Uncategorised

Elections

Tomorrow is the Australian Federal Election. It is weird how there are some topics that none of the parties seem to have been bringing up during the election. In particular, they don’t seem to be mentioning about how John Howard lied about the children overboard scandal last election (if he didn’t lie, then he intentionally kept himself uninformed which is possibly even worse). This was a case where information was suppressed until just after the election had finished. If the information had been made public, it could have changed the result of the election.

Hopefully by the end of Saturday we won’t have a Prime Minister who isn’t a spamer and telemarketer.

Jamin: from what those articles say, Michael Moore was offering incentives for people to vote — not incentives to vote for a particular candidate. While I agree that the latter is bad, why is encouraging people to vote bad?

In the Australian elections, I’ve received a postal vote application from my current MP. While I think it would be better if the applications were sent out by the AEC, I don’t think there is anything wrong with encouraging people to vote in this way.

Also, even if you don’t consider yourself a Bush supporter, the people who manage the websites you referenced certainly are. If you want to accuse someone of being a propagandist, perhaps you should choose some less obviously biased news sources.

Hub: there is a preference to get Thunderbird to check all IMAP folders for new messages. It just isn’t exposed in the UI. Instructions for turning it on can be found here.

In an email, Jonathan pointed out that simply using gtk_icon_theme_load_icon() by itself is not optimal either. If the user changes their icon theme, you should reload the icon in case it has changed in the new theme.

This is quite easy to handle correctly though, using the "changed" signal of GtkIconTheme:

GtkIconTheme *icon_theme = gtk_icon_theme_get_default ();
g_signal_connect (icon_theme, "changed", G_CALLBACK (callback), NULL);

Now callback() will be called when the icon theme changes, at which point you can reload the icon.

What would be nice would be a GtkImage constructor that let you pass in an icon name plus desired size, and handled theme changes for you. Maybe I’ll do a patch for this …

So the Federal election has been announced for 9th October. If you are an Australian living overseas, now would be a good time to apply for a postal vote. It’d be great if this gets rid of John Howard. Of course, even if he does win he will probably retire soon after the election …

Last week, it also turned out that John Howard is a spammer. He paid his son’s company to send out unsolicited email to members of his electorate. Apparently our anti-spam laws include exceptions for political parties, so it might not be illegal. However, the Labor party are chasing it up whether it was legal for a third party to send out the spam (since they don’t have the protection of the exemption). On the brighter side, it might encourage the politicians to rethink whether the exemptions in the Spam Act are a good idea or not.

I’ve been in Oxford for the past week at the Canonical conference. There are lots of great people here, working on a lot of cool projects. Jordi’s blog has a lot more info about it.

Bushisms

I found this one quite good.

Compulsory Voting

tberman: I agree that voters should have the right not to vote for anyone, but don’t feel that simply not turning up to vote is a good way to do so. In a non-compulsory election, the non-voter count is going to be comprised of those who are abstaining from voting, and those who are simply two lazy to turn up. With compulsory voting, those who don’t wish to vote for any particular candidate can simply leave their ballot blank, which is known as an informal vote.

Given the difference in turnout between U.S. and Australian elections, I’d guess that a fair number of the people who don’t vote in the U.S. would vote if they had to turn up to a polling place on the day.

I also think it is important for as many people as possible to vote. The people who get elected are supposed to represent the electorate. When there is a clear majority it doesn’t matter much, but in a marginal seat, those missing votes could easily swing the result. In this case, people can claim that the winner does not have the support of the majority of the electorate.

As far as the U.S. gravitating towards a two party system, I’d suggest that this is caused more by the vote counting procedure than the culture. When you have a system where where voting for someone who won’t get a high first preference count is equivalent to not voting, people are going to gravitate towards the parties where their votes actually make a difference (or not vote at all).

With a preferential system, you can vote for a minor party as your first preference, then number off the major parties with your other preferences. This also fixes the problem where two similar candidates might split the vote causing both to lose — one will get knocked out, and their votes will be transfered to the next preference (which would likely be the other similar candidate). This generally leads to the least unpopular candidate winning, rather than the most popular one.