There are already commercial grade ovens the precisely control smoke and hea pretty much any BBQ shop that does more than a few hundred pounds a day uses these.

  MIT is reinventing the wheel.

I didn't say that paper elections cannot be rigged. They can, and have been more often actually than there have been fair elections.

I did not even say that it's easier to rig electronic elections than paper elections. Personally, I'd expect it to be as long as you're the one calling the shots.

What is harder is simply to debunk cries of foul play. People can easily imagine what a paper election is like and how counting them (with representatives of all parties involved present) can be somewhat trusted. It is easy, on the other hand, to convince people that this is not the case with voting machines.

People don't trust what they don't understand. And trust is something a democracy needs urgently. People need to have faith in their system of government. Whether they like their current government or not, but they need to know that it was elected fairly and that it is what "the people" wanted. That's the whole problem here. Because without ... well, you see how Mexico is doing...

It is?

Explain this to Joe Random who just heard some populist cry foul play, claiming that they can't be audited and that the auditors are all in league with the party that won the election. Yes, it's bull. But the problem is that you CANNOT debunk it. Joe Random can't imagine how such an audit takes place. He can imagine counting paper slips, and he can see through the ruse when someone cries foul in such an environment. Any party crying foul in a paper election will be told that they should've put some monitors down if they didn't trust the ones running the show and counting the paper slips. That's (at least in my country) their right to do.

You can't do that with computer voting. Yes, someone can make an audit. But it isn't something you can easily explain to someone who has no idea of computers. He will readily believe someone who claims that it's bogus. Simply because he doesn't understand what "audit" means. He understands counting paper slips, though.

The danger is even less in the actual possibility of manipulation as it is in the possible loss of faith in the election. People are already weary of politicians and even politics to some degree (personally, I can only hope that the general apathy is more due to useless politicians rather than people genuinely not caring about democracy anymore). The very last thing we need now is that something gives them the impression that it doesn't matter jack anymore whether or not they vote because it's rigged anyway. Whether real or imagined, if someone starts beating that drum, people will follow easily.

Simply because you can't easily debunk it.

But any party involved can (at least in my country, and pretty much all civilized countries I know of) nominate election observers that can easily identify whether everything's running correctly without any kind of special knowledge. They can easily tell whether the ballot is properly sealed, they can easily tell whether people step into the voting booth alone. They can easily find out whether the choice is free of influence. They can be present when the ballot seal is broken (actually, over here people are essentially locked in 'til the paper slips are counted, collected and sealed again, nothing going in or out in between) and when the paper slips are counted.

It's pretty hard to manipulate anything in such an environment. It's easy to see whether someone tries to manipulate results since it takes little more than eyes to detect foul play.

You act as if that wasn't even easier with voting machines. "Whoopsie, computer crash!"

And unlike in this case, you can't even claim that they're criminally incompetent. Because, hey, computers crash, that's what they do, right? Happens to you at home, too, and you can't be blamed for that, can you?

In other words, them running out of ballots and being unable/unwilling to allow voters to vote is something people can easily identify as something not being as it should be. Manipulation gets heaps easier with voting machines.

Inconvenience != terror.
Weird != terror.

Basically, you're redefining everything to be "terrorism" if it in any way results in an inconvenience to a government.

Sadly, I'm not compatible with DRM so I guess I can't use that new browser.

There is one single very dangerous problem with electronic voting: Trust. People have to trust it, because they are unable to test it.

With paper and pen, it's easy. You can nominate anyone to work as an election monitor. The necessary qualification is "being able to find out where the X marks the spot" and "count". That's a skill set available to nearly everyone.

Working as an election monitor to rule out foul play with election machines requires someone to know quite a bit about computers. It's anything BUT simple to rule out foul play.

The danger here isn't even so much that manipulation can take place. And I don't even want to engage in the discussion whether or not these machines can easily be manipulated. The danger is that some populist aiming for the uneducated masses goes and cries foul play when he loses the election. And that's a danger not to some party but to the faith of the population in the whole democratic process. And that inherently is dangerous to democracy altogether.

It's not easy to debunk such claims. With paper, it's easy to go "oh please, count them yourself if you don't believe us. Here's the paper slips, and you can count, can't you?". Now try the same with election machines. Saying "you can do an audit yourself" isn't going to cut it. Why should we trust the computer experts? It's not something just anyone can do.

These machines are a danger to democracy. Nothing less.

That was not a normal M1000. It was clearly (badly) hand made or modified. I know this because I used to make fireworks as a hobby until the ATF started hiking it's skirt up and doing the mousey dance every time someone sneezed.

