Germany, with 100% paper ballots, has preliminary results in by the end of the night. That’s preliminary as in “everything has been counted, but we haven’t double-checked anything yet”. The final result comes later and has never differed in even close to significant ways from the preliminary one. Most of the time delay is not due to voting but to give people and courts time to deal with any challenge there might be.
The German constitutional court declared voting machines unconstitutional for the simple reason that they don’t allow people with just an ordinary education, no specialist knowledge, to ascertain for themselves that the vote is kosher.
The CCC actually tried to get them outlawed based on technical grounds, including that it’s impossible to have electronic voting that is both secure and private (“can’t prove to the Mafia boss how you voted” type of private), the judges listened intendedly and asked many smart questions, just to then turn around and say “yeah we barely understood that and we’re practically all professors and it’s our job, can’t expect J. Random Citizen to do that between shifts”.
On the flipside there’s overseas territories which don’t use the Euro, and there’s been plenty of talk of a multi-speed Europe. Single market won’t be negotiable, though, so there’s going to be inspections at the border keeping refrigerated eggs and chlorinated chickens out.
Links but no screenshots, insert joke about Gnome’s UX.
Dataport is kinda hit and miss when it comes to developing. It was created by taking the small IT departments of different ministries, agencies, etc, of multiple states, and putting them all under a common roof. They did that because they realised that standard state administration structures and IT weren’t really compatible but on the flipside, they also funded a whole new organisation with people accustomed to those very structures, and as dataport is still a public law corporation the internal administration – think payroll and everything – will still be done by career state bureaucrats.
It’s a different kind of dysfunction than you see in the private sector but dysfunction nonetheless. OTOH working directly with FLOSS upstream will help: It’s not that (sufficiently large) FLOSS projects don’t have their own bureaucracy, and the bureaucrats that be on dataport’s side will respect that.
Regarding maintenance: Aside from hardware upgrades because they make sense (power consumption) or you want new features (latest addition: Graphics tablets to allow citizens to sign stuff without having to print things), there’s a constant churn in software requirements as new orders come in on what to do and how to do it. Just because you wrote perfect software doesn’t mean that parliament stops passing laws.
As far as usability is concerned: Dataport will also have to train people, and they actually have the funds to do usability studies and such. Much will also depend on the different agencies they’re working for, can’t fix an agency’s workflows for them, and that goes beyond mere IT. I guess a public-law consultancy does make sense but having a ministry for administrative affairs reeks of Sir Humphrey. I guess you could hide it by making it a subsidiary of the court of auditors.
No idea where that number is from but at the start it’s just going to be getting rid of MS Office and Exchange, switch to FLOSS telephony, not getting rid of Windows. Licensing costs for 30k seats are certainly higher but you have to offset that with not getting any support from MS any more. Dataport will need a couple of in-house developers to resolve issues and work with upstream. Actual development, not tier 1 support and translating administrative instructions into templates.
Also for the state it’s not really about the money, but sovereignty. 188k are also peanuts in 18bn worth of state budget, that’s yearly maintenance for what 30km of state roads. Given that we currently don’t have any potholes we can afford it.
As to brainrot: Not really applicable. These are managed workplaces and not much will change on the end-user side.
I never understood how people couldn’t understand basic PEMDAS/BEDMAS/Whatever-the-fuck-your-country-calls-it.
There’s no “whatever-the-fuck-your-country-calls-it”, the US is the only country using it, and only up to high school. At least I’m not seeing any papers coming out of the US relying on it so at some point they’re dropping it and do what everyone else is doing: Write equations such that you don’t need a left-to-right rule to disambiguate things. Also, using multiplication by juxtaposition (2x + 4x2).
It’s ambiguous which one of these is correct. Hence the best method we have for “correct” is left to right.
The solution accepted anywhere but in the US school system range from “Bloody use parenthesis, then” over “Why is there more than one division in this formula why didn’t you re-arrange everything to be less confusing” to “50 Hertz, in base units, are 50s-1”.
More practically speaking: Ultimately, you’ll want to do algebra with these things. If you rely on “left to right” type of precedence rules re-arranging formulas becomes way harder because now you have to contend with that kind of implicit constraint. It makes everything harder for no reason whatsoever so no actual mathematician, or other people using maths in earnest, use that kind of notation.
