I live in regular suburban space in a fairly large US city.

I relocated from Europe (France) 7 years ago.

Service in a typical suburban neighborhood is still low quality (24/5, but 200ms latency,...... $75, capped) and more expensive than what I had in rural country France 7 years ago (30/7, 15ms latency, 29euros, ~40$, uncapped, includes TV, ondemand, landline phone).

So this is BS. Value is low in the US. This guy is paid to stir BS in the media.

And take us with them there.

Libertarianism is nothing else than rule of the powerful. If there is a power gap, it will be filled. Beware what replaces an elected government in that role. You may find that the new boss is not the same as the old boss, but is actually much worse.

Very worried about that. Since Preview is "cloud enabled" it's a POS that crashes constantly. It -was- the best PDF viewer before, it is crippled and buggy now. It always want to sync with 'the cloud' even when I don't want it to do this. I certainly hope that Keynotes remains the productive tool it is now, and not some bloated "cloudware" .

Why would you ask a question that has an obvious answer in any constitutional law 101 on Slashdot, and spend countless hours writing such an elaborate pamphlet obviously before searching for the widely available answer is amusing. Like Slashdot is a renowned law authority or something.

You must have lived under a rock. There has been numerous plane hijacks and blowups over the 80's and early 90's. The TSA is a useless security theater, but there is a need for some sort of security nonetheless, like metal detectors and random picks which have been good enough, as the rate of successful blowups during the end of the 90s prove. No need to go berserk and get everybody groped, that, is useless).

Thanks for the nice additions. It is a shame that you didn't got more mods up.

I did not know of the first exploit. Thanks for lighting it up.

I had read the scribd paper. It is not a problem with the vote but with the security of the user terminal. Obviously all systems are subject to this, even voting on electronic booth at the poll station (where on top of it, officials and their minions have physical access to the device).

The 3rd bug is more a glitch than a real problem, but I get your point that security is not perfect and there are known defects.

Your last point recoup my reservations. Wether the system is secure or not doesn't matter if citizen's cannot check for themselves that it is. Uncertainty can lead to turmoil and civil war, to the extreme. I really do not see a case for mass usage of this technology. I do see it useful in restricted use, for regions where it make sense for geographic reasons (like north america, which is huge, there is no way to install a voting station in all necessary locations to get a realistic expectation that distance is not the main deciding factor of abstention).

Addition:
* physical coercion is possible to force somebody to vote. It is always a possibility as soon as voting happens outside of a controlled ballot room. So even split credential is not a definitive solution to the issue of forced/bought votes.

I fail to see the benefit for the general voting body. IT makes sense only for citizens that cannot otherwise access a physical ballot due to distance (think deployed military personnel, nationals leaving in foreign countries, etc).

What the French republic implementation does (not the bogus system described in this article, that pertains to a particular party internal votes only) seems to enable verifiable anonymous votes.

You receive credentials in a split fashion. Half comes in the mailbox as paper. The second half is sent to a personal device (email is possible, but sms is preferred). If you want to prevent somebody to vote for you, just have your credentials sent to your personal phone, even if the family head receives the mail credentials, he cannot use them.

Second, the voting receipt is a sha key. Should there be a need for recounting, or should a citizen verify his vote, the sha key can be used. However, just having the sha key doesn't tell anybody what the vote was (without authority compliance, which is improbable to say the least, the procedure involves showing up IN PERSON with the sha printout, to verify your own vote). Votes are stored on the server anonymized, the sha key codes the voter identity, actually.

It is not immune to tempering (physical access to the computers always eliminate any expectation of security, just like physical access to paper ballots would result in the same uncertainty), but it is not -that- weak, and can be recounted if needed (by asking citizens to give back their sha keys, one can verify if all ballots have been counted, since the sha key is a proof of having voted, if the corresponding ballot is not found, there is a proof of tempering the results).
 

The official republic electronic voting system (reserved for consulate registered voters so far) has never been breached (that is known of). I have some reservations about e-voting (for lack of accountability and falsifiability by the random citizen), but being weak and easy to compromise doesn't seem to be the most important problem for the particular implementation. However, it is hard to use, and I know many voters that gave up voting because it was to difficult to have the voting system to work on their computer.

