I'd gladly mod you up if I had points. I did once what you describe, merging various sources from many authors using almost all flavours of word between them into a single document for publishing. It was a nightmare. The only way I managed to do it in the end was with openoffice.org. And I still had hours of fun quashing encoding variations between word for windows and word for mac, like quotation marks being straight on windows and angled on mac, which is terribly difficult to spot on screen but shows like a nose in the middle of a face in print.
Word is the epitome of what *not* to do as a wordprocessor. Those responsible for this mess should be drawn, hanged and quartered.
Frankly, I believe that computers make fewer mistakes than humans, so I would in fact prefer a plane with a single (or no) human pilots.
Reminds me:
Q: What is the ideal cockpit crew?
A: A pilot and a dog...the pilot is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to bite the pilot in case he tries to touch anything.
Yes, it's called the Grand Robert de la Langue Française by Alain Rey, 6 volumes, 2nd edition 2001 (ISBN: 978-2850366734).
As far as I know, it's gone electronic only since a couple of years, but you may still be able to snatch a dead tree version somewhere.
It's 4 volumes shorter compared to the OED, but that's not surprising when you consider that half of the english lexicon is made up of french imported words, only the other half being genuinely saxonish and thus germanic in origin, hence the need to make room for the redundancy.
"Programmers originally developed dynamic linking in the Multics operating system, starting in 1964, and the MTS (Michigan Terminal System), built in the late 1960s."
You'd need to already own the computer to pull something like that, which pretty much defeats the purpose. But, yes, it's been used in the past, along with other techniques. The intrinsic problem here is not to have a search path for execs and libs, but to provide hardcoded at system level a default path with $PWD included, instead of a path exclusively containing system directories under admin control.
MOD PARENT UP !! Fact is, on any unix out there, no competent admin would leave '.' neither in executable path, nor in dynamic library search path. It's another of case of a security hole known at least theoretically since the 60's, and observed in real life in the 80's, that microsoft overlooked in the design stage when it was time to follow proper security assessments, and are now stuck with.
They should be put on trial for dumb blunders like this one. When you hire top professionals who can't ignore the 'state of art' when doing an error like this, it should be considered a cause for limitless civil liability.
I think the problem with Linux is that those who develop it push their philosophy too much and refuse to give room for other philosophies, along with way too much spread ecosystem (distros, configurations, all the problems). There's a reason why we still haven't seen the year of Linux on desktop and probably never will.
You are wrong. There are commercial products released for *some* linux flavours. Agreed, they don't fare well on the linux ecosystem at large, for simple reasons : install is complicated while native free softwares are at hand's reach after an 'apt-get install zzz' or 'yum install zzz', they don't run on every flavour whereas native apps correctly packaged do, you can't get insurance your paid software will keep on running after upgrade while free softwares can be recompiled to take advantage of new system features, commercial applications generally don't respect native look and feel relying on wine while native apps do behave nicely (at the cost of an automated compilation in the worst case), and basically, non-free softwares generally expects linux to behave like windows which is orthogonal to the desire of linuxers to have the system *not* be windows-like, favouring stability over usability. Knwo what ? Many linuxers use linux as a desktop, it works, commercial softwares are simply subpar on linux compared to native apps. End of story, until commercial editors are going to invest on native ports for the platform.
You're misunderstanding the motto. But it should be read backward: liberty is the goal, equality is a mean to that end, and brotherhood is the precondition to achieve it. You can't feel someone else is your equal without thinking of him as a kind of brother; and you can't have freedom among people who don't view you as an equal. The relationship between those words is hierarchical, but to reach the top, you have to climb from a sane and steady base.
This is silly. 4.0 was an alpha version, not a failure, 4.1 a beta and 4.2 a RC. But 4.3 is actually extremely good at what it does. I barely ever used 3.5 before, it was either too bloated for the computers I had, or much too crash-prone. But it wasn't anymore useful than a plain window manager. In any cases, if I need something lean, then I take windowmaker over kde 3.5 anytime. KDE 4.3 is an entirely different league. Either you want it for your comfort and productivity, and you have a computer with the guts to run it correctly (I found that it's a breeze on an AMD X86_64 x2 3800+ with 4Gb RAM), or you deal with somewhat older hardware, and then you're better off with an entirely different and much less taxing window manager than any KDE version (xfce, window maker...). Since day 1, KDE is synonymous with huge RAM footprint, general bloat, and ressources hunger in exchange for nice effects, usability helpers, graphical wonders and user comfort. Either you cope with that, or you get away, but you can't have both.
