Religion has led to more deaths throughout history than anything else.

How about maybe... malnutrition? Or, to cheat horribly, old age?

I'm all for ripping on religion, but you've got to keep your sense of scale. Religion mostly doesn't kill people, just robs their lives of meaning.

Why would a pedophile want to do that when they can search the database where it is?

I'm pretty sure that this works the same as the corollary to Goodwin's law. When you bring up pedophiles or child molesters in an online discussion, you're an idiot, you've killed the thread, and your side loses the argument.

No. Those aren't serious idea-killing problems, those are minor engineering problems that have already been solved (each in a multitude of different ways). The problem is simply that a solid commercially viable product idea and source of funding have yet to be put together in the same room.

You're right. Humans can't grasp large numbers by simple intuition. Thing is, reality involves large numbers. That's why we've developed mathematical tools to deal with them over the thousands of years of human civilization. People who refuse to learn to use mathematics to understand the world deserve no more sympathy than people who refuse to learn to use hammers and complain that they have trouble pounding nails with their fists.

I won't. Gnome is even more limiting in practice than Windows.

Huh? I run Gnome. It does what it needs to do and keeps out of the way the rest of the time. What more could you ask for?

It sure seems like an easy problem, doesn't it.

As a programming problem, it seems like an easy problem because it is. Thing is - it's not a programming problem. It's a security problem. As a security problem, the programmer is the most significant potential attacker. Does it still seem easy?

If the margin of victory was greater then 2 percent, then it should be non-issue as far as who is in office. But it should be fixed for the next election.

Unless you're actually serious about the importance of voting, in which case the response here is very simple: Throw out the invalid votes (all of them) and re-run the election.

"Verifiable" means you don't have to trust the implementation.

But that raises the next question: Verifiable by who?

Saying that there are some experts who can verify the proper execution of an election simply isn't good enough, at least not if you want to call that election "democratic". With paper ballots marked with pens and placed in a ballot box, any voter of normal intelligence can observe an election, understand the security properties needed at each step, and see for themselves if those security properties are maintained. Any alternate system must maintain this property.

Great that you take the big view, but the necessity of feeding your kids needs to be addressed today.

If you're desperate, you take bad deals. It's worth a certain amount of effort to avoid being in that position.

Call me when Google uses a "small team" to convert a couple of hundred undocumented or poorly documented apps written in C and running on an old system like VMS since the mid-80s.

Why would those systems need to get rewritten?

In spite of bad teachers, who absolutely would not have been any better if they made more money.

You're absolutely missing the point of paying teachers more. If teachers, in general, were paid more you might have gotten *different* teachers.

More keyboards makes the situation moderately more complicated, but snooping doesn't require anything especially more difficult. It's probably even possible to separate out the keystrokes based on which keyboard they came from entirely based on the characteristics of the signals.

So if I write the next Da Vinci Code, get published, then die in a car crash the next day, my wife and kids shouldn't get anything?

You should get paid if you're working. That's how it works for everyone else. Authors and musicians aren't special.

The practice of expecting that a person's possessions go to their family and/or friends when they die is older than human civilization. It's what will happen by default unless society interferes and confiscates things. In contrast, with copyright it's every single other person in society who's being imposed on and having their ability to use their possessions constrained.