Somebody should invent IMAP.

Absentee voting already works this way pretty much everywhere in the United States:

First, you have to already be registered, so the notion that nonexistent people are suddenly able to vote is nonsense.

Second, you must file a request to get the absentee ballot. In most states you do not have to show any form of ID to do so, but your name is checked against the registration records before any ballot is provided.

Third, you fill out the ballot form, sign it, and mail it in. Note that the signature means your ballot is not really "secret."

Fourth, the forms are checked against the registration rolls again when they are counted, and signatures also may be checked (usually a sampling are spot-checked). In many places, absentee votes are counted AFTER the live votes and they may even be skipped if the number of absentee votes would not change the outcome of the election. If a voter has voted at his or her precinct, and an absentee ballot from the "same" voter shows up, that's an obvious case of fraud and the ballot is set aside.

There is no reason to imagine that email makes this any less secure than the snail mail system.

This is absolutely right. $249 LIST is a breakthrough price, even though some people are too thick to see that. Occasionally you'll find an 11.6 Acer on clearance or special in that price range (and if you do, BUY IT and install Linux), but over $300 is more typical.

The 11.6 size is a sweet spot. I have an Acer 1410 and my wife has an AO725, both running Ubuntu. It's rare that either of us does anything that couldn't be done with the Chromebook -- except for moving photos from an SD card to a hard drive. I know it's simple to plug either into a Chromebook. What I don't know is whether the ChromeOS UI plays nicely with external storage.

No. You probably can install a Kindle reader app, but you can't watch Amazon video on a rooted device.

But as a Kindle Fire user and a veteran of much smartphone hacking ... I don't see the point in ANY of this. What are you actually gaining? What does "fully functional tablet" mean? If you don't like the Kindle launcher, install something else. I use http://golauncher.goforandroid.com/ on my KF.

Forest. Trees.

SLS (SoftLanding Systems), the very first Linux distro, downloaded at 1200bps from Sunsite. Recompiled the kernel every week from alpha sources. Ran it on a '386, then upgraded to a fire-breakthing 33-mhz '486.

Then RedHat on a Pentium.

Then Mandrake when I couldn't get RedHat to run on a particular box.

Then Ubuntu.

Then Android. Does that count?

I know YMMV, but my experience has been exactly the opposite. Every time I boot my wife's Acer laptop into Windows 7, I'm just appalled at how spongy the UI feels, how slow it is to load programs, and how truly awful the fonts look. I suppose I could get used to it if it was my only option, but I find nothing "intuitive" about anything in the system, and anything I remember from the XP era just gets me into trouble.

As quickly as possible, I get back to the safety, security, performance and -- yes -- usability of Ubuntu.

I'm not pleased by Unity, but I am able to restore and reconfigure Ubuntu to a proper working desktop that acts mostly like Gnome 2. I'll be keeping an eye on the Gnome Remix. It may become a future option.

Oh, I can beat that. Sort of.

I followed Tmobile's advice on Tmobile's website, followed the link to LG's website to upgrade the OS. The upgrade failed and locked the phone in "upgrade" mode. I managed to roll back and found myself having a phone with no baseband (software radio), so it's not a phone.

And I can no longer flash anything. At all. So basically I have an Android equivalent of an iPod.

Out of warranty. Insured, but I know what insurance means: "Give us another $130 and we'll find a reconditioned phone to ship to you."

I bought a $30 crap phone from Amazon and said to hell with it.

Amazon's Silk browser, used in the Kindle Fire, implements SPDY and a reverse proxy cache in the Amazon cloud that is supposedly capable of predictive retrieval and caching. While it occasionally is faster than HTTP, on the whole it doesn't seem to mesh well with my browsing habits and I've disabled the so-called "accelerated page loading" on my KF. Judging from comments in the Amazon forums, my experience is not unusual.

... For the general public, it will be a site where they can view upcoming events, filter them by type, date etc. and view details of events they're interested in. There will also be an admin section ...

There is no earthly reason any of this requires writing code. This isn't 1999, people.

Actually ... you can,sort of.

Voice recognition -> extracting facts from text -> story generation. All three are currently functional processes (varying degrees of quality). Having C3PO observe an arbitrary event, "understand" by inferring meaning (mathematics, probability, context database) and generate a report is not nearly so far out of reach as we might imagine. It is currently out of reach because each step introduces error rates that would result in hilarious crap, so the short-term R&D focus tends to be on domains of information where data is already encoded (such as sports and business information).

In the near term, I think the interesting opportunity is likely to be machine intelligence aiding humans in the process of reporting and analyzing. Some of this is already going on in lab situations; I've seen a system at Northwestern University "read" a brief political story and quickly connect the actors and actions with data about political contributions and connections.

Since all of this is based on machine learning, the interaction with human journalists has the potential to make the AI smarter over time, sort of how Google Translate has mutated from hilarity to utility in just a few years.

Discussed in the documentation, but this is Slashdot, so nobody will read that.

No. This is not HTTP server push. Has nothing to do with HTTP server push. Has nothing to do with Web Slices, either. This is more like dynamically assigned micro-mailboxes for message passing. Read the docs.

The graph is crap. Note the lack of any explanation of methodology -- or even a clear explanation what's actually being measured.

Actual measured usage of the Web by mobile devices (i.e., phones and not including tablets) puts Android collectively slightly ahead of the iPhone. Rim has fallen to about 4-5% and everybody else is not worth talking about. The reason Blackberry scores so low is that most Blackberry devices suck at Web browsing. They're still very good email tools and that's what they're used for in corporate settings.

If you include tablets -- which typically are used in lieu of laptops or desktops -- then iOS takes about 60 percent and Android between 30 and 35 on the mainstream, non-geek sites that I measure.

As for the heaviest users of smartphones -- it's not geeks, but rather teenage girls. They're spending most of their time in the Facebook app and not even showing up as Web users.

I have access to a great deal of actual and current mobile usage data, and this is just completely at odds with reality. "Feature phone" owners in the United States typically do not have data plans and do not use the Internet.

Actual measured usage of mobile Web services by "feature phones" is slightly above that of Windows Mobile, which is to say "irrelevant noise at the bottom of the chart" in the range of 1 to 2 percent.

Grandpa's Jitterbug may in fact run J2ME, but Grandpa doesn't use it.