I'm awfully sure that some script kiddie moron can't alter tens of thousands of paper ballots instantly with a fucking Excel hack.

No, no, no. Why would a script kiddie moron care about the elections when there's all those online casinos they could be attacking? What I worry about are the squads of brainiacs being paid well by their respective governments to find innovative ways to hack the elections to give them a little "nudge".

Actually, while that is of note, it's not necessarily 'the most important', and probably not the most difficult or interesting. We do pretty well with e-mail and web-pages stored on remote locations. That's definitely a starting point. Data services fit into the ubiquitous computing model like any other. Don't like where your data is stored? Migrate it. Have this done automatically. The ideas mooted here do make the ownership issue more acute, but they hardly raise the questions for the first time.

Henry