Voting should be simple. And by simple I mean low-tech. Canada's system is nearly perfect. Everyone can understand it. Everyone can see how the votes are counted. An observer can watch the voting, can watch the counts. Recounts are easy.

As soon as you make it online, it becomes inscrutable. Even if you design a system with open hardware, open software, etc most people still can't understand it, and can't verify it. And even if they verify the software and hardware, they can't know that's the software and hardware that was actually used, or that it wasn't remotely patched with new software the day of the election, and then patched back after the election. There are ways of securing it... but they are themselves inscrutable, crytopgraphy, digital signatures, ... might as well be using more magic to show the original magic was right. The system should be something everyone can understand intuitively.

Paper voting is that. You have X paper ballots, each person is handed a ballot, person goes into a booth marks it, and then turns it in. You can see for yourself that the number of voters matches the number of ballots. You can see for your self that the voter puts the ballot in the box. You can watch the box yourself to see its not tampered with. At the end you can watch them take the ballots out of the box, you can watch them be counted, and recounted.

Democracy should be THAT transparent.

But why on earth would "ease of use" and "time saving" be the most important aspects of choosing the system by which we select our governement?

You propose giving up a voting system even a child can understand and verify for a system that only the elite could even begin to understand, and which would be all but impossible to prove was operating correctly on election day.

Sure. Provided the "right hands" acknowledges that they are not usually the the right solution to a problem chosen at random.

Sure those completely worthless people do exist and most developers do overestimate their own abilities.

Q: Do you know how many really good ASM/ C / C++ devs are out there that you wouldn't dream of saying that they "don't know squat" that still produce and release code with subtle to obvious bugs in it?

A: All of them.

Nobody is perfect. And nobody gets better at something by not doing it. You learn by doing.

I agree some developers simply shouldn't be developers, and that others are way out of their proper depth. But no developers live up to your standards. Unintended things affect all of us; edge cases we didn't consider, api/library/hardware specs we didn't fully or correctly understand but thought we did, requirements we didn't fully or correctly understand but thought we did... that affects all of us.

That is a bit much too. Nobody wants to be 'Mr. & Mrs. Alzheimer' ... and asking whole family trees to change their name is no more onerous than renaming a river.

I propose drawing on fantasy and science fiction for memorable disease names. Nazgul-flesheating-disease, Tatooine-Fever, Targaryen-herpes...

You also lose the ability to claim ITCs input tax credits. Given that anybody driving regularly for uber is buying gas, paying for maintenance and repairs... it would probably actually boost their net take home slightly to collect the tax.

The revenue is also going to include any money uber keeps for itself. The only way the CRA only looks at the revenue uber pays the driver is if the CRA decides the driver is really an employee... and then the 30k excemption is moot, because it will at that point be considering uber total revenues for the purposes of whether or not it has to collect GST.. which of course, it would.

One big difference, they can track my location even if I don't make a phone call. So if I have a phone on me, they can track all my movements in real-time.

They may be off relative to the law, but they are what they are and i suspect they're shared by most. The law should generally reflect the expectations/desires of the majority of its citizens*, not the other way a round.

(* emphasis on generally. I'm not advocating for true democracy)

Same difference. I expect that my location is kept private too.

Difference being that I am not friends with my telco. I can choose one from two or forego a modern convenience. The latter is an option, but runs against the freedom to pursue happiness. I want to be able to choose simple modern luxuries and conveniences without agreeing the government gets to know every where I go.

Yes. They have the necessity to know it to fullfill the service.

Bingo. They should't. Just as I have attorney/client priviledge and have dr./patient priviledge ... so too should I have ISP/carrier client priviledge. Enough private and personal information about me is recorded by the ISP/carrier in their legitimate fullfillment of service that special privliledge should apply.

The fault here lies not with the judges who are applying the law as it is written. The problem lies with the legislators who need to pass laws recognizing the privilege should exist.

Maybe one day eventually. But students and people who actually do any work are still buying them. Usually in the form of a laptop, but often desktops if they value power and performance and longevity over portability.

There is a large exodus sure... grandma might not need a PC now that she has a tablet. But nobody is giong to write a 10 page essay on a tablet if they dont have to.

The keyboard can be worked around with bluetooth... but the ability to multi-task-- collaborate with you friends in skype, while having not one, not two, but three browser windows open at the same time various sites with information your citing, plus your editor, plus excel for that graph your working on...

