In my apartment, there is a recycling bin right underneath the mail boxes. I check my mail about once a week, in a typical week, 90% goes straight into recycling, 8% is immediately shredded, and the last 2% is actually useful.
For many of us Americans, The debate over health care is not about quality or availability, but rather it is about who has the power to control quality and availablility of our health care. Socialized health care gives the government the power (through cash flow) to prescribe what our health care should be like. Given our current negative cash flow in the federal budgets I am not very optimistic about what health care will be like if we were to socialize that part of our society.
Bzzt.. Wrong. In the Canadian system, at least, the therapeutic decision rests purely between the Doctor and the patient. The only thing the federal government does is dictate to the provinces that "thou shalt have a public healthcare system" and provide national regulatory tasks, similar to the FDA and so forth in the US. Hospitals themselves are operated by local health authorities, and Doctors are typically private businesses.
In effect, our system is a single payer insurance system. Doctors do not work for the government, rather as an organization they negotiate a fee schedule with the province, and are paid on a per fee basis. The government can't force doctors to work anywhere (witness the problem with attacting doctors to rural areas in the country), nor can they dictate what course of treatment the doctor must use.
If you get an IT job that requires a security clearance, it's very likely that you will have to deal with that "crazy dividing line." Corporate IT Security likes to be able to have full control over a device and its data when little things like national security are involved. One of the most reliable and less-intrusive ways to accomplish this is with some type of "personas" system, which has been successfully implemented by several different packages for many years.
This is also why I carry two phones, but by my own choice. I could use my corporate phone for everything, but I'd rather keep my personal life and my work life as separate as possible. Two separate phone numbers, two separate email accounts/clients, etc etc etc... Also, the mental separation is huge. When I go on vacation, I leave my corporate phone on my desk.
Whatever it is, it's not a weather satellite. Those are put into geosynchronous or geostationary orbits (west to east with slight inclination or directly over the equator with zero inclination), so they'll have the same view of the Earth all the time. e.g. If India launches a weather satellite, they want it hanging over India 24/7 so, y'know, it'll show them pictures of the weather over India all the time. Because geosynchronous orbits are so much higher (42,000 km), they require a lot more energy than low earth orbit (150-300 km).
Actually, no. Much of the weather observations are done from polar orbiting satellites in low orbit. This allows them to have a much more detailed view of the earth and its weather systems then if you're geo-stationary. To put it in perspective, from geo-synchronous orbit, the earth is a sphere about 17 degrees wide. This is roughly the size of a basketball held out at arm's length. Sure you can see large scale weather patterns (Hurricanes and so forth) but it doesn't tell you about much about local conditions. This is where NOAA's POES satellites, as well as the ones from other nations are intended for. They are put into exactly the same type of sun-synchronous orbit as the NK launch.
I'm well aware of AMSAT, as I've worked them myself (And also been to Bob's lab at NRL). Alas, it's a whole lot easier and cheaper to flight qualify a lump of concrete than it is to qualify a satellite built by AMSAT and its volunteers. I'm not meaning to denigrate the AMSAT folks, as they've shown that they can build and operate very reliable spacecraft (Just look at AO-7) but from the point of view of the launch provider, it's a huge risk. Add to this the current ITAR regime, and it unfortunately doesn't bode that well, imho.
I would absolutely love to see a replacement for AO-40, but I don't see it happening any time soon.
For 99% of the population, who gives a poop about platform openness? when it comes to my phone, all I care about is whether it runs the apps I want. While yes, I could program for my phone, I don't have time or the inclination to do so. In fact, the lack of openness probably keeps some of the riffraff out by presenting a slightly higher barrier to entry.
The fact of the matter is that from a usability perspective,a lot of open source software simply sucks. I've been running linux since 1997, and except for some bright spots (XBMC comes to mind) most end user applications lack any kind of polish that would make it useful for my parents, or anyone else who doesn't have a technical bent.
Given how expensive it is to lift anything to space, lifting ballast to space is a sin. Lift another satellite in its place.
Ballast is always a necessity in rocketry. In order for the thing to fly in a straight line, the thrust vector must be aligned with the vehicle's centre of mass. The upshot of this is that if your spacecraft (Rocket and payload) doesn't have the center of mass precisely down the centerline, you need to add ballast weights in order to keep the thing from coming apart. If you look closely of an image of the shuttle at launch, the exhaust from the main engines (not the solids) is on an angle compared to the rest of the vehicle. As the fuel is burned off and the SRBs jettisoned, the center of mass changes, and the engines will gimbal to keep things on course.
