This would be way fun to build. The basic idea is a decorative water fountain that has the illusion of perpetual motion. A simple version could be a belt with buckets that brings water up to the top of a cascading waterfall sort of thing which at the end propels a wheel that turns the belt with buckets. Hidden in the water track somewhere would be a pump that would add water to the cascade and make the whole thing possible. But it would seem like it was just going by itself. Of course you could make super elaborate versions, junkart versions, elegant elitist versions. The possibilities are *wink* endless!
Electronic voting. Yea, even internet voting. Really shouldn't be impossible. Tom Scott says this is a terrible idea, but I don't think it's so unsolvable. The ways to cheat are: - stuffing the ballot box with bogus votes - counting or recording the votes bogusly - voting more than once or voting for someone else Voter confidentiality must be preserved. Here's my solution. - every voter must authenticate with some non-government system that 1) ensures user ID uniqueness 2) contains a method for contacting the voter (can be a form obscuring contact details) 3) creates a random code which is not retained by the system. This is easily done by Google, Facebook, or any tiny NGO. They would need to register and be subject to audit. - when a user votes, the data is logged in two public registers. 1) a voters register showing the person's user ID (or a unique variant from the authenticator) 2) a vote register showing the random code and how they voted
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