a polling place on election day; prepoll and postal votes satisfy the requirement to vote, but do not satisfy the made-up requirement of "attendance on polling day".
(Note: Laws for state elections may very. The above is true for Commonwealth and Victorian elections, but not strictly true for South Australian elections. I have no idea about other states and territories or local government elections.)
Wait, mefeems 'tis thou who haft no fenfe of humour. Ich vfed an form of humour known as "irony".
And in any case, iuft becaufe fpelling and writing was not as ftandardized at ye time ne meaneth not that Englifh grammour was oyer yan how j defcribed it. Iuft as there are things we can fay in colloquial fpeech (like double negatives) and things we cannot say (like "Said john donkey a the eatinged cat" for "John said the donkey was eating a cat"), there were ways grammour (and fpelling) cud differ and ways yey cud not. Thow wast wrong; I am right.
"To sticketh" is not grammatically correct. The "to" signifies that we are using an infinitive of the verb, yet the "-eth" is a finite ending. -eth is simply the original form of the -s suffix on verbs: it marks the singular third person present tense. So "he sticketh", "John sticketh" are fine, but "have to sticketh" is not.
Have you been to countries that use Cyrillic alphabets? I have. I frequently saw URLs written in Cyrillic, even though they were meant to be transliterated into Latin. So someone advertising "bank.kg" (I was in Kyrgyzstan) would write (fancy looking b)a(small captial h)(small capital k).(small capital k)(small capital gamma). They might have written the URL on the computer, but when it's a poster the character codes aren't there any more, it's just ink. I can understand the confusion that would come in Russia, where someone might right "bank.ru" as (fancy looking b)a(small captial h)(small capital k).py.
This isn't (entirely) about internationalised domain names and punycode; this is about being able to print domains in a cultrally acceptable, unambiguous way, even when character codings aren't around.
The real answer is competition. Firefox was decent when it was competing against Mozilla and, on Windows, Internet Explorer (Safari and Konqueror aren't sexy enough for Mozilla to care). Now, it only competes against IE so Linux and Mac users are secondary (or worse) and the developers clearly think it's so much better than IE that it doesn't really need to be competitive.
If the GTK and Windows ports of WebKit can get to a state where browsers for the rest of us can be based on them, then maybe Firefox can improve. Hopefully, it'll happen before Firefox is completely sidelined because otherwise we'll just see the replacement browsers stagnating after an initial period of being the greatest thing since sliced bread.
(Yup folks, Vi and Gnome need Emacs and KDE. It'll be a sad day everywhere but Redmond if one ever wins.)
The Kennet Liberal Government during the 1990s privatised power generation and distribution in Victoria. Originally the private distributors had a monopoly over different parts of the city or state, but now they all compete everywhere. (They use the same powerlines, you just pay different people.) I've never bothered myself to understand it, but I've heard as your PP said that it was modelled on the Californian system.
Show me a program that does it right, when using a cross-platform toolkit. I haven't seen any. That doesn't mean none exist, but everyone who uses cross-platform toolkits seems to decide it's just easier just to use the same code without making sure it's got a native look and feel on each platform. My problem is that it becomes to easy to do the wrong thing.
(1) It shall be the duty of every elector to vote at each election.
(2) The Electoral Commissioner must, after polling day at each election, prepare for each Division a list of the names and addresses of the electors who appear to have failed to vote at the election.
(3) Subject to subsection (4), within the period of 3 months after the polling day at each election, each DRO must:
(a) send a penalty notice by post; or
(b) arrange for a penalty notice to be delivered by other means;
to the latest known address of each elector whose name appears on the list prepared under subsection (2).
And in case you're wondering, voting quite clearly refers to the process of marking a number on a ballot paper, not to having your name crossed off (see for examples sections 239 and 240).
