The usage of "United States of America" as either singular or plural has shifted over the years. The guidelines you provide are good for the general case of collected objects, but "USA" seems to be a particular case that (sometimes, maybe, mostly) breaks the rule.

"That's not a knife. This is a knife."

Well played, but wrong continent entirely.

I realize this is heresy, but even though I've been working with PCs on a daily basis for THIRTY YEARS, not everything needs to be computerized.

The advantage of introducing computers into the voting process is in making the ballot preparation easier, more flexible, and more accessible. Want the same ballot and instructions in 10 different languages? It is expensive to generate the different paper versions, and impossible to estimate how many of which type you'll need. But it is trivial with a computer. Want a "spoken" ballot for the blind? Done. Want a ballot with 200-point font? You're limited only by the computer screen size. Want to include nice big pictures, along with party-affiliation graphics, for the illiterate? Pretty cheap to do on a computer. For 80% of the population, you can still utilize hand-filled paper ballots, which will be faster and cheaper in most cases, but having machines makes it easier for the other 20% to exercise their right.

But I agree with the earlier posts - use the technology only for generating the ballot. The actual piece of paper is what is important. If you want to add mechanized/computerized tallying of the ballots (i.e., optical scanning or barcoding) to make things easier in the 90% of races where a 2% counting error doesn't matter, fine. But keep those paper ballots and do randomized, hand-counted auditing, and have thresholds that trigger automatic hand counts in close cases.

because i doubt the universe cares much about the data we generate....

Oh, I don't know. Eventually we'll have so many hard drives dedicated to it that it'll collapse into a black hole.

Or - wait for it - the computing power requirements scale so large that the only way to keep the whole enterprise going is to build a Dyson sphere.

Maybe the universe won't care even then, but we'll at least come closer to leaving our mark!

People go into business to make money. If they can do it providing a bullshit product that's fucking useless to government for huge skips full of cash, they will.

Is that what gets you out of bed each morning, or do you have a shred of professional dignity? Sure, there are people who will do the minimum possible for that payday, but there actually are people who give a damn whether they do their job well or not, and care about what happens after the next payday.

What do they care

Probably these guys didn't get into this industry just to waste money. I would imagine that most of the people actually working on this are 1) motivated by the potential profits of mastering and proliferating this technology and/or 2) have a genuine desire to develop more sustainable energy sources and/or 3) masochistic engineers that love a good challenge. All three classes of people would be disappointed with failure, and really jazzed with success. I think that they care about succeeding greatly.

Daily tides here reach 11 miles per hour, and can go as high as 18....

Well, damn! And here I thought going to 11 was really something.

I wish I could dredge up some examples, but I seem to remember seeing some things which some of the astronauts said in the middle of a crisis which made them sound like it was just a little thing, when the rest of us would all be screaming "we're all gonna die we're all gonna die".

"Houston, we have a problem" when an oxygen tank has just exploded and practically ripped the service module in half. Yup, that seems like a good start.

You can but that costs many billion dollars. To do a continent wide HVDC network with some limited energy storage (compared to what would ideally be needed) you're looking at many hundred billions $$$ or EUR

Compared to a regional economy that measures €15 trillion annually, an investment of several €100 billion over the next decade or two is not unbearable. Indeed, if it means that power supply and distribution is more resilient, and you don't need to expend several €trillion in energy imports over the same time period, it seems like a worthwhile investment in infrastructure.

I've seen this before, in the movie Sleep Dealer. The U.S. / Mexico border is completely sealed, but folks in the U.S. still want cheap labor. So: they hire Mexicans, working in Mexico, as drone operators.

Just CHIP-IN-PIN and be done with it

Particularly when using CAPSLOCK, please be sure to use the correct term. Chip and Pin. Most English speakers are lazy enough in their pronunciation that it comes out as a homophone. But even if you couldn't hear the difference between "in" and "and", you ought to be able to work it out from context: you've got a chip, and you've got a pin; the chip does not reside in the pin.

Oh, yes, I am sure that the choice of CAD programs has something to do with the launch failure, or points to some sort of cultural deficiency at Orbital. Really, you get a touch of shadenfreude over that? How petty are you?

There are enough blood donors around the world, and the testing on their blood is comprehensive enough, that one can make statistical conclusions about the prevalence of certain blood types in the general population. In other words - there's a large enough sample set (hundreds of millions, if not billions, or units tested to date, coming from tens or hundreds of millions of donors) that the (statistical) error bars are very small.

without getting a snide look from the restaurant staff for ordering a big mac _and_ a quarter pounder...

And a diet coke, but hold the fries - just to keep them guessing.

The higher skilled workers will also see their pay fall, as the excess labor pool in general grows

That assumes that the excess labor pool is able to do the job of a skilled worker. If 10,000 formerly-employed McDonalds cashiers lined up outside to try and get the $120,000 System Architect's job at SomeCompany, does that suddenly push the salary being offered down to $40,000?

Reminds me a bit of this scene from Joe vs. The Volcano