... electronic systems that let people track their own votes can be used by others to track those votes.

The real point, and why it's illegal (in many jurisdictions) to show you how your vote was counted:

If you can prove to yourself your vote was counted for candidate Foo, you can prove to candidate Foo's campaign machine that your vote was counted for Foo, and collect the vote-buying money or other rewards. (Also: Strong-arm operations, like crooked unions, organized crime, and/or political machines, could get you to divulge your vote with various threats.)

But maybe it is time to ditch the secret ballot... at least for some things.

Absolutely not. The point of voting being secret is to keep people from intimidating voters into voting for someone other than their personal choice.

They bombed the London Tube for Allah...

"Allah" is just Arabic for "God". (Literally "The God" i.e. the one, the only, monotheist deity.) Christians who speak Arabic use the same word for the Christian deity - which Muslims recognize as the same entity. The word has the same root as Yahweh, Jehova, JHVH.

Interestingly, Muslims explicitly recognize Christians and Jews as "People of The Book", and the Torah and the Bible as explicitly their people's version of a heavenly-mandated collection of the genuine revealed word of God - though allegedly corrupted by time and translations. They claim there are many such books, but these two they explicitly recognize as valid instances.

They also explicitly recognize Jesus ("Issa") as a prophet (their second highest ranking one, if I have this right), Mary as their only known female prophet, and include the Second Coming in their end-times predictions. ("Prophet" is defined as someone who receives messages from God, directly or via heavenly messenger.)

When you use a usb drive, you'll be safe, until someone plugs it into that machine not knowing that as soon as they do, it will begin encrypting what's accessible on that usb drive.

Disk drives - hard, floppy, etc. - used to have a hardware write protect feature. (Switch, punched-notch, etc.) Set it and there was no way the stored content could be changed. A backup that you'd set would not be vulnerable to rewrite attacks when plugged into an insufficiently-cleaned machine to restore the files.

Then drives came out where software could override the write protection.

Then the feature went out of fashion. Drives were apparently a bit cheaper that way.

A pity.

So to make invention still go you first need to patent it, then you release it for free to all. Why do we still have patents at all, again?

Because that's the current law and getting it changed is an exercise in futility.

So, just like copyright and the GPL, they have to patent it first to keep OTHER people from patenting it and locking them out of their own invention. Once that's done they can go ahead and give it away if they want (or cross-license with people with other patents on useful stuff).

Sure it would be nice if patents went away on a lot of stuff - or even everything. It would be nice if other countries wouldn't try to conquer us if we disarmed, too. But as long as patents are there, inventors are forced to stay armed.

Really?

The fastest I've gotten a pump to run is about 1/10th gal/sec. That's 6 galons per minute. So you fill your tank every time you're six galons down?

My "car" - a Ford F-150 pickup truck - has a 37 galon tank, which I normally run nearly dry before refilling when I'm using it in the SF Bay Area. (I keep it full when I'm in less forgiving areas - like the Nevada desert.) At 6 gal/min maximum that's a 6+ minute fill up - plus "topping off" to a round amount, two trips to the cashier. (No WAY I'm trusting that much cash to the bill eater kiosk.) Waiting in line, getting change and reciept, hitting the rest room, ... Call it 15 to 25 minutes.

Fortunately I only have to do it a couple times a month.

the tanks themselves had nowhere near the shielding required to be used for human habitation (both radiation, and micrometeorite).

So you collect them into a cluster and store consumables (like water) that perform shielding in the outer layers.

Also: You really don't WANT shielding most of the time - unless you're up there for years. Primary cosmics mostly go right through you, while shielding produces lots of ionizing secondaries that tear you up. Then you need a LOT of shielding to block the secondaries. Its mostly the occasional solar storm that requires shielding.

This was looked at in detail over the last several decades. The tanks would have been very valuable for a lot of stuff. But not to NASA programs. Lots of politics involved.

The foam insulation would have off-gassed significantly and dumped all sorts of crap into your orbital environment, ...

Originally they were to be painted with a coating that would have kept the foam together, etc.

Then somebody looked at how much that coating weighed. (It comes right out of payload.) And they decided not to paint the tank after all and let the foam get shredded a bunch on the way up (after it wasn't really needed if you weren't going to re-use the tank for anything).

They actually burn some extra fuel to be sure the tank goes back DOWN and crashes in a desired area, so it doesn't go into low orbit, become short-lived space junk, then later come down in some unpredictable place along that orbit after "space weather" - mainly the varying expansion of the upper atmosphere - causes the orbital decay to proceed at some varying and unpredictable rate.

I recall space advocates being livid that the tanks were not being orbited and collected for orbital construction.

IMHO the smart home OS will look like QNX.

It might not BE QNX, but it will at least look like it.

QNX is doing just what is needed, and has been for decades. It's about the most rock-solid OS out there. It's tiny and fast.

