Mail votes can be secret to. The Swedish vote system uses the same voting envelopes as for normal voting, but then you need to send them in packaged in a special outer envelope (and with a few exception, this is done at special stations at that, not in private). These are opened under the same scrutiny and together with the voting boxes, unless there are voters who voted both by mail and at the station to (e.g. for changing their mind). Then the mail vote is discarded.
Just as in the above Canada case, there is similar regulation in Sweden. There is a special board which examines the problem (which may not need to be fraud, it does include regular screwups like just "losing" votes, e.g. if election logistics are screwed up which occasionally happens). If the board determines that a different actual election outcome would have been likely (not even the highest plausibility), a re-election occurs. The rules say this should happen if the difference would just be for a single seat, and even if it is only likely (50%).
For the last election, there were such re-elections occuring at several places on the local level, and even in one of the biggest regions (VÃstra GÃtalands lÃn). There were actually a maths professor from my university involved in doing the probability analysis for the board, to find the likelihoods of impact on the result. A few other local and regional elections were not deemed to be as flawed (1% probability) and were not redone.
impose a transaction tax (eg 0.01%) on every trade of any kind performed on the stock markets
Have they properly understood the implications of introducing a Tobin tax? Especially the unintended ones, such as flight to foreign or otherwise unregulated markets, added bureaucracy, etc?
If only those web browsers wouldn't be so dawn expensive....
On really old computers, new browsers tend to be more sluggish than old ones. Add to that: new versions of some browsers (especially IE) are not available for older operating systems, e.g. XP or 98/ME.
> if you plug a powered USB port into the thing to be able to have multiple peripherals, then you could likely get power from the hub.
No. Only USB outlets of type A (rectangular, the type you have on the back of your PC) supply power. Your peripheral (with a squarish USB type A outlet) would instead expect power...
>Whilst I don't live in Sweden (I'm in the UK), I have to ask quite what your point is? I do live in Sweden. Let's check your claims...
>The Swedes may pay more in taxes, but in return get free healthcare Untrue. Low cost only (there are small fees). And (sometimes very long!) queues...
>good roads Questionable, depends a lot on where you drive! Many smaller roads and streets in towns have suffered badly during the last decades from reduced maintenance.
>low crime free schooling and university Probably both correct (at least the crime rate is not high)
>(i believe) free (or heavily subsidised) childcare Heavily subsidised. Very costly for society...
>efficient public transport, and much more. Questionable, in Stockholm it's great, in most medium cities it's okay, anything more rural it's often quite spotty.
>They're also very highly rated in terms of their low wealth disparity (road fines for example are based on a percentage of your annual income so that a rockstar in a ferrari feels the same sting in their speeding ticket as does a poor person in a skoda) No, fixed amounts for speeding tickets etc. Fines for "normal" (non-road) crimes (ordered by court) use the day-fine system you describe though.
No, but usually you'd put your WiFi router inside your house. Hence, the house would work as a Faraday cage around the rest of the world, keeping all WiFi signals within the house (might be a good idea for tinfoil-hat wearers, btw)
You forget about wireless internet (over the cellphone net). In the best case, they would identify a computer, but then we have NAT, so in reality it's more like groups of computers...
I'm working on embedded systems. Real men don't program desktop computers!:-P
Small embedded systems are often sans FPU. Fixed point arithmetic is orders of magnitude faster on such a platform (I'm not sure what the numbers on desktop processors are but I wouldn't be surprised if it's slightly beneficial even there).
No, it's not at all obvious that not hiring someone again implies that the person in question was bad. I would probably NOT get a job at the place I used to work. That's not because I was bad - quite the contrary - rather, the problem is that I'm more or less, nowadays, horribly overqualified for the tasks at hand at that company.
Of course, in the design of the survey, you should make sure that the result "people are not using it but they would if they knew about it" and "people are not using it because they tried and it sucked" aren't compounded into a single result. They are very different, but given the wrong set of questions, will be very hard to differ from each other!
Oh, but you have that wet thing between Sweden and Finland as well! And a thousand years ago, the northern part of Sweden and Finland was basically wilderness belonging to no one except the wolves, so there was no land border then between Sweden and Finland either.
I'm not so sure about that; all of Estonia, Latvia, Poland and Germany are also "right next to Sweden", further, all of them were at least in parts once Swedish. Still, Swedish is not a native language in any of them (there once used to be a small minority in Estonia, but since a long time, it has disappeared).
When speaking about technical topics, two native Chinese will frequently switch to English.
I know this is anecdotal evidence, but I've had three co-workers that are Chinese at my current university. They all spoke with each other primarily in Chinese (sprinkled with borrowed English words of course, so I would understand separate words like "UML", "editor", "context"). That would not be too different from my own Swedish though, it's a common problem that some concepts just don't have any translation (yet?). English (and Swedish for that matter, as I am in Sweden...) were reserved for when the rest of us joined the conversation...
Well, the more direct reason is that there is an about 10% big Swedish-speaking minority in Finland. I will give you the fact that the main reason this is so is that about 1000 years ago, Finland was something of "Sweden's eastern colony"...
Slashdot Mirror
Mail votes can be secret to. The Swedish vote system uses the same voting envelopes as for normal voting, but then you need to send them in packaged in a special outer envelope (and with a few exception, this is done at special stations at that, not in private). These are opened under the same scrutiny and together with the voting boxes, unless there are voters who voted both by mail and at the station to (e.g. for changing their mind). Then the mail vote is discarded.
Darn you beat me. And yes, anyone building medical devices should have learnt the Therac-25 lesson!
"Red means stop, with no exceptions."
