... 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.

Here in Oklahoma, you can already get two years free at Community College. You still have to pay for books though. Part of our property tax pays the tuition. So, really it is not free, it is just everybody paying for it. However, I would say that it benefits the community.
Should the Federal government do it? No. They are too large and too distanced to be able to efficiently manage it. Costs would triple or quadruple. Instead, Obama should encourage the local communities to fund their local community colleges.

Sure it is. Local code enforcement is the realm of the municipality, not a HOA. The city has laws which govern what you can and can't put in your driveway, that you can't let your grass grow out of hand or allow trash in your yard. There is no need for a HOA.

Nope, those are all addressable with the city code enforcement.

But the prices didn't go down when they stopped having full service. In fact, they went up and continue to go up, even before you add in all the services that you used to get for free.

Also, in order to get 100% completion on many games, you have to have all the trophies, some of which are only available in DLC. You should be able to get 100% completion of the game with what you paid for the game itself.

Hotels are the same way. The "Full Service" hotels are more expensive, and you have to pay extra for internet, food, phone calls, etc. However, the budget hotel, often of the same brand, has free internet, free local calls, free breakfast, free cookies, bottled water, etc.

A HOA is upfront about the fact that they don't want a TARDIS in your driveway? I doubt it.
Also, in many cases, the HOA bylaws are not made available to you until closing. By that time, going back on the deal could cause you to lose thousands of dollars in earnest money. The agents know that if you have access to the bylaws, it lowers your chance of wanting to buy in that subdivision as no one wants to have the largest investment in their life subject to the desires of some nosy neighbor who has no investment in your property.

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.

I figured they used politicians to train the device what a lie looks like.

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.