So was Mendelssohn when he wrote his nuptial march, but it does little to avoid hearing it at most weddings, because many couples are not musicologist and have little choice over the matter. So it goes with our politicians : Machiavelli's original intents weight little in front of a wrong, centuries old, consensus.
try to understand the concepts of a subject matter you've inserted your low iq self into, such as: MASS MEDIA
Please, do yourself a favour and get out of your hole someday. 'Mass Media' as you call them don't really jump borders ; do we have US soap operas and fictions here ? Yes. Dubbed. Do we have the Simpsons ? Yes. Dubbed. Do we receive HBO, ABC, CNN ? Generally, no. It's not absolutely true, as we can opt to pay for some US channels on the cable - subtitled. Not many people do, and you'd be hard pressed to watch it outside of your hotel room. Printed press, then ? Give me a break. Most of the time I get it free, because people here already find the national press too expensive, so paying for something in english...
Leaves what ? Internet ? Mwhaahaahaa. In 1995 when I first connected to the 'net, english was absolutely, completely, totally mandatory. You simply couldn't find interesting pages in any other language. Today, I can surf for hours without seeing anything written in another language than mine. Reading pages in english is a choice. A choice I do, but I won't bet teenagers are doing it. In fact, the trend is reversed. Teens have the same education I received, but for people my age, english was deemed extremely important and the net comforted this impression, being 90% english when we got on board. Today's teens see absolutely no need whatsoever to read english, they rely on translations and pages in their national idiom. And the lazy brats can waste all their time seeing nothing but what takes less efforts for them to read.
You are confusing expansion of your zone of economic influence with voluntary adoption of US culture.
It did not worked the same way. There are '96 disk images ready for vmware and other such emulators. Try it out by yourself. Win '96 was in my opinion way less confusing and much more consistent than 98 in that respect. Just my opinion, though.
From snapshots you can't really see the differences between it and 95 or 98, but it was really a mix bag of both and had some very nifty tricks that did not make it in 98. For instance, you could get rid of mouse double-clicks, and use 1 click action throughout the UI, weblike. Options would turn blue when hovered by the mouse pointer. There was a good Personal Information Manager that wasn't kept later on. Etc.
Crashes were funny because they were hardwired to an external debugging machine ; so blue screens went like 'can't find//E/debug/dump' or something like that.
I completely agree. Before the widespread use of Internet, in a time when torrents were still a dream, I was using daily an early build of Windows 98 dubbed Win'96 by the press. It was massively copied the old fashioned way and spread. Tough beast to use, but pretty stable compared to a legit Win95 if you absolutely barred yourself to put a picture in the background of the explorer.
Dear sir, I'd like to thank you for the demonstration you are unwillingly making of what I was previously writing. You obviously missed the last half of most of my sentences ; of course, this may be the result of ADD, but it's most probable that you're not understanding what I'm saying. I wasn't asking so much as proof of the decrease in literacy among the general public that you make an ass of yourself in public.
This said, to put my reasoning in a simpler form : english as an homogenous, live, language is on the verge of explosion under the sheer weight of foreign loan words ; this will probably lead at first to localized form of english, interacting at the lowest level via a common vocabulary of limited scope (the TV one) and later on will lead to the birth of new, incompatible languages. Original english will live on certainly for a long time as a dead language, for intergroup relationship - much like learned people knew latin until the XIXth century.
You're making a bad case with me, because if I didn't liked english, I certainly wouldn't have spent the better part of the last 15 years learning it.
On a final note, I've always thought I had no particular prejudice against my fellows human beings, but your message made me realise I'm strongly biased against assholes - regardless of colours and origins.
