except there is ample evidence of MS having bribed key people in several institutions in the past. so unless you have relevant evidence of GP's mother being involved in professional sexual services, you are making yourself appearing as full of shit (for the fallacious comparision. no doubt you are a shithead anyway just for the derogative use of the term "whore")

I didn't see any actual complaint yet, nor any meaningful description of the main perceived defects. Did you? I'm not saying they don't exist, I just highlght that the actual motives are not stated and thus the explanation is totally insufficient.

On the other hand ... it's pretty damn too easy to produce a document in ms word that renders like crap on open/libre office, I see it happening all the time. The problem is never the content, but dumb and irrelevant formatting practices. Comparing MS to a global infection, it is hard to heal by acting on a single point. TFA actually hints at this: "Wenn die ganze Welt mit einem Standardprogramm arbeitet, dann ist es wichtig, dass wir auf dem gleichen System sind". Sad, but they might have a point there.

The other alleged flaw, that someone had to wait weeks to get mail delivered on his smartphone because some obscure special mail server had to be set up on linux is obviously absolute bullshit. This, if at all true, speaks of incompence, not of platform suitability. So, this whole issue really stinks.

"they" who?

what kind of being could possibly put "99.9% of democracies aren't democracies" and "we should respcet rules and regulations" in the same sentence. a mushroom?

please note that the ad hominem in my comment was rethoric. It was actually referring to the content of your article and the attitude it implies. I think it should be obvious but maybe it is worth pointing it out now.

of course many may have learnt something interesting from the ensuing threads. like with any other discussions. that's the cool thing about fora. but I still find that simply dumping the full set of requirements for your assignement on a public forum isn't professional or nice at all. you can ask what you want but one would expect at least some evidence of effort on your part, too. of course this could be subjective and you might view this differenty. this is just my standard, doesn't necessarily apply to you, so no hard feelings.

and no, I know nothing about "lrd" and googling produces little of relevance, this even has spurred my curiosity a bit about how it relates to you inspecting my posting history. any clarification would be appreciated. peace :)

some people just don't learn.

i guess because he knows what kind of crap *that* can be.

of course his full requirement list is ridiculous, nevertheless as a request to the community on a public forum. anything else? this dude is just looking for someone else wanting to do his fucking job, but he also wants a medal for it (read: a tap on the shoulder). likely he *is* in a "closed source, with a strong industry support" environment, so screw him.

i'm afraid you misunderstood that mm was just an example for GP's point which was that current freshmen are taught in a too high level of abstraction. sw engineering tools have evolved a bit but are still far from perfect, resource availalability has increased a lot but resources are still finite. today you absolutely need to have a clear picture of what is happening at lower levels to make good decisions at high level.

i don't see a solution for this anytime soon since this comes only from experience, and academic degrees would take a lot longer (that's not a good thing for our education models which are basically efficient factories of skilled workers). on top of that, abstraction levels tend to get higher, so there is less opportunity to tinker with stuff. if you are an old hack you have learnt as technology evolved, so you have naturally gone through all that from scratch. new generations don't. that's their strong point (because their naivety may result in astounding innovation) but at the same time their weakness (because they implement like shit), at present. maybe when we have far more sophisticated execution evironments this will be less of an issue. now it is, and it simply means a degree means very little, only hr guys "value" that.

dunno, but the moment there is no "commercial" anything, the world will have learned.

all of them actually want you buying stuff constantly.

but on a pure semantical level, marketing naturally implies profit, while government should be synonymous of "caring for the res publica", even though in our particular reality government is nothing but another marketing tool.

yeah but it's hivemind control. hivemind oriented individuals are a majority, so hivemind control is actually a reality. and a pretty obvious one if you ask me. now for example you may not be buying this bullshit but it is your hive, and you can't escape: these hivelings may be your relatives, your friends, people you like or love. you screwed, bro. in other words: controlled.

of course the problem itself points to the way out. let's not despair!

oh my. will this be the end of vi/emacs flames? :'(

citation needed. also you could tell us about the last time you repeated a count for paper votes. there are indeed methods to perform verifiable counting electronically, you just don't know about them. the tricky part here is "for everyone" as in "without any specialist knowledge on the subject" (quoting the very same ruling you wrongly cited, see below). fair enough. however, you actually *do* need some specific knowledge to repeat and validate a count on paper, at least you need to be able to read and count. there's people around who can't even do that. as society progresses it should not be unreasonable for some degree of computer literacy to be considered normal.

the german *constitutional* court ruled that the *specific implementation of voting machines* used in the 2005 bundestag election didn't meet the requirements.
http://www.bundesverfassungsge...

this i totally agree with. note also that i'm not an online voting advocate at all. it's just critics mostly tend to use weak (if not plain wrong) arguments.

totally agree.

besides, if implemented well online voting can be as secure and verifiable as any other method. the real problem is still corruption.

on a higher level, the system is already rigged: if you control the media you simply manipulate the elections as a whole, e.g. in the us there is no need to risk commiting electoral fraud: with things as fox and cbs and an ignorant and acritic majority of the population you can plant any sockpuppet you need.

also works on the local level, completely legal:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

i'd say OP could be a good example of this, having "reservations against online voting" and wanting to "fight" it just because it is "online", without any sensible description about the system and the suspected flaws. this nonsense is so common, our democratic societies systematically move focus away from every important aspect of political discussion. we absolutely love having red herrings jumping around us, voting ends up being just a ritual.

fyi, that bbc article was utter nonsense, just plain wrong in almost every aspect:
http://www.regjeringen.no/en/d...

is that what she said?