On traditional rockets, the same thing is accomplished by adding weights so the whole thing is balanced. Back in the day, the way that most amateur radio satellites got launched was as ballast on a launch with some larger payload. That's getting tougher and tougher in the modern era due to competition for that space, and also, to put it bluntly, it's a lot easier to certify a lump of concrete for flight than it is to certify a satellite built by a bunch of guys you don't necessarily trust, sometimes int heir basement.
Launching a big lump of nothing also makes sense, given that this is really just an all-up test of the launch platform. Are you going to entrust a $500,000,000 payload to an unproven launch vehicle? If they did and it went boom (which tends to happen in rocketry a lot), we'd here no end of their choice of an untested vehicle. If the test passes, then there is more confidence in the subsequent launches being safe enough.
The flaw on Hubble's main mirror is one of Spherical Aberration. Basically, the light bouncing off the mirror's surface doesn't actually converge at a point, but rather in a line. It doesn't matter whether you're looking at the ground, or at the stars, spherical aberration is still bad.
That's why Hubble was useful in the first place. As a telescope, it's not that impressive - far bigger and fancier ones exist. What sets it apart is that it is above all that atmospheric interference.
Well, not quite... the adaptive optics on modern ground-based telescopes can deal with much of the problems associated with atmospherics. The real win with Hubble is that a) it can look in wavelengths that are heavily attenuated by the atmosphere (Think UV and Infrared) and b) it can stare at a target, continuously, for very long periods of time. Earth-based telescopes are (obviously) limited to observing at night, while Hubble can continuously observe a large portion of the sky on a continual basis (24 hours, 36, whatever). This is especially important when you're trying to observe extremely dim targets who's brightness can be measured in photons per minute.
As a basic DIY type person, I love the new cars. For my 2006 Jetta, I've got the VCDS cable/software, which lets me connect to, diagnose, and twiddle the configuration bits on every control module in the vehicle. If something's acting up, the computer tells me what is wrong, and even if something's a bit off, I can see live values off of the various sensors in the vehicle.
For reference, the VCDS tool is a complete third party re-implementation of the VW group's diagnostics/configuration software. The capabilities it exposes are far and beyond what you can get from standard ODB-II. For example, I reconfigured the car to operate the headlamps at 50% intensity while in daytime running lights mode. I've also re-configured it for the scandanavian DRL configuration, so my tail lamps are always on, making things much safer.
when did the US government buy Iridium, SES, and Intelsat? And then, of course, when did the US government annex Thailand since Thaicom has signed a contract with SpaceX to launch Thaicom 6 next year. I won't even mention the contracts with Asia Broadcast Systems and Satmex since those are obviously US government affiliated.
Well, in the case of Iridium, when the constellation was in danger of being de-orbited, the DoD gave the trustee a sweetheart contract in order to keep the constellation in orbit.
this is what happened in the 86 challenger shuttle disaster.
Well, no, not quite. In the challenger disaster, the O-Rings that seal the booster sections suffered a blow through, which cut into the main tanks for the liquid rockets, causing those to explode. After the main tank exploded, the solids continued to fly on for a few seconds until the range safety officer issued a destruct command, causing the two SRBs to explode as designed.
The flip side to using solids for space flight is they very much follow the KISS principle. They are relatively simple devices. As long as you have your materials science right, you light them and they will go. There are no turbo-pumps to fail, no presurization lines that might burst, etc etc etc.
There is a reason why the LES on Apollo and Mercury, as well as your typical ejection seat, and hell your car's air bags, are all based on what is, or is effectively, a solid rocket. They're damned reliable.
Space based telescopes also have one other important advantage over their earth-bound siblings, namely the ability to image a target for extremely long periods of time. Except for the polar regions, telescopes on earth realistically only have 4 to 6 hours of useable imaging time per night. The rest of the time is spent waiting for it to get dark. A telescope in orbit, on the other hand, can stay pointed on a target for days, weeks or months at a time.
Canada's "Humble" space telescope (MOST), for example, stared at a patch of the sky for 5 years straight. Its mission is to continually watch a group of stars, watching for subtle variations in their brightness which could a) indicate the transit of extra-solar planets and b) help determine the composition of these stars.
People are making a fundamental error in terminology here. If you're looking to hire someone for a programming job, then you shouldn't be looking at someone with a CS degree. Computer Science is not about coding or programming, it's about the practices behind it. If you want a coder, go hire a code monkey from your local technical college. If you want someone to design the software, make sure it's sane, and then hand it off to a code monkey, then hire a CS grad.
