Alas, the only known emergent sentience is the one that exists in the neuron colony inside each of our skulls; but there are some pretty damn cool sub-sentient emergent behaviors even in quite limited organisms. Bacteria in biofilms do some very impressive things, as do slime molds when they form masses.

It's too bad that (to the best of my knowledge, and I've hunted a bit), no organisms have evolved to exploit RF signalling. It's not inconceivable, loads of organisms use electrical signalling internally, a fair number have magnetic sensory structures, and a variety of common metals are amenable to biological chemistry if you need a better antenna; but that's the sort of thing that would make linking multiple nervous systems with reasonable speed and without direct contact possible.

Salting is a simple enough matter, just a few random bits, much like the salt in a password hash.

As for the rest, I suggest facilitating the process of selling bogus votes. That is, any polling machine can be used to freely generate a bogus voting receipt which will appear to validate at the website but has a void flag set. For extra fun, someone validating a bunch of voided ballots (that they cannot see are void) will trigger an investigation.

The void flag is just a second election key mixed in with the hashed data. A real vote will have the correct election key hashed in. Election officials WILL be able to distinguish a void vote from a real one.

It wouldn't prevent all problems, but it would leave a great deal of evidence behind distributed among the voters so that it would be quite difficult to make it go away.

I can imagine other schemes which would be more air-tight but would put too many technical demands on the voters.

I would hope that, should any impropriety be found in the contracting process, that the superintendent and any collaborators are dealt with as harshly as possible.

As for Apple, I'd be curious to know how much terminating the deal would involve for them. Obviously they'd rather have the sales than not; but there is a big difference between 'not making sales we had previously expected to make' and 'large piles of used inventory being returned and/or inventory prepared for this specific contract now without a destination.'

Particularly if it is only the former, Apple might well cave(not for honor's sake; but because an 'iPads in Education Program a Giant Clusterfuck; Lawsuits Fly!' is not a headline that Apple PR wants running any longer than necessary); if it's the latter they might be harder to convince.

In fairness to Apple, they have been working to improve the situation, and things are better now; but the state of the possible when this program started(~2 years ago) was rather less pleasant. They started tightly wedded to the 'device basically has one user, who has an account directly with Apple and a CC number on file' model; and it has been a rather slow path to getting support for a model where things like 'applications owned by the institution' actually works smoothly.

Apple's first-party support for remote management is still better than Android's; but their grip is tight enough that it is them or nothing, while Android is all over the map; but 3rd parties can actually offer options without the keys to the OS.

Wow, asking you to do the work so that they can deliver a sales pitch is really, really, nervy.

Are you running something in-house(or off the shelf but fairly heavily specialized) enough that they couldn't just put together an equivalent test environment on their end and use that for the sales pitch, or are they actually that lazy and entitled?

We certainly deal with doing the various things required to make what our users choose work; that's sort of what they pay us for; but I wouldn't have imagined a salesweasel demanding that I set up their tech demo for them.

No, actually he didn't give them a reason. He made a joke they didn't find funny. Had they actually believed he was going to cause a problem, why did they wait until the plane landed (after an uneventful flight) to harass him?

They clearly have nothing. Note that they didn't think it was important enough to have the plane land early (like they surely would if they actually thought he was going to do something harmful). If they had anything more than the tweet, they should have had no problem getting a warrant by now.

So naturally, they allowed the flight to continue to it's destination to give him the maximum possible time to do the bad thing (which never happened) because they truly believed he would do it, right?

The fact that nothing at all actually happened is purely immaterial, I suppose?

Now, turn in your Jr.g-man badge.

No, none of that. He tweeted. That's it, just a tweet. A spit in the ocean if you will. He didn't mess with the pilots or frighten the other passengers. As far as we know, he didn't belch obnoxiously or fart during the flight either.

If the feds ACTUALLY believed he was hacking the plane, why did they wait until it landed to do anything? Shouldn't they have ordered the plane to make an immediate emergency landing before something happened?

The best though is the self-generating reference. Wikipedia article goes up, magazine publishes article using Wikipedia. Said article is used as a citation to satisfy [citation needed].

You're missing all of the subtlety. There is no legitimization by fiat. Doing what the bully says doesn't legitimize the bully.

Not that lack of legitimacy (unfortunately) doesn't make the bully disappear.

TL;DR version, there's no good reason to preemptively lick the bully's boots.

There are many reasons:

It doesn't play well with others. It works well enough with a use case that exactly matches the expectations of the developers, but put a toe outside that and you're in for some genuine hell. It takes a nice modular system and turns it into an all or nothing hairball of dependencies.

People keep claiming it's simple, but they never seem to notice the big pile of crap in /lib/systemd, /var/lib/systemd, etc etc.

It takes a joke like the "COME FROM" statement and actually implements it!

It won't quit metastasizing.

There is nothing it does that couldn't be implemented in a truly modular and far less invasive way.

It's a solution looking for a problem.

That's not all that universal either. We have it where I am, but only at one location in the county. There is also absentee ballots, but if you're already accepting ballots by mail, why not internet?

No, they may rule by might but it can never legitimize them.