Doing any real work on a tablet is a JOKE. Tablets etc might one day catch up... let you attach a keyboard, monitor, and mouse... and run your desktop apps. Yeah... that could happen.

But so what... that's still a home pc with a desktop OS, with a tablet mode... why its almost like your inventing Windows 8 / Windows 10....or Ubunutu Unity...

Yeah, T9 and iTap etc should have been available; so not quite as bad as I made it out to be... but still texting was very different then. (i guess its still that way on dumb/feature phones... but i haven't used one since the Motorola Razr 2.)

Hmmm.... typed this; using 2 spaces using regular spacebar as indents:

{
    This
        is
            a
        test
}

Simply copy and pasted this from wikipedia

; Uses S-C Assembler variant.
; .or is origin
; .as is ASCII String
; .hs is Hex String .or $300
main ldy #$00 .1 lda str,y
                beq .2
                jsr $fded ; ROM routine, COUT, y is preserved
                iny
                bne .1 .2 rts
str .as "HELLO WORLD" .hs

Then Using preview and viewing the page source I get:

<code>
{
    This
        is
            a
        test
}
</code>

and

<code>
; Uses S-C Assembler variant.
; .or is origin
; .as is ASCII String
; .hs is Hex String .or $300
main ldy #$00 .1 lda str,y
                beq .2
                jsr $fded ; ROM routine, COUT, y is preserved
                iny
                bne .1 .2 rts
str .as "HELLO WORLD" .hs
</code>

I'm not getting nbsp entities nor am i getting TT tags?! I'm using Firefox on Windows 7; not sure what else to say?!!

And the texter wasn't "the world champion" just some dude who won some local texting contest. Still fast, but lets not go nuts.

Oh, and it was Leno not Letterman.

There was simililar race in Australia at the time and the morse guy won there too.

10 years ago the phones they were using had those press 1 once for A, 1 twice for B, 1 three times for C, 1 for times for 1, 1 five times for !. press 2 once time for D, press 2 twice for E.... systems.

It wasn't a competition between morse and a smartphone with swyft etc.

I still give the edge to a morse expert... but not by nearly as much.

code tags of course. ;)

<code> </code>

And to post tags with out /. eating those html entities for less than and greater than:

&lt; and &gt; and &amp; for the ampersand itself

Lol, yes, relax. I'm not a pure C guy and I won't offend you by pretending to be.

You know, until I saw it in this thread, it never occurred to me to just open a new block for the purposes of inlining a debug declaration. Thanks, I'll use that.

Cool beans. The one C program I do have to maintain (a small 'plugin' DLL for an embedded system) I have to compile with Visual Studio 2010, which doesn't support C99 syntax. So as of about today I'm still not allowed to, even if the rest of the world has been enjoying it for 16 years. VS2012 doesn't have it either; but i hear VS2013 does. :)

That's not the issue at all. The specific example I gave was the issue:

An IF DEBUG; where the variable was only used within the debug conditional.

In C++, C#, etc I've always declared and initialized anything I needed in a debug block in the debug block, except for in C where not only did i declared it at the top, but it gets its own debug block too since its only used by debug builds.

Even in a short function this is inelegant looking:

void func(int a)
{
      int x = 1;
      int y = 2;
      int z = 0;
#IF DEBUG
      int q = 3;
#ENDIF
      z = dosomething(a, x);
      y += z;
#IF DEBUG // do something that needs z,y and q
#ENDIF
[... rest of function...]
}

Your note that I can start a block anywhere -- Thanks; until now it hadn't occurred to me to use that expressly to inline declarations for debug blocks.

I'm not sure about that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Yes it also says:

Thus C99 is an ANSI standard, but its not "ANSI C"
When you say "ANSI C" its still C89/90.

At least that's my take on it.

// comments were added to the C standard. Not good old ANSI see but still ok.

I haven't looked at the code, but the one thing I usually trip over when having to write pure C instead of C++ that's really mostly C is that everything has to be declared at the top of the function... Always. even some variable you only use in the IF $DEBUG block, I normally declare those in the if $debug block where it occurs, rather than creating a 2nd if debug block at the top of the function just to declare it.

And stuff like that.

Or he loads up a few more of those apps for it...