Canada has a worse system though. No primaries - party organization rather than voters select the candidates. No executive branch election - winning party sets up the cabinet however it wants. No accountability except the vote in the next election which is in 5 years time in the lower house - at least US House representatives can be kicked out in 2 years. No voting at all for the upper house - the members are selected by the Prime Minister. Worst of all is the "parliamentary supremacy" - the rule of men rather than the rule of law. I don't see where Canadians get such enormous confidence in their system. US has it's problems too but it is a lot more democratic political system than the one Canada adopted from the UK.
And thank God. As a non political person, why should I give a flying frak about who the parties put forward? The entire job of a political party is to put together a slate of candidates that I can look at and decide whether I want to vote for them or not. There is no reason on God's green earth that we should have to endure elections twice over. One of the main reasons why the US is stuck in the hole they're in is that their politicians are constantly fighting elections and campaigns, and not actually governing. The job of a government is to govern, it's right there in the name "government". It's not to slander their enemies and be in constant campaign mode.
Case in point: In Ohio, in 2010, the citizens elected a Republican state legislature and governor on promises that they would work to attract businesses to the state and thus reduce unemployment. However, one of the first things they did was pass a law which (similarly to what Scott Walker was doing in Wisconsin) removed the collective bargaining rights of public worker unions. In 2011, citizen organizers put the repeal of that bill on the ballot and won by almost a 2:1 margin, indicating that the original bill was probably not what the citizens had thought they were voting for in 2010.
That's why you toss the party in question out on their ass in the next election. This is also why you need more than two political parties.
As a person fairly knowledgeable about technology and what can go wrong during its implementation and use, I am somewhat dubious about the use of unauditable unverifiable, proprietary computer systems for voting. However, many discussions of this issue are based on an underlying assumption that paper ballots and hand counting have an error rate of zero and a margin of error of 0%, and that is not the case. With the best will and good intentions in the world human beings handling 120 million pieces of paper will make mistakes, ballots will get torn, ballot boxes lost in transit, etc. Not saying it is worse than computer systems owned by big-dollar donors to a specific political party, but it is not perfect.
The record of the voting system in Canada is extremely good. Judicial recounts, which automatically occur when a result is within (I believe) 1% or some such, often don't change the result by more than a few votes, out of upwards of 20,000 cast in a given riding (Electoral district for you yanks). Each ballot is counted, in full view of multiple people, generally representing the major political parties involved and others. If there is any hanky panky happening, it would be in the news very quickly.
Here in lotusland, we also elect the park board.:) That said, in BC at least, I don't know why they still bother with school boards. The province has basically tied the hands of the school boards in terms of curriculum, negotiating with teachers, etc... so I really don't see why it's an elected thing any more.
The ballots are counted by hand at each polling station. From what I understand, there are roughly 1000 ballots cast per polling station. In larger cities, such as where I live, you'll actually have what amounts to 3 or 4 polling stations co-located in a single location, but each has its own returning officer, counters, scrutineers, etc... It's a very scalable architecture when you think about it.
Polling stations, much the same as in the US, are typically in community centres, libraries, church basements, and other public places.
Anyhow, in the end, the results are tallied and returned within about 2 to 3 hours of the polls closing. Of course, due to the fact that this country is 4.5 time zones wide, and most of the population is concentrated in the eastern time zone, the election results are usually known before the polls close on the west coast.
The real difference is that when we vote, all we vote for is the local representative. Unlike the US, we actually allow the politicians to govern, for better or worse. What we don't have is a gazillion citizens initiatives demanding that the government spend money on new projects while preventing the government from raising taxes to support these projects.
Enshrined within the constitution is the premise of parliamentary supremacy, which is exactly as it sounds. The vote of Parliament is supreme, it can even override the supreme court (though only for a period of 5 years). Binding referendums are thus, by definition, unconstitutional, and thus we don't have to do this stupid crap on election day.
If we don't like what they do, we turf 'em out in the next election. (Also, we have more than two realistic choices on the ballot paper)
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In my apartment, there is a recycling bin right underneath the mail boxes. I check my mail about once a week, in a typical week, 90% goes straight into recycling, 8% is immediately shredded, and the last 2% is actually useful.