This is an actual M-1000.The message is clear, don't set off fireworks on the patio furniture.

Some of the ones I made might BARELY qualify as a small bomb but those involved 4 oz. of black powder and a well reinforced tube.

You should note that commercial fireworks are mortar shells, not skyrockets.

Now, how many times has your house burned down in all of that? How many skyrockets in your windows?

I can understand you not wanting it daily for months, but surely on the actual holidays it might be nice to not get all bunched up over it.

Also, no offense to Harvard, but Harvard is NOT generally known for its engineering programs. Just in the past couple of years, Harvard has started to try to make a shift there, but generally Harvard was a place to go for liberal arts, econ, and hard sciences. There's a much better engineering school "down the road" in Cambridge that's much better known for engineering. (And that school -- MIT -- is known to make fun of Harvard all of the time for its lack of engineering skills.)

I'm not saying these Harvard kids aren't smart -- I'm sure they are. But you're looking at a heat transfer kind of class intended for engineering students who actually wouldn't take a better heat transfer class... at a school that traditionally has downplayed engineering. (Harvard historically disliked "practical" training in college -- that was professional schools, not an undergrad liberal arts degree.)

I think the fundamental difference here (so to speak) is that ISIS is not a fundamentalist uprising. Oh, sure, they claim to be a religious movement, but everyone in the region does. Fundamentalism, in any religion, is not typically accompanied by using sexual slavery as an incentive to get young men to fight for you (ISIS has quite the flexible and convenient moral code).

My understanding of ISIS (mostly from a Muslim Arab coworker, so of course my "expert" could be wrong) is that they're "religious" in the same way Scientology is: they have all the trappings of religion, but it's all quite contrived. They emphasize whatever parts of scripture helps their goals and ignore the rest in a very obvious and transparent way that fools almost no one. It's not that they're murdering "moderate Muslims" per se, they're simply murdering anyone who speaks up about how evil they are, or simply speaks against them, whether on religious grounds or any other grounds.

There are many other places in the world where IMO the problem really is religious fundamentalism, but those guys aren't raising armies and conquering vast territory. Even in Afghanistan it's just one tribe after another, not a united fundamentalist army.

I think it's a mistake to confuse the problem with fundamentalist Islam in other parts of the world and other cultures with ISIS and the Arabian Peninsula.

Wow. Just wow. Brisket is one of the most flavorful and delicious cuts of meat. It's cheap because it requires a lot of prep, not because it's not "good." That's pretty typical for meat -- the stuff you can just throw on a grill and cook in 5 minutes: that's expensive. The stuff that's also ridiculously flavorful and beefy but which takes at least 12 hours of careful cooking (usually because it's tough and has lots of connective tissue, not because it doesn't have great flavor)... well, that's cheap, because rich people are lazy, I guess.

I love a high-quality ribeye. But if you give me a good-quality smoker and sufficient time, I'd choose brisket over any steak any day. If you haven't had slow-smoked brisket that made you cry because it was so awesome, you have no business commenting on this article.

Sounds like someone hasn't a single fact to back up his bald assertion.

Whatever gets you through the night.

1) LOL, if you believe less energy is consumed at higher RPM in an electric motor, I've got perpetual motion machine to sell to you. A transmission allows you to operate the car at highway speeds at a much lower engine RPM.

Yes, you can get slightly decreased energy usage at lower rpms because of lower friction and less slip on an induction motor (the kind used by Tesla), but throwing a multispeed transmission in there adds weight and complexity, and also increases drivetrain losses (transmissions are inherently lossy), though the amount of loss over a single-speed gearbox is probably not much.

As I've asked before, what other applications have an electric motor paired with a multi-speed transmission? Train locomotives like these? Dump trucks like this one? Ship propulsion units like these? No, these all have motors either directly driving their loads, or using a single-speed reduction gear. And trains at least have a much higher typical speed range than cars do (0-150+mph for Acela Express, 0-220mph or more for high-speed trains outside the US).

Burning empty buildings and train tracks isn't "terrorism", it's "sabotage" and "arson". Messing up some train tracks to inconvenience people, and then calling it in so the train doesn't go over the tracks and no one gets hurt, isn't "terrorism", by definition, because there's no "terror" involved. This goes even more so for blowing up power lines, which rarely hurts anyone (unless it's in the middle of a heat wave or something, or cuts the power to a hospital).

This is like calling sit-in protesters "terrorists".

People taking their clothes off and marching to court? Are you kidding me? There's nothing remotely "terroristic" about that. That's a pure and simple protest. Protesting is not the same as terrorism.