What I couldn't find was an explanation of what the "crypto" stuff in that 2D barcode is. I think I've seen something about some other similar systems where there's some mathematical voodoo that goes on that lets you use that data to tally a group of votes without being able to know the details of the individual votes.

Regardless of the details, I think that the data in that barcode has stuff that allows anyone to verify that a) it is an authentic ballot and b) given the full set of ballots, recompute the tally on their own and compare that to the published results.

Wish I could remember where I saw that or how it worked though.

The mechanism shown in the video actually does address this. The voting form layout is randomized, and the "key" portion (the bit matching checkboxes with candidates) is destroyed at the voting location. The receipt shows your marks, so you can verify that the marks counted match the marks you made, but it does not show what those marks mean. Even if someone forces you to give up your receipt, they have no way of knowing how you voted, only that the system recorded the vote correctly.

Yes, storing and providing full text search over a large pile of email consumes resources ... duuuh?

Also they're measuring the performance of Thunderbird while converting to the new system, not in its steady state. This is like complaining that Firefox uses a lot more CPU importing settings from IE than IE uses when looking at your home page.

Their claim as to how long it took to do the full text indexing of the mail seems dubious to me. I've got a similar amount of mail, and the time it took to index was more like minutes, not days.

The other thing to do if you want longish term reliability is to add redundancy to whatever you're storing with a tool like par2, http://www.par2.net/ and http://www.quickpar.org.uk/ are your friend.

Raid5 will help you if you lose a whole drive (e.g. siezes up from sitting still for a long time), the par2 data will both allow you to verify that the data hasn't been corrupted, and if it is (e.g. a couple sectors go bad), it will let you recover the data.