For many of us Americans, The debate over health care is not about quality or availability, but rather it is about who has the power to control quality and availablility of our health care. Socialized health care gives the government the power (through cash flow) to prescribe what our health care should be like. Given our current negative cash flow in the federal budgets I am not very optimistic about what health care will be like if we were to socialize that part of our society.
Bzzt.. Wrong. In the Canadian system, at least, the therapeutic decision rests purely between the Doctor and the patient. The only thing the federal government does is dictate to the provinces that "thou shalt have a public healthcare system" and provide national regulatory tasks, similar to the FDA and so forth in the US. Hospitals themselves are operated by local health authorities, and Doctors are typically private businesses.
In effect, our system is a single payer insurance system. Doctors do not work for the government, rather as an organization they negotiate a fee schedule with the province, and are paid on a per fee basis. The government can't force doctors to work anywhere (witness the problem with attacting doctors to rural areas in the country), nor can they dictate what course of treatment the doctor must use.
Eh... we flew around Baghdad with the doors open... Acute airborne lead poisoning is pretty dangerous too... ;)
If you get an IT job that requires a security clearance, it's very likely that you will have to deal with that "crazy dividing line." Corporate IT Security likes to be able to have full control over a device and its data when little things like national security are involved. One of the most reliable and less-intrusive ways to accomplish this is with some type of "personas" system, which has been successfully implemented by several different packages for many years.
This is also why I carry two phones, but by my own choice. I could use my corporate phone for everything, but I'd rather keep my personal life and my work life as separate as possible. Two separate phone numbers, two separate email accounts/clients, etc etc etc... Also, the mental separation is huge. When I go on vacation, I leave my corporate phone on my desk.
Now to build a time machine and switch myself with him just to say yabba...dabba...doo.
Much better would be to shout "Oh my God, what's that?!" and then cut the mic. ;)
Whatever it is, it's not a weather satellite. Those are put into geosynchronous or geostationary orbits (west to east with slight inclination or directly over the equator with zero inclination), so they'll have the same view of the Earth all the time. e.g. If India launches a weather satellite, they want it hanging over India 24/7 so, y'know, it'll show them pictures of the weather over India all the time. Because geosynchronous orbits are so much higher (42,000 km), they require a lot more energy than low earth orbit (150-300 km).
Actually, no. Much of the weather observations are done from polar orbiting satellites in low orbit. This allows them to have a much more detailed view of the earth and its weather systems then if you're geo-stationary. To put it in perspective, from geo-synchronous orbit, the earth is a sphere about 17 degrees wide. This is roughly the size of a basketball held out at arm's length. Sure you can see large scale weather patterns (Hurricanes and so forth) but it doesn't tell you about much about local conditions. This is where NOAA's POES satellites, as well as the ones from other nations are intended for. They are put into exactly the same type of sun-synchronous orbit as the NK launch.
Hi Bruce,
I'm well aware of AMSAT, as I've worked them myself (And also been to Bob's lab at NRL). Alas, it's a whole lot easier and cheaper to flight qualify a lump of concrete than it is to qualify a satellite built by AMSAT and its volunteers. I'm not meaning to denigrate the AMSAT folks, as they've shown that they can build and operate very reliable spacecraft (Just look at AO-7) but from the point of view of the launch provider, it's a huge risk. Add to this the current ITAR regime, and it unfortunately doesn't bode that well, imho.
I would absolutely love to see a replacement for AO-40, but I don't see it happening any time soon.
How about platform openness? Just sayin' ...
For 99% of the population, who gives a poop about platform openness? when it comes to my phone, all I care about is whether it runs the apps I want. While yes, I could program for my phone, I don't have time or the inclination to do so. In fact, the lack of openness probably keeps some of the riffraff out by presenting a slightly higher barrier to entry.
The fact of the matter is that from a usability perspective ,a lot of open source software simply sucks. I've been running linux since 1997, and except for some bright spots (XBMC comes to mind) most end user applications lack any kind of polish that would make it useful for my parents, or anyone else who doesn't have a technical bent.
Given how expensive it is to lift anything to space, lifting ballast to space is a sin. Lift another satellite in its place.
Ballast is always a necessity in rocketry. In order for the thing to fly in a straight line, the thrust vector must be aligned with the vehicle's centre of mass. The upshot of this is that if your spacecraft (Rocket and payload) doesn't have the center of mass precisely down the centerline, you need to add ballast weights in order to keep the thing from coming apart. If you look closely of an image of the shuttle at launch, the exhaust from the main engines (not the solids) is on an angle compared to the rest of the vehicle. As the fuel is burned off and the SRBs jettisoned, the center of mass changes, and the engines will gimbal to keep things on course.
