The importance of picking the right voting system
First of all, the solution to the e-voting problem is available at the Open Voting Consortium. If you’re not afraid of thinking, you owe it to yourself to review some of their material, otherwise just support them when the question of e-voting comes up. A good place to start reading is the Open Voting Faq. They are very smart people who have done a lot of thinking about all the good things and bad things that can happen during an election, and the “right” way to solve the problems that can come up.
Some common objections and solutions I’ve heard are as follows:
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12:34 CST | category / entries / links
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Basic Open-Source Migration Path
Made a slashdot comment trying to help out someone who is trying to pitch a Linux solution to their business, specifically about the role of Open Office in the mix. I commented that it already has a non-animated version of clippy, thus you will automatically impress the people you are showing this to. :^)
Actually, in my experiences, Open Office support (not tech-support, but document support) is very solid. There are slight quirkisms (slightly different line-wrappings if fonts arent found, some UI choices are slightly different), but regardless of the maturity of the OO.org software, some important elements to your pitch must be:
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13:32 CST | category / entries
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Open source in asia / India / China
The Chinese market and Indian markets are huge— beyond
your wildest dreams huge. Imagine the combined market of
the US and EU in EACH country, but the economic maturity
(read potential) of 1955 in the US.
[source…]
Imagine if you could time-warp back to the 1950’s and set up shop, knowing what you know now. But imagine that it’d be different and interesting because it’s all involving new technology, new ways of doing things (will China be tech, nano-tech, bio-tech, etc?, and to what extent will each of those play a role).
And now the funny part. Socrates did this, right?
Intel: Hello we would like to show you our processors and this lovely software called Linux and OpenOffice.
Oriental Guy: Very nice. The chips are a bugger to copy, we will just have to buy them. How much for the software?
Intel: Free.
Microsoft: You will be sued and die!
[source…]
14:22 CST | category / entries / links
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This one goes out special to David…
“If at age 20 you are not a Communist then you
have no heart. If at age 30 you are not a capitalist
then you have no brains.” (attributed to George Bernard Shaw)
[source…]
So I’ve got 4 more years, Dave. ;^) … The guy has some other
interesting statistics, quotations in his other nearby entries.
11:42 CST | category / entries / links
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Got the visa!
So, the whole reason I put up this thing is to have a place I could point people to about the whole Visa process with Bety. Short of it is we got the visa, after much sitting, standing, and waiting. Didn’t know it was still possible to wait eight solid hours for paper to move from one side of the building to the other, but I guess there are a lot of people that apply for visas, and it’s almost guaranteed that each case is unique to some extent.
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01:14 CST | category / entries
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Got Blosxom installed…
So, I started updating my website, and ended up installing Blosxom. It feels like the Mo-zilla (well, FireFox) of blogging software, the base software is simple to the point of being unusable, but the architecture is great and there is a decent ecosystem of trivial to use plugins that customize it to your needs.
Most time was spent diddling around with the HTML templates. The one I’ve come up with (as you can see) is pretty simple, but that’s kindof what I want. Nicest thing about Blosxom is that it hides an incredible amount of complexity behind an incredibly simple interface.
Plugins I’ve got installed are:
- Markdown — neat text formatting.
- SmartyPants — pretentious “quotation” marks, etc.
- seemore — put in a <;— more —> comment, and it gets separated into traditional intro/body sections.
- timezone — handle alternate timezones (I’m CST, webhost is PST)
- directorybrowse — makes each category / directory clickable.
- moreentries — prev, next links.
- flatarchives — archives of all entries.
- MarkdownBlockquoteReferences — my own addition to format URL references in blockquotes from Markdown will send it over to that DaringFireball guy, as it ~should~ be included?
…installation of plugins (and blosxom itself) is generally as simple as “stuff this file into your ./plugins directory” … you’re expected to edit everything inline for configuration (local modifications), which is a really good system for certain types of techy people, and it makes everything uber-easy to get started with.
23:00 CST | category / entries
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