Ugh yeah, should have clarified that it's anything which on its own identifies a voter with a vote, which a receipt (I'm guessing) would do much as a signed ballot paper does.

Ask yourself what stops people from opening ballot boxes to mess with the votes? The answer (in the UK at least) is four uniquely serial-numbered ties which have their numbers noted when the box is sent out, and verified when it's opened. Just put all the innards in an epoxy resin, put them in a toughened metal cabinet, lock the door with a key and attach aforementioned ties. A screwdriver won't help you.

In the UK in particular you *cannot* issue a receipt - anything which can be used to match a vote to a voter is illegal. Even signing your name instead of putting a cross renders your ballot spoiled.

Unless you happen to be a scientist in a related field, raw data tends to be next to useless. Anybody can draw pretty graphs in Excel and get worried about a rising trend line, declining trend line or anomalous result but it takes someone who knows what they're talking about to explain what they actually mean.

You know the multi-billion dollar LHC? Guess what they did their first physics on. Not finding new exotic particles, but proving that what we think we know so far still stands up. Duplicating data is exactly how things get proven and disproven. If Group A and Group B use exactly the same source data there's no possibility of Group B proving Group A's research wrong.

I wish I had a dollar for every time an OSS project spat out something like "ERROR: 0947445" with no mention anywhere of what aforementioned error code meant or how to fix it, then upon further dredging through a hundred uncommented lines of code to find out what was going on it turns out that the root cause was that I hadn't installed some-package-to-do-something-2.4-beta (which should have been a prerequisite, but isn't).

Source is actually on the more modular side of engine design - bolting in a new render path for OpenGL isn't massively taxing.

My MacBook Pro with an 8600M GT plays L4D2 just fine and that's an '07 model.

Yes, because Valve are going to release the source so that the communities can compile their own distro-specific releases...

I'd love to see Steam become a truly cross-platform application, but until the Linux community can come up with a way of making something as simple as a CLI utility install and run the same on every distro without resorting to --with-obscure-option-to-fix-ui-glitch and --without-something-that-doesnt-come-with-this-distro then it's not going to happen.

You can record it to watch it later though. See the BBC's Internet Blog.

Hey now, some media players are hooked on their timelines. I recall RealPlayer back in the day insisted on a timeline and scrubber for live playback (it may still do, but I haven't used it for many, many years) and IIRC Windows Media Player still does.

Lets be honest here, the OSS guys can barely agree on which letter should appear if you press the "A" key, never mind before you introduce shift, ctrl, alt, option, meta, super or chording.

Weren't CompuServe email addresses numerical?

There are only so many lastname.tld kicking around, and if you have a common name you're screwed. I need to get to some quite obscure variations on my first name, last name and middle initials before I find a domain which is still available and can fit in a sensible amount of space.

Given the choice of the free mail providers out there who provide webmail and a reasonable approximation of reliability and longevity who would you choose?