On traditional rockets, the same thing is accomplished by adding weights so the whole thing is balanced. Back in the day, the way that most amateur radio satellites got launched was as ballast on a launch with some larger payload. That's getting tougher and tougher in the modern era due to competition for that space, and also, to put it bluntly, it's a lot easier to certify a lump of concrete for flight than it is to certify a satellite built by a bunch of guys you don't necessarily trust, sometimes int heir basement.
Launching a big lump of nothing also makes sense, given that this is really just an all-up test of the launch platform. Are you going to entrust a $500,000,000 payload to an unproven launch vehicle? If they did and it went boom (which tends to happen in rocketry a lot), we'd here no end of their choice of an untested vehicle. If the test passes, then there is more confidence in the subsequent launches being safe enough.
The flaw on Hubble's main mirror is one of Spherical Aberration. Basically, the light bouncing off the mirror's surface doesn't actually converge at a point, but rather in a line. It doesn't matter whether you're looking at the ground, or at the stars, spherical aberration is still bad.
That's why Hubble was useful in the first place. As a telescope, it's not that impressive - far bigger and fancier ones exist. What sets it apart is that it is above all that atmospheric interference.
Well, not quite... the adaptive optics on modern ground-based telescopes can deal with much of the problems associated with atmospherics. The real win with Hubble is that a) it can look in wavelengths that are heavily attenuated by the atmosphere (Think UV and Infrared) and b) it can stare at a target, continuously, for very long periods of time. Earth-based telescopes are (obviously) limited to observing at night, while Hubble can continuously observe a large portion of the sky on a continual basis (24 hours, 36, whatever). This is especially important when you're trying to observe extremely dim targets who's brightness can be measured in photons per minute.
As a basic DIY type person, I love the new cars. For my 2006 Jetta, I've got the VCDS cable/software, which lets me connect to, diagnose, and twiddle the configuration bits on every control module in the vehicle. If something's acting up, the computer tells me what is wrong, and even if something's a bit off, I can see live values off of the various sensors in the vehicle.
For reference, the VCDS tool is a complete third party re-implementation of the VW group's diagnostics/configuration software. The capabilities it exposes are far and beyond what you can get from standard ODB-II. For example, I reconfigured the car to operate the headlamps at 50% intensity while in daytime running lights mode. I've also re-configured it for the scandanavian DRL configuration, so my tail lamps are always on, making things much safer.
when did the US government buy Iridium, SES, and Intelsat? And then, of course, when did the US government annex Thailand since Thaicom has signed a contract with SpaceX to launch Thaicom 6 next year. I won't even mention the contracts with Asia Broadcast Systems and Satmex since those are obviously US government affiliated.
Well, in the case of Iridium, when the constellation was in danger of being de-orbited, the DoD gave the trustee a sweetheart contract in order to keep the constellation in orbit.
this is what happened in the 86 challenger shuttle disaster.
Well, no, not quite. In the challenger disaster, the O-Rings that seal the booster sections suffered a blow through, which cut into the main tanks for the liquid rockets, causing those to explode. After the main tank exploded, the solids continued to fly on for a few seconds until the range safety officer issued a destruct command, causing the two SRBs to explode as designed.
The flip side to using solids for space flight is they very much follow the KISS principle. They are relatively simple devices. As long as you have your materials science right, you light them and they will go. There are no turbo-pumps to fail, no presurization lines that might burst, etc etc etc.
There is a reason why the LES on Apollo and Mercury, as well as your typical ejection seat, and hell your car's air bags, are all based on what is, or is effectively, a solid rocket. They're damned reliable.
Space based telescopes also have one other important advantage over their earth-bound siblings, namely the ability to image a target for extremely long periods of time. Except for the polar regions, telescopes on earth realistically only have 4 to 6 hours of useable imaging time per night. The rest of the time is spent waiting for it to get dark. A telescope in orbit, on the other hand, can stay pointed on a target for days, weeks or months at a time.
Canada's "Humble" space telescope (MOST), for example, stared at a patch of the sky for 5 years straight. Its mission is to continually watch a group of stars, watching for subtle variations in their brightness which could a) indicate the transit of extra-solar planets and b) help determine the composition of these stars.
Most industrial diamonds these days are manufactured diamonds. Much cheaper to do that than to pull them out of the ground.
How many presentations did Strom Thurmond do in the final few years before the moths ate too many holes?
