This is true. For one reason or another (and I'm not sure what it was), he was Not Present at the SOPA vote.

No, that's more BS media propaganda. Ron Paul voted against Don't Ask, Don't Tell and has said he's in favor of allowing gay marriage at a federal level. He's personally against it just like he's also personally against abortion, but he's consistent in sticking to his beliefs that people (and states) should have the right to decide for themselves. So don't listen to these people who go on about how he's some racist homophobe who wants to pass laws limiting civil liberties. That's a bunch of BS, the guy supports equal treatment for everyone, gay, straight, man, woman, pro-life, pro-choice, whatever. For future reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Ron_Paul

As to the first one, build the machine to randomize the order of the paper ballots. As to the second one, the only reason (I think) to have a paper ballot is in case there is a recount. If the vote comes down 70/30%, the odds that the so many have been miscounted out of a population of hundreds of millions is pretty low. If it ends up like Florida in 2000, or if there are later suspicions/accusations/whatever about the voting machines, then you do a careful manual recount of the paper ballots. I'm by no means an expert on this, I'm just regurgitating what guys like Schneier have come up with.

Here's what Schneier said about it in 2004:

"Computer security experts are unanimous on what to do. (Some voting experts disagree, but I think we’re all much better off listening to the computer security experts. The problems here are with the computer, not with the fact that the computer is being used in a voting application.) And they have two recommendations:

DRE machines must have a voter-verifiable paper audit trails (sometimes called a voter-verified paper ballot). This is a paper ballot printed out by the voting machine, which the voter is allowed to look at and verify. He doesn’t take it home with him. Either he looks at it on the machine behind a glass screen, or he takes the paper and puts it into a ballot box. The point of this is twofold. One, it allows the voter to confirm that his vote was recorded in the manner he intended. And two, it provides the mechanism for a recount if there are problems with the machine.

Software used on DRE machines must be open to public scrutiny. This also has two functions. One, it allows any interested party to examine the software and find bugs, which can then be corrected. This public analysis improves security. And two, it increases public confidence in the voting process. If the software is public, no one can insinuate that the voting system has unfairness built into the code. (Companies that make these machines regularly argue that they need to keep their software secret for security reasons. Don’t believe them. In this instance, secrecy has nothing to do with security.)

Computerized systems with these characteristics won’t be perfect -- no piece of software is -- but they’ll be much better than what we have now. We need to start treating voting software like we treat any other high-reliability system. The auditing that is conducted on slot machine software in the U.S. is significantly more meticulous than what is done to voting software. The development process for mission-critical airplane software makes voting software look like a slapdash affair. If we care about the integrity of our elections, this has to change."

Source.

I'd forgotten about it until now, but about five years ago I was working at a gas station here in the US (Mapco, if you're curious). They had one of those cameras inside, making sure we weren't stealing. One day someone calls the phone and says he's watching us, and starts asking us what we're doing and generally trying to intimidate us with this idea that he's going to be monitoring us full-time. The manager got real upset about it, called the higher ups and I'm not sure whatever happened, but he said that it wouldn't be a problem anymore. I kept working that job for another year or so after that, was plenty lazy and ate food on the job (was the solo employee most of the time), goofed off, even left early a few times, and never heard anything about it, so I assume that they really did get rid of that guy, whoever he was.

Seems screwed up now, but at the time I didn't think much about it, just that the security guy who called was an asshole. What's bad now is that it's becoming normalized, to where you can be spied on all the time and no one says anything about it. I suppose privacy will go away completely in the end, it's only inevitable, but it needs to go away for everyone at once, not be used so the government can have Total Information Awareness while protecting every single thing it does as a "state secret."

I more or less agree, but still, it doesn't hurt to go actually make a reasonable plea on the site, as they're asking you to. This is one form of resistance against such things, just because it's not nearly enough by itself is no reason to acquiesce to the establishment. Congress and corporate america are genuinely completely out of touch with the realities of the 21st century, so it'd do more good to bitch about it there, not here. The Ron Paul people actually got involved in the Republican party this election cycle (not to glorify the tea-partiers), infiltrated the nominating and committee process and such, which is what the rest of us should have been doing with the entire government instead of bitching about not having any choices in the Obamney election. MoveOn.org is sort of trying this now with their Candidate Project deal. Why not use it as a chance to continue mounting actual resistance to the SOPA/PIPA/ACTA/etc. agenda, instead of just declaring it hopeless prematurely. The population of the internet is huge and has the potential to exert a lot more economic influence on the government's agenda than special interests like the MPAA do, people just haven't woken up and realized that yet.

I don't see anything actually new here. Technically the US gov already has the right to refuse entry to people who have renounced US citizenship, they just haven't been enforcing it. And they can already tax assets over $2 million as if they were sold immediately prior to renunciation of citizenship, and can continue taxing you for up to 10 years after renunciation (see HEART Act). This place turns into the Soviet Union a bit more and more every day.

It's all so obvious now.

Oh seriously, those people? They're always pushing panspermia stuff. Like that whole "discovery of microscopic alien life" thing last March. From what I remember of that whole thing, the journal itself isn't to be taken seriously. Their research on the meteorites might be good, but the fact it appeared in JoC doesn't make me hopeful.

That isn't the optimal strategy, better ones have been found. I can't remember the title, but I remember reading a book on genetic algorithms which mentioned a competition in which professors were invited to submit Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma algorithms. Many were submitted, included the "tit for tat" strategy you refer to. IIRC the genetic algorithm killed them all and eventually found a unique strategy better than all the submitted algorithm's strategies, including the mirror/tit-for-tat one. On that note, I haven't read the paper yet but this hardly seems that exciting. They basically built a genetic algorithm to experiment with possible neural networks until it evolved a population optimized for well-known and well-studied games. Unless there's more to it than that, this seems like something already accomplished years ago. Cool, but hardly cutting-edge.

Overreaction much? Blame the journalists not the researchers, I don't think they're doubling as full-time PR people.

Realistically I'd think larger companies will universally raise their prices just enough that they can round up. A assuming 1.25 cents per purchase over hundreds of thousands of purchases will actually add up, if you're doing lots of cash transactions.

Disagree, the carrying capacity of Earth increases with new technological breakthroughs. As an example, we're only utilizing less than 30% of the *surface* habit right now (we can grow shit on the oceans, you know). The real issue is capturing enough energy (plus converting it to the desired forms) to feed/house/etc. everyone. Trying to control population is a needless violation of human rights, at least at this point. Well, not entirely needless given the current technology and economic structure, but the point is we have more than enough resources, we just manage them poorly, plus the first world has pretty well demonstrated that comfortable living is more important than taking care of the less fortunate. Oh don't get me wrong, Malthusian growth can't continue indefinitely, but we are so freaking far from that point it isn't even funny.

Boggles my mind that not everyone is using flat screens w/ HDMI + computer, yet.

Meh, I grew up in an urban area of Tennessee and creationism was never taught in any classroom I was in, just evolution. Albeit I'm pretty much certain it's not the same in the rural areas. We still have active KKK down here, and the rural towns off the major interstates are pretty much 50 years behind the rest of the US.