"in case you decide to vote or get a public job"

that's not the whole trouble,

1 - you cannot even apply for a public job selection exam
2 - you do not receive your salary for the 2nd month after the election if you have a public or somehow government-related job
3 - if you represent your own business, you cannot participate in government bids
4 - you cannot renew or get a passport or ID document
5 - you cannot renew your registration to go on studying for free on public schools
6 - you cannot get loans from financial entities ran by the government

(4) is already a lot of trouble to me, as although my job is not government-related (we do sell for the army, but I do not represent the company legally), I really need my passport to be able to work.

And as I pointed out, you CAN justify your absence, which is even easier than to pay the fine at the electoral justice. The law says you OUGHT to vote, and there is a lot of trouble if you don't. But yes, you can justify the absence or pay the fine (I didn't know it was so cheap though!).

Either voting, justifying, or paying the fine, there's accountability, or you get in trouble.

The point is that the electoral justice knows with some precision how many (and from where) votes are expected, which makes frauds a bit harder - at least one tiny advantage of the (otherwise stupid) obligatory voting over methods which allow dead people, outsiders, and Disney characters to register and vote.

- You OUGHT to vote if you are a Brazilian citizen between 18 and 70, and is not illiterate. You get in a lot of trouble if you don't.
- You don't register for avery election; you have a "voting ID" valid for every public election.
- You have to vote in a specific designated place (noted in your "voting ID"), generally the closest voting section from the address you provided when getting your "voting ID". If you are away, you have to justify the absence (preferably on a mail office, at the election day)
- Election happens in one day, throughout the country (there may be 2-phase elections, for example for mayor, governor or president, when in the 1st phase the winner does not get more than 50% of the votes - oh, yes, we DIRECTLY vote for president - every citizen's vote has the same "weight").
- Although the voting machine is electronic, when you get to the voting section there are PAPER books with all voters for that section listed, and your ID is checked against that. You sign the book and get a "receipt" detached from it (you have to prove you voted, as it is a legal obligation).

Soo, the electoral authority "knows" how many votes should appear in the results. Generally we do not have Disney characters, dead people, etc. voting, nor people voting in several electoral sections.

As far as I can remember, results have matched the pre-election polls (from multiple sources) quite well. Generally people know in advance what the result will be from each city or even city area, and that can be seen in real time as the electronic counting unfolds at election night (yes, we generally get most results in the night of the election day). I can't recall results being seriously contested by the losing parties (we have MANY parties).

Results are manipulated by "social engineering": Sending buses/boats to collect people from remote locations for voting in "exchange" for voting, trading dental treatment promises, money, death threats, etc. Illegal too, but easier and more difficult to trace than manipulating after the votes were cast.

I trust that there are so many crooks in politics in my country that if a party found a way to manipulate the results after elections, there would be so many me-too-or-else-I'll-tell that it would spread like a wildfire and the results would be awkward enough to be laughable. It is a self-regulating system. If a hacker found a way to manipulate the results, he would not stop at selling the method to one single candidate. I believe the same applies for other voting methods (except the ones which allow Mickey Mouse to register, of course) - it is not the system itself that prevents fraud, but the fact that fraud works both ways, and that the result is not a complete surprise.

In recent international elections you can see in the news that if the results do not match what the population though it would be, it is noticed at once, and people get to the streets (sometimes there wasn't even a fraud, it's just that some people won't accept the losing). It hasn't happened here so far, so we still trust the way it's been done.

You're right. We have a very real non-fossil, non-nuclear fuel solution, environmentally friendlier than fossil.

We have been running cars on sugar cane ethanol in Brazil since the 70'. The technology is very mature already, and most (if not all) cars made in Brazil now are "flex-fuel" (can run on any mixture from pure ethanol to our gasoline, which actually already has 24% of ethanol).

It always annoys me how few people have heard about this outside Brazil, and how the (american) media tries to create every possible bad news/stats/study about it.

I had to send some furious emails to Road&Track because everytime they mentioned "ethanol" as fuel they'd list disadvantages associated only with corn ethanol, as if it was general to any ethanol source, never mentioning the existence of our established system here. Only recentlyI could I finally see "corn ethanol" correctly identified in the magazine when identifying a disadvantage.

It looks to me the media likes to bash ethanol fuel and ignore the Brazilian success with sugar cane ethanol because: 1 - They are against the corn subsides, 2 - They don't want it to look as a good idea until the US can produce its own ethanol (I don't think we could handle the US demand for ethanol anyway), and 3 - "not made here"

(so please, before posting gossip about "sugar cane ethanol harming food production", "sugar cane ethanol causing rain forest damage", "ethanol fuel bad for environment", do check your sources for hidden agendas)

I won't debate about this, so some points in advance:

- CO2 emissions at the exhaust pipe are no better than fossil (maybe worse, since you burn about 30% more fuel in volume per km), but most of that "C" was arrested from CO2 in the air when the sugar cane was growing.

