Mail-in means you can be coerced to vote a certain way by someone in your household. It also means someone might be able to get a hold of your ballot papers and vote in your name (there are Austrian politicians who have been convicted for doing just this). The postal service might "lose" ballots depending on whether they come from minority neighborhoods or other characteristics (in Austria, mail-in ballots have the voter's name on the outside). This is different from normal mail since if the postal service regularly lost your mail you would notice and complain; can you tell of your mail-in vote has really arrived? Votes might also be "lost" after they arrive wherever they are meant to be counted; letters presumably need to be guarded for several days, as opposed to votes put in a ballot box and counted later that day (this was one of the factors in the Austrian constitutional court cancelling one round of the most 2016 presidential election).
There are certainly other failure modes. In the last Hungarian parliamentary election the ruling party got less than 50% of the votes overall but literally 99% of the postal vote. That seems rather fishy to me.
Anyway, if you have long lines, that means the people organizing your elections are not doing their job right. There need to be more polling places. Other civilized countries manage this, the US would only need to take their democracy seriously.
Maybe, but you can say that about anything that is not in-person face-to-face communication along with physically handing over the passport for inspection. I think the process was pretty rigorous for the current state of the art, and infinitely better than the normal approach of mailing around PDFs into which I have pasted a scan of my signature.
I guess I agree it's a form of pedantry, but once you're a bit used to reading singular "they" (and it's hard to escape nowadays) you get used to it, and the opposite starts looking weird. Also, it's pedantry that seems to actually be socially beneficial: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/aug/05/he-she-or-ge... (I don't agree with everything being done for "gender-neutral language", especially in German. But this particular case is simple and useful enough in English.)
For whatever it's worth, the reason this tripped me up here was that I had to read the original post several times because I thought that "he" was referring to the attacker (as in the featured article), not to the target. Re-reading it now I don't quite see why I was thinking that.
Ugh, my Austrian bank is currently trying to force me into using a system like this. The "standard" way is via an Android or iOS app, the "alternative" is via a smartcard reader thing that seems to work with Windows only.
They claim that this is mandatory due to some EU regulation, but they conveniently forget to say what regulation that is supposed to be.
I had to verify my identity for an online service a while back. They used a third party company that has a mobile phone app essentially for video conferencing; you then call this company via the app and talk to them. They ask you to show your face and move around and to show your ID, including moving it around so they can check that the security hologram (this was an EU passport) is indeed one. So for this kind of check MS Paint skills would not be enough by far.
I guess they had no way of verifying that the ID info is real, but apparently this process was trustworthy enough for their client.
> in: Böszörmeny et al.(eds): The School of Niklaus Wirth
I used to have that book somewhere. All of it was nicely typeset, except for Dijkstra's chapter, which was facsimile copies of (nicely) handwritten text.
The page is not about bark notes in general. It links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birch_bark_manuscript and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Novgorod_dialect. All those things are very important, but they are better placed in those specialized articles rather than one boy's biography.