What if the cast votes simply went to the system equivalent of /dev/null?

Flash memory systems (SD cards, Compact Flash, etc) never just die do they? That's never happened, ever, ever. Yeah, that's never happened to me, apart from all those times when ... Really, we have nothing to worry about.

Sarcasm aside, with enough memory cards, it's going to happen to some. What's plan B?

I wonder what Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; means then. It is probably about Congress giving priviledges to some religions while reigning into the exercise of others and forcing religion down everyone's throat including that of atheists.

The modern image of the angels is a missunderstanding of the greek word angelos, which actually means messenger. An angel surely is not a guardian. While sometimes the Bible mentiones God sending some of his guardians (the seraphim) to earth as messengers, they went there to deliver a message, not to protect someone or fight on your side or whatever. So whoever believes in angels as guardians, his belief is definitely not based on the Bible.

If ever a fault it's still that of the GOP if they can't get their stuff together that just a few switching democrats can flip their primaries.

The linked "fact check" is a guy's alternative opinion on how to interpret the numbers. It is not a conclusive counter-proof.

By the time Bush Sr. got into office, the decline and fall of the USSR was already well under way. I read a fascinating article (can't find it, sorry) recently detailing how Reagan convinced the Saudis to flood the oil market; with USSR oil production taking up enough of its GDP to put it into an economic death spiral. Interestingly enough, the Saudis are once again flooding the market (according to Iran, which has been raising a small stink about it), and the Russians are still oil-dependent.

his death was not prevented because of failures by British intelligence services ....

Gah, I meant:
his death did not happen because of failures by British intelligence services, but instead, it happened because Facebook did not tell the UK intelligence services that it was going to happen.

According to the report on the death of Private Lee Rigby, his death was not prevented because of failures by British intelligence services, but instead, because Facebook did not tell the UK intelligence services what was going to happen.

If they expect Facebook to police postings on Facebook and inform the UK authorities, why do they need to tap into the cables? It's all money wasted.

Oops, meant to say

"The google guys said PV/wind and grid storage couldn't economically make coal and gas superfluous in the near future"

The Manchester "Baby" is also claimed to be the first true computer. Both Colossus and ENIAC are not full computers in the way we understand them now.

That's fine and well, but if you give up the economic argument then Google's surrender becomes irrelevant.

The google guys never said PV/wind and grid storage couldn't economically make coal and gas superfluous in the near future, they didn't say Nuclear could ... or even if Nuclear could do it cheaper than PV/wind/grid-storage.

It probably wouldn't bother me so much if the job that it performed could not equally be performed by just simply looking inside of the box before putting it away.

Ah, but here you're falling into one of the common misconceptions about cosmology. The universe isn't expanding *into* anything -- if it were, the universe would have a centre

First of all, I never suggested that the universe actually *was* expanding into anything... I only offered the notion that even if it *were*, the fact that it has only been doing so for a finite amount of time still makes the universe finite, even if the space it were expanding into were infinite.

Second of all, if it were expanding into an infinite space, there is no reason to conjecture that this space would be limited to three dimensions, so no "center" to our expanding universe can necessarily be found - any more than you could find the center of a soccer ball on the surface of the soccer ball. A center definitely exists, but it's not going to be found on the restricted topology of the soccer ball, and the center of the universe exists, but you can't find it at a point in space... it would therefore be most correct to say that the center of the universe is actually the instant in time of the big bang.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't SSD's have a point where they put on too many write's per bit?

It appears to only be able to tell if something is missing from the toolbox, which is perhaps useful because you can have an external indicator on the box that shows that the toolbox does not contain everything, and may reduce the occurrences of having a toolbox stored away before it has been properly restocked, but it does not do anything to actually locate the tools that were once in the box. Even if the range were limited to a few hundred meters within the box, that would still be extremely useful because you would still generlaly be able to locate it as long as it is still at the same work site.

So it's doing half a job... which however better than no job at all that may be, is still not a full job.