Do you have a link for the Ohio counties that use DRE? I run one of the voting locations in Franklin County (Columbus area), Ohio. We use ballot markers that print out the voter's choices which the voter then scans on a separate ballot counter.

Six or so years ago, I got a call from the county BOE asking if I would be willing to work the elections.

Me: Sure. What do you need me to do?

BOE: We'll make you a VLM.

Me: Ok, what is a VLM?

BOE: A Voting Location Manager. You'll be in charge of a voting location.

Me: Um...

BOE: Don't worry. We have a 2.5 hour online training course that you will take. A mandatory 3 hour in person training class and a 275 page manual. You'll be fine.

For 98% of the voters (we get about 1200 in person voters for a busy election in this location) the process is straight forward. Check the ID, look up the voter, print a slip that has their precinct ID, and send them to a ballot marker. The other 2% are the edge cases that I have to be trained for. These include name changes, new citizens, voter precinct changes, voters who must vote provisionally because they requested an absentee ballot, and curbside voters who cannot physically enter the location.

Besides the training, the job requires me to visit the location a few days before the election to make sure machines were delivered and see how the location should be set up. Sunday before the election I have to go to BOE HQ and pick up poll books (sealed) and a pile of papers (maps, posters, sample ballots, log books, forms, etc) all of which has to inventoried. Monday evening my team will set up the location. Tuesday, we must arrive at 0530 to finish setup so the polls can open at 0630. Voting ends at 1930 and then we have to pack up the site, seal everything, complete a pile of paperwork, and police up the site. Finally, two of us from opposing political parties have to drive the physical ballots from the ballot counters, the poll books, and a pile of paperwork back to the BOE HQ. I'll get home about 2200 Tuesday evening.

Across the nation, there is a perennial shortage of people willing to work the polls. Franklin County has to find ~4,000 poll workers every election. We do get paid, but I have to take a day off work and the pay amounts to about 20% of my day job wage. Interestingly, half or so of my team, including myself, are military veterans. Veterans seem to volunteer for these kind of jobs at a rate much higher than the general population does (~6% of US adults are veterans). It is too late to volunteer for this election, but Uncle Sam Wants You! so consider calling your local BOE for the next election.

And, FWIW, the ballot marker machines we use run Linux.

Unless, of course, you count /usrX11/bin/twm as a desktop(*). twm predates KDE by a decade or so. IIRC, even XFCE was 1st released before KDE. And when KDE was first released, Qt used a proprietary license.

(*) And still occasionally useful when your config files are completely FUBAR.

Retail sales are not down, they continue to grow. September saw a 0.8% increase in retail sales and the previous month's growth was revised upwards to a 1.3% gain. Two caveats. First, reported retail sales are in nominal terms that don't account for inflation. Second, the business press describes the economy as K shaped where the top 20% of households by income continue to spend liberally partially due to the wealth effect of stock market gains while the middle and lower income households struggle.

You are likely not among the intended audience of the IMF report. The report was not written for college sophomores. It is an 85 page global financial risk discussion written for business and government economics and finance professionals who understand precisely what each of those big words mean. The /. summary is simply a shortened version of the report's executive summary. Not everything written needs to be reduced to the reading level of the average high school student.

Which field is the unique serial number? I don't see any such value.

$ lscpu
Architecture: x86_64
    CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit
    Address sizes: 43 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
    Byte Order: Little Endian
CPU(s): 16
    On-line CPU(s) list: 0-15
Vendor ID: AuthenticAMD
    Model name: AMD Ryzen 7 1700X Eight-Core Processor
        CPU family: 23
        Model: 1
        Thread(s) per core: 2
        Core(s) per socket: 8
        Socket(s): 1
        Stepping: 1
        Microcode version: 0x8001138
        Frequency boost: enabled
        CPU(s) scaling MHz: 97%
        CPU max MHz: 3400.0000
        CPU min MHz: 2200.0000
        BogoMIPS: 6800.37
        Flags: ...
Virtualization features: ...
Caches (sum of all): ...
NUMA: ...
Vulnerabilities: ...

Rogue AI Finds Flaw in Nvidia Safety Platform, Breaks Into $COMPANY

Why the AI boom makes inflation harder to tame

OTOH, as Herbert Stein put it:

Ya know, Slashdot has this thing called a URL that you can insert in your comments if you want geeks to find your website...

