Root the Vote: Early Returns
On my timeline, it's just after the November elections and too soon to tell exactly what happened. The expected failures did occur, most particularly in Florida where 18,000 of 153,000 votes seem to have quietly vanished with no independent audit trail, no fallbacks, and no possibility of verifiable recounting. Other polling places across the nation reported less-severe problems, but enough failures occurred to be worrisome.
Here in Dutchess County, an ancient lever-action voting machine failed at the polling place monitored by my voting-inspector wife. She had called for a "custodian" when the machine refused to print the zero total sheet at the start of the day; he promised to return to help close the machine. It also failed to print the final totals and they manually copied tallies from the dozens of odometer-style dials inside the machine. Yes, it failed, but no, the result wasn't catastrophic.
More on this after the dust settles.
Last Tab
Those embedded OS surveys are at www .linuxdevices.com/articles/AT7070519787.html and www.embedded.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=187203732. Jonathan Coulton's classic Code Monkey tune is at www.jonathancoulton.com/music/thingaweek/ CodeMonkey.mp3. Lewis Carrol's Red Queen defined the software release treadmill in Through the Looking Glass, which you can read at www.gutenberg.org/etext/12.
Jack Ganssle's recommendations on becoming an embedded developer could be your ticket to a new career at www.ganssle.com/geek.htm. Read the NSF report on engineering salaries at www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf06303.
Reports on the election appear in Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram are at www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0611.html.
I played hooky from ESC's last Thursday session to visit the MIT Museum, which is something of a geek Mecca. You can see some hints at web.mit.edu/museum. Yes, I counted Smoots as I walked across the Harvard Bridge (web.mit.edu/spotlight/smoot-salute).
