Keep in mind, JJ Abrams also had the Enterprise submerged in under water. I could maybe buy that if they had the shields up the whole time and the water never got to touch the hull, but it was made completely clear that no, it was just dunked in water and functioning normally.

In short, JJ Abrams doesn't care about geeky physics and engineering concerns; if something looks kind of cool, he'll go with it.

I wondered why no one ever came up with the idea of a blaster that fired three bolts in a slightly spreading triangle.

And I wondered why nobody ever used simple projectile weapons, like a 20th-Century assault rifle or even a shotgun. With blasters, when you shoot at a Jedi, you or one of your buddies gets hit with the deflected blaster bolt; so use simple bullets that would vaporize on the sabre even if the Jedi could get them all.

Or if you want to go all science-fictiony, lasers. Go for what Larry Niven once called "a mile-long invisible sword".

Should we go back to paper ballots?

Yes, yes, yes.

I live in the Seattle area of Washington State. We used to have a nearly perfect system and I would like to see it adopted everywhere. (We now have mail-in voting only, which is convenient but I worry about fraud.)

Here's the perfect system:

Ballots are stiff paper/very light cardboard, printed with oval "bubbles" next to the things for which you can vote. You vote by filling in a bubble with an ink pen.

Once you are done voting, you feed the ballot into an optical reader over a collection bin. If you have made any obvious mistakes (such as voting for both candidates for a single position) the machine kicks the ballot back out to you; you then get a fresh ballot and vote again.

Once my wife had a little ink smudge on her ballot, and the machine kicked it back. It was designed to err on the side of absolute clarity; if it accepted a ballot, that ballot was unambiguous.

The optical reader keeps an unofficial tally, and at the close of voting the tally is forwarded to the state elections department. An unofficial but very accurate result is available within an hour or so of the end of voting.[1]

There are physical paper ballots so there is a literal paper trail. Recounts are easy.

There is no "hanging chad" problem; the optical scanner at the polling place makes sure that each ballot is unambiguous.

Then all you need is a good "chain of custody", making sure that all ballots are delivered (and no fake ballots are introduced into the counting).

[1] Of course, absentee ballots will also be counted and the absentee results will not be available that fast; but non-close election results will be known that fast.

More on this:

https://news.cs.washington.edu/2013/08/14/chicken-chicken-chicken-chicken-chicken/

I've said it before: companies that are perfectly happy with ARM chips now are not going to be in a hurry to lock themselves in to sole-source chips.

http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3202785&cid=41735071

Intel would have to be better than ARM, and not just a little bit better... they would have to be dramatically better, such that the risk of being locked in to a sole source vendor would be worth accepting. It hasn't happened yet and I don't expect it to happen.

It will be difficult for any company, even AMD, to really challenge Intel in the high-end CPU market. But it would take a miracle for Intel to lock down the mobile CPUs market.

Intel's plan:

0) Get everyone locked in to needing to buy chips from Intel.
1) Charge stiff margins for those chips.
2) Profit!

Intel does have some chips in some Android devices, but they aren't charging the stiff margins they would like to charge. I don't think they will ever manage to do it.

Second best would be to not charge stiff margins but at least get a large chunk of the available profits from the mobile space. But I don't think they will be able to push out ARM and gain majority share of the market; they will continue to be a niche player.

Another turn in the wrong direction, in my opinion, is Wayland, which breaks many highly useful (to users) capabilities provided by X11.

If Keith Packard thinks Wayland is a good idea, I'm inclined to trust him. And, he does.

Perhaps you don't fully understand what Wayland is or why the senior X11 developers think it is a good idea. Please read through this and see if it changes your mind:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=x_wayland_situation&num=1

I'm not an expert, but you asked on Slashdot so I guess you are willing to listen to non-expert opinion.

• Insulate as much as you can. In the USA we can hire experts to come out, look at a building, make recommendations, and then carry out the work. My home, for example, had its insulation upgraded as much as possible: thick insulation in the attic space, as much insulation into the walls as they could take (not much), and windows replaced with triple-pane windows filled with krypton gas.
• If you expect to lose power for only short times, it may be enough to have a large capacity UPS on your server. For long-term independence you will need a generator.
• Could your server needs be handled by a low-power server? I use an HP Proliant Microserver which is pretty much a laptop motherboard (uses an AMD Turion II mobile processor). Perhaps you could use an actual laptop for your server and have a built-in "UPS" in the battery.
• For rooftoop solar, photovoltaic panels would be simplest, but I believe that panels that collect heat are the most efficient. I suggest you Google search for "solar off-grid" and "solar water heating" and read about these.

The user experience is a bit laggy on the first-ever device using the new chip. PROOF! Proof that the chip is a complete failure!

Hmm. Maybe we should wait a while and see if any updates from Google will improve things.

Why make it harder to vote for people who have to work, single parents, the elderly, those without transportation, etc?

When in-person voting was standard in my state, there was always a provision for "absentee" ballots, available to anyone who would have a true hardship to vote in person. I never proposed getting rid of all absentee ballots; I just think they should be limited to those who truly need them, rather than all voters mailing all ballots always.

The number of fraud cases is likely extremely low, to the point of being a statistical anomaly.

How can you know this?

If you prevent 1,000 cases of fraud by stopping 10,000 legitimate voters then would you really say that is a solution?

Do you have any evidence whatsoever that in-person voting stops any voters, let alone ten thousand of them?

If in-person voting is such an unreasonable burden, then why was it the way my state did things from the time it became a state until a couple of years ago?

Do you at least agree that voter fraud is a problem? If an honest count of the people's votes would choose candidate A, but ballot-stuffing manages to swing the election over to candidate B, would you agree that some harm has been done?

I claim that 1,000 fraudulent votes is equivalent to disenfranchising 1,000 legitimate voters. Do you agree, or do you disagree with this statement? If you disagree, then why?

It is disenfranchisement for the sake of exclusion, not actually making the system better.

Who is trying to disenfranchise voters for the sake of exclusion? Who are the voters to be disenfranchised?

Did you intend to specifically imply that I'm a liar, that I don't actually care about voter fraud but just want to disenfranchise people? If so, upon what evidence do you base this conclusion?

I don't personally have any evidence that it's happening. James O'Keefe, however, collected video evidence that if it did happen, that the Democratic party operatives he talked to would be okay with it and encouraged it.

"I mean, that's not even like lying or stealing. If someone throws out a ballot, you should just... do it."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_uHDjk3fSc

But isn't this sort of beside the point? If I told you about a vulnerability in a server, would you (a) fix the server, or (b) demand to know whether I had any evidence that the vulnerability was actually being exploited?

Much better solution. No lines. No scheduling around work. Several weeks to study out everything.

It's also much easier and lower-risk to vote fraudulently by mail. Even if someone comparing the signatures detects a forged vote, it will be pretty much impossible to find the person who forged it.

I much prefer showing up at a polling place and marking a piece of stiff paper or light cardboard, with volunteers (all political parties welcome) watching everything. I want the ballots hauled away in locked boxes and watched at all times.

Go ahead and use computer scanners to tally the votes. But keep the ballots as a paper trail. Recounts are easy to do and humans can easily check up on the results from the scanners.

And, polling places can have unofficial vote tally scanners that count votes all day and then forward the results to the state department of elections, so the news can find out who appears to be winning.

In fact, the above is the way elections used to work where I live; in recent years the state has gone to mail-in ballots only.

Where I live, the state department of elections mails out a voters's guide many weeks before the actual election, so it's easy to study. Ideally the guide should include a printed sheet that would list the offices for which you could vote, so you don't even have to figure that out on your own from your voter's ID card or whatever.