Actually are not bananas exactly, but I am writing today to announce the new FSFLA’s website, I just thought the bananas would be more attractive. 🙂
If you’re curious, try to access: http://www.fsfla.org — I hope our DNS is already propagated to yours.
Thanks FSFE for providing the vserver, and Jonas, who was really patient with me 🙂
I fortgot to blog about it few days ago, but the morning’s experience I had today made me remind this subject 🙂
Here in Hamburg, the metro (subway, s-bahn, u-bahn, whatever) really works. It is irritatingly in time, and all the station have plates with a minutes countdown. There’s no ticket control to get in the train, but if you “forget” to pay and someone ask you for the ticket, then you would pay much more.
It’s incredible, eveybody buy tickets!!! Including me 😀
I imagine this kind of system in the Sao Paulo’s metro, for instance….heheheh
But sometimes the train delays. That already happened with me twice, I guess. The reason: people jump in front of the train trying to kill themselves.
I thought it was a joke, but a couple of days ago I was in the metro coming to the FSFE’s office and when the train supposed to go straight to stop in the station, it got another rail and stopped in other place. Georg said “it is strange, the train always stops in the other side”. Well, when we were walking in the station, he saw the ambulance, few police people and said: “ah, someone jumped in front of the train, again”. With a weird naturalitty in his voice!!! I got stalled, and asked “WHAT????!!!” How could people decide to kill themselves jumping in front of the trains?? And worst: How can the others think that it is normal???
If you have been in Brazil, and saw an accident on the transit, for instance, you noticed lots of people standing around willing to see whether the person is bleeding, or lost a leg, or died. Here it doesn’t happen!!! Nobody stops to ask whether the criature is still alive or not!
Well, this morning I was again in the train, coming to the FSFE’s office again. The sound system start to announce something different, then I asked Georg: what happened? (Since I cannot — yet — understand german). And his answer: “Someone jumped in front of the train”.
Minutes later, more messages in the sound system. I asked again: “What happened now? One more?” And he: “No, they are just telling that they took of the corpse and the traffic is back to normal.”
And one more normal working day begins…
It doesn’t sound weird???
The brazilian voting system is already internationally known for being 100% eletronic and insecure, for sure. Since the elections in 1996 they start to implement a system, completly proprietary, to do electronic voting in which we dont’t have, for instance, the right of recounting the votes, because there’s no printed version of our votes. It’ s completly automated! Besides, You cannot even know if you really had participated in an anonymous voting because they type your elector number just before go to the machine and type your vote. It’ s really easy to know who votes to who.
The government in Brazil managed to do it in a way that all the people are really proud of being the country where the voting process is 100% eletronic. Wow! Even knowning that people still die hunger in the poorest regions in Brazil….clap clap clap! Milions of reais spent in an eletronic-proprietary-insecure-antidemocratic systems.
Now they are giving us the favor of improving the idea: they are opening a licitation to buy more voting machines and adapt the old ones (around 400 thousand) with a new feature: fingerprint scanner devices. They would collect the initial fingerprints in the next elections, and then in the voting after that, we’d not need to bring our “titulo de eleitor” (elector ID) to get recognized by the super new system.
In a discussion mailing list in Brazil, one guy questioned how it would be if the system for any reason cannot recognize the person by the fingerprint. Another guy gave a suggestion that I think was just fantastic: in case of not being able to recognize someone, they would ask this person to shit in a super shit identifier machine connected to the system! You know, just as a contingency 😉
I cannot avoid on imagine big lines of people going to the government in order to have their figerprints collected and then passing in a toillet to drop the “contingency”.