ISoldat53 sends this quote from McClatchy DC: "The CIA, which has been monitoring foreign countries' use of electronic voting systems, has reported apparent vote-rigging schemes in Venezuela, Macedonia and Ukraine and a raft of concerns about the machines' vulnerability to tampering. Appearing last month before a US Election Assistance Commission field hearing in Orlando, Fla., a CIA cybersecurity expert suggested that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his allies fixed a 2004 election recount, an assertion that could further roil US relations with the Latin leader. ... Stigall said that most Web-based ballot systems had proved to be insecure. The commission has been criticized for giving states more than $1 billion to buy electronic equipment without first setting performance standards. Numerous computer-security experts have concluded that US systems can be hacked, and allegations of tampering in Ohio, Florida and other swing states have triggered a campaign to require all voting machines to produce paper audit trails."

microbee writes "Following the Linux kernel 2.6.29 release, several famous kernel hackers have raised complaints upon what seems to be a long-time performance problem related to ext3. Alan Cox, Ingo Molnar, Andrew Morton, Andi Keen, Theodore Ts'o, and of course Linus Torvalds have all participated. It may shed some light on the status of Linux filesystems. For example, Linus Torvalds commented on the corruption caused by writeback mode, calling it 'idiotic.'"

MessedRocker writes "I have at least a few USB flash drives around that I haven't needed since I got my 16GB flash drive, a 40GB external hard drive which I haven't needed since I upgraded to 500GB, and a couple of SATA hard drives I have pulled out of laptops which are either as large or smaller than the one I have in my laptop now. Furthermore, I don't really know anyone who needs any hard drives or flash drives. What should I do with my small, obsolete storage devices?"

With so many people losing their jobs, the farewell email, letting colleagues and contacts know where you are moving and how you can be reached, has become common. Writing a really good one, whether it be funny, sad or just plain mad is an art form. Chris Kula, a receptionist at a New York engineering firm, wrote: "For nearly as long as I've worked here, I've hoped that I might one day leave this company. And now that this dream has become a reality, please know that I could not have reached this goal without your unending lack of support." In May, lawyer Shinyung Oh was let go from the San Francisco branch of the Paul Hastings law firm six days after losing a baby. "If this response seems particularly emotional," she wrote to the partners, "perhaps an associate's emotional vulnerability after a recent miscarriage is a factor you should consider the next time you fire or lay someone off. It shows startlingly poor judgment and management skills — and cowardice — on your parts." Let's hear the best and worst goodbye emails you've seen.

An anonymous reader writes "I received a state university degree in Computer Science. After graduation, I immediately took jobs in QA to pay the bills while waiting for other opportunities, which of course turned out to be as naive as it sounds. I've been working QA for several years now and my resume does not show the right kind of work experience for programming. On the whole I'm probably no better as a a candidate than a CS graduate fresh out of college. But all of the job postings out in the real world are looking for people with 2-5 years of programming work experience. How do you build up those first 2 years of experience? What kinds of companies hire programmers with no prior experience?"

SmarkWoW writes "The university I attend is currently looking to change the way in which is provides its students with an email service. In the past they used a legacy mail system which can no longer fit their needs. A committee has narrowed the possibilities down to three vendors: Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Representatives from these three vendors will be coming to our college and giving a presentation on the advantages of their systems. We're looking at other services these companies provide such as calendaring and integration with existing software that our university runs. What questions would Slashdot readers ask during these Q&A sessions? Which of these three companies would you recommend? Why? What advantages would each have that college-level students would take advantage of? What other aspects should we consider when making our decision?"