Those 68k boards are still in use in various pieces of equipment I think...

Fairly healthy, you can read more about them here: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=MSI+Profile

When I left the GSM Mobile division of Motorola 3 years ago, I would have bet money that the company would fall flat sooner rather than later. My aptly timed departure came only a few months before my entire team was sent home. After riding the Razr wave all the way back to the beach, Moto had no competitive mobile software platform in its R&D pipeline. Even at that time, there were talks of the company spurning its mobile division, which was bleeding cash at an unprecedented rate and dropping market share to Apple, Samsung, and others. At a few dark corners of the office, a privileged group were working on integrating Android on some upcoming VZW handsets. Fast forward a bit, and Motorola finally did split the mobile division off. They were gunning for this outcome for years, I think Google was an inevitable outcome.

It's the can of worms popping open... You don't necessarily have to "buy" physical routers, switches, etc. These days, you can simulate pretty much any network setup you want via software and see how things work out: http://www.gns3.net/ Also, asking "us" what hardware you should buy is like asking someone what kind of computer you should buy, the question is too general and the answer will depend largely on the business/security needs of the company. Tannenbaum wrote a very good book about TCP/IP networking which you may want to read: http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Networks-Andrew-S-Tannenbaum/dp/0131651838 Aside from that, you should look into the basic requirements for network administration/security and make sure you understand and know how to apply them, the topics listed here could be a good starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CISSP

The "chance" or probability of two drives failing at the same time is not any higher than the probability of a single drive failing. You can check my math, but the events are independent. It's like saying it's much more likely to flip two pennies and return heads on both than it is to flip one penny and return heads. The former has a probability of 25% (1 in 4), while the latter has a probability of 50% (1 in 2). If RAID is "fairly pointless", why is it in use in most (if not all) enterprise servers? RAID provides a higher chance of data availability, but the offsite backup is still needed in case the RAID device gets hit with a sledgehammer for example. I'd rather have a NAS RAID device and an offsite USB drive than just the USB drive that I tote back and forth every week to sync with some other unnamed storage, as you originally suggested.

Wasn't aware of the corruption issue, thanks for the heads up. I'm now doing random spot checks of my digital photo archive :-)

Exactly, availability. 1) No RAID, a drive dies, data is 0% available. 2) RAID 1/5, a drive dies, data is still 100% available. See how option 2 is better than option 1? :-) Methinks you'd be smart enough to plug it into a decent surge protector, and why would you be actively adding to/deleting from a backup device? Your software app or script should just be doing incremental changes in the background every so often. A USB drive isn't any better at protecting someone from being an idiot (accidentally deleting something).

Get a couple of NAS drives. Have your laptop run backups between the two devices in case 1 drive fails, or just run 1 device with RAID 1/5. Burn Blu-ray backups every 6 months or so, throw them in a fireproof safe or safe deposit box. Or take a separate USB drive to do the backups and throw that in the safe. If you're running Windows and the NAS is available as a windows share, you can run the free SyncToy app to do incremental backups.

They are about as powerful as the small form factor mobo-cpu combos that are available for these types of projects anyway. You can get most of the functions you want/need (phone, bluetooth, music, movies, GPS) with the exception of controlling the HVAC. And as a bonus you can take it with you and use it the rest of the time you are *not* in your car. Trust me, I looked into doing this for my 2005 Subaru Impreza, the DIN slot was the right size and everything, but it was completely not worth the time/effort. Some other guy had already done it so I even had steps to follow, but to get it to look right, he had to get some plastic custom fabbed from a machine shop. If you're planning on doing the car-puter for any purpose other than fun/hobby, you're wasting your time.

I like all of the ideas he mentioned, from the uniqueness of each ballot, to the tear off receipt, to the shredding of the plaintext ballot "key". These are great for maintaining anonymity, but what about ballot stuffing? How do you prevent someone that's been dead for a couple months from "voting"? My polling place didn't ask for ID, just my name, I imagine that probably happens quite a bit...