(What little I've seen of it reminds me of what "super" - my clone of Wiser's clone of the core of Dkikstra & Riddle's T.H.E. - might have evolved into if it were oriented to being invulnerable to failed or hostile tasks rather than being completely dependet on the tasks it supports being well behaved and perfect.)

Verification is the process of checking that software works correctly. The more complex the system, the more complex the process of verification.

You said "verification" but you're thinking of "software quality assurance". Though "verfication" is sometimes used to describe a step in that process, when used standing alone (at least here in silicon valley), it refers to the analogous process in integrated circuit design.

Verification is a BIG DEAL in integrated circuit design. A good hardware project will have at least as many verification engineers as designers (and hardware designers will freely act as verification engineers - on OTHER designers' modules - during the later stages of a chip tapeout, without taking a carreer hit.) It is the limiting factor in when the chip design hits silicon and when it hits the market.

So IMHO the previous poster is talking about the up-front quality assurance processes and costs of hardware, rather than software, complexity.

(Releasing a rev to a software product due to a QA issue missed due to added complexity may be costly. But releasing a rev to silicon takes months and millions of dollars of sunk cost. They're not in the same league.)

If [self-serviing private philanthropy] does not achieve its goal, or does so inefficiently, then the public is not likely to be fooled.

If self-serving private philanthropy does not achieve it' goal, nobody is harmed except the self-serving private philanthropist.

If PUBLIC philanthropy does not achieve its goal, the general population has been looted and received no benefit in return.

... the companies pushing for more visas are NOT doing it because they're looking for the best and the brightest from around the world. They're doing it to drive the price of programming

They're also creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. The depressed prices for programmers and refusal of employers to hire Americans (for any but a few top-level jobs requiring rare or broad-ranging talents and experience), while importing H1Bs from several countries for any position short of startup principals and early-hires, has not been missed by the Millenials. The latter are, entirely rationally, avoiding computer science degree programs in droves.

There is no shortage of US computer scientists now. But if this keeps up, in another 20 years there WILL be a shortage of YOUNG US computer scientists.

Story I heard about mid-20th-century IBM mainframe. (I think it was the 360 series).

Core memory was tight and had cooling issues. The designers examined the instruction set and determined that, given cacheing and the like, no infinite loop could hammer a particular location more than one cycle in four (25% duty cycle), for which cooling was adequate. So they shipped.

Turns out, though, you could do a VERY LONG FINITE loop that hit a location every other cycle, for 50% duty cycle (not to mention the possibility of hitting a nearby location with some of the remaining cycles). Wasn't too long before a student managed to do this.

And set the core memory on fire.

Right. Playing with your gun teaches the ability to resist road rage. Are you even listening to yourself?

Try it. Then sound off. B-)

As you can see, the moderation converged on a more proper +5 Insightful

  I've read the post carefully and it doesn't qualify as Flamebait IMHO. It states a controversial political opinion and thus invites a discussion, which may lead to flamage, but does not itself lead with a flame.

So this looks like someone who doesn't like the position trying to suppress it, by hitting it with the most plausible -1, in the hope that one more like-minded person will have mod points and get it suppressed before very many people see it. That works for "politically incorrect" subjects (such as criticisms of the "heat death of the Earth, everybody panic and suppress technology" interpretation of climate data), where a crowd of like-minded free speech haters are ready to suppress opposing opinions. But pro-pot doesn't appear to attract that much system-gaming opposition.

Right now it only takes two downmods to hide a non-anonymous itme. It seems to me that we have enough people willing to moderate that it's time to scale up the mod system, so a small astroturf operation can't shut down debate. Say: double it: Mods get 10 points, -2 hides, non-anynomous starts at +2, high-karma at +4, doulble everybody's current karma and readjust the cutpoints for bonuses, caps, and the like. That would mean it would take two moderators to suppress a anonymous post and four for authors willing to risk reputation. (It would also mean more work for those who are willing to moderate - but they might be more willing to spend a point if they had more to spend.)

Have you seen people drive? Road rage? Now think many of these same people with guns.

Target range practice is a very powerful biofeedback mechanism for teaching the suppression of the production of adrenaline and of all symptoms of excitement. Aligning gun sights - a pair of visual targets separated by about the length of the gun barrel (inches, a foot, or several feet), aligning them with a target (at tens of feet), and holding the alignment, gives visibility to even microscopic tremors and movement. Getting the image right and stable means drastically suppressing this movement. Over a number of range sessions, this leads to learning how to be icy calm, as a reflex, in the midst of a very stressful environment (full of intermittent explosions, bright lights, acrid smells, and odd-temperature winds).

(The effect is extreme. It was discovered that good target shooters, thinking they were just controlling their breath, had actually learned to "stop their heartbeat" - compressing the time between the pairs of beats before and after firing a shot and doubling the time between beats during the trigger pull.)

The result is that, after just a few good sessions, this becomes imprinted. Even in a rage, putting your hand on a gun drops you into that icy calm state.