If 10am is the new 9am then 1am is the new midnight. Give them some time to adapt and they'll still be late for school

Sure, they probably sold a few Kindles this Christmas. But my guess is they compare annual low with annual high here. Who the fuck buys paper books on Christmas day?!
- You're guaranteed a long wait for the item to arrive in the post due to holidays.
- You're busy with whatever family-holiday thing you do.
- It's a bit late buying that book as a gift.
- If it's for yourself, you probably bought it already.. when you bought Christmas gifts two week ago.
- You've already got lots of new stuff.

Rubber hosing is a potential issue, but there are 2 factors that limit the risk:
1) The written receit only needs to be kept until your entry is confirmed in the public records.
2) You are free to hand your receit over to anyone you trust and they could verify the public record for you. This could be individuals or an organisation.

If you put your receit in a box together with 1000 others immediately after you have voted you reduce the risk of having your vote exposed. You do have to trust the people/organisation looking after that box that they will fulfill your obligation to check the public records, though. But you're free to choose whom to give that receit to yourself.

How would it be easier to demand someone to reveal his vote number than demand him to reveal his vote?

The mapping from you to your vote number has to be yours and yours only. If that is not ensured, I agree that this system is broken. I don't see, however, any reason why that mapping would or should be revealed.
(See also reply to Mr. Freeman.)

A receit from the voting machine would take care of that. You get a receit back from the machine stating your voter number and your vote. It does introduce the problem that you have to carry a piece of paper revelaing your vote for a while, but you only need to keep the receit until you have verified that the same voternumber+vote combo is registered in the official records. Alternatively you could hand your receit over to someone you trust. If $yourfavouritetrustworhyorg is present at the voting station, you could hand it over to them immediately and let them monitor the official records.

Rather than focusing on the machine itself it is much more important to make sure that the results are verifiable. Here's my take:
1) Give the voter a randomly chosen voter number.
2) Reveal the vote for each voter number in some puclic channel. (Yes I mean print each and every one's vote in the newspaper)
3) Extend voter's obligations to include reading the newspaper the next day.
4) Have volunteers count the number of people entering each voting station.

If everyone is happy with his own entry in the newspaper and the volunteers are happy with the number of entries, then the election went well.

All this focus on securing an inherently insecure channel..I suggest we instead make sure that if the votes are not OK then it will be discovered after the election? I mean, if anonymity weren't an issue it would be as easy as having a list at the library after the election with names of people in one column and whatever they voted for in another. If everyone is happy with their own entry and the list doesn't have bogus entries, the election went well. Since anonymity is an issue, let the voters draw their receit number from a hat and use that number in the library list instead.

I get it. It's a local law enforcement inspection device disguised as a fake ATM

Yes.. Nice, wet, rainy winters in addition to those nice wet rainy summers! Norway just can't wait.

You underestimate Joe's vast amount of neurons finely tuned to the 10+ years of Windows usage. After 150 minutes tutorial it is still easier for him to do a wacky windows hack to solve a problem than doing that "sumo attitude thingy.."or whatever, because the windows hack he's done a billion times already.

The windows legacy in peoples way of thinking is something the OSS world has to accept and deal with, not bitch about. Don't underestimate 2000 hours of Windows exposure!

Quite a few of the choices are there because any application developer is forced to make choices from all the choices already out there.

Lets say I want an application with features XYZ. I go looking and find a large number of application with feature X, a large number of application with feature Y, a large number with feature Z. However, as the applications are spread out across different framework, GUIs, distros, personal coding styles and whatever, and since standarization is for suckers, I have a hard time finding an application with even two of my features, and there is no way in hell I will be able to find on with all three.

So.. there's nothing else for me to do than set out to make the application myself, and I as the developer have to make the choices about GUIs, frameworks and whatever. and since I want my application of choice to be far superior to the others, I read up on them all before I make the decision. A pretty time-consuming affair, but hey...I want my application to be far superior to the others. And after a lot of reading, a little bit of coding, and lots of swearing and bugfixing I finally get there: The oh so wonderfully superior BwashedXYZ.

Sensibly, I put it out there in the public for everyone to enjoy, and pat my shoulder knowing I've made the world a better place. Now anyone on distro A, using GUI B, with backends C,D,E,F and G installed, can tweak this to work on their H1 hardware (H2,H3,H4,...,Hn hardware doesn't work unfortunately since the manufacurers are suckers and cant provide drivers for this particular setup). I open open a bottle of champagne and prepare myself for the enormous amount of mail and gratefulness I'm about to receive

Those mails of course never reach my inbox. Due to lack of standarization I've created a product that is usable for a fraction of those 1% who chose to use GNU/Linux in the first place. Thousands of geeks cheer in harmony for another package in the distribution A repository, but unfortunately that happened to be a totally different thousands of people to my thousand of people: The thousands that would benefit from my XYZ application. I investigate and find that in my thousands of people I find tens of people using GNU/Linux(1%) and ones of people being bothered installing backend C (10% of the 1%). None of the latter had hardware H1

I'm all for free choice and the benefits of having competing products,but it has to be complemented by other things to work optimally. Some times one is just so much better off just deciding on some standard so that we all can use our creative energy WHERE IT MATTERS in stead of re-inventing wheels.


hmm... Maybe I should write this post in ancient Greek. I've heard it's such a superior language to express thoughts..

To be even more pedantic: Science does require belief. Digging deep down in the fundamental of mathematics you get to axioms you just have to accept or not since they are not provable. Sure, it's not really hard to accept that something can't be true and false at the same time, but it still goes unproven. The same thing in physics and science based on observations. At some point you go from observing the sun rise every day to stating that the sun will rise every day as a fact. It is a belief based on observation and calculations. Lots of observations and lots of calculations, but still not a fact.

Linux can run on 79 year old hardware.