Voting is compulsory. We do not have a gun pointed at our heads (merely the threat of a small $20 fine). We do not have a legal means of enforcing a vote (merely the ability to enforce having the name marked off). But the law is clear. You are required to vote. Voting is compulsory, and anyone who tells you otherwise is spreading a myth, mistaken or lying.
That's also illegal (you can't get caught, but if you could you could be fined for it). And I doubt the counters bothered to read it.
(Actually, in the 2006 Victorian state election, the government introduced computers to allow blind people to cast secret ballots as a trial; the law passed allowing this required the computers to allow a user to cast an informal vote — which is illegal!)
Funnily enough, every time I've seen a wxWidgets app running on my Linux box, it's always stuck out like a sore thumb. They abide by Windows UI design patterns, just using Gtk+ widgets. This is a bad way to do cross-platform applications; instead, you should follow the lead of Pidgin/Adium/libpurple and separate out the front-end and back-end code; the front-end should be maintained by separate platform specific teams. That way, your program looks and feels native. No cross-platform toolkit will do that.
Will these themes just match the look or also the feel of the toolkit? (e.g. on Gtk+, will it let me remap my keyboard shortcuts on the fly from the menu?). Unless they can match the feel, there's not much point; they should crawl up in a whole and whither away like all suppliers of cross-platform toolkits.
(The correct approach to writing cross-platform programs is to separate the front-end from the backend; Pidgin/Adium/libpurple are an excellent example.)
Actually, read the law. It is compulsory to vote. In fact, it's compulsory to make a formal ballot. If you only write "1" on your lower house ballot, or put your name on the ballot, or do anything else that invalidates your vote, you're breaking the law. Just because you don't (or even can't!) get caught doesn't make it legal.
It's not illegal not to vote if you aren't enrolled, no, but it is illegal not to be enrolled for Commonwealth elections and elections in most states and territories. (I think South Australia is the only exception there.) Break one law, break the other, up to you.
Not an insurmountable problem. For marketing purposes you could say it is based on KDE 2003 ("Kackle 2007 is a laugh generator for KDE 2003"). For technical purposes you would say it requires libkde 3.5 or greater ("Installing: Kackle 2007 is included in most distributions; simply use the standard method. If you need to build it yourself, you will need libkde 3.5 or greater to compile and install it").
For most users who'll only read the marketing stuff anyway, the technical details of which precise library version it requires is irrelevant.
Windows does much the same thing: Check how many programs require XP Service Pack 2 or 2000 Service Pack 4 or something.
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It's not a question of whether people thing CDDL is Free or not. There are "zealots" like Stallman who think that both GPL v2 and GPL v3 are free. But he would be the first to say you can't include GPL v3 code, like a future relicensed version of the Solaris kernel, in GPL v2 code, like the Linux kernel.
And I think most people will agree with you that Fuse isn't good enough. But at the moment, there are only two options: complete reimplementation from the ground up, and Fuse. Fuse is easiest.
Because most people in civilised societies realise that playing with trams is a bad idea that could cause death? I don't know how the remote control system of trams here in Melbourne work, but I do know if you have a long enough metal bar with the right height/width you could do the same as this guy did --- yet tmk it's never happened.
Can't you click two fingers at once? like for scrolling, but you let go straight away. I know that's how I used my MacBook when it had Mac OS X on it. I probably enabled an option somewhere, but I couldn't tell you where...
With my MacBook, my biggest complaint about the design is that the USB etc. ports are all on the lefthand side. This means you lose half the cable on a mouse if you're righthanded, like I am. So it's not all bad for you lefties!
But ... Swiss keyboards are physically different from US keyboards (European layouts have funkily shaped (and easily-missed) enter keys, whereas US keyboards typically have a key a little less wide than the right-hand shift, but otherwise the same); what's one extra difference between friends? And even if they weren't, why should US keyboards be limited by limitations in Swiss keyboards? It's clearly not as if the Swiss decided that US keyboards were good enough for them.
