The story on the CBC national news last night suggested that it was snail-mailed anonymously on a portable hard drive to a DC based journalist. This doesn't explain where the data ultimately came from, but does explain how the ICIJ came to have it.

Google App Engine is great.

Obviously lots of people around these parts have issues with the fact that you are giving Google control of your data, and that much is certainly true, but I think it misses the point.

Not every site needs to store people's private data, and for everything else GAE is a Java developer's dream come true. It's incredibly fast to get set up, the APIs are all very intuitive to anyone with experience in Java webapp development, it scales quickly and powerfully when it gets hit by a flood of users, and the management tools and UI are top-notch. On top of that, the free quotas are fairly generous, and charges after that are reasonable.

My only real complaint would be the BigTable-based database. They expose it (as an option) with JPA, and it's tempting to treat it as a relational database, which is decidedly isn't. You'll get terrible performance and quickly use up quotas if you don't spend a lot of time designing for the storage model they use, which is probably best described as a hierarchical tree of maps.

(For what it's worth, and I'm sure I'll regret doing this, here is a recent app engine based project I worked on, tracking Toronto's streetcars)

I disagree.

Turn your argument on its head: If the controls are above the tabs, that seems to imply that they apply to all tabs. Does that mean that if I click "reload", all tabs should be reloaded? If I enter a new URL, should all tabs go there, since the URL bar is outside the tabs as well?

I would argue that actually interacting with controls is far more important than rearranging them, so their placement should agree with the latter, not the former.

"for basically just catching up to where the rest of the world already has been for a couple years."

Another way of looking at is that they are now well ahead of where apple are in this regard.. i.e. locked down daap, only supporting one single video codec and 2 minimalist containers, etc.

I wouldn't imagine this would actually cause that much trouble for anyone except the thief.

Since (at least in Canadian elections, don't know about others) the polling station would know exactly how many ballots had been placed in that box, it would be pretty easy for them to figure out how many ballots had gone missing.

A single missing box would probably contain under 100 ballots, so unless the final count was extremely close there would be no need to redo the election in that riding. On the other hand, if it was extremely close undoubtedly a do-over would be called in that riding.

/ You look like soviet russian. Do you  \
| break computers or do they break you? |
\ (Accept) (Yes) (Reboot) (Maybe later) /
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         \  O|  |O|
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