Wrong. They use different kernel versions, with different kernel patches. And most importantly, the userland apps certainly differ here and there. The most important example is the Mandriva Control Center. It's task-oriented, making it far more friendly than searching for configuration tools by name - in particular, if you have a localized system, where translations are often arbitrary and non-intuitive.

For specific examples, check out Mandriva's wizards for video cards, disk partitioning, network setup, network sharing. Now try to setup those things under Ubuntu without hitting the Ubuntu forums first.

That said, network card compatibility is pretty much hit or miss, as they often depend on binary blobs (either proprietary or windows drivers) that break in different ways with different kernel versions. My dad's current laptop's wifi only works reliably with WEP, not WPA, while mine kernel-panics with WEP. I bet bugs would manifest themselves differently on Ubuntu.

CMake is there in the summary. Maven is not that popular probably due to its design to do "everything".

What seems to be really missing is autotools. Even if you don't want to admit it is better than most alternatives, it's the only one that really solves a ton of problems that no other tool is able to handle. Simply reading through the autoconf, automake and libtool manuals will teach you a lot about the many issues most other tools just ignore, or solve poorly.

Apparently, games where you launch deadly projectiles at enemies. I'm surprised they didn't have a "Jump" or "Save the world" genre to match that. Read it as "random genre because we don't actually play games so we have no clue".

It's funny how the so called "homebrew" community is quick to hand anyone's head in a plate, when these companies would very much like to hang them all together. It's not like the bits fail0verflow didn't break were any harder anyways. They brought the pirates 80% of the way in, Geohotz already had the last, say, 15%, only feasible because of the first 80%. And fail0verflow now claims they have no responsibility on the piracy matter.

I don't have anything against the fail0verflow dudes, but I'm sure I will have an ironic smile on my face once one of them gets canned in the same way.

Sure, they could switch candidates A and B. Then you can get some of the unused ballots and feed into the same system and check that every permutation is being counted properly.

You always depend on a 3rd party to verify it. The entity responsible for the counting can be dishonest even with paper ballots.

Sure, they can count every vote for #3 as a vote for #2. But the system must then be designed to count the votes incorrectly. This is easy to verify later (take one of each ballot type, feed the votes into the system, see if it is counted properly).

Or they could just not give a shit, and ignore the counted votes, and using some arbitrary number instead. Because if you are not trusting the system to count the votes correctly, why would you trust a person to write down the totals to the proper candidate?

You do know that TED Talks consist of people going in front of other people and cameras, and talking, right? So perhaps the substance is indeed in the video.

The guy actually presents a very simple way to verify your vote was correctly registered, without ever revealing who you voted for. The secret is to remove the candidate names (by shredding that part of the ballot), scanning your vote into the system, and taking home the receipt, which contains no names. Only the system knows which is which. You can later use your receipt's code to see if it registered your vote properly (because it will match your receipt), but there is no way to know which candidate actually received that vote. It actually solves the problem of verification without compromising privacy.