Electoral fraud is not a problem today, but it was not always so. Stuffing ballot boxes was a common practice in many areas in the past. In Roane County where I grew up in E TN, this was an issue up until 1970. It was halted only because a group of good government advocates literally stood over the boxes from the time the boxes were distributed to precincts until the votes were counted. That group consisted of voters across the political spectrum from George Wallace supporters to George McGovern supporters. The one thing they had in common was a desire for fair elections. Their slate won resoundingly and booted out the very last remnants of the Memphis Crump machine that had dominated TN from the 1920s until the 1950s.

That group was able to win peacefully. But just South of Roane County, in McMinn County, TN, GIs returning from WWII solved a similar problem in 1946 by breaking into the Nat'l Guard Armory, arming themselves, and storming the county jail where the sheriff and his cronies had secreted the ballot boxes.

Thanks, I was going from an old, inaccurate memory on the unit. I've heard stories that in one of the buildings you could almost go swimming in the stuff. A family friend who won nearly every award that a chemical engineer can win and who had a major hand in the lithium production, told me one time that the mercury was in an inert state that didn't pose a lot of danger. He also used to claim that we should be as much or more concerned about the arsenic leaching out of old coal mines in the Cumberland Mountains above Oak Ridge as we should be about the various releases from the Oak Ridge facilities. I'm neither a chemist nor a biologist and can't really evaluate how true those claims are.

I grew up in the Secret City Manhattan Project town of Oak Ridge, TN in the 1960s and 70s. Last estimate I heard said that the contamination in Oak Ridge from the Manhattan Project and the Cold War would not be cleaned up until 2050 -- 100+ years after the end of WWII.

As kids, we would ride our bikes onto the reservation woods in the area between the West end of Oak Ridge and the K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant. There were gates that proclaimed this was illegal trespassing, but try telling that to 10 year old kids. Years later, I learned that there had been a couple of major releases of uranium hexaflouride over this area. There were also releases of strontium-90 into the local rivers. The plant had told their workers not to drink the water, but had waited 24 hours before alerting the downstream community water supplies. The Y-12 plant also released 2.4 million tons of mercury into the creek that runs through the center of Oak Ridge. The mercury was used to purify the lithium that was used in the hydrogen bombs (*).

A few years ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. It was dealt with and I seem to be cancer free today. I recently learned that because I lived in Oak Ridge and had cancer, I am now eligible for compensation under the
Radiation Exposure Compensation Act changes that were passed as part of Trump's One Big F'Ugly Bill Act. This is the American Way (TM). Rather than preventing or fixing the problem before hand (cough, cough AI), we'll just pay off the victims after the inevitable disaster.

(*) To be fair to the scientists who worked on the Bomb, though, many of whom were the parents of my friends, the environmental movement really didn't get moving until the early 60s and the imperatives of a world war and the later Cold War took precedence over the local environment.

Jimmy Kimmel’s Interview with James Talarico That the FCC Doesn’t Want You To See

1,689,537 views 9 hours ago

I fooled 'em. I just removed the sticker with the serial number on it from the back of the tv..

Not only do they get the road names wrong, they also get important info such as weight limits wrong. My BIL, who was the civil engineer for an Ohio county, used to complain that Google maps was sending semi-trucks down a road to a bridge with a weight limit that could not handle the load. A semi that approached the bridge then found itself in a spot where turning around was next to impossible. IIRC, they fixed the issue with a road sign that told semis no go since they could not get Google to correct their map.

I woke up on April 17, 2009 and discovered I was Canadian. Canadian citizenship laws have become rather relaxed. My Mom was born in New Brunswick in 1931 in a house that is now part of King's Landing. Because Canada had no citizenship law until 1947, she was technically a British Overseas Citizen. The family moved to Detroit during the depression. Mom became a US citizen in the 1950s and lost her Canadian citizenship as a result. Didn't matter anyway for me because Canada only recognized citizenship if your father was Canadian. That was fixed in 1977. But then in 2009 Canada restored Mom's citizenship and gave it to me as well. But under the 2009 law, I could not pass it on to my kids because I wasn't born in Canada. Looking at your links, that requirement seems to have been relaxed.