You obviously know nothing in linguistics. Media speech, especially news and soap, may use about 2.500 ~ 3.000 words between them. This number is at the moment decreasing to cater for the lack of education in the masses. A reasonably educated speaker knows 15.000 words. A complete english dictionary has about 38.000 words in it. Media is not a language, it's unable to cope with the requirements of even a low-class technician. You may be watching the same TV as the average californian gang member if you live in NYC, but you'd already be at loss in certain suburbs of LA (where you wouldn't dare going in the first place, of course).
ps. Oh, btw, yes, I've read some Shakespeare plays. I've even been in Stratford upon Avon to watch one interpreted by the RCP a couple of years ago. I read the play beforehand, to get a hang on the text. No big deal with a little help from a competent dictionary.
But I also dug a bit into Beowulf, and didn't got very far. And I guess neither would you, albeit this admittedly was written in a kind of primitive english. When you get to a certain point of evolution, you can't make sense of previous states of the language anymore.
That's exactly where you are being delusional. Most of the English evolution happened on a geographically limited island, and kept in synch between speakers, give or take a few local oddities you can live with. You minimize the importance of today geography. The sheer scale of the evolution creates evolutionary spots that are not synchronised and will lead to a balkanisation of the english language, where speakers of euro-english won't be able to interact with spanglish or chinglish speakers anymore. The only known example of a language evolving differently from remote spots has been the evolution of latin. Superficially, latin, spanish, italian, french, romanian may seem connected (and they are), but it's a babel tower. We don't understand each other past really primitive common roots.
You know, I've been teaching chinese students at Master level. They barely spoke my tongue (improving their fluency was part of the reasons they were studying in Europe), but were supposed to be already good english speakers. Trouble was, we weren't taught the same kind of english, obviously. I won't pretend to be completely bilingual, but I've not much trouble interacting with people from the UK or the USA, on many levels (from basic food to litterature, philosophy, and law science). But there was already a wall between the chinese and I.
Now, you can keep on dreaming in your fantasy world, but I don't see far east nations dropping their tongues anytime soon. Just look at the number of pages on Internet written in (even mangled) english in.cn,.kr or.jp. Face it, they completely ignore us and can't care less wether we understand them or not. All they need is to understand our methods, they come in our countries to learn how we do things, and they rertun home as quickly as possible to copycat what they were taught. If you can't see that, you'll be in trouble really soon.
Oh, I'm absolutely not in favour of any control whatsoever on which or which language is best suited for international business. But please, don't be delusional. The sad pidgin that's taking shape as a new kind of lingua franca is barely remotely linked to english. Mind you, I'm not even a native english speaker, and nonetheless I'm stupefied by the amount of abuses english (as a beautiful language and cultural vessel for poetry, theatre, art) has taken recently. Today many native speakers cannot write correctly lose/loose depending on context ! And that's just an example among many.
Maybe our old cultures are fading, but more subtly, english culture is fading too. We foreigners know that because we can see it happen under our eyes. Our native tongues quickly fill up with english loan words. You have the disadvantage to believe it's your own maternal tongue that's leading the pack. But in reality, we are at the same time eating through the rich history and the beauty of english by corrupting it a little more each time we publicly write things in our malformed attempts at speaking your idiom.
its all rather silly and absurd from an american perspective: hey france, history spoke, and you lost, and the british won. now everyone speaks english in the world, shut up, get over it, and deal with it
Wait a couple of years until you begin learning chinese, and see if that's easy.
The general public. I know of elderly that plan to stay the day in a small group, chatting in the room. They bring coffee and cakes. Elections are something very local here. Each voting room receives at most ~ 2000 voters ; most of the time, a classroom of the local school is used (we vote on sundays). It's a time to meet with neighbours and chat with friends. At the same time, you just look around. You can stay 1 hour or 2, and then others have gathered in a large enough number so you leave. But we are mostly a pacified society.
If you didn't already know about this concept, then you are clearly not an expert in electronic voting or even in any related field of cryptology. Cryptographic electronic voting is a highly technical subject involving many different areas and subfields of cryptology, some of them heavily number theoretic and mathematical. You are probably not technically knowledgeable enough to pass judgment on such heavily technical subjects in which you are uninformed (or worse, prejudiced against, as evidenced by your choice use of words such as "ideologies").
The public does not trust scientists, even when the scientists clearly know more than they do.
