Came across this on stackoverflow.com, where they were having a community vote for moderators..  Looks like a nice piece of software.

OpenSTV is open-source software for implementing the single transferable vote and other voting methods such as instant runoff voting, Condorcet voting, and approval voting. OpenSTV is the only open-source software that implements the single transferable vote exactly as used by governments, including Scotland and the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts. These methods have been extensively verified against other software and/or actual election results.

Organizations can use OpenSTV to implement their own elections. First, the organization must adopt a voting method. Second, the organization must conduct the vote, and this will most likely be done with paper ballots. Third, the ballots must be entered into the OpenSTV program. Finally, you can use OpenSTV to count the votes and determine the winners of the election.

OpenSTV will run on MS Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

http://www.openstv.org/

1. Newsletter Editorial

Greetings everyone, and happy upcoming valentine's day.  If you have a carbon-based loved one in your life, might I suggest that you turn off the computer for the day and spend it with them.  Or else set up a lan network in your house so the two of you can chat via instant messenger.  If you don't have a human loved one in your life, don't stress it -- plenty of posts in this newsletter to excite your neurons.

And now let's get down to brass tacks.  If you haven't yet heard about and checked out the software creations unveiled on January 1st as part of our NANY (New Apps for the New Year) event, that's the first thing you should go check out -- several of the entries have continued to flourish and are worth your attention.

And if those applications aren't enough for you.. I'm excited to be able to highlight another wonderful surprise to emerge from the Coding Snacks section of our forum.  The Coding Snacks area is a place where anyone can come and post an idea or request for a new freeware utility -- and where coders hang out and implement these requests.  Recently someone posted a very clever idea to combine standby/hibernate modes with a computer restart operation, and it resulted in a very cool utility called Boot Snooze which you can read about below.

Let's see what else.. Well I put lots of posts in the "Your input requested" section of this newsletter (section 2), so if you've never posted on the forum before, why not pick one of those threads and add your thoughts.

For those of you that are always on the lookout for some nifty tools to stick on a USB drive or for one's back pocket when called to the rescue for some friend or family member, I ran across some nifty tools from:

http://www.rizonetech.com

I'm sorry to say folks that I won't be able to do the weekly news over the coming weeks. Trawling through the news on a daily basis typically happens at work (I have very little free time on weekdays), and my company is currently in the process of being relocated, generating a ton more work than usual. I expect that in the next 2 months or so my free time will pick up again and I'll be able to get back to the regular weekly tech news for you all. In the meantime, I'll be sure to post anything I come across that I think is relevant to the forum and will generate discussion. See you round the forum guys.
-Ehtyar

Table of Contents:

• 1. Facebook’s Project Titan: A Full Featured Webmail Product
• 2. Quantum Superclock Will Be Accurate Past End of Life On Earth
• 3. "Don't Be Evil" Meet "Spy On Everyone": How the NSA Deal Could Kill Google
• 4. H.264 Video Codec Stays Royalty-free for HTML5 Testers
• 5. Carbon Trade Phish Scam Disrupts Exchanges
• 6. Wikileaks Finds Cash to Continue
• 7. IiNet Wins! Film Industry's Case Torn to Shreds
• 8. Crystals in Meteorite Harder Than Diamonds
• 9. Comcast Sees End of IPv4 Tunnel, Beginning IPv6 Trial
• 10. Oz Banker Caught Porn-surfing On Live TV

Another nice real life spy story:

When officials searched the aspiring spy, they found a paper tucked under the insole of his right shoe. On it were written the addresses of several Iraqi and Chinese embassies in Europe. In a trouser pocket they discovered a spiral pad in which Regan, who had been trained in cryptanalysis by the Air Force, had written 13 seemingly unconnected words — like tricycle, rocket, and glove. Another 26 words were written on an index card. In his wallet was a paper with a string of several dozen letters and numbers beginning “5-6-N-V-O-A- I …” And in a folder Regan had been carrying, they found four pages filled with three-digit numbers, or trinomes: 952, 832, 041, and so on. The spiral pad, the index card, the wallet note, and the sheets of trinomes: The FBI suddenly had four puzzles to solve.

http://www.wired.com...0/01/ff_hideandseek/

I find the rise of twitter and the decline of blogging sad..  It seems like the amount of aggregate writing on the web is staying constant, we're just now getting a lot more one-line off-the-cuff throwaway comments, and less thoughtful considered commentary.

I remember when it was kind of cool to be a blogger. You'd walk around with a swagger in your step, a twinkle in your eye. Now it's just humiliating. Blogging has become like mahjong or needlepoint or clipping coupons out of Walgreens circulars: something old folks do while waiting to croak.

Did you see that new Pew study that came out yesterday? It put a big fat exclamation point on what a lot of us have come to realize recently: blogging is now the uncoolest thing you can do on the Internet.

http://www.roughtype.../blogging_a_grea.php