- unlike corn ethanol, the complete cycle (from production to engine) returns 4 to 5 times more energy than it was "invested" in production, so only a small amount of CO2 is produced by other energy sources (specially considering that most electricity in Brazil comes from hydroelectric). The rest is "solar power" - the only real renewable source, as it is the only significant energy being "added" to the Earth all the time.

- along the years while ethanol production grew in Brazil, food production also grew. We're not stopping producing food to produce ethanol. Food production is (as everywhere capitalist else) regulated by market price. Nobody will produce food if it costs more to do it than what you can sell it for.

- Road&Track (Dennis Simanaitis) once mentioned a paper where it said the rain forest was being cut due to ethanol production. First, the rain forest region is not good for sugar cane. Second, when I found&read the paper, it actually suggested that corn ethanol subsides made many US farmers drop soy production for corn, that made the soy international value rise, some Brazilian farmers could have expanded soy plantations in the rain forest region (I have not verified this fact, but one can see how far the prejudice can go).

- ethanol production got to a point where we have big sugar cane plantations close to the ethanol production (thus reducing the need for fossil diesel for trucks to carry the cane to the plant), the vegetal matter not converted in alcohol is burned to provide heat for the conversion process, and in at least one case excess heat is used by a power plant which supplies electricity for the site and nearby community (again, the CO2 produced by this burning is "renewable")

It is not cold-fusion perfect, but it is a way better, not pie-in-the-sky, alternative for fossil fuels, real, tested, mature, and in use for some 30 years.

(even cold fusion worries me a bit. what are we going to do with all the He produced when/if all energy we use comes from cold fusion? will we all talk funny? or will it take the ozone layer's place in high atmosphere?)

You seem to think all things must have only one cause/solution/explanation, and that must be the one you believe. "Oh, you see: There IS another explanation for this, so you your's is futile, impossible and completely insignificant". I tend to think most of the "non-digital" things may have composed causes, and I like speculating about it with people who know how to do it friendly, so it is useless to keep arguing, specially since I just noticed your sig, and I don't believe in you ;-)

Knowing that the police may quickly verify the identity of someone who claims to be someone else really gives me the illusion of feeling safer. I don't know why.

Giving an easy way for the police to confirm that I am myself only gives the government more power if I DON'T want them to know who I am.

I'm not trolling or antagonizing with you, really. I just don't get it (maybe I was brainwashed, being born during Brazilian's military dictatorship).

Case 1: I have the right not to show ID, police asks me who I am, I tell them the truth, they go away.
Case 2: I have no right to deny showing the ID, police asks me to show it, I do, they go away.

They got the true in both cases. They'd only get a lie in Case 1 if I had a reason to hide who I am.

How Case 2 gives them more power over me than Case 1? By the same logic, one will get to the point where police won't be allowed to even get close to you and ask for the time without having reasonable reason, a warrant, and five lawyers in standby.

In Brazil the law says you have to show ID if asked for, but that not result in Police asking for IDs of every person they meet (as I said, I was never asked for it unless while driving). It just makes things easier when they do have to verify your identity.

Even if the law did not say I had to show it, why deny it just because I have the right to? The law doesn't say I have to pack broken glasses safely when disposing them in the recycling bin, nor where and how I should leave the tray in a fast food, but doing that makes other people's jobs easier. Showing the ID to an officer (even if you don't have to) makes his job easier. Isn't that a good thing?

There are bad cops? Sure. But what extra "abuse" rights does that rule gives them? If they are going to harass a guy just because of his looks, they are going to harass him - the only difference would be that he would legally have the right not to show the ID - not before "his" stash of pot was "found".

In the US, if you deny showing your ID, the cop will not know if you are doing that because you "know your rights and draw the line", or if you have a serious reason to hide it. In Brazil if you deny it, you must have a serious reason, so there's no doubt.

To be honest, there are indeed downsides: You always have to remember carrying your ID, and if you are caught without it by a commonsenseless cop you'll be in trouble, but it is the same if you are caught driving without a driver's or vehicle document - or, in the US if you are thrown in a situation where you really have to show ID. Basically, everybody carries it - and in regions so underdeveloped that people do not have them, well, generally there aren't even cops there, and if there are, they will know people don't have IDs.

I used "positive feedback" in the "control loop" sense, not in the "pat in the back" or "antropomorphic" sense.

You introduce a tiny, random perturbation in a control system. Positive feedback loops back to the input reinforcing that tiny perturbation in the same direction. Negative feedback subtracts from that perturbation in the input.

And please, positive/negative are not something intelligently designed, it's just positive=pass the characteristic along; negative=does not pass the characteristic along. Huge male sea elephants are a result of the "positive feedback" of females picking the bullies over generations. In the same "control loop" terminology, one could say the output "overshoot", and now the size may become a disadvantage (they may unintentionally squash the females) - that's "negative feedback" kicking in.

