I posted a question yesterday about what was wrong with a simple program. No-one seemed to know so here's my attempt at writing that simple program. Feel free to tear my ideas to pieces. Hint: I am not a programmer.

MAIN:
print("Please enter your Voter ID")
scan, store as voterID
if (voterID == any value in array of legal voters)
then run the vote program
else {
print("Error")
go back to main }

VOTE:
print("Enter your choice of candidate")
scan, store as candidate
if (candidate == A) {
then record vote for candidate A
remove voterID from array of legal voters
exit }

elif (candidate == B) {
then record vote for candidate B++
remove voterID from array of legal voters
exit }

else {
print("Error")
go back to vote }

They didn't decide to do anything. A backronym can be constructed for anything.

I don't understand how voting machines can be so complicated that such gross errors occur. Surely it can't be much more than a glorified counting program that also keeps some sort of log about what it's done. I'm making the presumption that these programs are for some reason very complicated, and that's why errors like this are more frequent than they should be. Can anyone either explain why they're so complicated or give another reason why they seem to spew out so many errors?

(Aside from the witty "they're all programmed to vote for candidate X!" responses.)

Here's a link to a wikipedia section explaining what the summary means by "controlled nuclear explosion".

I think the difference is that if an aeroplane is involved in an accident then, as appears to be the case here, all witnesses, both human and computer, are likely to be lost. In hospital theatres it's only going to be the person on the table who's likely to die, in which case you have an entire room of witnesses, plus any that were observing from a neighbouring room. Likewise, in a car accident witnesses are more likely to survive, both inside the vehicle and other drivers on the road. Material evidence (such as rubber on the road) is also much more likely to be recovered.

As for the privacy of the communications; that's obviously an issue. Perhaps all transmissions could be encrypted with a hash of the plane's tail number and a salt known only to the relevant authorities.

Have a look at here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrunchPad.
It's supposedly running an ubuntu variant, so debian should be fine. In the recent video of it the narrator apologised for the loading times claiming that they were "on a 3G connection".

I think this is probably designed for people who don't need tech support. I'm hoping they do one better and let us put whatever we want on there.

Give us the address, we'll give his server so much traffic he'll be begging to give the domain away.

Damn you entropy!

The card supports quad-SLI, so I guess you just end up with 4 285s in SLI.

Good god the introductory video is annoying. 95% of it consists of an actual video recording a screen and looks horrible: why on earth didn't they use a screen-capturing program? The other 5% is made up of a woman frowning at said screen to tell the viewer what's bad about all other search engines.

The page design is strange; no overt MS branding anywhere. It's almost as if they don't want you to know...

Another thing that's cool about this particular project is that the artist said it allowed him to just quietly work in the corner. He didn't have to set up with an easel and influence the behaviour of the people around him. To everyone else, he must have just looked like he was texting.

So does this also mean they can search my home if I'm connected to the AC grid, have a microwave or have somehow acquired a quasar?

Sure, with an IR spec read-out, you'll be able to tell that something new has got into the water supply. But what you won't be able to tell is what that contaminant actually is. For that, you'll need some sort of structure determination, as IR will only tell you if it has C=O or N-H bonds for example.

The reason this is important is that without the structure, you won't be able to tell whether a farmer has just switched to a different type of fertiliser, or the city has being trying out a new way to grit the roads, or whether you're actually dealing with a case of attempted terrorism. The only way this would be helpful would be if you could somehow be sure that only malicious activity would alter the chemical composition of your water, which I think would be extremely difficult in practice.

You just submit the hash of your answer as the real answer? This would outwit a sizeable proportion of attacks by people who know you, as they might be unlikely to guess that you'd do this, and even if they do, they'd still have to guess the hash type.

Then again, if they truly know you, then maybe they'd guess you'd be this paranoid :P