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Comment Re: Aircraft safety is important (Score 1) 147

The problem with this plan is, that once you can check your vote afterwards, then someone else, say, your boss or your spouse, can pressure you to show it to them as well, to make sure you voted "the right way". That way, election fraud (albeit in another form) would become almost a certainty.

Comment Re:Lying != Assuming (Score 5, Informative) 22

> WhatsApp for end-to-end encryption,

Did you take into account that although Facebook cannot read your messages due to end-to-end encryption, Google can, if you've enabled cloud backups?
Messages are back-upped at Google in unencrypted format.
Google (and people who say "pretty, pretty please" to Google) can read them.
And I think that's a security issue that's not widely advertised by WhatsApp/Facebook.

Comment Re:How do you anyway in Google Maps? (Score 1) 229

The strips aren't that thin, if you only know which country you're in.
In fact, a very large part of France would still be France if you flipped the sign on the E/W coordinate.

Eight years ago, I experienced this first-hand.
A good friend participated in the randonneuring (cycling) event Paris-Brest-Paris, which, as the name indicates, starts and ends near Paris, after visiting Brest, in the most western tip of France.

I had bought a GPS tracker for him so all friends could follow his progress from their homes.
The tracking package I used (OpenGTS) had no driver for the exact model of the tracker, but had one that was "close enough" that I could modify.
The driver was in Java, which I didn't know, but which looked to me a lot like C/C++. I made the modifications, tested, everything was fine.

During the ride, we saw, to our horror, that, at a junction, he took the wrong turn.
Instead of west, he was going east! It took some time to figure out what happed. The junction was exactly at the zero-meridian, and I, not knowing Java, had missed that in order to compare two strings for equality, you need to use .equals instead of ==.
By the time I fixed this error, he was almost in Germany on the map, and jumped from there directly into Brest, a jump of more than 1000 km.

Comment New??? (Score 1) 22

Why do they present this as an innovation?
About 8 to 10 years ago, I bought a GPS tracker with exactly this functionality.
You could send it an SMS with some command, and it would send back its current location.
No internet necessary (although it could also send regular updates over GPRS).
Cost? About $50 on DealExtreme.

Comment Re:who's still selling x86 hardware? (Score 1) 107

I have an ASUS EEEbook X205ta that has the same.
I'm running 64-bit XUbuntu on it.
I only needed a 32-bit UEFI loader for grub on it to make it work.
Unfortunately, the Linux kernel still has trouble with the power saving modes of the Baytrail chipset, but some workarounds have been made.
Here and here are links with helpful information.

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