For this year's general election, Nevada is the only state where virtually every voting machine has a paper backup that could aid in a machine malfunction, an audit or a recount.

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"Without a paper trail attached to a voting machine today, I think any election would be suspect, " Heller says.

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Then you wait in a third line to hand somebody the handwritten ID form and have your paper ballot optically scanned by a scanning machine.

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Casting around for a dissertation topic, the student, Eugene Aserinsky, decided to hook sleepers up to an early version of an electroencephalogram machine, which scribbled across half a mile of paper each night.

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However, the machine designed by Dr Rostoker and his colleagues currently exists only on paper.

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That copy machine in the corner of your office may someday cause you bigger problems than a paper jam.

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Chief among them is that Mr Son seems to have built an investment machine that is sucking in ever-increasing amounts of cash but, despite the fabulous paper wealth that the firm is generating, spewing out only dribbles of money at the other end.

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"Although the conditions to be checked may change over time, current experience suggests that such health checks should ensure that software patches are applied, a firewall is installed and configured correctly, an antivirus program with current signatures is running, and the machine is not currently infected with known malware, " he wrote in the accompanying paper.

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Greg talked about the lovely, reassuring hum of the machine when it was powered up and positively glowed at the sharp report of a key striking the paper.

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