Awesome. I'm sure government security contractors, the paragons of efficiency and inexpensive solutions that they are, will step right up and make everything cheap.

&_&

I don't know that it *is* more likely to catastrophically fail. Just make the landing zone on one of the more reliable drives, or better yet mirror the landing zone with RAID or ZFS. That way your landing zone is redundant, and the only way you could realistically catastrophically lose a fresh file is by having exactly the wrong two drives fail within at most a few minutes of each other.

I've been personally working on switching my own file server over to greyhole (from ZFS) this week. I'm doing it because instead of defining redundancy on a per-device basis, it lets me set redundancy on a per-directory basis. In the end that will let me make a more thorough use of my set of drives and their mismatched sizes. I have a relatively small amount of files that are actually very important and would be genuine problems if lost.

With greyhole I can mirror those truly important files across multiple drives for redundancy (and even send them off site for super safety), while all the MP3s don't need the same kind of redundancy. If I lose them I can just download them from Google/Amazon again, or rip them from CDs again.

I think the main draw of greyhole is that flexibility in how the redundancy is handled. It lets you make the most efficient use of your drive space, as long as you have a similar situation, with files that have drastically different redundancy needs.

Another thing I enjoy about greyhole is that its failures won't be as catastrophic as RAID or ZFS. Since it's dealing well above the file system all your files are still just files. Even with zero redundancy if a drive fails the entire pool doesn't drop dead, you only lose whatever files happened to wind up in that particular spot, and all the others are still safe.

I think you missed the point, that the government may be dumb, but the private sector is plenty dumb too.

Takeaway: people are dumb.

Second time today I've seen a story on /. about a patent that's just an obvious/existing concept basically with just "on a mobile device" or "across a network" added to it.

Using a radio transceiver to communicate with another radio transceiver? Not novel in the slightest.
Using NFC for payments? Not novel in the slightest, see the decade or so of prior art all across the world.
Consolidating the physical content of cards? Also not novel. For years people have been photocopying the barcodes of loyalty cards and taping them together to make single cards with all the barcodes on them. And believe you me: if the technology to do the same with NFC and magnetic strips were as accessible as copy machines they would do that too, because it's obvious as hell.
Parental controls on payments? You've gotta be kidding me if you think that's novel.

But take those four non-novel, extremely obvious ideas and slap "on a mobile phone" in there somewhere and suddenly you're Leonardo da fucking Vinci.

So sending and receiving a digital file (after all, that's what the annotations are, at the end of the day) from a server is non-obvious? You can't say "well, nobody ever sent and received *this particular type* of file before, so I'm inventing!"

Fuck that. A file is a file, and syncing it with a server is syncing it with a server, regardless of the content of that file.

I think Wikipedia could count as prior art. After all, it's nothing but a system for storing/receiving annotations to a digital work, and then distributing them to users depending on various criteria. Annotating text is annotating text, whether that text is hypertext or an ebook...FFS most ebook formats ARE hypertext in a stupid wrapper.

Not exactly. I imagine it would have slightly different harmful fumes.

Actually, I bet they WILL have solid refresh rates soon. Enterprising Android hackers have already written custom software for Nooks that gets them decent refresh rates (enough to badly play Angry Birds). It comes at the expense of grey scale range and battery life, though. See: http://liliputing.com/2012/02/nook-touch-hack-speeds-up-e-ink-shows-why-its-not-ready-for-tablets.html

Don't forget that tradional LCDs also function by physically moving around the molecules of liquid crystal to change how it polarizes light. It's not like there are tiny motors moving around the e-ink display components. Both are just electromagnetic fields moving around microscopic things. The only big difference is that the microscopic things in e-ink stay where you put them when the field is removed.

Give it time. We're a clever bunch, humans.

I'm far from ready to vouch for the idea as a whole yet, but let me play devil's advocate for a moment.

Like one comment mentioned above, giving people a pair of cards tied to a passphrase would be a decent idea. What if we gave them THREE cards, maybe of different colors, but only two of them are valid. If they use the third dummy card instead of one of the valid ones it looks like a successful vote, but the user is then required to visit whatever office again for a new set of authentication cards. That way coercion cannot be effectively applied, and votes can't be bought reliably.