Except in Germany with a fixed green arrow.
Just as in the above Canada case, there is similar regulation in Sweden. There is a special board which examines the problem (which may not need to be fraud, it does include regular screwups like just "losing" votes, e.g. if election logistics are screwed up which occasionally happens). If the board determines that a different actual election outcome would have been likely (not even the highest plausibility), a re-election occurs. The rules say this should happen if the difference would just be for a single seat, and even if it is only likely (50%).
For the last election, there were such re-elections occuring at several places on the local level, and even in one of the biggest regions (VÃstra GÃtalands lÃn). There were actually a maths professor from my university involved in doing the probability analysis for the board, to find the likelihoods of impact on the result. A few other local and regional elections were not deemed to be as flawed (1% probability) and were not redone.
impose a transaction tax (eg 0.01%) on every trade of any kind performed on the stock markets
Have they properly understood the implications of introducing a Tobin tax? Especially the unintended ones, such as flight to foreign or otherwise unregulated markets, added bureaucracy, etc?
If only those web browsers wouldn't be so dawn expensive....
On really old computers, new browsers tend to be more sluggish than old ones. Add to that: new versions of some browsers (especially IE) are not available for older operating systems, e.g. XP or 98/ME.
Oops, typo. Fix:
Your peripheral (with a squarish USB type B outlet) would instead expect power...
> if you plug a powered USB port into the thing to be able to have multiple peripherals, then you could likely get power from the hub.
No. Only USB outlets of type A (rectangular, the type you have on the back of your PC) supply power. Your peripheral (with a squarish USB type A outlet) would instead expect power...
>Whilst I don't live in Sweden (I'm in the UK), I have to ask quite what your point is?
I do live in Sweden. Let's check your claims...
>The Swedes may pay more in taxes, but in return get free healthcare
Untrue. Low cost only (there are small fees). And (sometimes very long!) queues...
>good roads
Questionable, depends a lot on where you drive! Many smaller roads and streets in towns have suffered badly during the last decades from reduced maintenance.
>low crime free schooling and university
Probably both correct (at least the crime rate is not high)
>(i believe) free (or heavily subsidised) childcare
Heavily subsidised. Very costly for society...
>efficient public transport, and much more.
Questionable, in Stockholm it's great, in most medium cities it's okay, anything more rural it's often quite spotty.
>They're also very highly rated in terms of their low wealth disparity (road fines for example are based on a percentage of your annual income so that a rockstar in a ferrari feels the same sting in their speeding ticket as does a poor person in a skoda)
No, fixed amounts for speeding tickets etc. Fines for "normal" (non-road) crimes (ordered by court) use the day-fine system you describe though.
>, and human development index.
No, but usually you'd put your WiFi router inside your house. Hence, the house would work as a Faraday cage around the rest of the world, keeping all WiFi signals within the house (might be a good idea for tinfoil-hat wearers, btw)
"BECAUSE THEY ACT AS IF THEY OWN MY MACHINE, NOT ME"
You should be glad that they don't act like they own you too? :P
You forget about wireless internet (over the cellphone net). In the best case, they would identify a computer, but then we have NAT, so in reality it's more like groups of computers...
You forgot the reference...
http://perso.ens-lyon.fr/jean-michel.muller/goldberg.pdf :-)
I'm working on embedded systems. Real men don't program desktop computers! :-P
Small embedded systems are often sans FPU. Fixed point arithmetic is orders of magnitude faster on such a platform (I'm not sure what the numbers on desktop processors are but I wouldn't be surprised if it's slightly beneficial even there).
http://oestrem.com/thingstwice/2007/05/latex-vs-word-vs-writer/
Please google for "BibTeX4Word". Word doesn't need to beat BibTeX, because BibTeX and Word can nowadays be used in combination...
Why not a bug in the VHDL code?
Lamp flicker is at 100/120 Hz (two power "boosts" during each sinus cycle doubles the frequency).
No, it's not at all obvious that not hiring someone again implies that the person in question was bad. I would probably NOT get a job at the place I used to work. That's not because I was bad - quite the contrary - rather, the problem is that I'm more or less, nowadays, horribly overqualified for the tasks at hand at that company.
Of course, in the design of the survey, you should make sure that the result "people are not using it but they would if they knew about it" and "people are not using it because they tried and it sucked" aren't compounded into a single result. They are very different, but given the wrong set of questions, will be very hard to differ from each other!
Oh, but you have that wet thing between Sweden and Finland as well! And a thousand years ago, the northern part of Sweden and Finland was basically wilderness belonging to no one except the wolves, so there was no land border then between Sweden and Finland either.
I'm not so sure about that; all of Estonia, Latvia, Poland and Germany are also "right next to Sweden", further, all of them were at least in parts once Swedish. Still, Swedish is not a native language in any of them (there once used to be a small minority in Estonia, but since a long time, it has disappeared).
... I am quadrilingual!
When speaking about technical topics, two native Chinese will frequently switch to English.
I know this is anecdotal evidence, but I've had three co-workers that are Chinese at my current university. They all spoke with each other primarily in Chinese (sprinkled with borrowed English words of course, so I would understand separate words like "UML", "editor", "context"). That would not be too different from my own Swedish though, it's a common problem that some concepts just don't have any translation (yet?). English (and Swedish for that matter, as I am in Sweden...) were reserved for when the rest of us joined the conversation...
That's because Finland is next-door
Well, the more direct reason is that there is an about 10% big Swedish-speaking minority in Finland. I will give you the fact that the main reason this is so is that about 1000 years ago, Finland was something of "Sweden's eastern colony"...