The electoral process must not only be fair, but also it should be very visibly fair. Otherwise the losing side will always accuse the other side of "fixing" elections. So the switch to e-voting requires the much harder work of persuading people that it is trustworthy. Other technical challenges are also very difficult. The voter should be able to verify that his/her vote is cast correctly and counted correctly. At the same time no one else, even with the cooperation of the voter, should be able to connect the vote cast to the voter. Voter not being able to prove how he/she voted is a fundamental requirement, without it people would buy/sell votes with confidence.

Strangely some people do lock up jewellery and other valuables in a safe inside the house too. In fact most states require you to lock the gun cabinets. (No requirement to lock the house though ;-))

Any one who can log in to your unix/linux account, (or any one who can read your ~/.ssh folder, if you are dumb enough to leave it group/world readable) can steal your ssh keys and pretend to be you and log in to all machines in the known hosts file.

The quality of Indians applying for H1B positions from India has changed a lot in the last decade. The opportunities have expanded a lot in India, they get very good salary and they hire cooks and maids for a pittance over there. So most top quality engineers do not want to leave India. Real high quality ones from IITs and Regional Engineering Colleges (whatever they are called now) etc go into management and if at all they come to USA, it is to Wharton, Kelloggs and such brandname MBA programs. Some high quality engineers come to USA to do Masters and they are usually good. Also a big factor is USA has lost its charm in the eyes of most young women in India. They are used to having maids and cooks. They go, "what? do the dishes, cook the dinner, wash the clothes, and gasp, clean the bathrooms? Are you crazy I am not coming there". So they high quality applicant stream has dwindled. I have not seen an IIT resume cross my desk in the last 10 years.

On the other hand there are plenty of second, some third or even fourth grade engineers still enchanted by USA. They still apply and they are the ones most slashdotters disdainfully make fun of as poor quality desi programmers.

I would not go back, no matter what pay they offer and how many cooks, drivers and maids I could afford over there. Once you get used to the clean water and clean air, and reliable electric grid, it is difficult to readjust. But next generation of me are not coming here. Sadly. It would benefit both USA and them. And those who are still willing to come damage USA and damage the reputation of all Indians, all for a fistful of dollars.

Pretty soon the Arctic will be ice free round the year and ice breakers will be scrapped and may be one or two saved as curiosities in museums.

Well, the dictionaries constantly add new words and new meanings and usages for old words. My pet peeve: pretty soon "begs the question" will have an accepted definition "raises the question" instead of circular argument fallacy . Insecticide is something that kills insects. It need not be insect on insect violence. So it is time we expand the meaning homicide to anything that kills humans.

BTW in most barbershops in the USA they have a jar of disinfectant where they soak the combs, brushes and clippers, brandname "Barbicide". Shhh, don't tell them it is a liquid that kills barbers.

It is marketing bullshit. It is not supposed to make sense.

Yeah, never miss an opportunity to blame the government and the bureaucracy. All that fracking and all that cheap natural gas flooding the market has no bearing on the decision. Most energy experts predicting USA to become a net exporter of petroleum products in the coming years did not affect the decision. 25 billion dollars is a pittance for Duke Energy and the only reason they scuttled the project was because of bureaucracy and regulation and delays.

Expect the same thing to be repeated in West Virginia and South Western Pennsylvania coal belts. They will blame the government, onerous regulations, etc etc and claim "clean coal" was killed by enviro nazis. All the while the natural gas is getting cheaper than even the dirty coal. If you spend more money on cleaning up dirty coal how can you compete with another thing that burns more easily, transports more easily and costs less?

We may disagree whether this boom in fracking and natural gas abundance is a good or bad. But one thing we can be sure is, these entrenched interests would blame the government at every opportunity even when the true cause is thumping its chest like an 800 lb gorilla right on their faces.

You don't understand. Telling the policemen off, calling the FBI jackbooted thugs, firing warning shots at the police under castle doctrine, killing teens in hoodies armed with skittles and ice tea are are the rights Pakistanis would never have in America.

Their no-contract plans are good. Despite a strong smear job by some Attorney General, (probably paid under the table by the big carriers), their phones are not locked once they are paid for. Unlimited talk, text and data, throttle down to 120 kbps after 500 MB, (10 Mbps before). 2GB more for 10$/month/line. 10 more for unlimited. When I got my nexus 4 from Google directly they gave me a micro simcard for free in their kiosk. Another nexus4 I saw from the store did not have as much junk pre loaded. No surprises so far.

My brother was saying that T-mobile benefited immensely in the failed take over big by AT&T. Apparently they had fine print, saying AT&T should give T-Mobile some 3 billion dollars and access to its network, if the deal was stopped by the Feds. So suddenly T-Mobile's coverage area increased tremendously and got some money too. But other are saying that still, T-mobile's coverage is its weak spot.

It is very telling there is no obfuscated FORTRAN coding contests. I think most carefully written lucid code in FORTRAN will beat the winner of this obfuscated c code winner handily.

Cost of using computer or phone includes things other than just money. Speaker's time is valuable too. That is what limiting infinite consumption. But in corporations such things can take a completely surreal turns. There was the apocryphal story about the build group of a major software vendor that was doing daily builds on products (both release and debug, mind you) on branches way after the end of life of products. The product teams had been disbanded but none of them issued "stop build" request and the scripts were faithfully rebuilding a frozen code branch for more than a decade.

How many people laughed at all the rednecks creating weird contraptions to hurl pumpkins down a harvested field in Discovery channel? Now who is laughing, eh? When space travel is commercialized and you are crammed into the economy class seat of the commuter plane to mars, you may have to thank Bill "1 gallon" Schwarzenhammer, winner of Pumkin Chunkin 2021, who was the first one to hurl a pumpkin all the way to Moon, more known for his ability to gulp down 1 gallon of beer without pausing for breath.

It is not your father's fortran buddy! The highly optimized procedures, oops sorry subroutines, are in FORTRAN, But the simulation runs on huge high performance clusters with a mix of GPU, CPU and FPU. You might get a different result if you replace all he 3 meter ethernet cables in the cluster with 10meter cables.

Navier-Stokes equations come under continuum mechanics. Fundamental assumption is even at infinitely small control volumes the field quantities like mass, momentum and pressure are continuous. But we know the fluids are made up of molecules. These quantities are not really continuous when the control volumes are comparable to atomic/molecular dimensions. These molecules undergo random motion induced by temperature (Brownian motion). These are supposed to be the fundamental reason for turbulence. So you can not use N-S to predict the fluid flow far into the future. These things are known even before computers were even invented.

But instead of expecting perfect weather forecast if you are willing to settle for reasonable accurate over reasonable periods of time, yes, it could be done.

Another problem with weather forecasting is communicating the massive data that emerges from these simulations to the masses. Listeners want to know if they have to pack an umbrella. How are you going to tell thousands of users with million different daily routines, whether it would rain long enough when and where they are outside vehicles or buildings to require an umbrella, over a few sentences in radio?