Discussions

JoshRoss said:

Blue Ink said:

*snip*

The coercion angle is the best reason that I have seen against this idea, for third-world nations. I wonder how much of this kind of thing happens in industrial nations? You would need both very low voter turn-out and highly organized corruption. It is easier to market a bad politician to the electorate than it is to organize a mass fraud without marketing.

Yes, probably nobody could ever bribe or strongarm enough people in any general election to make a difference. Local elections are a different story, even in industrial countries... but that's probably not the worst concern.

There are other kinds of pressure that must be faced, including peers, friends, family in general and spouses in particular. This might seem outlandish, but it's a fact that people do lie about their voting habit... 5-10% is not unheard of in exit polls, go figure where the rate goes when the veil of anonimity is lifted.

I'm not a sociologist, so I don't know if people would rather cast a vote they can stand up to in public (thus skewing the election results) or keep voting following their conscience (possibly making divorce lawyers happy in the process).

Either way I don't think that verifiability would justify the consequences.

W3bbo said:

qwert231 said:

*snip*

Writing your own UserControl to represent the site's menu (assuming you're using ASP.NET's built-in Sitemap API) really is trivial.

 

...but you'd need to know HTML and CSS well enough, and if you knew those you'd be able to bend the current menu to your will anyway (for example, with some simple stylesheet rules, failing that a simple ControlAdapter subclass for the menu).

 

I suspect you're using tables for layout, in which case you'll find advanced layout tasks much harder.

 

I'm with vesuvius on the System.Web.UI.WebControls classes: use them sparingly (preferably never at all), especially on public-facing websites. The System.Web.UI.HtmlControls classes are your friends and give you so much more control and are just as easy to use.

As a side note, .NET 4.0 seems to do much better with this respect (e.g. menu rendered as ul/li and CSS seems way more pervasive). I didn't have the time to test it on real world projects yet, but it looks promising.

JoshRoss said:

Bass said:

*snip*

Even a feeble person can find a listing in a phone book, and phone books typically have many more records than your voting district would. In addition, computers are no more difficult to use than phone books.

 

A district would have a public participation count. If you knew that your vote was recorded correctly and the count was reasonable, then a reasonable person would accept the results as legitimate. 

 

 

Creating a mechanism that would allow voters to verify their vote after the election would have another adverse effect: votes could be sold and bought quite effectively. Even blackmailing or any other kind of coercion would become possible.

This is the reason why at least a few countries forbid cell phones and cameras in the voting booth.

intelman said:

blowdart said:

*snip*

Maybe hardly anyone uses it?

Interesting... the Press Release calls it a "vulnerability".

PaoloM said:

Minh said:

*snip*

Thanks everyone

 

The interview(s) was NOT like a RPG session, but I'm *forced* to play as part of my job. Woe me...

 

I need to create a character. Any suggestions?

Congratulations!

More than anything I envy the fact that you will be able to say something like "Sorry Honey, I'll be late. Still got a dragon or two to slay by tomorrow"... and actually get away with it.

Shining Arcanine said:

Blue Ink said:

*snip*

You must try very hard to avoid cell phones then, because apparently the FBI (and anyone who hacks a cellular network) can do call-less eavesdropping with current technology:

 

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1035_22-150467.html

Not really in the same league... law enforcement and criminals are not a matter of choice, while entrusting personal information to a private company hoping it's not abused or misplaced is.

And since not doing so does not require that you stop browsing the web, but simply that you stop using a particular browser, it's really hard for me to find a good reason to keep using Chrome.

Putting this in a different perspective... what if it turned out that only the phones manufactured by company XYZ can be hacked? Would you still buy one?

Shining Arcanine said:

Maddus Mattus said:

*snip*

I believe it was established that the talking to Google it does was to check for product updates. It also gives Google anonymous information about where you downloaded chrome so they can keep track of their distribution network. Apparently, they distribute different versions of the same release depending on the download site to be able to do that.

The main concern was that Google Chrome - by default - sends pretty much every URL/URL fragment you type in the address bar along with your google cookie, if you have one. There are a few more points, detailed in the Google Chrome Privacy Notice.

While the transparency is commendable, it doesn't take a full-fledged paranoid to be uncomfortable with most of this. True, you can disable pretty much everything, but the fact that these features are on by default was enough to make me campaign against Google Chrome with the least technically inclined members of the family.

Shining Arcanine said:

CreamFilling512 said:

*snip*

Check task manager's thread count for Firefox. It definitely supports threading. Whether or not it does it intelligently is a different story. Firefox cannot utilize more than a single CPU, so why it is threaded in the first place is a mystery to me.

Multithreading is extremely useful even on a single core, especially when the application is IO bound (I'd say a browser qualifies perfectly) or when you have low priority chores to carry out.

Even if you use a different process per tab, you still have to manage several requests per tab, and a threadpool makes things much much easier to implement and maintain.

Dr Herbie said:

ScanIAm said:

*snip*

Yes we pay a TV licence to pay for the BBC -- you need to get licences for any receiving equipment (so PC with TV receiving card counts). However, you don't need a TV licence to watch BBC iPlayer which streams a selection of the previous week's TV.

 

In UK terrestrial TV there is the BBC which effectively is a mandatory subscription service, but doesn't have adverts on it's 4 main channels. Then there are the other terrestrial TV stations that have adverts, but don't receive funding from the licence (although there was a parliamentary move to allow them to take a slice of the licence money for things like news broadcasts).

Then there are cable and satellite stations (like Sky), which require a subscription and then still show adverts; it's like your paying for it twice over.

 

I'm happy with the licence fee system because the BBC is a high quality broadcaster (in general), plus we get 7 national radio stations and numerous local radio stations -- all without adverts.  The 7 national radio stations are also available in the BBC iPlayer for 7 days after broadcast, which is where I mainly listen to them.

 

 

Herbie

 

 

EDIT: I should point out that you don't need a TV license to listen to the BBC radio stations; they're free to whoever want to listen to them.

That is true for most of Europe... I'm not really opposed to public funding of broadcasting networks (insofar as it fosters better quality, which is not necessarily true when adverts are allowed). What I find a bit outdated is that - at least in some countries - the licence is practically flat, sometimes with some ridiculous distinctions between color and B/W (why then not a different rate for HDTV, or maybe charge by the inch?). Not to mention that it requires the payment of a separate bill, which is just a hassle and unnecessarily adds another cost.

figuerres said:

CreamFilling512 said:

*snip*

there are still a lot of things that use java.....

heck uninstall java and flash and acrobat and then see how fast you get nagged to re-install all of them...

flash will come up first most of the time .... but the other two will hit before very long.

That's definitely true for Acrobat and Flash, but I would say that it is perfectly possible to live a Java-free life without much nagging, if any. Our company instated a no-java policy over three years ago, and we got zero complaints so far.

Your mileage may vary, depending on your surfing habits...