It's worth working on to be sure. Another thing I think is worth working on is educating people on what blockchain actually is (which it seems you are doing). I think paper voting works primarily because people know and trust how the votes are counted and how they get to the counters, for the most part. But personally I barely understand transistors and flip flops let alone blockchain and that makes me slightly worried about how it might be possible to exploit them.
Am I the only one still against network-based, and to a lesser extent electronic-based, voting?
It's near impossible to rig or suppress a physical election without a lot of effort, but one person can DDoS an entire network and no one can vote and the whole election needs to be scrapped.
Not even the strongest cryptographic or software systems are free from exploits (especially over time) and there's no way to be sure the open source code for the system is the same code actually being served on the system.
A lot of software has died by its own hubris by assuming their systems are secure and then a single 17 year old on 4chan finds a bug and ruins it all. You can't afford for that to happen in an election. Forget hackers, some skilled social engineering gets you the votes of thousands, but you cannot do that in person so easily.
I'm sure the problems have been discussed extensively but other niche problems include lack of availability for rural areas (which has been a huge problem even with paper voting). I think the only reliable voting system at scale is in person.
I agree with you in principle, but how can you have an apolitical discussion on a topic that is fundamentally and inseparably political? It's a conversation on treason, presidential decisions, exile, intelligence organisations... It's always been political. Hypothetically the president might want to pardon Snowden and then change his mind when he is in the country, then yes I'd like to discuss his motivations. And people have been burned by this man before so I can't blame their biases.
What the NSA is doing is wrong and edward should be pardoned, but he has said himself he is fine with a fair trial in court (fair is the key word here). So even if you are undecided on the pardoning you have to agree he should be given trial in the US unless for some weird reason you love the NSA that much.
Order as humans understand it is different from physical order. We see order as an array of ascending numbers or a house of cards. The universe sees order more like a state of 'useful' energy, where it's possible to extract it, and seemingly became ordered by putting energy in. This is why I think the information theory definition of entropy is a bit misleading.
I like to see it as a radioactive atom, which starts as a useful structure with potential energy that has an inherent timer until this energy is lost due to the universe wanting to return to equilibrium. So it's statistically extremely unlikely to get the atom back to its original energetic state by nature, but not because because it's literally impossible, it's just impossible to do this without putting energy back in and that's not something that happens naturally.
A reversal of entropy is entirely possible, it's just called doing work. Of course, we don't have the knowledge necessary to reverse each individual atom in the melting process of an ice cube, but one day we might. It's theoretically possible with enough work. Of course, there will always be a loss of energy, but i'm pretty sure that's an entirely different thermodynamic law.
Untrue, even on flash-based storage full deletion is possible.
Here's an answer I pulled from reddit:
If you are appropriately using TRIM the data will be obliterated when 'garbage collection' occurs -- forensics will not be able to recover deleted data. This is going to be largely dependent on your OS and Hardware, but if you confirm TRIM is working correctly in your setup, shortly after you permanently delete something (not recycle bin or trash) it will be gone for good.
The main takeaway is that people vastly exaggerate how recoverable disks are, making any effort at all will stop 99.9% of hackers trying to recover data.
I think it's more pragmatic advice than anything, even if all these websites deleted your data properly there'd be snapshots and pictures and backups around forever.