For that matter, although we've talked about it enough for the last two or three years to make it seem less insane, there's a good argument that even attempting to solve a problem as hard as a fully automated car requires tremendous arrogance. Except that they actually seem to be succeeding, which I guess changes it from arrogance to confidence.

I don't think there's any evidence that Google has actually "succeeded" in coming up with a car that's marketable to the general population. It's easy to say you're succeeding when you've solved 90% of the problems, but if the 10% remaining include nearly insurmountable obstacles without some more technological breakthroughs, then I don't think we can call it success. It won't be success until regular people are "driving" them.

Electronic voting (i.e. voting machines) has its own set of serious issues, but this is about Online voting (i.e. from a home/office computer) which adds way more problems than just electronic voting, not the least of which is vote-selling. How might an employer treat two employees differently if one of them could prove that he/she voted the way the boss liked? What about a spouse? Why not just sell it to the highest bidder?

Well I think the point is to protect the other voters from the ones who would sell their vote (and the people who would buy them).

Just to be clear (even though you may be trolling), we're talking about online voting here, not electronic voting. I do believe that electronic voting (i.e. with voting machines in a private booth) might be able to work, but it still has to generate a paper ballot which you then insert into a cardboard box on the way out. The only difference to a paper and pencil ballot is that it should provide a way of tabulating them really fast, but there still has to be a way to do a manual recount (and there should be manual recounts at a random sampling of polling stations every time).

I'm surprised there isn't more concern about the serious and fundamental problems with online voting.

That blog post makes two points, one about vote selling and one about security. I don't see how any online voting system could ever stop you from being able to sell your vote, and that was one of the major reasons for a secret ballot. That pretty much makes online-voting a non-starter right there.

In those cases, the information (since it was gained as part of an intel and not LEO operation) would not be admissible.

"Why PC's Crash, and Mainframes Don't" (April 98) is still somewhat relevant today. I wish the archives were online.

is probably the "least bad" one I've seen. It would be nice if multiple ratings could be applied to a post, ("+1 funny, +1 insightful, -1 Troll") but it is fairly good at reducing the trolls and flamage.

But I don't expect that of the teabaggers infesting Slashdot these days.

Judging from the news stories the drive was recycled in 2011.

Don't worry, soon Slashdot will be coming out in favor of re-invading Iraq.

They bring them down!

Really, though? Can't they just contact them and grant them a limited use right or something? Or can't they contact them and say, "please change your site to include this prominent text, or contact us to discuss"? Why is it that these legal types have to be such dicks?

So nowhere near good enough to ID a person, or even a vehicle.

A feature to us, perhaps (although it's not that difficult to get non iTunes files onto an iPad), but to the average consumer? If it isn't priced aggressively it will have trouble competing against the iPad.

So it's probably about the same as the equivalent Apple Product. But without anything like iTunes behind it.