Crap display, crap keyboard, crap mouse replacement, low main memory, small slow hard disk. (Unless you've got a solid state disk.)

Just use a real computer, you know you want to.

Exactly. The problem with buying votes is verifying that you've got what you've paid for. With a vote placed in the ballot box by the voter there is no way to achieve this ... but there is a way to achieve it with postal votes, which is one of the things wrong with postal votes.

That's the key, and makes for clean elections - I've observed elections in the UK, Kosovo and Ukraine.

This tends to mean manual counting of physical pieces of paper that have been marked by the voter by hand, as that's vastly easier for lay people to observe and verify than hidden things going on inside computers or other machines. (I'm not saying that proper independent observation by lay people of what goes on inside a machine isn't possible, just that nobody has worked out how to do it yet.) If I'd observed an election involving machines I would have had to write in my report that I had no confidence in the outcome of the election because I had no visibility of what was going on inside the machines.

The big problem with the cleanliness of the UK voting system is postal votes - and this is in my view precisely because this is a part of the process which is *not* independently observed - you don't know for sure who applied for the postal ballots, who acquired them, or who filled them in under what pressure.

Good point.

I come across this when calculating how much fuel to put in an aeroplane - the bowser dispenses litres, I need to know what that is in pounds for the weight and balance calculation, and the fuel burn (and thus how much fuel I need) is specified in the POH in gallons per hour ... ... but these are indeed American gallons, not Imperial ones, and getting that sort of thing wrong can kill people.

Are the Colonies really still using Imperial units? - thought they must have stopped doing that yonks ago, after losing all those space probes to erroneous conversions between foot-slug-poundals and furlongs-per-fortnight.

Or is it like their refusal to use global standard paper sizes, or basically follow any other international standards - if it was invented in Europe it must de facto be Communist and therefore can't be touched with a barge pole?

... but these people haven't made a "profit" until they have SOLD their holdings.

Who to? Other investors? What if they all sell at once?

My local shop would build me what I asked them to, and it would work.

They've got people who know what each week's new motherboards can and can't do - there's no way I could keep up with that.

Of course manually built-to-order is slightly more expensive than buying commodity-boxes-designed-for-Windows off the shelf, but sometimes you get what you pay for.

Well yes, that as well.

... else's business?

Maybe I'm trying to work out where I'm going to live, and want to avoid neighbourhoods that are so dangerous that their residents think they need guns.

Well, you could always follow the NRA's advice and get a gun and shoot everyone who walks through the door. You gotta gun, you don't need locks.

... to get your records from the NHS that I've come across is when you want to transfer to a private doctor. In which case when the right conversations have been had you don't even pay the £10.

You don't get that many places. Conservative governemnts want to tell you to live your life the conservative way (things like, who you can sleep with, drinking laws etc), socialists want you to live your life the socialist way (things like, what you're allowed to do with your own money, the state will only engage with groups not individuals, one size fits all, etc).

Very few places have liberal governments who want you to be left alone to live your life *your* way, whatever that might be.

Only suited, it seems to me, for use in large numbers if you've got more land to waste than you know what to do with (which is the case in some parts of the world but not others).

In constrained city streets there is neither the road space nor the parking space for vehicles like this. OK so it might be a modest improvement if motorists started using them, but it would be a pretty catastrophic backwards step if existing cyclists started using them in any numbers.

But you can't do auto-updates of Java, otherwise other stuff on your machine stops working.

Java is sufficiently flaky that it's very common for particular applications to need particular versions very carefully installed and configured, so you end up with several versions on your machine - allowing auto-update is a recipe for utter chaos.

... is, as we say every time this comes up on /., paper ballots marked by the voter with a pencil.