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MASSIVE Star Trek Movie spoiler source

You have been warned, the site at the end of this posting contains massive Trek spoilers. DO NOT CLICK if you want to be a “virgin” for the reboot of Trek coming this Christmas. Said link is here.

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Bubba Gump Shrimp Factory

Based on the much-loved (and loathed by yours truly) film Forrest Gump, my son Neal and I visited the Bubba Gump Shrimp Factory in Charleston last weekend. Hate the movie, LOVED the decor and food. Check out my tumblr feed…

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Voting with (little) Confidence

Electronic voting systems – introduced en masse following high-profile problems with traditional voting systems in the state of Florida during the 2000 presidential election – were designed to quell fears about accuracy. Unfortunately, those concerns continue to permeate political conversation. The Emergency Assistance for Secure Elections Act of 2008, introduced recently by Rep. Rush Holt, proposes government funding for jurisdictions that use electronic voting to switch to systems that produce a paper trail. But many experts say that a paper trail alone can’t solve the problem.

Ben Bederson, an associate professor at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland, was part of a team that conducted a five-year study on voting-machine technology. Bederson says that machines should be evaluated for qualities beyond security, including usability, reliability, accessibility, and ease of maintenance. For example, in a 2006 Florida congressional election, some voters were uncertain whether touch-screen machines had properly recorded their votes, especially after 18,000 ballots in Sarasota County were marked “No vote” by the machines. “Security, while important, happens to be one of those places where voting machines actually have not proven to fail,” Bederson says. “However, in many other ways, they have failed dramatically, especially [regarding] usability. The original Florida problem was primarily a usability issue.”

In the study, participants were told to vote for particular candidates in mock elections. The researchers then compared the results recorded on the machines with the voters’ intentions. Bederson says that even for the simplest task – voting in one presidential race on a single screen – participants had an error rate of around 3 percent. Bederson notes that, although the error rate that occurred in the study may not necessarily mean that there is the same error rate in terms of actual votes on actual machines, the study does raise concern, considering how close some recent elections have been.

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Microsoft to acquire Yahoo!

Wow, I was just commenting yesterday to a colleague about how much cash-on-hand Microsoft has (over 22 Billion last I checked), and then I wake up to read that they are going to use some of that to