In Texas, our electronic voting machines do not require a paper trail, so there's no way to verify who really won.

While Governor and Federal Representative have been pretty much blue up until about 30 years ago, our Federal Senators have often been red.

This time around the Democratic Senatorial contender lost to a Tea Party candidate (the incumbent Republican retired), taking around 41% of the vote.

In Travis county, seat of the Texas government and Austin, any registered voter can now go to any polling place. Instead of the usual grade school, I chose the closest polling place, city hall of a small town of 500 surrounded by Austin's south side.

Walking in, there was no line, though all six booths were occupied. By the time I finished checking in, one booth was available. The entire ballot was around a half-dozen screens.

Except for the lack of an audit trail, that's how easy voting should be everywhere in this country.

Oh, not being a member of the Electoral College, I knew my vote for President would not truly matter. So, being pretty sure the state would go red, I felt obliged to enter a write-in for my favorite candidate, "Popular Vote".

For some years I used "PubicBroadcast" as id for the guest connection, partially to see if any neighbors would catch the typo, partially to annoy the extreme prude living across the street. The WPA2 key of course was "IReallyShouldPayForMyOwnWiFi"

How lovely when the mob rules. No 1st amendment issue here!

Like most corporations today, the Chocolate Factory has forgotten what our Founders knew was vital to a well-functioning society: Gotta remember the little guy. He may be annoying at times, but lock him in his room just for being a PITA, then who knows when it'll be your turn to enjoy the same?

As any TruFan will tell you, it's pronounced SKIFFY. ;)

The phrase Sci-Fi came from beloved fan and editor Forrest J. Ackerman, who coined it in honor of Hugo Gernsback, an early 20th century radio enthusiast and pioneer in Science Fiction publishing, who himself coined the audio term "Hi-Fi" for use in one of his other magazines. (He's also the namesake behind Science Fiction's version of the Oscars, called of course the "Hugo").

Alas, Forrey's term stuck.

Names aside, no, Science Fiction does NOT need its own category. It's a genre. Opening that door would mean we'd need a Fantasy Oscar, a Western Oscar, one for Murder Mysteries, Romances, Action/Adventure, Comedy...

I would recommend a re-acquaintance of the Scientific Method.

This is just smoke & mirrors. Hardware vendors have nothing to fear from these "rules"; they're merely scary posturing.

What happens to hardware after it has been sold has nothing to do with any particular operating system that may have been originally installed.

Tell me honestly that chip, screen or battery maker X could be held liable if I, the end user root my gadget to get Win8 the hell off of it, or may it play with others.

And why do these new requirements not apply to x86? UEFI came from Intel (and HP) in the first place. M$, mighty though they are know two things:

• It would not be wise to piss off the main source of chips that runs their code.
• It's all BS anyway, as they can't stop folks from playing with the hardware once it's been sold.

What no one seems to be talking about (pun intended) is that a blanket ban on hands-free devices would also preclude one from speaking to another person in the car.

So, sure, just tweak the law to allow for conversations with persons actually present in the vehicle.

So it'll be OK to take your eyes off the road to respond to conversation with your passenger, but not the disembodied voice in your headpiece ... exactly how is that safer?

What would I like to see slowed down to such a degree?

Anything from the U.S. Senate. Those guys move waaaaaay to fast.

Inertia, plain and simple.

Having been a PC guy since the mid 80's, the switch to a MacBook Pro a year ago last Spring went quite well. The only time I use Parallels these days is for some legacy Excel sheets, as LibreOffice still isn't quite up to par with their VB implementation. (Or I haven't RTFM enough times to properly convert the code...)

Sure, needing to support folks still on 'doze keeps me familiar with the current state of that O/S, but more & more the lines are blurring.

No matter what the platform, the user experience is fairly homogenized: You point. You click. You tap a bit on the keyboard. Stuff happens. Rinse & Repeat.

Bit of a PITA, but...

Manually run a small script each day on a home server. (If you're away from home you SSH in to run the script).

Do this every day, perhaps right after the coffee starts brewing. Make it a habit so you won't forget...

...because if you do forget (or keel over, or for whatever reason do not run the script), another script kicks in and your current P/W list is forwarded to the appropriate parties.

PITA part is remembering to do this every day. Sure wouldn't want to cron that as well, would kinda defeat the purpose.

Perhaps the good folk at Big Blue have never heard of filters...

That was the subject of Arthur C. Clarke's last books (Time Odyssey, with Stephen Baxter).

We humans needed to be stopped as we were only hastening entropy.

Many may anticipate the iSqueal fork, hoping it will conveniently be available via the crApp store...

... and it will be, as soon as Emperor Jobs figures rewrites the laws of math, discovering a new (and certainly non-Euclidean) equation wherein FREE * 30% > $0

"Having a life" conflicts with "making me better at my job". Job & life are intertwined, so you never know where a piece of knowledge from one will help the other.

On the surface studying history, for example wouldn't seem to help divining more about OOP. But you might be reading a bio of some historical figure, come across something he or she came up with, and solve that bottleneck that's troubled you all day (or week).

Don't try to choose *all* your classes based solely on what they'll do for your 9 to 5. Pick some stuff that interests you outside your chosen field. The more you know in general, the better you'll be at your job ... and your life.

Have been down this road. FrontPage (shudder) in the 90's. DreamWeaver and others for a bit.

HTML, JS, CSS, XML, PHP, Python, Perl... it's all text. Finally realized I did not need a gui editor with internal browser.

Best bet is to know your code, have a good mental idea of what it will do, use the browser to verify.

The following is all open source, so no emptying of the wallet...

Put Apache on your dev machine so you can run vhosts. Modify your hosts file to point localhost to whatever internal-only domain name you choose.

Code with jEdit - java based so completely cross-platform, code folding, syntax highlighting, macro capability etc. A wonderful tool.

View with FireFox. Install the FireBug, Web Developer, ColorZilla and MeasureIt extensions. Find a 'doze machine somewhere so you can (begrudgingly) use IE just to make sure stuff is rendering as you expect. Install Opera & Chrome just because you can, though you'll use them the least.

Write code, save, tab over to FireFox, F5 to refresh. Rinse and repeat. You'll barely touch the mouse, as Ghu intended.

When things look good, upload with FileZilla (which supports SFTP, so you can safely dial in using your private key).

Good luck!