You missed out the next step. The lawyers & marketing bods get involved, realise they are losing money, and split the hardware and software up into discrete items again, that they can sell to you individually. Rinse, and repeat.

Only if you make up the religion yourself. Otherwise the priest class do the governing, and are sometimes part of the government, or are manipulated by the ruling class.

You have jobs?

Yes, he didn't die, he retired to Hebden Bridge.

...the only force strong enough to hold back the technological singularity!

Quite right. My company's (and personal, for that matter) data is too valuable to give to unknown spotty Herberts at wherever the datacentre is, to read, share and lose, to say nothing of the spooks for whichever country it happens to be in. Not until there are proper SLAs and data protection rules in place, at the very least.

Oh I agree - I was trying to say that all sensible forms of what we call democracy are compromises between "true" democracy and convenience. The trick is to get the balance right!

Didn't "the downfall of democracy" start when our ancestors decided it was better to elect people to decide things for us rather than doing it directly? Yes, I know that's not how it came about, but representative democracy *is* a concession to convenience over direct democracy.

I don't disagree, but I'm afraid the X Factor generation will demand a more user friendly way of voting, or they won't bother.

That's not strictly true I'm afraid. In the UK the "marked register" (the paper audit of who voted) is marked with the ballot paper number against the voters name. So currently there is an audit trail from the individual to an individual ballot paper, and hence to their vote. It's not available to just anyone, but you can, under certain circumstances, find out how an individual voted, or more importantly how they were recorded as voting in case of fraud. Both individual ballot papers and marked register are retained after the election. I'm talking about something similar for electronic systems is all.

The problem with electronic systems is they are often floated as the sole solution to all electoral fraud (they're not) or as intrinsically weaker than paper based systems (and I'm arguing they are not that either).

Paper votes are subject to impersonation, for example, especially if voter turnout is low. During canvassing for the recent UK General Election for example, I became aware of people who were not voting due to absence (and hadn't secured a postal vote). It would have been simple to use those votes if I was so inclined.

The only solutions are transparent voting systems (if electronic, software and hardware must be publicly documented so that flaws are found and fixed - yes, I user Firefox!), plus independent audit trails (say, issue each voter with a receipt that can be checked against the voting record, if they agree).

The inconvenience of paper voting (many hundreds of people couldn't vote in the UK due to various issues related to this, and unexpected voter turnout) will push us towards electronic, probably internet voting whether we like it or not. The real question is not are these systems acceptably fraud resistant, but how to make them so.

I've decided to look at things, and try to remember them, rather than (as I used to) react to any interesting sight or situation by trying to take a picture. It's been quite a liberating change.

(OK, so I counted the .jpg files by date - 120 in the last year)

One card to rule them all, one card to find them, One card to bring them all and in the darkness bind them (With apologies to you know who)

Unless you are intercepting the entire beam of a directional antenna (only likely if this is an antenna communicating with another mast or base station, rather than the more likely scenario of one designed to talk to handsets) then inverse square is the correct formula, surely.

Every time you do you are holding the antenna of that right next to your head. Yes it's lower power, but there's an inverse square distance law at work to, so the intensity is massively greater than that from the one 20 feet away. So either buy the apartment, or stop using cell phones. They are the only two logical choices.

You do not need to struggle like how you do with Windows

Mod me troll if you please, but you may think of it as struggling, I prefer to think of it as consulting. If it was easy, who'd pay me for it?