The trick to the Betteridge law is that when a journalist writes a headline as a question, the question is suggesting what most people find improbable; and the improbable rarely happens.

There's some of that. But that's more about choice of subject matter. A journalist ALWAYS needs to write something that is SOMEHOW different from what the reader believes. (If he's just reinforcing what the reader believes, why should a reader bother reading his output?)

The real trick that leads to qusetion-headlines (that are almost always implying something that's wrong) is different.

When a journalist writes a juicy headline as a question, it's because he couldn't find evidence to support the conjecture, but wants to run it anyway.

Usually this is because he guessed wrong. The deadline is approaching, he's got to publish SOMETHING to stay employed, and he just wasted a bunch of time researching something that didn't pan out. Oops! So he runs his orignnal conjecture and the workup he did on it before finding out that it was either wrong (usual) or maybe right but couldn't be supported in the time available (rarely). He just phrases the headline as a speculation rather than an assertion.

That way his credibility isn't wrecked for the future, he gets to publish something, it's interesting and plausible (even though probably totally bogus), and in those rare cases where it WAS right he's scooped his competitors. However it comes out it's a win for the journalist - though it's a bunch of noise for the readers.

The treble with that remark is that it's totally off-key.

Yup. $10M to use it as the default encryption mode. They also tried to require it for FIPS certification so pardon my gasps of disbelief.

Sounds to me like a quantum monkey-at-a-typewriter.

The third paragraph should begin:

Low voter turnout is not a problem.

And that last should be:

Conversely, if you would fight you should vote. Withholding your vote in such a circumstance also makes the election less convincing, increasing the destabilization of the government. An election boycott is a vote for genuine war.

No vote is better than an ill-informed / non-informed vote.

Ya know, I'm not so sure about that. The whole premise of democracy is that we are, collectively, smarter than any of us individually.

Democratic and Repubican forms of government are NOT based on such a premise.

The entire point of such forms is to avoid civil war. They do this by modelling the war - well enough that the faction that loses the election is convinced that, if they try to reverse the result by force of arms, they will lose that, too.

Low voter turnout is . If people don't care enough about an issue to fight for one side or the other, (let alone not caring enough to even examine the sides), not voting for a side picked randomly, or on the basis of name recognition or the like, does no harm.

Voting in such a circumstance may cause a lot of harm. Just like visibly corrupt elections, a visibly frivolous electorate reduces the ability of the election to convince the losers they've really lost. Further, it gives them the idea that they were cheated out of what they "deserved" and could win - giving them an opportunity to start a war AND claim the moral high ground in doing so.

Conversely, not voting when you would fight is a vo

... 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.