Calvin was not a jew, dude.

ah, so that's the other half!

Obvious question: what is 95% confidence supposed to mean? How is it different from say 94%?

As long as the student cannot come up with something like "there is a chance of 5 in 100 that the result was caused by the sampling process" he has no idea what he is talking about.

Speaking of critical thinking, the student should also understand that one in twenty results with 95% confidence will be wrong.

Of course seven stones is a lot. Also, this was not a tournament game. But still, this is amazing progress. Btw, an older version of mogo is freely available, try it out for yourself.

These days are over.

Go program beats professional 9 Dan at 7 stones handicap

On a side note, Zhou Junxun won the LG Cup 2007, so this is definitely a top player.

Maybe I am overlooking something, but what is the point of hashing here? What is the gain compared with simply handing out a random number?

Assuming the number is not random or can be stored, the hash will not prevent a dictionary attack.

Great idea, send your secret random bits to some web app for harvesting

Just some thouhgts: The paper ballot can be understood and verified by every voter. The technique used may be simple, but the protocol is quite sophisticated. To verify the system you propose, you would still need to repeat all calculations. Also, how do you verify that the random numbers are really random? Your argument for stochastic verification suffers from a lack of randomness. The 0.1% percent that actually check will be far from random. Electronic voting is supposed to make the voting process easier. Manual verification of hashes of several hundred bits is not my idea of simplicity.

Even if this works in theory, there may be flaws in the implementation. And even if implemented correctly, there may be issues with key management.

But most importantly, for 99,9% of the voters, it is impossible to understand the system, let alone verify the actual vote. Therefore, it is just a matter of time (or money) before some manipulation by insiders takes place.

The real problem with electronic voting vs banking comparison is that banking has a completetly different aim: earning money.

Electronic banking is not secure. Period. E.g. in 2008, in the U.K. online banking fraud caused losses in the order of 50 Million Pounds. However, the banks still make a profit. ("It's just the cost of doing business...")

This kind of thinking is a bit problematic with voting.

Since Moore's Law is about Transistor density and says nothing about speed, I see no difference in reliability.

as promptly demonstrated by the following rant:

Answer: usage of prepared statements.

And while we are at it, let us not forget to mention Qt.

You obviously have no idea what a context switch is.
A context switch happens when the scheduler stops one process/thread and gives the CPU to a different one. This has nothing to do with cross-library calls.