I think it is the same reason why I do not buy a lottery. Guaranteed expense/effort and small chance of success. Plus lots of mental blocks that increase the effort and further decrease the chances. It is safer to concentrate on things where one has a chance to be good at - like programming.

I know every area of activity first gives sucky failures, blows to one's self estimate, etc. Then slowly it may improve. I could not imagine what it is like to have a girlfriend until age 33. Now I have a wife (due to the internet and luck) and two kids. I cannot give recipes because of the luck part. :-)

As far as I understand the problem with the typical US voting machine is that the vendors keep the actual algorithm secret and they do not produce paper trails. These machines were designed specifically for election fraud.

This is more obvious to the "nerd community" than to ordinary people.

Here in Hungary the German minority was deported in 1946 based on a previous census where they answered honestly about mothertongue because it was a neutral information at the time the census was made.

Before I had the nav, I just went on a few known ways into the city and used a map in the last couple of streets to get to a destination.

Now the nav guides me through lots of streets I have never tried before thereby increasing my knowledge.

They are made by Saab: Griffin, Dragon

It's the sweater.

At language design time, it could have been easy to say there are as many string types as integer types, like short string, long string, long long string, referring to the size field. Auto-extending them in a function call may be tricky though.

People are sheep. They revolt when someone makes it the craze/fashion/whatever, but then let the country become the same crap as in the west. Here in Hungary we can choose between two similarly corrupt parties, just like everywhere else I see.

I have seen some good ideas to change things. For example to allow voters to say yes to more than one candidate - so they can vote for the third or fourth party and can still have a say in the fight between the two strongest. Here is one such site: http://www.rangevoting.org/