Bikes still take energy and materials to manufacture, transport, and maintain. The food calories needed to turn the pedals are usually grown with energy-intensive agricultural methods.

If you want a real green alternative, ride into a forest, take off your bike wheels, stab yourself with the spokes, and let your body compost naturally. It's probably the single best thing you can do for the environment.

It comes with a quick launcher if you prefer. On my relatively modern PC (Core i5), it starts in less than a second.

Microsoft's OneNote is by far the best note-taking program I've ever used.

1. Simple interface with notes divided by notebook, tab, and then sections.

2. Fast, indexed search across all your notes

3. Media-friendly; it's easy to insert hyperlinks, images, etc. and it'll automatically remember the source URL when you copy and paste something.

4. Option to save notebooks to the Microsoft Cloud (Skydrive) and share them with people. Or you can just save and export as HTML, DOC, etc.

5. Built-in audio recorder with speech recognition if you want to record lectures alongside your text notes.

6. Easy content hotkeys -- headers, bullets, stars, question icons, priorities, to-do lists, etc.

7. Support for inking/drawing with a tablet, including handwriting conversion to structured math equations

Etc. It's not free and it's not open source and it doesn't run on Linux, but it's still awesome.

Great start. I would make every vote a short-answer essay question as well, where you have to list 5 reasons you are voting for that candidate.

And your vote will only count if at least 3 of those reasons match up with the candidate's actual voting record.

I see. I shall return to my rampant fanaticism, then, and leave you in peace.

Wow. Fascinating. Thanks for the reply :)

"Well, if the felons are that many that they can determine the rules, you're already so fucked up that it doesn't matter any more anyway."

This has to work both ways -- either this issue matters or it doesn't. If it doesn't matter, then it's fine to disenfranchise them just because they'll never be electorally significant anyway. If it does matter, let's discuss why instead of merely counting their numbers.

"However, it is not a democracy if you can deny anyone the right to vote."

Perhaps semantically true, but the goal of a society (IMO) isn't to appease linguists, it's to maximize citizen contentedness and well-being. It doesn't matter what we call it.

"What if the specific felony just shouldn't be one? Well, most probably the ones who would care about that would mostly be those who were convicted for it. But by denying them to vote, you'll take away their ability to influence that."

Absolutely true, and an unfortunate side effect of my preference for not letting felons vote. One would hope they can champion for the cause before committing said crime or after being released. (In case it wasn't clear, I think they should be re-enfranchised once released, not barred from voting for life)

That -- the tyranny of the majority -- is one of the inherent dangers in democratic governance, but it also has to balanced against the will of the majority.

I responded in another similar thread, and I hope you don't mind me pointing you there. I didn't expect so many responses to my OP and I'm exhausted by answering all the comments.

I wasn't clear, but I am absolutely NOT in support of PERMANENT removal of voting rights... only while they're in prison. (Except, perhaps, in cases where the person is convicted of serious vote fraud or such, where they've explicitly attacked the democracy)

Once they're rehabilitated or otherwise deemed sane enough to be part of society again, then they deserve every right of a regular citizen, voting rights included.

I regret that this wasn't made clear in my original post.

As a hypothetical, yes. In reality, it seems there are much easier ways to manipulate the population through media and religion.