What's difficult is prying the sa password out of your DBA's cold, dead, hands :P

Funny thing about those old ATMs with the physical buttons: many times I'd walk into the ATM to find the screen had physically shifted in its housing so those nice physical buttons no longer matched up with the on screen choices. In fact it wasn't uncommon for the buttons to be exactly between the choices. Other times the actual display would be set back and behind such a thick layer of shatter-proof glass that what button lined up with what choice depended on your viewing angle.

The point is that *any* voting machine is going to need proper calibration. A touch screen as an input modality isn't necessarily bad, but you can botch the implementation just like with any other tech.

You're kidding right? My first iPhone had a Nike-branded pedometer app built in that couldn't be uninstalled, only hidden.

Ideally, the systems management team should handle install into staging and production environments. They have worked with the dev team to establish a standard environment. The dev team should take time to understand the environment where the application will be deployed, and the systems team should understand the application well enough to diagnose basic problems.

Unfortunately, in my experience, cost cutting means that the installation and maintenance is done by an IT contractor pulled from a rotating pool in Bangalore who doesn't know how the application works. They usually can't tell a software bug in our code, from a missed firewall configuration step, from bad permissions in the filesystem, from a bad load balancer config... the list goes on. That's when I get pulled in. Of course I don't have permissions to do any useful diagnosis, and they are so fresh out of training they don't know how to execute a TCP dump. ...and that's why I don't do J2EE development anymore :)

C:\>ver

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601]

C:\>help ver
Displays the Windows version.

VER

Hmm, doesn't say anything about kernels in there...

So you are unconcerned with the risks associated with intentionally jumping out of an aircraft thousands of feet above the ground and relying on a piece of fabric to arrest your fall, but you *are* worried about the additional minuscule chance you will get clobbered by a dentist spacing out at the controls of his Cessna? :)

He was probably referring to an initialization vector, which in a block cipher plays a similar role to salt in a hash, making it harder to analyze.

I don't know if it actually works out to 99%, but in general, road wear rises with the 4th power of axle weight, so trucks account for the lion's share of wear and tear on roads:
http://www.pavementinteractive.org/article/equivalent-single-axle-load/

On the other hand, 99% might not be that far off:

Roads are usually designed assuming that a single axle on a big truck carries a maximum of 18,000 pounds. Compared to a typical car carrying 2,000 pounds per axle, a fully loaded truck stresses the road surface 6,561 times as much.
  http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2974/why-cant-they-make-highways-last-forever

Correct. The police should be more constrained in their actions than the average citizen. Unfortunately we've allowed things to get turned on their heads.

MIT still does: http://web.mit.edu/nrl/www/

If the M6500 isn't already a "developer-oriented" laptop, I'm not sure what is. Dual core i5 2.67 GHz CPU, supports up to 16GB ram, and a *matte* 1920x1200 display. The thing weighs about 15 lbs with the power adapter and gets about 45 min battery life. You'll obviously never match the power of a desktop workstation in a laptop form factor, but as a "desktop equivalent" it does a pretty good job.

As a New Englander from Boston, I take offense in your lumping New York in with New England. Despite the name of their baseball team, they are no true Yankees :)

You are doing the statistics wrong. You are only counting threats associated with an actual bomb and ignoring the far more likely scenario of a kid wanting to get out of class. The report says they don't keep national stats on empty threats, but does give this example:

For example, in the 1997-1998 school year, one Maryland school district reported 150 bomb threats and 55 associated arrests.
The South Carolina Department of Education in its 1999-2000 school incident crime report lists "disturbing schools," which includes bomb threats, hoaxes, false fire alarms etc., among its 10 top crimes, second only to simple assaults.

So let's take a SWAG and say that in the same 12-year period there were 100,000 prank or empty threats. That brings the likelihood that a threat is accompanied by a bomb down to 0.00014%. In other words, you're probably more likely to fall down the stairs and break your neck trying to evacuate than you are to be blown up if you ignore the "bomb threat".

When they retire, their positions will be filled in India or South Korea.

If by spoiled you mean refusing to live in factory housing so they can be rousted at 2am to reconfigure the line and work a 16 hour shift due to a last minute change order, then they are spoiled.

When a production line goes down, it costs an astronomical amount of money every minute it is down. Because you don't want the line to go down, you want responsible adults working the line, not teenagers. Responsible adults need to put a roof over their heads and potentially feed a family. It'd also be nice if maybe there was enough left over so their kids can go to school or get the advanced vocational training their parents never got. So you need to pay a living wage.