Doesn't change the fact that home computers are generally entirely too security-compromised to trust with something like voting.

People's home computers are an awfully weak link in the chain. TFA mentions it, but I think it bears repeating: an embarrassing number of US home computers are infected with some sort of malware. I've read estimates as high as 60% of all computers.

I won't trust most strange computers enough to log into my Gmail account (even using two-factor authentication), unless they live under the control of either me or a very short list of other people I know and trust to keep a clean system. So obviously there's not a chance in hell I'd trust those malware lockers with the keys to our government.

Probably that one. The crap that is regularly hidden in fine print on boxes and buried in wordy EULAs is horrifying.

Exactly. This is why I'm always so baffled by people who engage is massive flaming holy wars over which programming language is for idiots, and which one will instantly turn you into the techno-wizard of your dreams, no effort required.

There's Javascript out there that is a beautiful, well thought out, well structured piece of art. There's also plenty of C, Java, Python (pick your favorite programming language and insert it here) that is an unholy cloud of inept fuckery. No amount of high tech programming language wizardry can make you produce a good result if you're a doofus to begin with, and it takes a lot of programming language fail to really hold you back if you're genuinely skilled and intelligent. The user is, at the end of the day, responsible for the outcome, not the tool.

Obligatory car analogy: If I traded cars with a professional rally racer and then challenged them to a race, they'd probably still win because they know what the fuck they're doing.

You're unfortunately right about the expected lifespan of houses.

It doesn't have to be that way, though. Right now I'm renting a house that's 87 years old, and it would be nicer than any modern house if the landlord gave a crap. It's still structurally sound, the exterior is beautifully designed (if in need of a little TLC), and despite its exceedingly odd by modern standards floor plan, it's far more usable for actually living like a human being than most modern houses. Also, the fact that it's relatively small for the neighborhood means that we've got a much bigger yard for our dogs and garden than most of the rest of our street.

And this house is just a timber-frame with lathe and plaster on the inside and wood siding on the outside. I grew up in an old adobe house in rural New Mexico. It would be tough to say how old *that* house was, but I'd have to guess it was well over 100 years 20 years ago when I was a kid. I drove by it recently and it's been replastered and it has a new roof. It looks practically new. In England there are cob dwellings that are hundreds of years old. In Africa there are multi-story wattle and daub structures on rubble trench foundations that have been standing and occupied for thousands of years.

My childhood home was also much easier to work with than a lot of modern homes. All the plumbing and wiring was reasonably easy to access, and ran through conduits that went around the house on the exterior or pipes trenched around the outside of the foundation. My dad replumbed it and rewired the parts of it that weren't already to modern standards when my parents bought it. It cost him a few hundred dollars.

Meanwhile, one of my coworkers owns a house that's only about 20 years old in a big housing development, but she's already had to hire a whole crew to dig through the giant concrete slab that is under her living room to fix a leaky pipe, and she'll probably have to again. Some genius ran all the plumbing straight under the slab foundation when it was built, probably to save the $100 of extra pipe it would have taken to route it all around the house instead -- or to save the slight measure of fucking foresight it would have taken to just put the wet wall near the water and sewer hookups instead of on the opposite end of the house.

But when you're building houses and your goal is to build as many as you can as quickly as you can for as cheaply as you can, there's just no room for things like foresight, or spending a little extra to do it right, or even taking the slightest care when it comes to placing the house sanely on the plot of land.

I HATE modern tract-housing cheap-ass developer built "homes." They're sterile, they're shoddily constructed, and they seem to be designed by people who don't have a very firm grasp on the experience of actually...you know...living in houses like people.

There is no fucking reason to waste energy and resources to build a house that won't last at least a hundred years, unless you're a housing developer cutting corners on construction to rake in a little extra cash.

I wouldn't call it pedantry. I'd call it legitimately calling out the author for both having no apparent grasp of basic arithmetic, and likely being a moron.