The number of holes in the Diebold technology was simply incredible. There were ways to compromise the machines themselves, ways to compromise the software that counted the votes, etc.

There was no way to run a recount. A recount consisted of saying "Yup, I added the numbers again and they're the same". There's no trail of ballots after the election to check. The machines just keep a count and when the election is over, they're wiped.

Add to that the other issues of technology obsolescence and the machines needing to be stored for long periods of time between uses. Add in the difficulties of handing out machines to voting personnel who get an hour's worth of training.

E-Voting is a solution looking for a problem. The paper ballots with optical scanning is as much technology as you need.

He's at Disneyland with Walt in suspended animation

Many of the system utilities for RSTS/E, a DEC PDP-11 operating system, were written in BASIC-Plus. That included the login utility. The older versions of RSTS/E came with the utilities as BASIC source so you could mess with them.

BASIC-Plus was pretty advanced but it still lacked some critical things like scoping. I don't think it was possible to do recursion in it.

Assume that you make the transfer at 120 km/hr, that means that if you want to have a 5 minute dwell time, you need 10 km of track to make the transfer. You'll need more track for a buffer to slow down in case there's mechanical difficulty or a passenger problem and you need to bring the trains to a halt.

Now, a "tram" is typically a one or maybe two car light rail vehicle. Your HSR trains are typically 10 cars. Are you only loading onto 2 cars at a time? That's workable in rural areas but how do you handle the big cities? Or do you try to form the LRVs into a longer train to load up. Any LRVs that miss the schedule will really screw things up.

This sounds neat but it's not really practical.

No, the gap is that there are too many trusted parties and when some idiot on the other side has a security breach it is affecting people everywhere.

A large percentage of my company website is XML that gets translated into HTML via XSLT. On the plus side it works fairly well and getting our non-designer employees to update information in the XML files is straightforward.

On the minus side, we've found it nearly impossible to find web designers who can wrap their head around the idea of making a template page or to write an XSL stylesheet. Typically I wind up with a monstrosity in HTML that then has to have the template ideas teased out of it. It might just be that we can't find sophisticated web designers here in Japan, though.

I wound up learning way too much about XSL and XSLT to implement some of the things that happen in the site and there is a lot of damn strange XSLT code in the stylesheets. However, XSLT may be a monstrosity but I think I prefer it to CSS.

It should be something that the judge has regular discretion to give. Also, major sanctions against the attorneys for bringing frivolous lawsuits.

Ten years ago this might have been a viable threat to Linux. Today, however, Linux is worth too much money to too many people for this to be used to wipe it out. At worst, it will mean that cheap hardware will be locked down.

There was a time when converting from DC to AC meant motor-generator sets (meaning exactly what it sounds like - a DC powered motor turning an AC generator) but today we have the technology to convert high voltage DC to AC. High Voltage DC is more efficient over long distances and, as noted, is better for undersea cables. Typically, you use DC for the long haul and then do a conversion, once, to AC and feed it into the high power AC distribution grid for relatively local distribution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current

I don't think that's fair at all. This is a VTOL rocket that takes off and lands all in one piece. I don't know if they'll be able to get it to being a Single Stage To Orbit (SSTO) but they're a lot farther along than NASA ever got at that game. The whole vehicle is reusable (like an airplane).

The closest thing to this was the DC-X. DARPA funded it and they got it to the point where it flew for less than 3 minutes and up to 3000 meters (about 10,000 feet). It did not go supersonic.

NASA took over the program and promptly broke the prototype.

Then, NASA and Lockheed Martin poured over a billion dollars into the X-33 project and never got to the point of a finished vehicle.

So, libertarianism to the rescue? Not necessarily. Pragmatism and a desire to actually fly something rather than mess around with paper studies endlessly? I'd say that's more of the driver.