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Comment Yes, voters need voter-verified paper ballots (Score 1) 190

Yes, you should object.

Voters can't be sure that there's any evidence of their vote entering the system accurately reflecting their vote without a voter-verified paper ballot. Electronic ballots are easily lost, misrepresented, and useless in a recount. Electronic voting doesn't improve on the problems with voter-verified paper ballots and electronic ballots introduce problems all their own. So this is an area where traditional voter-verified paper ballots are better for the voter and well worth fighting for.

Braille printed ballots are extra nice to have (the braille can co-exist with the ink print on the same voter-verified paper ballot). But voters who can't read ink printed text without braille (illiterate and blind voters, to name a couple of examples) can get help from a computer to help them prepare a voter-verified paper ballot. These voters can feed in a voter-verified paper ballot into a machine that is essentially a scanner/printer combo that prints marks on a traditional voter-verified paper ballot filling in the blanks in accordance with user input to the computer. The user can get the voter-verified paper ballot out of the machine and check out its accuracy, either submit it to be counted or spoil it to get a new voter-verified paper ballot and mark it themselves, Such voters can also bring someone they trust to help them vote but this is obviously less preferred as this means divulging one's vote to someone else.

Comment Re:White Werhner von Braun may be many things... (Score 1) 165

An aspect of Nazism managed to seep into the British Empire precisely because they were mortal enemies

I think you might have some of this the wrong way around. The British Empire had institutionalised racism and concentration camps in its colonies long before the Nazis existed.

Comment Re:House of Lords? (Score 1) 282

Who whips up that fervor, the war on drugs wasn't started as a grass roots campaign, for sure, it came from the top

Most often, it's the people who either need A Cause to get elected, or want to use a particular mob cry to funnel money to businesses in their constituency and get kickbacks (sorry, campaign contributions). The old hereditary House of Lords (before they abolished most of them and stuffed the house with Labour cronies followed by Tory cronies) had the advantage that, aside from a few issues like inheritance tax and fox hunting, the members didn't really have much of a vested interest in anything. If you watched the debates, the contrast between the two houses was astonishing. The Commons was full of people trying to score points against the other party, the Lords was almost empty, but those there were having an intelligent debate on the issues in the legislation.

Comment Re:All the happy (Score 3, Informative) 136

OpenVMS has run on Itanium since Itanium was launched. This isn't a port to a new OS, it's just updating the existing support for the newer chips.

The x86 port story is quite funny though. The 80386 launched with four protection rings specifically to make porting VMS from VAX easy. DEC never did the port (or, if they did, never released it publicly) and instead designed their own chip, the Alpha as the successor to the VAX. The Alpha just had two protection rings, which required a little bit of restructuring of the VMS design. Now, x86-64 has only two protection rings (unless you count HVM and SMC modes as rings), and is being considered as a porting target for VMS...

Comment Re:It's not a marketplace.. (Score 1) 258

Are you really that obtuse? A marketplace that someone is saying is large is significantly smaller than a single company that sells products in that market. Your argument is equivalent to saying 'this big shop has a huge profit and sells thousands of products!' and then mocking people who point out that there are individual suppliers of single products in that shop that have an order of magnitude higher profit nationwide than the total profit from all sales in the shop.

Comment Re:As a T-mobile subscriber... (Score 2) 111

T-Mobile is aware of their shortcomings: http://explore.t-mobile.com/test-drive-free-trial

T-Mobile has been making a huge push in Voice over LTE (VoLTE) on the 700 MHz band
nd I imagine that as everyone switches over, it won't matter which carrier you have,
since eventually you'll be able to roam on any network.

Comment Re:where's the money?! (Score 1) 213

Communications of the ACM has changed a lot over the last few years. They're trying to make it a lot more relevant and also raise the impact. This means that the Practitioners section is now managed by the team behind ACM Queue and contains stuff that people doing exciting things in industry are doing and the rest has a higher standard of peer review. The Research Highlights section often points to papers that I want to read. Most of the top-tier conferences and journals for computer science are ACM-sponsored.

Comment Re:uh, get rid of the "top X" ranking? (Score 1) 258

They do pay developers, but they pay them quite a lot less than the purchase price. The logic is that they'll get a load more downloads. That makes sense, as I've downloaded several things for free that I'd never pay for and a few that I've only run for 5-10 minutes and never touched again.

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