In a democracy, you should have good schools for the simple reason as to have a people that’s actually able to carry a democracy.
Originally, school was for the nobility and (fledgling) bourgeois, so they could run their spreadsheets, wage wars, and impress people with trivia, everyone else’s education came from family tradition, neighbours (farmers talking farming stuff), or an education in the trades. Want to study geometry? At some point, the best option was to become a mason. And they would swear you to secrecy.
Universal education is a brainchild of Martin Luther, he wanted everyone to be able to read so that all could read the Bible.
Nothing. And that’s why people don’t write equations like that: You either see
4
6 + ---
2
or
6 + 4
-------
2
If you wrote 6 + 4 / 2 in a paper you’d get reviewers complaining that it’s ambiguous, if you want it to be on one line write (6+4) / 2 or 6 + (4/2) or 6 + ⁴⁄₂ or even ½(6 + 4) Working mathematicians never came up with PEMDAS, which disambiguates it without parenthesis, US teachers did. Noone else does it that way because it does not, in the slightest, aid readability.
Those two things are memorisation tasks. Maths is not about memorisation.
You are not supposed to remember that the area of a triangle is a * h / 2, you’re supposed to understand why it’s the case. You’re supposed to be able to show that any triangle that can possibly exist is half the area of the rectangle it’s stuck in: Start with the trivial case (right-angled triangle), then move on to more complicated cases. If you’ve understood that once, there is no reason to remember anything because you can derive the formula at a moment’s notice.
All maths can be understood and derived like that. The names of the colours, their ordering, the names of the planets and how they’re ordered, they’re arbitrary, they have no rhyme or reason, they need to be memorised if you want to recall them. Maths doesn’t, instead it dies when you apply memorisation.
Ein Anfänger (der) Gitarre Hat Elan. There, that’s the Guitar strings in German. Why do I know that? Because my music theory knowledge sucks. I can’t apply it, music is all vibes to me but I still need a way to match the strings to what the tuner is displaying. You should never learn music theory from me, just as you shouldn’t learn maths from a teacher who can’t prove a * h / 2, or thinks it’s unimportant whether you can prove it.
x/0 is the set {+inf,-inf}, fite me IRL.
Learning the actual algebraic laws, instead of an order of operations to mechanically replicate. PEMDAS might get you through a standardised test but does not convey any understanding, it’s like knowing that you need to press a button to call the elevator but not understand what elevators are for.
Though “lazy teachers” might actually be a bit too charitable a take given the literacy rates of US college graduates mastering in English. US maths teachers very well might not understand basic maths themselves, thinking it’s all about a set of mechanical operations.
Why? Because a bunch of dead Greeks say so!
The Greeks certainly didn’t come up with PEMDAS. US teachers too lazy to teach kids actual maths did. And that’s before taking into account that the Greeks didn’t come up with Algebra.
You’re trying to transmit power via magnetism so distance is an issue.
Aluminium is actually a better conductor than copper when you judge it by mass, not volume. I think also by tensile strength.
In any case there’s a reason that large overland wires aren’t copper, but steel-cladded aluminium. Copper will always have its applications but so does gold and yet we’re not running out of gold to plate connections with.
In cases like windings requiring more volume is actually an issue, in the case of PCBs… no, despite Apple’s insistence, it’s actually fine to have a phone that’s 0.2mm thicker.
Gigaset produces in Germany.
What if I told you that Germany is a federation. NRW would be the fifth largest US state, Bremen the third smallest (actually, almost identical population to DC), most of all the US has more states. They can do stuff in parallel that’s no excuse to not have quick election results. And now don’t come with “but there’s so much space in between” you’re not sending the results via horse buggy are you.
And, no, of course the federation doesn’t legislate on state elections. It gets to say how federal (and EU) elections are run. State’s rights my ass in Germany the federation has no tax office, it’s all collected by the states, and their police can’t put boots on the ground outside of international borders (incl. airports) and the train system (cf Amtrak cops). Certainly can’t just decide to invade a city like is happening in LA. They also don’t have anything like ICE, that’s all state responsibility.