Every state I've lived in and the Federal government will all let you pay extra if you want to. If you really think that you want to pay an extra $300, do it.

If you can convince all your friends, let them do it to.

If you say, "I meant everyone should pay an extra $300." Then don't try to make yourself sound noble by saying you'd gladly pay, because that's not what you meant.

That argument would be a lot more persuasive if they didn't have code that parsed out the "accidentally" captured information and stored it. They knew exactly what they were doing.

See this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/04/schmidt_wifi/

Of course, you probably believe that rogue engineers were able to plant code into the Google black helicopter fleet.

I wanted to see my old searches instead of Google's auto-suggest. I turned off instant search but couldn't turn off the auto-suggest (or whatever they call it), so I switched to Bing.

It's been several days and I haven't been hit by lightning yet.

In the local Juco culinary program I've taken some classes in, they allow students to use (simple) calculators and paper dictionaries, but no electronics besides the calculators. This came up precisely because of the situation the original poster describes: one student said she wanted to use an electronic dictionary, but they discovered that she had either saved (or bought a package containing) some data that students were not allowed to have during the exam.

Before people go into the issue of memory versus comprehension, understand that in a professional kitchen (or anywhere you have to get things ready in a timely manner), one does not have time to look everything up and memorizing recipes or measurement conversion or other data is in fact a measure of progress in a subject.

That said, since most schools only really care about buzzword-compliance and revenue, the OP should probably just allow the students to tell him they completed the course requirements and save them the time of proving it.

Personally, I'm not too anxious for constant satellite telemetry to be a mandatory part of the equipment. I don't think too many people would be happy to hear that their flight was canceled/delayed to install a new satellite transmitter on the plane.

The major technical issue is 100% fail-safe reliability. With decent compression, the bandwidth shouldn't be that big a thing.

He's wrong. Utz developed all the information put on the package (with the possible exception of the base part of their UPC number). Some of the information is required to be there by others, but they don't create the information. Some of the formats (the bar code, for example) are created by others, but they don't create the information. Further, none of that information is guaranteed to be correct, and the only party responsible if it's not is Utz.

Think how many people would be unable to take jobs if just 1% of the checks returned false negatives. Who wants to wait while the INS (or other agency) decides they might have made a mistake and will update the database in the next annual batch? I like to eat and I have to pay bills; I'd prefer to take the chance that someone will hire a few illegal aliens to this.

Actually, adding more lanes does work, compared to the real world numbers of high speed rail.

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10170

I've seen this talked about, too. I wonder how many battery packs could be stored, charged and kept in ready racks (or whatever the system is) by a standard 0 to 1 attendant 'gas' station. The prototypes I've seen on TV also appear to have a lot of moving parts; I expect they'd have a failure rate close to, or in excess of, the failure rate of the normal gas station car wash.

In my experience with paper ballot elections, everything is supposed to be under lock and key both before and after the election and the counting is done in a room with restricted access.

The difference is not the security. The difference is whether the raw data can be gone through again if one wins enough court fights. Of course, there are plenty of recorded stories of destroyed/missing ballot boxes and precincts that have returned more paper ballots than there are registered voters. It's almost as if there is no perfect system that allows for a secret ballot.

Irrigation manufacturers have been doing this kind of thing for years. It may be new in India due to economics, I suppose.

Having a wife, I am sometimes forced to watch shows like Bravo's Millionaire Matchmaker. In one episode, she tells the eager young women that one of the best places to pick up wealthy, unattached men is at comics conventions. I was a little surprised to hear it, but her logic made sense.

There's that Battlestar Something-or-other show that some people watch, too.

Sad to say, but if a show doesn't get ratings, it's because people aren't watching it.

None of you are lawyers (as far as I could tell from the previous posts). Neither am I. What I do know about this is that the terms of Amazon selling these e-books are defined by very carefully drafted contracts (assuming that both sides had lawyers who like earning fees) and this issue will be decided on a legal interpretation of those contracts.

It's not a matter of philosophy. It's not a matter of technology. It's a legal matter.

This is not the first system to be federally certified. It is the first system to be certified under the current standards. The standards change every couple of years and anything that enters testing while one set of standards is in force is grandfathered with that set of standards, even when new ones come into force. (When a significant revision is released, the current standard then takes effect - that is what slows changes in voting equipment to a crawl.)

By the way, good luck getting an open source group to pay for continued repeat testing of any system as each revision is released.