Still wondering why ? A 6th grader with a good pair of eyes can understand and control a paper vote. The more people you gather to keep watch, the better, no training necessary. It would take you, with all your intelligence and experience, weeks of efforts to verify an e-system implementation, and you'd be one of a handful able to do so. And all it would take to rig the system would be to outsmart your small lot of scientists. Just *imagine* for a second the source code is mathematically correct and you verified it. How about the compiler ? Do you know if the system really runs on the bare metal or is it trapped in a VM ? Are you per chance a computer scientist as well as a cryptologist ? How many scientists would it take to screw that light bulb in the end ? How long would it take ?
Of course it happened. A lot. That's why the voting process evolved. In my youth, when I went with my parents, boxes were made of wood, sometimes you would hand the envelope containing the ballot to the election judge for him to put into the box, etc. Nowdays, boxes are transparent, made out of plexyglas, the officials are forbidden to even touch your ballot. You give your id, a person checks you are on the list, if you're okayed the judge push a lever on top of the box. This advance a mechanical counter and open the slit just the needed time for you to cast your vote. At the end of the day, boxes are spilled open on wide tables, the judges still don't have the right to touch them. 4 voluntary citizens of the precinct man each table. They make a rough division in 4 stacks, count each stack, then swap stack with the counter in front of them. When done, counters pairs swap places and go over the process again. One juge continuously records counts for each table. When done, ballots are put back in box and box is sealed again. No official ever touch a ballot. There are still fraud attempts, but either they are very local (and suppose a high level of complicity between everyone there, so it's unlikely to matter to the result), or in some countries, they rely more on brute force than actual fraud (think Iran, for instance).
The question is not to know if a paper election can be rigged. The question is : does e-voting add more fraud possibilities to the voting process on top of already known frauds occurring with paper. And the answer is yes, it doesn't really avoid known frauding means, and it makes more subtle, new frauding schemes more likely. That's because the machine knows at any given time how many votes have already been cast, and who is leading. It can be made to cheat just enough to give a slight advantage that's not statistically detectable. OTOH, paper frauds must be very blunt to have any chance of being effective, and are therefore much more difficult to conceal. Especially if everybody has been given the right by law to attend every step of the process.
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I'd gladly mod you up if I had points. I did once what you describe, merging various sources from many authors using almost all flavours of word between them into a single document for publishing. It was a nightmare. The only way I managed to do it in the end was with openoffice.org. And I still had hours of fun quashing encoding variations between word for windows and word for mac, like quotation marks being straight on windows and angled on mac, which is terribly difficult to spot on screen but shows like a nose in the middle of a face in print.
Word is the epitome of what *not* to do as a wordprocessor. Those responsible for this mess should be drawn, hanged and quartered.
Frankly, I believe that computers make fewer mistakes than humans, so I would in fact prefer a plane with a single (or no) human pilots.
Reminds me :
Q: What is the ideal cockpit crew?
A: A pilot and a dog...the pilot is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to bite the pilot in case he tries to touch anything.
Yes, it's called the Grand Robert de la Langue Française by Alain Rey, 6 volumes, 2nd edition 2001 (ISBN: 978-2850366734).
As far as I know, it's gone electronic only since a couple of years, but you may still be able to snatch a dead tree version somewhere.
It's 4 volumes shorter compared to the OED, but that's not surprising when you consider that half of the english lexicon is made up of french imported words, only the other half being genuinely saxonish and thus germanic in origin, hence the need to make room for the redundancy.
"Programmers originally developed dynamic linking in the Multics operating system, starting in 1964, and the MTS (Michigan Terminal System), built in the late 1960s."
wikipedia
Those who can't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
You'd need to already own the computer to pull something like that, which pretty much defeats the purpose. But, yes, it's been used in the past, along with other techniques. The intrinsic problem here is not to have a search path for execs and libs, but to provide hardcoded at system level a default path with $PWD included, instead of a path exclusively containing system directories under admin control.
... Good times.
Freudian : this was the title of the second clip on the same CD. Can't remember the girl name right now.
MOD PARENT UP !! Fact is, on any unix out there, no competent admin would leave '.' neither in executable path, nor in dynamic library search path. It's another of case of a security hole known at least theoretically since the 60's, and observed in real life in the 80's, that microsoft overlooked in the design stage when it was time to follow proper security assessments, and are now stuck with.
They should be put on trial for dumb blunders like this one. When you hire top professionals who can't ignore the 'state of art' when doing an error like this, it should be considered a cause for limitless civil liability.
