> Most paper ballets are counted by machine so they could easily be tampered with at the count […]

Do you have a source for that statement? In Germany, ballots are counted by people making tally marks on paper.

Hmm, not off hand. I'll see what I can find. It was my understanding from the hanging chad situation in Florida years ago that, at least in the states, most are initially counted by machine.

Edit: Here you go. I couldn't find research or a study regarding it but this is probably good enough and was always my experience when I voted by paper: https://www.wired.com/2016/11/vote-counts-ballot-get-counted...

wtf :D

From the article:

> […] the press release has been removed and they are not responding when asked if they still plan to release the source code and take the abstract of their final paper to the conference in Kassel, Germany.

Edit: That does not mean that this story is not complete horseshit.

Except… WhatsApp definitely gets a copy of your address book: https://www.whatsapp.com/faq/en/general/20971813 “During this entire process, only phone numbers are sent to WhatsApp for lookup, securely, over an encrypted connection.”

Whatsapp also gets the metadata about the message: sender, receiver, time and probably location.

No, I do not think that you are understanding him correctly. What makes you think that?

Just one example from the article:

> rather than stating that either position or momentum are "as yet undetermined", it became common usage and popular wisdom to jump to the conclusion that there is complete "uncertainty" at the fundamental level of physics

Can you explain how you drew any other conclusion from the article? The whole thing is driving at this one point.

His position is ‘that either position or momentum are “as yet undetermined”’. That means that the ‘uncertainty’ is not due to our ability to measure things, but ‘rather […] a statement about the actual reality about what variables (hidden or not) are stored by each particle’. :)

I wonder, is there a correlation between the telegraph.co.uk article and your comment?

“Student” comes from Latin “studens”, which grammatically is exactly the same as “studierend” (Partizip I in German / Present Active Participle in Latin). The difference in meaning is random.

Heh, but German is not Latin, and so 'student' in German, as often happens with borrowed words, has acquired a different meaning, viz. that of a noun in this case.

Sorry, in Latin every adjective can also be used as a noun. So “studens” (“studierend”) can also mean “Studierende(r)”.

Edit: The point is, Latin “studens” also has the concurrency aspect to it, just as German “Studierender”. If you say “studens ambulat”, it means “He/she is taking a walk, while studying.”

> Well, the important difference is that German has actually simple, clean rules for spelling in those cases.

In German, there are the “Fugenlaute”, sounds that are inserted between the words that a compound is made of. And it is not always clear, what these sounds should be.

Some examples:

* “Schaden(s)ersatz” (compensation for damages) – some put an “s” between “Schaden” (damage) and “ersatz” (substitute), some don’t. * In the German constitution the word “verfassungsgebend” appears, but some would call it “verfassunggebend”.

There are even words that have a different meaning depending on the “Fugenlaute”:

* “Landsmann” / “Landmann” (Land = country / land; Mann = man): “Landsmann” is a man from the same country; a “Landmann” is a peasant or farmer.

There really aren’t “rules” that apply.

There is a lengthy article in the German Wikipedia about this topic: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugenlaut

Landsmann is NOT a Fugenlaut.

That’s a Genitiv.

For most cases, Fugenlaute are completely meaningless, and both spellings accepted.

The German word for “staple” is »Tacker«, which is onomatopoeic.

If you wanted to say that two cars crashed, you could use:

»Zwei Autos (prallten|krachten) gegeneinander.«

Both »prallen« and »krachen« are onomatopoeic.

Onomatopoeia is common in German as well.