you joke, but seriously, read about the Jains. They do try not to kill plants, eating no roots, and ideally no leaves, just fruits. Nor do they eat honey or milk. And your logical conclusion is accurate. The highest austerity is starvation.

As an example Chandragupta of Maruya conquered India through military action at first, but became a Jain and continued his conquest through diplomatic marriage. In the end he became an ascetic and fasted himself to death.

it's almost like a triple eclipse

you are either a troll or like 8 years old.

you raise one good point at the end though: ballot stuffing. it is a real problem.

one way this is handled is by collecting and publishing a list of eligible voters ahead of time, and only producing one ticket per voter, and provide a mechanism for a voter who has NOT voted to verify that their vote was not counted.

i'm not sure if the method talked about in this video addresses this issue well...

i think that this method has been around for a while though, maybe 5-10 years. i got very excited about it when i first read it, but it is hard to explain, and so i don't think it will ever be used...

condorcet voting would also be nice, but suffers the same problems

i understand your confuse. but i also understand the explanation.

alright watch the video... see after he tears the names off the ballot? now your ballot doesn't say who each checkbox means... not in plaintext anyways, the meanings are encoded in lotsa crypto gobeldygook on the right there... you take your ballot home with you, and verify it's in the database, exactly as you see it in your hand.

now... goon has to take your word that checkbox #1 is for the guy he wanted you to vote for, he has no way of knowing, and you don't have any way to prove it, even if you want to!

the system in question allows me to verify that my vote was correctly cast, without being able to prove it. assuming the ballots are made right, you will get the information about who each checkbox refers to, this secret is encoded in the 2d bar code, but encrypted, so that strong-arming can't work. when you rip off the names and shred them, this makes it very hard to prove to someone else who you voted for. YOU might know that checkbox #3 had ron paul next to it, you remember that, but when the thugs look at the ballot, they have no way of knowing...

now that said, the thugs could force you to wear a little camera and video everything you do in the booth, or some other contrivance... but it's still a stiff improvement... and that is not a new risk introduced by this tech.

another possible attack against this system is bad ballots. you have SPECIAL ballots that switch the democratic and republican candidates, and you check to see if the person has dreadlocks or a crew cut before you decide to hand them the good ballots or the bad ones. ideally the cryptography is such that only a small group of people can make valid ballots, and so you can centralize the fraud detection. this attack would require a good amount of collusion though, and any system fails if the entire world is conspiring against you (THEY ARE!!!!)

that sounds pretty good, but i think this crypto-thing would be better. people are working hard on the crypt to solve real problems

what you describe is pretty good, as it tries to fix problems with throwing the paper votes, but this improves on that a bit.

it's features include
* at the end i can check that my vote is in the published database of votes, which newspapers, etc can verify is added right.
* I cannot prove to anybody else who i voted for (so they can't strong-arm me)
* officials can not throw the votes in the trash, or a river, or bury them, or delete them... if the votes aren't in the published database people will see that their vote is missing.
* they can not scan the votes, keep them in the database, but add it up wrong and publish a wrong total, and then throw the records out. if they add it up wrong newspapers, universities, or any old slashdotter can do the adding themselves and call bullshit.

http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequests/

sneakers is the real deal, if you want a semi-realistic hacker movie.

great idea, but actually, this is a forwards mortgage.

+funny

google maps

I see this mistake all the time. The units look similar, mA and mAh. Also I often see mW and mWh confused in the same way.

mAh is a unit of electric charge, like the coulomb. mAh is not a rate of charge, or a rate of energy transfer. It's basically an amount of electrons.

A battery might say how many mAh it can store and dispense. Combined with the voltage, this would tell you how much energy the battery has.

If you leave OpenMoko plugged in long enough you can have an arbitrary amount of mAh(until your battery is full anyhow). It has nothing to do with how fast it charges. Following your link i see you misread the article. It says mA.

Personally I'd rather know how many mW this thing charges at. The page you link doesn't mention the voltage, but USB is specified at 5 (4.75 to 5.25), so that makes a maximum of 1000mA*5V, or 1A*5V = 5 Watts or 5000mW. This is not very fast...

For the OpenMoko it's probably fine, the OpenMoko battery is probably not that big. For a big chunky laptop it would be terrible, it'd take maybe 4x as long to charge as discharge. You wouldn't be able to operate on battery power.

Think about it, if the laptop needs to have enough power to operate USB peripherals, it requires significantly more power than that to operate if it's to function with a few USB peripherals plugged in.

maybe this would help people donate easily?