Day: September 24, 2016

People of Australia!

… Yairs?

People of Australia! Oyez, oyez, oyez!

[from: Christine Leigh Langtree’s answer to What city in your country do you feel would give a foreigner the best idea of said country’s culture?]

… Oy! oy! oy! Whaddaya want, Nicko? I’ve got some shrimps goin’ on the barbie!

There’s this guy on Quora, right. An’ ’e arsked a question ’bout two yeeears ago.

… Go on.

And the question was, wait for it…

… Why, one-and-a-half decades into the twenty-first century, do Australians (and many others) still have to physically go to polling booths and fill out voting papers in general and state elections?

… You wot?!

… Why, one-and-a-half decades into the twenty-first century, do Australians (and many others) still have to physically go to polling booths and fill out voting papers in general and state elections?

Ha…

… baha…

haHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Good one, mate! Now come on over an’ ’ave a prawn mate!

An’ bring yer own farking beer this time, ya cheaparse!

---

Why, people of Quora, why would my fellow antipodeans react in September 2016 with such merriment about this question, asked January 2015?

Domhnall O’Huigin, God rest him, had the right answer from Ireland’s experience. But Australia has a rather more salient counterexample for online voting. A rather recent counterexample. A rather annoying counterexample.

A counterexample that has spawned the following questions right here on Quora:

• What do you think of the Census fail In Australia?
• What was the reason for the Australian census breakdown on August 9, 2016?

The 2016 census went online. It was a disaster. A government orchestrated DDOS on its own servers.

And right after the disaster, every pundit known in the continent was chortling to whoever would listen, “well, so much for online voting.”

Of course they can:

var’aq – Esolang. A programming language using Klingon vocabulary.

Of course, the pIqaD (see Klingon alphabets) does not have an official Unicode encoding: the ostensive reason is that Klingonists don’t actually use the pIqaD. The gossip is that the German arm of the ISO vetoed it, for fear of bringing Unicode into disrepute. (Then Unicode went and dumped every daft emoji they could find into the codeset; way to pick the wrong target, German arm of ISO.)

That means you would need to use an unofficial mapping into the Unicode Private Use area (ConScript Unicode Registry), if you want your var’aq program to show in pIqaD. But if you’re going to be programming in var’aq, I suggest the unofficialness of the ConScript Unicode Registry is the least of your problems…

Question patterns by Jay Wacker on The Quora Blog

Question patterns exist. However according to Jay Wacker’s response to Edward Conway in comments there, all such bot-generated questions are posted by a specific bot, so this is not Quora’s doing.