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Phen ,

You already got a bunch of responses on the ranked system so I'll mention other stuff.

There are many elements that go into the voting system. Here in Brazil if a candidate doesn't get over 50% of the votes we do a second poll with just the top two performers, which on top of counting every individual vote instead of grouping them by county, makes it a lot better than the US system. On the other hand, we don't have anything like the American primaries so we have no say over which candidates are going to run.

If the US election was like the Brazilian system, Trump wouldn't have won in 2016. If Brazil used the American system (with just two to three parties), Bolsonaro would probably not even have a party to run on in 2018.

Other important stuff is how to vote. Here there's a single day for polls which is a federal holiday and everyone has their own assigned location for voting, which is mandatory (but not really). If you're away from your designed location you can go to any other to fill a form or even use an app to notify that you can't vote. In some states it's also illegal to sell alcohol on election day. You're not allowed to do anything for a campaign while polls are open but it's also illegal for cops to arrest anyone (for anything) without flagrant. We can't vote by mail and we need to have an ID to vote. Oh it's also illegal to take a picture of your vote or bring people with you while you vote.

Polling locations are usually the closest school to your house or some other public building that is just a short walk away (except for very small rural towns). However, if you move and don't change your voting location within a few months or the election, you'll have to go back to where you lived before in order to vote - too many people never update it and have to go back to their home town every election (or just skip it).

All of those little things impact the end result because they can help (or prevent) people from voting. In the US, actual access to polls is already being weaponized by parties extensively, but here that is only now starting to be a thing.

Finally, there are the urns themselves. Here we have electronic urns with closed source code that can be audited by every party. At the end of the day each individual urn prints its own totals which are then displayed to the public and made available on the election website.
It's not a perfect system and if (or more likely when) someone manages to hack it, they could easily change the result of an election, though I believe the systems in place are enough to at the very least expose that such a hack happened. The paper ballots used by the US on the other hand are much easier to fraud, but with much smaller impact to the total vote count (maybe high risk of impacting the results on key counties). Both systems still have a very large room for improvement in terms of fraud safety.

Canadians who have lost their sense of smell say it's misunderstood, undervalued — and deserves more attention ( www.cbc.ca )

For millennia, the sense of smell has been widely undervalued — ranked far below vision by the likes of Immanuel Kant and Sigmund Freud. In 2021, a survey in the journal Brain Sciences found that people consistently ranked smell below vision and hearing — and even below commercial products. One quarter of college students...

Phen ,

Nah, I've lost it 25 years ago and never really missed it. On contrary, in the rare instances in which I was able to smell something since, it's always been something I would rather not.

Is it theoretically possible for Windows 11 to delete pirated content on your PC?

I heard Windows 11 has been updated to take screenshots of your computer. Is it theoretically possible for them to delete content from your PC or external hard drives if they can determine that you have pirated content on them? Can they theoretically report you for it? I know it's unlikely but is it still possible? I'm thinking...

Phen ,

On the realm of possibilities, windows can do whatever it wants. If it is connected to the internet then yeah it would be possible for Microsoft to do something like that, but I wouldn't be worried about it just for piracy. Something like that could be possible for detecting CP or things on that level but I doubt MS would go low enough to do that for simple pirated content.

Phen ,

In general, yes, but in this case I don't think there's any way for the service to beat piracy even if the service was just as good (which it isn't). Take the One Piece manga, for example. A lot of people read it from illegitimate sources simply because they can manage to release it two to three days earlier than the official every week. You can read it for free online in your local language once the magazine reach the shelves in Japan, but even that is too late because the contents gets leaked while all the partners are preparing for that simultaneous release.

Phen ,

It would be a service problem if the chapter was released officially in one language then translated to others by pirates faster than the official company, but that is not the case. The official Sunday release includes the English, Spanish and Portuguese translations (among others) and they are all made available at the same time, for free for several regions.

Pirate websites only manage to release it faster because they get access to the unfinished product and then have people work on them with no regards to any work laws in order to finish and release it as soon as possible without any schedule or time constraint.

Phen ,

No words here at all. I generally don't use words for thinking unless I'm trying to think of a sentence or something like that.

Phen ,

It's like an instinct. You get the meaning behind the words without the words needing to be there.

Phen ,

I also can't picture anything in my mind either. It's like a different language that is based on feelings instead of words. You know when you move next to a fire and you feel hot? You don't need any words to feel hot, right? It's kinda like that. I would open the drawer and feel a "this isn't right" feeling.

Phen ,

Stack overflow still have users? These days it rarely shows up on my search results and when it does the answers are always outdated by several years.

Where do the rural homeless near you live?

This seems to be something people don't always give second thought to. When people talk about the homeless, the first things thought about are images of people on busy city streets in rusty clothes waiting around near allies. In there, the answer is quite static, because it can be I guess. But if that's the case, change the...

Phen ,

I have no idea where he slept, but there was one former millionaire homeless dude who setup shop on the side of the highway for over a decade. He sold honey, pine seeds and some other stuff like that that he managed to forage around the area (probably getting into people's property too).

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