They're different. Labeling one better than the other is like labeling Star Wars as better than Star Trek. Each excels at a different part of the image. One has more resolution, the other provides a smoother, progressive picture. And Star Wars (only considering the three films that actually *EXIST*) is better.

Mach is a measurement of speed relative to the speed of sound - thus Mach 1 is different (in terms of miles per hour) at sea level than it is at 50,000 feet. Escape velocity isn't a relative speed though. So - what are you referring to? Mach 34 at sea level? Then it's meaningless because nobody accelerates to that velocity in atmosphere that dense. Mach 34 at 50 miles up? Well now the atmosphere is so thin that Mach 34 is pretty darn slow (in terms of miles per hour thanks to slow speed of sound) and achievable (thanks to less drag because of less atmosphere).

It's Mojave, you insensitive clod.

On the other hand, if your phone can't tell you how to spell "paid," you may not have paid enough.

Problems with this system you have described are discussed at least tangentially in another thread on this story's comments here.

The generally accepted stance on voter security (as I understand it from reading Bruce Schneier's blog and Ed Felten's blog is that what is important is that a vote get recorded accurately, that a user can verify (at the time of casting but not after) that the vote they're casting is the vote they intended to cast, and that we be able to ensure a one-to-one correspondence between votes and voters. That doesn't mean that we can map votes to voters later. Such a capability may be useful, but the security concerns (voter coercion, mostly) would outweigh the auditing benefits.

Think of the paper ballot example. Assuming users actually use the ballots correctly (obviously a huge assumption and one that doesn't play out in practice, but work with me here), you have an accurate, auditable record (a recount is meaningful because it has the potential to discover mistakes of the original count) of the voter's decision. At the time of casting the ballot, the voter can verify (if they so choose) that the ballot accurately reflects their choices. We have one-to-one correspondence because other measures were taken to ensure that each voter received one ballot. When the voter casts their ballot, their vote is recorded, but there will never be any way to trace back the choices that the voter made back to the voter. The voter isn't subject to coercion from, say, a shady employer who threatens to fire any employee who doesn't vote for Candidate A. Employees can lie to their employer about who they voted for and (this is important) nobody has the ability to retrieve the voter's vote to prove/disprove the voter's claim.

As I see it (though IANAExpert), the proper way to do an electronic vote is to tally votes electronically in a moderately secure environment ("absolute" security would be counter productive, IMO), but to print out a physical record of votes recorded by a machine which is verified by the user and dropped in a ballot box. If there's dispute with the machine tally, you have an auditable record to check the dispute against. If you ask a machine to do a recount of the 4,328,512 votes that it took (which seems like a strange number of votes to record in a precinct with 715,386 eligible voters), it's going to give you the same numbers. Sure, you may know fraud happened - but there's nothing you can do about it.

The only issue with HDDVD encryption was keeping 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 secret. Oh, crap. There it is.

That is insufficiently secure because someone could be forced to give up their paper with their unique identifier in order to prove that he voted in accordance with the wishes of someone criminally coercing him. To be properly secure and anonymous, there needs to be absolutely no way to associate me with my vote - whether the desire for the association is legitimate or not.

Well, an opt-in install for the addon would be nice. Other than that, I totally agree with you.

It can be uninstalled. For all users. As Administrator.

<sarcasm>Obviously the maliciousness must exist somewhere. Let's blame Mozilla for having an idiotic feature that Microsoft could take advantage of in this way.</sarcasm>

Seriously, I don't ascribe this to maliciousness on anyone's part. Microsoft failed to test this in all circumstances in a way that's not uncommon for them (limited user account usability fail), but if that's "malicious" then so was the entire release and lifetime of their exceedingly popular OS. You know, Windows XP. The one that everybody loves so much because it doesn't suck?

Yeah, it's a huge pile of limited user account usability testing fail. *shrug* If somebody's going to claim the Firefox extension thing is malicious, they'd better not be claiming that Microsoft is being malicious/anti-competitive/monopolistic/whatever by giving XP the End of Life notice. Both products suffer from the same problem, and MS is trying to move past them both.

+1 abso-friggin'-lutely.

I'd give a +funny (at least...I'm 75% sure you're trying to be funny), but I spent my mod points this morning.

Running Firefox 3.0.10 on XP SP3 and following your instructions (opened a new tab, navigated to http://slashdot.org/ then clicked "Read more..." on the Google's Android to Challenge Windows? article), everything appeared fine. I assume that when you said "titles of stories" you meant "headers of comments"? When I'm reading a story, I don't see titles to other stories. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the error that I'm supposed to be looking for?

I'll let you off with a warning this time then.