What if you run the audio through a 50 Hz (60Hz in America) band reject filter and then add some hum from another time? Then the recording has a different time fingerprint.

Sure. Except slashdotters. Missing Option: Breasts!

When I click the link on my android phone, it redirects to the mobile site, from there back to the normal site, again to the mobile site and on and on, until my browser barfs out. Nice. Engineering at its best.

You're overgeneralizing. This never ever happened to me. There are obviously different banks out there. Whenever any bank sends me an email, they mention my name, nothing else. Not even the account number. They don't even send me the URL of their secure web site. It would look suspicious (to me, at least) if they did.

Any sensitive stuff comes either by snail mail (like TANs; this is apparently where other banks save money), or I download it actively from their site.

In my company the desk phones are VoIP, too. The good part is, they are also IP routers. All IP traffic of workplace PCs goes through them, so the phone decides about priority. AFAIK the phones are meshed into a magic routing network which ensures QoS pretty well. I work in a multinational company where only we in Germany have this kind of phone. All the others use soft phones. And you can tell the difference. The desk phone users' voices are always 100% crisp and clear, while everybody else turns into a robot or disconnects every once in a while. That's pretty annoying, especially in conferences with a dozen participants, so I wish they'd all switch.

Subtract a point. As an Apie you'd remember phone numbers EVEN THOUGH you hate using the phone. I do. Score: 39.

Life's not a game, son.

I only use ball pens that I abduct from hotel lobbies etc. They are usually quite good, much better than the official office supply at work. Plus they make a nice souvenir. The wooden ones from Scandic are beautiful, too. They suffer from a very short ink tube, but the unlimited supply compensates that.

The dude has an excuse: he is Dutch, and they legally use apostrophe's for plural's (for some word's).

Nah! German elections (1/4 of US population) use only paper ballots where you mark one (or more) circle(s) with a cross. Reliable projections are usually available less than 1 hour after the voting has closed; the official result takes around 6 hours. I wouldn't call that slow. But why do you find that the recount is dubious? Just have different people recount the same paper sheets (which is usually done anyway). But even if it were: If you use voting machines, even the *original* count is dubious.

What I didn't understand in the 2000 US election is that Gore was urged to concede defeat quickly, even though it was such a close call. And I understand even less that he actually did. As if pride is more important than a fair election. And then they stopped counting the votes. Which IMHO was against the law and common sense.

Here, the would-be loser would say "Let's wait until all votes are counted." And everyone would agree. It's an important election, so a few hours wait is acceptable.

I admit that everyone is biased. But the general practice in Germany is that news channels provide only facts by default. Whenever someone expresses their opinion, it is usually marked as such. That's a self-imposed convention AFAICT. With American TV (especially Fox) I have the impression that the separation is not always that clear. It seems that the selection and presentation of news always serves an agenda. (But that could just be my biased POV.)

I agree that compulsory voting is problematic. But at least there shouldn't be obstacles to voting. It strikes me as odd that you must register to vote, and in the process you are required to say which party you support (correct me if I'm wrong). This is hardly a secret ballot. In most civilized countries everybody registered citzen above 18 is automagically registered to vote and IMHO this is how it should be.

Not quite. Voting machines were the problem, which were unable to count votes due to hanging chads.

A simple cross on a paper ballot counted by people is much less error-prone. Humans make errors, too, but are better at correcting them.

I have the impression that money is more important than votes in the US electoral system. This doesn't seem right. My spider sense tingles when I read that the quality of a candidate is measured by the amount of donations he receives. This is obvious bribery.

IMHO feedom of speech should come with responsibility. It is hard to ignore that Fox (ab)uses their power to support a certain political direction. A news channel should try to be unbiased.

Same here. 1 hr if I obey traffic rules: no shortcuts through pedestrian paths, no one-way streets in the wrong direction, stop at red lights without cross traffic.

Well, strictly strictly speaking, the cloud doesn't have to be remote at all. Here is the NIST definition of the cloud, which we use to avoid cloudy wording when it comes to clouds. It doesn't even contain the word remote. It speaks only of availabilty, scalability and the likes.

It's OK as long you're not seen by two cameras at the same time.

Maybe it has to do with the way the discovery of quantum mechanics totally changed science (at least physics). I once read an anecdote about Max Planck. When he started studying physics, his professor told him: "It is nice that you are interested in science, young man, but unfortunately you are a bit late. We have uncovered almost everything. All we need to do is fill the last little corners here and there. So there won't be much interesting left for you." (quoted from my memory..) He couldn't have been more wrong.

Since then, physics as a whole has acquired a more humble stance. From "we know it all" to "we are slowly learning". I think that most physicists share this view, which shows also in the motto on my Exploratorium mug: Where the right answer is a question.

Maybe other fields of science still need to make this discovery by themselves.