Fred Clark is, as always, eloquent and just plain right. His Left Behind critique series has been fantastic, and why I started reading him, but his other articles are often thought provoking and smart.
From here in oz, congratulations to you all.
woot!
Get well soon. Or "gt wll sn."
We just had an election here in Australia, which you're probably aware of: We ousted our Bush-clone Little Johnny, and so far the world hasn't imploded from having a Labor government.
Our ballots are paper. We get one for the House of Representatives (the lower house) and one for the Senate (upper house). The House of Reps is elected by "Electorates", which are primarily based on population and so are redistributed over time. Federal elections use different electorates to State, State electorates being smaller.
The House of Reps ticket has boxes which are numbered from 1 to n, where n is the number of candidates, one per political party. Whoever gets the least number of 1s has all their ballots put into the pile corresponding to the 2 on the ballot. This process is repeated (which each ballot looking at whatever was the NEXT choice for the voter) until ONE pile has more than 50% of the vote (usually this means there are only two piles left, but can occur before). 50% + 1 = a win. The majority of seats in the House is the Government, and the leader of that party is the Prime Minister and thus leader of the Government.
Then the Senate, which is the complicated one :D
The ballot has two parts, with a thick line dividing it. ABOVE the line the voter can put a single 1 in a box. That means they accept the slate that the party they voted for had submitted to the electoral commission. If the voter doesn't do that, they have to put the numbers from 1 to n into all the n boxes.
At the last election there were 40+ boxes below the line on the two foot wide ballot.
I'd try to explain proportional representation, but I got too confused to continue. Simply, you win a seat if you have a quota of votes, which is something like the number of votes cast divided by the number of senators in the state plus one. Once YOU get your quota, your excess votes are redistributed to the other piles until all the quotas are filled. There is an article on this here which is a better explanation than I can make (see the Senate section).
Oh, and our elections are compulsory. We are ticked off (heh) on the electoral roll when we get our ballots. If you don't get ticked, you get fined.
Simple, right? Not like your confusing elect the candidates and then elect them again thing.
Wasn't the whole point of working in cells, where you only know your cellmates and leader, and maybe one or two message drops to contact others -- wasn't that ALL to ensure that you only knew what you needed to know. You could never reveal to captors (or your wife or significant (or insignificant) other) the details of the top secret plan B because you didn't know.
So interrogation or torture would only reveal the limited details you knew, and so would reveal very little indeed -- unless you were one of the big planners or leaders, in which case you shouldn't be caught alive anyway.
In Friday, Heinlein had the heroine tell all to her captors -- standard policy for operatives as future drugs made interrogation almost 100% effective. Unfortunately for her, the captors then used torture to 'confirm' the details that she had been quite willing to already spill with and without drugs. Since she knew little at all that could be used against her employers, she had nothing to hold back.
xkcd is full of win.
I remember reading about half when I found out about the mouseover text... and had to reread from the beginning taking care to put my mouse over the image and read what came up (in some cases it changes the whole joke!)
trs strts wth
dsmvwld tpc hr
mkng lght hs fn
...
Nels: not cal me shirley, pls. tx.
boom, ting
She's here all night folks :D
Blog.. spear. Ouch. Let alone the other errors all over that page.
So, it's okay to be unethical, but that is alright, because it isn't SPAM... uh-huh.
In a way, I'm impressed. The guy is twenty, apparently owns his own house and has his own business... sadly, that business is using tricks to exploit search engine optimisation. Which means, fake sites, spam blogs, fake blogposts all polluting up the internet.
From here in Aussieland, I'm afraid that you won't see elections delayed, but more that if the results aren't to the Deciders liking, they won't be happening. Overturned results, elections declared void due to 'errors', fraud only investigated if the wrong party won...
Good luck.
Scooter done bad things,
But he lied for chimp's Bestie:
I can has pardon?
arggg... 'favourite' not favoured...
wait.. 'fav-our-ed'... err yeah.. pronounce that with three syllables.. that'll do it.
wet flowers, Dave Bell?
hairy nosed baby felines -
your favoured things?
-----
!
?;
&:
:)
exclamation point
question mark semicolon
ampersand colon
Haiku open threads?
this can only end in tears:
bad poets in snow
Jim says "Fanfic" as well as "Fan Fiction". I'm thinking that they are both legitimate -- The full "Fan Fiction", or the fannish "fanfic".
#2: I can hear the lawyers firing up their word processors.
To write legalslash?
Ah, 1AM posting for the win. (Aussie time 3pm, btw). Following Dawno's lead, Patrick now has a reminder on my blog as well... Let there be a wave of 0-readership blogs, all with reminders for Patrick.
what the? first it tells me I posted too often (so I checked, and wasn't there)... and now I see double. Oops.
I've got an appointment with the dental hygienist tomorrow, does that count?
I've already done the two-fillings-and-a-crown-in-one-sitting, that was last month.
I've got an appointment with the dental hygienist tomorrow, does that count?
I've already done the two-fillings-and-a-crown-in-one-sitting, that was last month.
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