I think the problem with Linux is that those who develop it push their philosophy too much and refuse to give room for other philosophies, along with way too much spread ecosystem (distros, configurations, all the problems). There's a reason why we still haven't seen the year of Linux on desktop and probably never will.
You are wrong. There are commercial products released for *some* linux flavours. Agreed, they don't fare well on the linux ecosystem at large, for simple reasons : install is complicated while native free softwares are at hand's reach after an 'apt-get install zzz' or 'yum install zzz', they don't run on every flavour whereas native apps correctly packaged do, you can't get insurance your paid software will keep on running after upgrade while free softwares can be recompiled to take advantage of new system features, commercial applications generally don't respect native look and feel relying on wine while native apps do behave nicely (at the cost of an automated compilation in the worst case), and basically, non-free softwares generally expects linux to behave like windows which is orthogonal to the desire of linuxers to have the system *not* be windows-like, favouring stability over usability. Knwo what ? Many linuxers use linux as a desktop, it works, commercial softwares are simply subpar on linux compared to native apps. End of story, until commercial editors are going to invest on native ports for the platform.
You're misunderstanding the motto. But it should be read backward: liberty is the goal, equality is a mean to that end, and brotherhood is the precondition to achieve it. You can't feel someone else is your equal without thinking of him as a kind of brother; and you can't have freedom among people who don't view you as an equal. The relationship between those words is hierarchical, but to reach the top, you have to climb from a sane and steady base.
This is silly. 4.0 was an alpha version, not a failure, 4.1 a beta and 4.2 a RC. But 4.3 is actually extremely good at what it does. I barely ever used 3.5 before, it was either too bloated for the computers I had, or much too crash-prone. But it wasn't anymore useful than a plain window manager. In any cases, if I need something lean, then I take windowmaker over kde 3.5 anytime. KDE 4.3 is an entirely different league. Either you want it for your comfort and productivity, and you have a computer with the guts to run it correctly (I found that it's a breeze on an AMD X86_64 x2 3800+ with 4Gb RAM), or you deal with somewhat older hardware, and then you're better off with an entirely different and much less taxing window manager than any KDE version (xfce, window maker...). Since day 1, KDE is synonymous with huge RAM footprint, general bloat, and ressources hunger in exchange for nice effects, usability helpers, graphical wonders and user comfort. Either you cope with that, or you get away, but you can't have both.
So was Mendelssohn when he wrote his nuptial march, but it does little to avoid hearing it at most weddings, because many couples are not musicologist and have little choice over the matter. So it goes with our politicians : Machiavelli's original intents weight little in front of a wrong, centuries old, consensus.
try to understand the concepts of a subject matter you've inserted your low iq self into, such as: MASS MEDIA
Please, do yourself a favour and get out of your hole someday. 'Mass Media' as you call them don't really jump borders ; do we have US soap operas and fictions here ? Yes. Dubbed. Do we have the Simpsons ? Yes. Dubbed. Do we receive HBO, ABC, CNN ? Generally, no. It's not absolutely true, as we can opt to pay for some US channels on the cable - subtitled. Not many people do, and you'd be hard pressed to watch it outside of your hotel room. Printed press, then ? Give me a break. Most of the time I get it free, because people here already find the national press too expensive, so paying for something in english...
Leaves what ? Internet ? Mwhaahaahaa. In 1995 when I first connected to the 'net, english was absolutely, completely, totally mandatory. You simply couldn't find interesting pages in any other language. Today, I can surf for hours without seeing anything written in another language than mine. Reading pages in english is a choice. A choice I do, but I won't bet teenagers are doing it. In fact, the trend is reversed. Teens have the same education I received, but for people my age, english was deemed extremely important and the net comforted this impression, being 90% english when we got on board. Today's teens see absolutely no need whatsoever to read english, they rely on translations and pages in their national idiom. And the lazy brats can waste all their time seeing nothing but what takes less efforts for them to read.
You are confusing expansion of your zone of economic influence with voluntary adoption of US culture.
It did not worked the same way. There are '96 disk images ready for vmware and other such emulators. Try it out by yourself. Win '96 was in my opinion way less confusing and much more consistent than 98 in that respect. Just my opinion, though.