I bought a second-hand SUN Type 5c keyboard ages ago, took off all the keys and gave them a wash. Being incredibly lazy, I put the keys back on only as I needed them. To this day, there's only two keys I haven't put back on: the blank key where escape normally is that sends no signal; and the Insert key. And in spite of being a computer geek, when I've been using someone else's keyboard and accidentally hit the insert key, they've usually had to tell me what's happened and how to fix it; I've completely forgotton.
I bind the Menu key on my normal keyboards to "Compose", which lets me type combinations and get diacritical letters and special characters; so if I feel like spelling "cafe" properly, I type c-a-f-compose-e-' and get café. Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to duplicate this functionality in Windows or the Mac. The closest they get is dead keys (so that instead of typing c-a-n-'-t to get "can't", you have to type c-a-n-'-space-t) and alt-gr combinations so that you have nonce combinations you usually have to look up each time you want to use them.
As for numlock, isn't it cool to be able to flash the numlock, capslock and scroll lock leds? or am I just still too immature to be let into the Real World?
Can we just start making keyboards without caps lock? It'd be easier. Or, hey, maybe we could put a little screw in it...
You can buy keyboards without caps lock; or at least, with the caps lock key hidden away to the side. Sun keyboards with the "UNIX" layout switch capslock and control; after an initial adaptation period, you never hit it accidentally. They also move the Escape and Backspace keys nearer to the homerow so they're easier to access, at the espace of puting `~ where backspace normally is. The only disadvantage these keyboards have is that there's no right-hand control key.
The Happy Hacking keyboard is a small-sized keyboard without a dedicated caps-lock key; its layout is based on Sun Type 4 keyboards, so it's generally a subset of the Sun keyboards (which are currently up to Type 7). Unfortunately, most models have no cursor keys.
No, what I really want is a laptop without a capslock key, or one in a less annoying spot. I gather the XO puts control next to A, but it was never for sale in Australia.
*confusion* How on earth can it be considered kosher in freedom-loving America for a state government to meddle in the affairs of an independent group that happens to involve itself in federal politics? Does this only apply to the Democrats and Republicans, or are the Greens and Libertarians and whoever else might happen to have primaries similarly required to hold them before anyone else?
Your point No. 2 reminds me of a requirement in the Australian Constitution on who can stand as candidates to the Commonwealth Parliament. Basically, anyone employed in an office of profit under the Crown (i.e. employed by a state or federal government) is ineligible. The reason of course is that by being employed by the government, they may be biased against the interest of better government. (I don't personally understand who it means members of the executive can be parliamentarians, but that's clearly another matter.)
...), there's always going to be some people who won't do anything, and people who could excel if they had just a little bit more help. At least with the dole we can ensure they have the opportunity to live in humane, even if difficult, conditions.
Now, I can understand why it makes a difference for parliamentarians. I can even understand (altho I disagree) why someone might want to exclude dole-bludgers from voting.[*] But I don't think it's fair on others. Many thousands of people are employed by the government in same way shape or form, a lot in forms even most minimalist governments will want to retain. You effectively disenfranchise one of the largest groups of employed people there are. Now, some of these people could just as effectively be employed by the private sector, but for others, the public sector is the single most effective way to deliver these services (such as the public transport, a convincing argument against I have not found). Why should people who do us all a favor by choosing to be employed by the government be disenfranchised? Additionally, many people employed by private companies will also be (partially) funded. They will not have chosen to be employed by the government, and might not even be aware of it. Should they be disenfranchised?
[*] Personally, I think people on the dole are the most likely to know what the needs of such people are, and should be entitled to express their opinion. No matter what methods we use to deal with the unemployed (the dole, private charity handouts, debtors prisons,
"Retrofitted"? I don't understand what you mean here. All you do to get Optional Preferential Voting (OPV) is say "you only need to number as many boxes are there are seats to fill".
OPV with both multi-member and single-member electorates is not exotic. It's used in a number of Australian states. As soon as one major party realises that the other major party is getting a lot of preferences from a minor party, they do what Queensland Labor did and launch a "Just vote one" campaign. Voila: Instant FPTP, just using a vertical line instead of two diagonal ones.