People are making a fundamental error in terminology here. If you're looking to hire someone for a programming job, then you shouldn't be looking at someone with a CS degree. Computer Science is not about coding or programming, it's about the practices behind it. If you want a coder, go hire a code monkey from your local technical college. If you want someone to design the software, make sure it's sane, and then hand it off to a code monkey, then hire a CS grad.
Canada has a worse system though. No primaries - party organization rather than voters select the candidates. No executive branch election - winning party sets up the cabinet however it wants. No accountability except the vote in the next election which is in 5 years time in the lower house - at least US House representatives can be kicked out in 2 years. No voting at all for the upper house - the members are selected by the Prime Minister. Worst of all is the "parliamentary supremacy" - the rule of men rather than the rule of law. I don't see where Canadians get such enormous confidence in their system. US has it's problems too but it is a lot more democratic political system than the one Canada adopted from the UK.
And thank God. As a non political person, why should I give a flying frak about who the parties put forward? The entire job of a political party is to put together a slate of candidates that I can look at and decide whether I want to vote for them or not. There is no reason on God's green earth that we should have to endure elections twice over. One of the main reasons why the US is stuck in the hole they're in is that their politicians are constantly fighting elections and campaigns, and not actually governing. The job of a government is to govern, it's right there in the name "government". It's not to slander their enemies and be in constant campaign mode.
Case in point: In Ohio, in 2010, the citizens elected a Republican state legislature and governor on promises that they would work to attract businesses to the state and thus reduce unemployment. However, one of the first things they did was pass a law which (similarly to what Scott Walker was doing in Wisconsin) removed the collective bargaining rights of public worker unions. In 2011, citizen organizers put the repeal of that bill on the ballot and won by almost a 2:1 margin, indicating that the original bill was probably not what the citizens had thought they were voting for in 2010.
That's why you toss the party in question out on their ass in the next election. This is also why you need more than two political parties.
Two parties does not a democracy make.
As a person fairly knowledgeable about technology and what can go wrong during its implementation and use, I am somewhat dubious about the use of unauditable unverifiable, proprietary computer systems for voting. However, many discussions of this issue are based on an underlying assumption that paper ballots and hand counting have an error rate of zero and a margin of error of 0%, and that is not the case. With the best will and good intentions in the world human beings handling 120 million pieces of paper will make mistakes, ballots will get torn, ballot boxes lost in transit, etc. Not saying it is worse than computer systems owned by big-dollar donors to a specific political party, but it is not perfect.
The record of the voting system in Canada is extremely good. Judicial recounts, which automatically occur when a result is within (I believe) 1% or some such, often don't change the result by more than a few votes, out of upwards of 20,000 cast in a given riding (Electoral district for you yanks). Each ballot is counted, in full view of multiple people, generally representing the major political parties involved and others. If there is any hanky panky happening, it would be in the news very quickly.
Here in lotusland, we also elect the park board. :) That said, in BC at least, I don't know why they still bother with school boards. The province has basically tied the hands of the school boards in terms of curriculum, negotiating with teachers, etc... so I really don't see why it's an elected thing any more.
The ballots are counted by hand at each polling station. From what I understand, there are roughly 1000 ballots cast per polling station. In larger cities, such as where I live, you'll actually have what amounts to 3 or 4 polling stations co-located in a single location, but each has its own returning officer, counters, scrutineers, etc... It's a very scalable architecture when you think about it.
Polling stations, much the same as in the US, are typically in community centres, libraries, church basements, and other public places.
Anyhow, in the end, the results are tallied and returned within about 2 to 3 hours of the polls closing. Of course, due to the fact that this country is 4.5 time zones wide, and most of the population is concentrated in the eastern time zone, the election results are usually known before the polls close on the west coast.
The real difference is that when we vote, all we vote for is the local representative. Unlike the US, we actually allow the politicians to govern, for better or worse. What we don't have is a gazillion citizens initiatives demanding that the government spend money on new projects while preventing the government from raising taxes to support these projects.
Enshrined within the constitution is the premise of parliamentary supremacy, which is exactly as it sounds. The vote of Parliament is supreme, it can even override the supreme court (though only for a period of 5 years). Binding referendums are thus, by definition, unconstitutional, and thus we don't have to do this stupid crap on election day.
If we don't like what they do, we turf 'em out in the next election. (Also, we have more than two realistic choices on the ballot paper)
So that's why it sounds like Nickleback has only ever written 2 songs...