It was not an official build. I digged a bit and found a ref :
//E/debug/dump' or something like that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Nashville
From snapshots you can't really see the differences between it and 95 or 98, but it was really a mix bag of both and had some very nifty tricks that did not make it in 98. For instance, you could get rid of mouse double-clicks, and use 1 click action throughout the UI, weblike. Options would turn blue when hovered by the mouse pointer. There was a good Personal Information Manager that wasn't kept later on. Etc.
Crashes were funny because they were hardwired to an external debugging machine ; so blue screens went like 'can't find
I completely agree. Before the widespread use of Internet, in a time when torrents were still a dream, I was using daily an early build of Windows 98 dubbed Win'96 by the press. It was massively copied the old fashioned way and spread. Tough beast to use, but pretty stable compared to a legit Win95 if you absolutely barred yourself to put a picture in the background of the explorer.
Just for your information :
See what I mean now ?
Dear sir, I'd like to thank you for the demonstration you are unwillingly making of what I was previously writing. You obviously missed the last half of most of my sentences ; of course, this may be the result of ADD, but it's most probable that you're not understanding what I'm saying. I wasn't asking so much as proof of the decrease in literacy among the general public that you make an ass of yourself in public.
This said, to put my reasoning in a simpler form : english as an homogenous, live, language is on the verge of explosion under the sheer weight of foreign loan words ; this will probably lead at first to localized form of english, interacting at the lowest level via a common vocabulary of limited scope (the TV one) and later on will lead to the birth of new, incompatible languages. Original english will live on certainly for a long time as a dead language, for intergroup relationship - much like learned people knew latin until the XIXth century.
You're making a bad case with me, because if I didn't liked english, I certainly wouldn't have spent the better part of the last 15 years learning it.
On a final note, I've always thought I had no particular prejudice against my fellows human beings, but your message made me realise I'm strongly biased against assholes - regardless of colours and origins.
You obviously know nothing in linguistics. Media speech, especially news and soap, may use about 2.500 ~ 3.000 words between them. This number is at the moment decreasing to cater for the lack of education in the masses. A reasonably educated speaker knows 15.000 words. A complete english dictionary has about 38.000 words in it. Media is not a language, it's unable to cope with the requirements of even a low-class technician. You may be watching the same TV as the average californian gang member if you live in NYC, but you'd already be at loss in certain suburbs of LA (where you wouldn't dare going in the first place, of course).
ps. Oh, btw, yes, I've read some Shakespeare plays. I've even been in Stratford upon Avon to watch one interpreted by the RCP a couple of years ago. I read the play beforehand, to get a hang on the text. No big deal with a little help from a competent dictionary.
But I also dug a bit into Beowulf, and didn't got very far. And I guess neither would you, albeit this admittedly was written in a kind of primitive english. When you get to a certain point of evolution, you can't make sense of previous states of the language anymore.
That's exactly where you are being delusional. Most of the English evolution happened on a geographically limited island, and kept in synch between speakers, give or take a few local oddities you can live with. You minimize the importance of today geography. The sheer scale of the evolution creates evolutionary spots that are not synchronised and will lead to a balkanisation of the english language, where speakers of euro-english won't be able to interact with spanglish or chinglish speakers anymore. The only known example of a language evolving differently from remote spots has been the evolution of latin. Superficially, latin, spanish, italian, french, romanian may seem connected (and they are), but it's a babel tower. We don't understand each other past really primitive common roots.
You know, I've been teaching chinese students at Master level. They barely spoke my tongue (improving their fluency was part of the reasons they were studying in Europe), but were supposed to be already good english speakers. Trouble was, we weren't taught the same kind of english, obviously. I won't pretend to be completely bilingual, but I've not much trouble interacting with people from the UK or the USA, on many levels (from basic food to litterature, philosophy, and law science). But there was already a wall between the chinese and I.
Now, you can keep on dreaming in your fantasy world, but I don't see far east nations dropping their tongues anytime soon. Just look at the number of pages on Internet written in (even mangled) english in .cn, .kr or .jp. Face it, they completely ignore us and can't care less wether we understand them or not. All they need is to understand our methods, they come in our countries to learn how we do things, and they rertun home as quickly as possible to copycat what they were taught. If you can't see that, you'll be in trouble really soon.
