RAM prices stayed high long after production costs dropped. It took government action - overseas, I recall- to punish the collusion and price-fixing and force the prices to drop. There ain't no such thing as a free market.

Disney not two weeks ago fired their IT department and replaced them with H1B workers. They just didn't want to pay American salaries to American workers. The arguments is over.

The NSA ain't god, and this is *me* saying this. The NSA is an API for the governments's paranoid would-be supergovernment. They just do what they're told, being Slashdotty geeks, and then they go home. Hacking the evoting machines would be... problematic even for their kind of organization.

Much easier if billionaires just buy the voting machine companies and tell a few trusted IT people to install backdoors on the main accumulation points. Auditing is useless if the original votes are uncountable because of anonymity requirements. We trust the accumulated totals. And if you think the Koch bros. and others like them aren't capable of that, then you ain't paying attention.

Canada DID had (last I heard) a nationwide paper voting system. You draw an "X" with a pencil next to your candidate. They counted each card on a table with both parties looking on (It works if one side is not constantly contesting the reading to slow it down intentionally so their boy can win by running down the clock). They finish the count nationwide in three hours. Works, and you can recount in less than a day, if you have to (if one side isn't trying to delay, delay, delay).

I understand the Harper Government is rapidly shoving e-voting down Canada's throat.

Guess why. Go on, guess. Why replace a system that works and can't be cheated with a series of black boxes that can't be trusted? Why would you possibly want to do that. Golly. I can't. Why would they do that... it's like they *want* a system that can be hacked to win, esp. since their side owns the companies, one way or another. Nah, that can't be right. That would be dishonest, and plays to the public's idea that computers are always awesome and better than people.

If a company has a person who has access to the accumulated counts, then that person can change the vote, downstream, upstream, or final destination. The individual computers don't matter; there are no ways, given the constraints, the verify who voted for what - yes, there are established, effective ways of controlling the data, but if you can't audit the entire chain, it doesn't matter. The code, the counts, the data are owned by private companies, and they have established that all of that are their protected trade secrets. Past lawsuits show us that they refuse court orders and countersue, and that they destroy the data, such as it is. Puttering around with geeky analysis of the browsers and malware isn't addressing the problem which is: they who control the machines control the elections. Worrying about the "hackers" on the outside is specious. It's the hackers on the inside.

We can be tracked with decimeter precision. Yay. I'm sure it won't be used against us. Carry on.

Except for the whole "We want to use robot cars" thing. Uber wants to dump the Uber drivers, kids. They want self-driving cars, and all the profits for the executives. They aren't out to make you money. They want all the money. And yes, that means two million cab drivers, poor laborers in a crappy job, out of work forever.

Same thing in the trucking industry. They want the drivers gone. And not because of human error- the error is caused by pressure by the owners to increase profits, which dials down to making drivers work too many hours. The drivers are fine. They are being wrecked by greedy owners, who now jui-jitsu their nasty little secret into blaming drivers and virtously switching to robot trucks. Millions more out of work.

Your school doesn't accept the poor or badly parented., or those with low test scores. So, gosh, costs are low. Who could have guessed.