In any case, I think your major point is that single-member STV is not all that great a system, and it's well taken. I do wish Australians weren't brainwashed to believe that since we have a slightly better electoral system than America's, we've reached the peak. There's a long way up to go before we should be happy. Sure, we can be proud of achievements we made way back in the 1910s and 1940s, but it's time for more reform.
Point is by requiring us to express an opinion, even if we don't have one, it becomes a government requirement for us to think a particular way. It then goes from being a good law (which a requirement to submit a ballot, completed in private would be) to being a bad, 1984 one. The only factor which makes it bearable is that it's illegal to enforce it.
(It's also worth noting that at least the Victorian electoral law requires that any method to vote must allow a user to cast an informal ballot. IOW, the law requires that a voter should be able to break a bad law.)
Preferential voting is a plurality system. It's slightly more likely than FPTP to elect independent candidates, I gather, but ... the UK and Canada have multi-party systems in their lower house. Yet it's major news in Australia (at least to us election geeks) that the Greens came second (i.e. lost) in the seat of Melbourne! Add to that the fact that the National Party — little more than a branch of the Liberal Party — gets represented quite well in Parliament yet it gets about half the vote of the Greens, who are completely unrepresented in the lower house!
It's quite clear that Australia suffers from the exact same problem as America does. The only solution will be a true proportional-style voting system in the lower houses (and for Tasmania to increase the size of their parliament again so it's slightly more representative than your average local council in Victoria).
Parent poster is wrong and spreading misinformation. Please mod him down.
Voting is compulsory. It is illegal to leave your ballot blank or deliberately invalidate it. It is also illegal for anyone to know that you've done that, but that doesn't change the law — you are required to vote. Go read it. Similarly, there is no law that requires you to attent a polling place on election day; prepoll and postal votes satisfy the requirement to vote, but do not satisfy the made-up requirement of "attendance on polling day".
(Note: Laws for state elections may very. The above is true for Commonwealth and Victorian elections, but not strictly true for South Australian elections. I have no idea about other states and territories or local government elections.)
Wait, mefeems 'tis thou who haft no fenfe of humour. Ich vfed an form of humour known as "irony".
And in any case, iuft becaufe fpelling and writing was not as ftandardized at ye time ne meaneth not that Englifh grammour was oyer yan how j defcribed it. Iuft as there are things we can fay in colloquial fpeech (like double negatives) and things we cannot say (like "Said john donkey a the eatinged cat" for "John said the donkey was eating a cat"), there were ways grammour (and fpelling) cud differ and ways yey cud not. Thow wast wrong; I am right.
"To sticketh" is not grammatically correct. The "to" signifies that we are using an infinitive of the verb, yet the "-eth" is a finite ending. -eth is simply the original form of the -s suffix on verbs: it marks the singular third person present tense. So "he sticketh", "John sticketh" are fine, but "have to sticketh" is not.
Have you been to countries that use Cyrillic alphabets? I have. I frequently saw URLs written in Cyrillic, even though they were meant to be transliterated into Latin. So someone advertising "bank.kg" (I was in Kyrgyzstan) would write (fancy looking b)a(small captial h)(small capital k).(small capital k)(small capital gamma). They might have written the URL on the computer, but when it's a poster the character codes aren't there any more, it's just ink. I can understand the confusion that would come in Russia, where someone might right "bank.ru" as (fancy looking b)a(small captial h)(small capital k).py.
This isn't (entirely) about internationalised domain names and punycode; this is about being able to print domains in a cultrally acceptable, unambiguous way, even when character codings aren't around.
The real answer is competition. Firefox was decent when it was competing against Mozilla and, on Windows, Internet Explorer (Safari and Konqueror aren't sexy enough for Mozilla to care). Now, it only competes against IE so Linux and Mac users are secondary (or worse) and the developers clearly think it's so much better than IE that it doesn't really need to be competitive.