Oh, I'm absolutely not in favour of any control whatsoever on which or which language is best suited for international business. But please, don't be delusional. The sad pidgin that's taking shape as a new kind of lingua franca is barely remotely linked to english. Mind you, I'm not even a native english speaker, and nonetheless I'm stupefied by the amount of abuses english (as a beautiful language and cultural vessel for poetry, theatre, art) has taken recently. Today many native speakers cannot write correctly lose/loose depending on context ! And that's just an example among many.
Maybe our old cultures are fading, but more subtly, english culture is fading too. We foreigners know that because we can see it happen under our eyes. Our native tongues quickly fill up with english loan words. You have the disadvantage to believe it's your own maternal tongue that's leading the pack. But in reality, we are at the same time eating through the rich history and the beauty of english by corrupting it a little more each time we publicly write things in our malformed attempts at speaking your idiom.
its all rather silly and absurd from an american perspective: hey france, history spoke, and you lost, and the british won. now everyone speaks english in the world, shut up, get over it, and deal with it
Wait a couple of years until you begin learning chinese, and see if that's easy.
The general public. I know of elderly that plan to stay the day in a small group, chatting in the room. They bring coffee and cakes. Elections are something very local here. Each voting room receives at most ~ 2000 voters ; most of the time, a classroom of the local school is used (we vote on sundays). It's a time to meet with neighbours and chat with friends. At the same time, you just look around. You can stay 1 hour or 2, and then others have gathered in a large enough number so you leave. But we are mostly a pacified society.
If you didn't already know about this concept, then you are clearly not an expert in electronic voting or even in any related field of cryptology. Cryptographic electronic voting is a highly technical subject involving many different areas and subfields of cryptology, some of them heavily number theoretic and mathematical. You are probably not technically knowledgeable enough to pass judgment on such heavily technical subjects in which you are uninformed (or worse, prejudiced against, as evidenced by your choice use of words such as "ideologies").
The public does not trust scientists, even when the scientists clearly know more than they do.
Still wondering why ? A 6th grader with a good pair of eyes can understand and control a paper vote. The more people you gather to keep watch, the better, no training necessary. It would take you, with all your intelligence and experience, weeks of efforts to verify an e-system implementation, and you'd be one of a handful able to do so. And all it would take to rig the system would be to outsmart your small lot of scientists. Just *imagine* for a second the source code is mathematically correct and you verified it. How about the compiler ? Do you know if the system really runs on the bare metal or is it trapped in a VM ? Are you per chance a computer scientist as well as a cryptologist ? How many scientists would it take to screw that light bulb in the end ? How long would it take ?
Of course it happened. A lot. That's why the voting process evolved. In my youth, when I went with my parents, boxes were made of wood, sometimes you would hand the envelope containing the ballot to the election judge for him to put into the box, etc. Nowdays, boxes are transparent, made out of plexyglas, the officials are forbidden to even touch your ballot. You give your id, a person checks you are on the list, if you're okayed the judge push a lever on top of the box. This advance a mechanical counter and open the slit just the needed time for you to cast your vote. At the end of the day, boxes are spilled open on wide tables, the judges still don't have the right to touch them. 4 voluntary citizens of the precinct man each table. They make a rough division in 4 stacks, count each stack, then swap stack with the counter in front of them. When done, counters pairs swap places and go over the process again. One juge continuously records counts for each table. When done, ballots are put back in box and box is sealed again. No official ever touch a ballot. There are still fraud attempts, but either they are very local (and suppose a high level of complicity between everyone there, so it's unlikely to matter to the result), or in some countries, they rely more on brute force than actual fraud (think Iran, for instance).
The question is not to know if a paper election can be rigged. The question is : does e-voting add more fraud possibilities to the voting process on top of already known frauds occurring with paper. And the answer is yes, it doesn't really avoid known frauding means, and it makes more subtle, new frauding schemes more likely. That's because the machine knows at any given time how many votes have already been cast, and who is leading. It can be made to cheat just enough to give a slight advantage that's not statistically detectable. OTOH, paper frauds must be very blunt to have any chance of being effective, and are therefore much more difficult to conceal. Especially if everybody has been given the right by law to attend every step of the process.