Hmm, I did not anthropomorphize evolution. It was a metaphor. Do you think incest is just a taboo? Isn't there a biological advantage in not interbreeding? When there's a possibly inheritable characteristic (not "designed"!) that has some slight advantage over another in terms of health/survival of the genes, won't that result in this characteristic being reinforced because of natural selection? Can then you "get" the metaphor of, say, "The urge for a cockroach to run to dark places is evolution's reaction to predators" without one having to explain the actual whole process? (well, my mistake for using metaphors in writing a scientific paper...)

But you must be right; incest is just a taboo - Nature almighty does not want us to mix up genes; that's why She created Eve from an Adam's body part; we all have the same genetic code, and that's the way it should be.

As you said "many animals have incestuous relations **when there's no better alternative**". How do they "decide" that not interbreeding is the "better alternative"? Do animals have taboos too? Or is that a behavior that could be explained by the advantage of not interbreeding being reinforced by natural selection?

(and yes, I know there are even animals that reproduce asexually, thus passing along the same code. I'm talking about the rest of us)

But evolution didn't have time to adapt to foster-parenting yet :-)

Then for this there's AnyoneEB's interesting reference below.

Indeed, but can't one of the reasons for this need to set out on their own be our instincts' way of avoiding inbreeding (instincts inherited from the times when they could set out on their own)? What is the reason we (and some mammals) have the urge to set out on our own, whereas other mammals (like meerkats, which then live in clans where only the alpha pair breeds) haven't?

No flame disclaimer: I'm not trying to present a "scientific explanation" here, just brainstorming and trying get free knowledge from you. My field observations are from Animal Planet, and I'm a semi-autistic engineer, so what do I know about human and animal social behavior? My first post was an attempt to do a funny musing I had about the subject.

That's really interesting! I wish I had mod points...

Would there be an opposite equivalent on the parents' side? An explanation for why parents are not sexually attracted to their offspring?

Only imprinting that on the offspring side surely works well to avoid sibling inbreeding, but maybe not as effective to avoid parent-offspring inbreeding (at least not consensual!)

Is there some similar imprinting in the parents, or is it just learned moral values?

(I was about to ask "Can't they be there to avoid crimes in the first place?" but then I though "Minority Report"...)

In Brazil (as far as I know) you ought to carry an ID, and ought to show it to the police officer, if asked for.

I have no problem showing my ID if asked (I'm 41, and was never asked to show it, except while driving through police "blocks", maybe 10 times or so). I'm Ok with exchanging this bit of "freedom" or "privacy" for better security.

It's not like "surrender this freedom today, and it's 1984 tomorrow". Even if you have the right not to, showing the ID makes it easier to you (unless you have something to hide) and to the police, who will then spend more taxpayer dollars going after criminals instead of going into a legal argument with you. What is the downside?

(and yes, criminality numbers are not good in Brazil, but that's not caused by the ID policy...)

Wow, I didn't know posts here were considered "scientific" explanations! I naively thought it was just a healthy exchange of ideas.

They would venture far enough not to interbreed, not necessarily away from the whole group. A lot of mammals get urges to leave the family when they get close to sexual maturity.

I though about this "scientific" explanation (I'm posting here, so it ought to be) when I saw a documentary where two cheetahs, brother and sister, who got along so far started to get aggressive towards each other and parted ways then they became "teenagers". The "scientific" explanation (this time from the most authoritative source of true - the telly) was that this diminished the chance of interbreeding.

Couldn't it be plausible that humans too had a mechanism to separate close-to-sexual-maturity from siblings and parents? Couldn't that be activated by something as simple as a pool of hormones also having effect on a developing brain? Maybe that is a bug now, but used to be a feature?

I don't suppose we (well, most of us) suddenly became morally aware that interbreeding was not correct, thus decided not to do it. Unless, of course we were intelligently designed this way.

...to incest, which is bad for the gene pool.

When our primate ancestors stopped leaving the cave as soon as they could and started staying home with their parents until later in life, what better way to avoid interbreeding between offspring and parents than to make teenagers hate/piss off their parents, and do whatever they could to impregnate/get impregnated by someone else?

That's nature saying: "Get away from these same-gene carriers. Get out, and get wild. Multiply now!". And when they do, that's positive feedback for the evolutionary push. Interbreeding would reduce the probability of survival of the group in the long term (and short term, if <disgusting attempt to joke about people locked in basements removed>).

When I read this part, I thought you would mention Symbian. At least it looks like it does what you suggest. I am not a Symbian specialist, but when you write something that needs access to more than simple GUI stuff, you need to sign the app (tied to a specific phone IMEI, at least with the free online signing process), and in the process request what you want to allow the app to access (GPS data, user data, comms etc). Then when installing the app, Symbian will warn you that the app requires access to special features. Of course nothing is unbreakable, but it's a step in the direction you described.

don't you realize that, being Open Source there will be much more peer-reviews, and lots of people contributing for addressing bugs and instabilities, thus drastically reducing crashes and downtimes?

The even releases will be stable enough that they will have very high uptimes and rarely crash - when compared with closed-source cars, so they won't even need crash testing (that will be done on odd releases).

Besides lowering insurance costs due to less crashing, it will also do so by being less prone to theft, since - you know - it will have less vulnerabilities which could allow break-ins.