If the GTK and Windows ports of WebKit can get to a state where browsers for the rest of us can be based on them, then maybe Firefox can improve. Hopefully, it'll happen before Firefox is completely sidelined because otherwise we'll just see the replacement browsers stagnating after an initial period of being the greatest thing since sliced bread.
(Yup folks, Vi and Gnome need Emacs and KDE. It'll be a sad day everywhere but Redmond if one ever wins.)
The Kennet Liberal Government during the 1990s privatised power generation and distribution in Victoria. Originally the private distributors had a monopoly over different parts of the city or state, but now they all compete everywhere. (They use the same powerlines, you just pay different people.) I've never bothered myself to understand it, but I've heard as your PP said that it was modelled on the Californian system.
Show me a program that does it right, when using a cross-platform toolkit. I haven't seen any. That doesn't mean none exist, but everyone who uses cross-platform toolkits seems to decide it's just easier just to use the same code without making sure it's got a native look and feel on each platform. My problem is that it becomes to easy to do the wrong thing.
Similarly, section 245 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act (1918) (which is entitled "Compulsory voting" not "Compulsory turning up to you have your name crossed off") begins:
And in case you're wondering, voting quite clearly refers to the process of marking a number on a ballot paper, not to having your name crossed off (see for examples sections 239 and 240).
Voting is compulsory. We do not have a gun pointed at our heads (merely the threat of a small $20 fine). We do not have a legal means of enforcing a vote (merely the ability to enforce having the name marked off). But the law is clear. You are required to vote. Voting is compulsory, and anyone who tells you otherwise is spreading a myth, mistaken or lying.
Merry Christmas!
That's also illegal (you can't get caught, but if you could you could be fined for it). And I doubt the counters bothered to read it.
(Actually, in the 2006 Victorian state election, the government introduced computers to allow blind people to cast secret ballots as a trial; the law passed allowing this required the computers to allow a user to cast an informal vote — which is illegal!)
Funnily enough, every time I've seen a wxWidgets app running on my Linux box, it's always stuck out like a sore thumb. They abide by Windows UI design patterns, just using Gtk+ widgets. This is a bad way to do cross-platform applications; instead, you should follow the lead of Pidgin/Adium/libpurple and separate out the front-end and back-end code; the front-end should be maintained by separate platform specific teams. That way, your program looks and feels native. No cross-platform toolkit will do that.
Will these themes just match the look or also the feel of the toolkit? (e.g. on Gtk+, will it let me remap my keyboard shortcuts on the fly from the menu?). Unless they can match the feel, there's not much point; they should crawl up in a whole and whither away like all suppliers of cross-platform toolkits.
(The correct approach to writing cross-platform programs is to separate the front-end from the backend; Pidgin/Adium/libpurple are an excellent example.)
Actually, read the law. It is compulsory to vote. In fact, it's compulsory to make a formal ballot. If you only write "1" on your lower house ballot, or put your name on the ballot, or do anything else that invalidates your vote, you're breaking the law. Just because you don't (or even can't!) get caught doesn't make it legal.
It's not illegal not to vote if you aren't enrolled, no, but it is illegal not to be enrolled for Commonwealth elections and elections in most states and territories. (I think South Australia is the only exception there.) Break one law, break the other, up to you.
Not an insurmountable problem. For marketing purposes you could say it is based on KDE 2003 ("Kackle 2007 is a laugh generator for KDE 2003"). For technical purposes you would say it requires libkde 3.5 or greater ("Installing: Kackle 2007 is included in most distributions; simply use the standard method. If you need to build it yourself, you will need libkde 3.5 or greater to compile and install it").
For most users who'll only read the marketing stuff anyway, the technical details of which precise library version it requires is irrelevant.
Windows does much the same thing: Check how many programs require XP Service Pack 2 or 2000 Service Pack 4 or something.