UMP (which is conservative right party) is reckoned for hiring the worst people to do any sort of techno job and ridicule themselves in dub-songs when trying to be cool on facebook. That would be just another milestone in their long history of hiring the nephew of some big shot, because he "knows computer", for 100k euros of public funds.

Moreover, the paper ballot vote at the last UMP president election also got seriously rigged. There was a 2 month period where the two prominent candidates claimed victory (and it seems that the one that cheated the most is still the ongoing president of the party... ). So in some sense, a weak system is not a bug, for the elections of this party, it's a feature.

Agreed. Highway mileage are the last thing that matter. You never need to convert them to anything else anyway.

What only matters is units that need to be converted to one another and are tedious or borderline insane in "imperial". having base 16 for small measures and 3 for longer is nonsensical. square feets being multiple of 144 is very impractical. Volume units that are a jungle of non-convertible measures is problematic.

But definitely, highway miles, who cares? Same goes for temperature. This is a single unit, it is confusing for foreigners for a while, but you get used to it. Unlike volumes and weight metric units, the Celsius system is not vastly superior, simply because Fahrenheit system is not broken, it is unusually consistent for an imperial measurement.

I think time could benefit from rationalization, but I doubt it is doable because of political/sociological resistance.
Beside, there is rarely need to do other type of conversions than hours:minutes to seconds, months to years and weeks to years/month. It would be more practical to have a unit in wich a year is a kilomonth, a month a kiloweek etc, but that would be a disruptive change, for little practical improvement.

Try making Macarons with your gut feeling, and tell me how it goes :)

Patisserie requires precision. You cannot just pour, stir and adapt. Doing this is a recipe for poor looking pastries, at best. At the extreme they do not even take and you have nothing but a sugary goop.

This is why recipe are actually different depending on what is customary for raw ingredients (amount of fat in butter/milk, amount of gluten in flour, yolk in eggs, dominant variant of yeast, etc).

Now, if you are making pizza, this is a different story.

In most of Europe, size of containers is standardized. That is, it is illegal to package things by 486g, meanwhile everybody else sells 500g in order to get a sticker advantage. Similarly, it is mandatory by law that stickers give price per unit or price per volume or price per weight in a consistent unit per product type, all produces of a particular type have to be labeled in price/Kg, and it is not legal to label them in price/L. It is especially irritating when, in the US, a similar item is sold per pound from one brand, per floz on the second brand, and per "unit" on the third one (typical for toilet paper rolls, often labeled per sheet, or per linear feets or per weight, all brand choose a different one, and sometimes even within a single brand this is not consistent). Makes any comparison practically impossible.

And remember I am saying all that, meanwhile I am all infuriated by the fact that incoherent and inconsistent units make it super hard to do the most simple things, like comparing the price per volume/weight of produces you buy at the local grocery store. One is labeled in oz, the other in pounds, the third one in fluid oz (brilliant, having too different things with the same name). Anyway, I am buying groceries, not participating in counting-bees contest, so computint divisions by 12 and multiplications 16^3 was not in my program for the day. This is were mandating consistent units for selling volumes of goods and comparable price/g or price/L would make sense. Conversion and comparison is simpler for consumer. Instead, the unit jungle makes price impossible to compare.

I was born and raised in metric land. I am now doing everything in "imperial" measurements, because using foreign units to do daily tasks is just about as productive as speaking cantonese to order food at your local burger drive-in. It doesn't work without excruciating efforts.

Go to a shop, buy food produces, everything is labeled in oz and other random nonsensical units. Still, converting everything doesn't make it easier. Cooking is their example, so lets try it! You'd thought that using your imported cookbook, you'd be able to cook all in metric. Not so quickly. First cookware are not in metric, but I also had imported metric measuring bowls, haha ! Then I discovered that the amount of fat in butter, milk, etc is not the same as in Europe (it is standardized, but standardized differently). So all recipe made with an european cookbook fail miserably, the cake falls, it looks dry, or wet, but never quite right. Good luck then finding a US cookbook using metric measurements. Then, what is the point exactly of using an imperial cookbook, convert all units to metric, use metric tool and result in failure because you made conversion errors ?

Nop, You are making a conversion error (it is expressed in g/L in most places, equivalent to 10BAC). Most of Europe is between 0.05 BAC and 0.03 BAC. Many countries are at statutory 0, not sure how that is enforced in practice (since natural BAC is often in the 0.01 range).