I'm pretty liberal and fairly progressive, but I'm not 100% anti-gun, so your statement is certainly not broadly generalizable outside of conversations in the media, in my experience. I voted against a gun law just a few months ago, though it passed anyway. I wanted to vote for it, because the requirement that weapons be stored securely (either in a safe or with a trigger lock) was good, and the requirement for timely reporting of stolen firearms was good, but I couldn't vote for it because it also contained a ban on large magazines, which violates the fourth amendment by depriving people of property without due process—in other words, eminent domain all over again.

We do, IMO, need to mandate some changes, like gun safety classes for anyone purchasing a firearm for the first time, electronic fingerprint safeties on all new firearms, etc. And I wouldn't personally want to have a firearm in my house because I think the safety risk exceeds the safety benefit, at least in my neighborhood, but that doesn't mean I think that my opinion should be forced on everyone else. That's part of being a true liberal. Anyone who believes otherwise is a progressive authoritarian, not a progressive liberal.

You're assuming that the speed at which the problems are solved is positively correlated with fundamental understanding of the concepts. For problems like multiplication, this isn't really the case.

Not only is it not the case, in highly intelligent people, for large problem sets, it is often reverse-correlated. When I was a kid, if you gave me 50 math problems, I'd take longer to solve them than the folks who were making Fs in the class—not because I was struggling, but because after the first five or ten problems, I was so bored that I'd spend a few seconds working on a problem, followed by fifteen minutes daydreaming about anything else but the subject at hand.

Well, as a matter of fact, the process you propose has been in use for over a year ...

No, it hasn't. My parents have gone through security as "TSA Pre" travelers. There's remarkably little difference between that and normal travel, from what I've seen, and at most, no more difference than the difference between buying a first-class ticket and a coach ticket (separate line). Yes, in theory, you have to do a few less things, but you still get in line, stick your bag on a belt, walk through a magnetometer or a porn scanner, then wait for your bag.

What I was proposing is a separate line in which you hand them a card, they swipe it, verify your face against the data from their database, and you walk straight through security and out the other side. No putting bags on a belt, no magnetometer, no porn scanner. Just walk through.

The true answer is to allow people to get through a full background check in exchange for skipping the screening process entirely. Frequent travelers (the majority) would do so, and this would cut the number of people waiting in line to almost nothing.

But they won't do that, because the TSA is primarily a jobs program, not a security screening service.

Even if you're right, the fact remains that security researchers have shown that the bug in question didn't exist in Secure Transport as of the 10.8.5 sources. Because Secure Transport is open source, you can verify that yourself if you don't believe me.

Snow Leopard (10.6) is not vulnerable to this bug, since Apple did not switch from OpenSSL to their own SSL/TLS library back then yet.

No, that's not correct at all. First, it doesn't affect 10.8.5, either, which blows that theory. Second, Secure Transport was introduced way back in 10.2, and has been used for Foundation and Core Foundation SSL negotiation since at least 10.4, according to various security vulnerability reports (and probably earlier). In other words, this has absolutely nothing to do with Apple "switching" anything. It's just a bug, and a fairly recent bug at that.

... and then carve a face in it.

My version of "Hacker boot camp" wouldn't focus on "how to code" or "how to look up & hook up a library function that does an optimal sort" - you're going to need to figure that out for yourself when Java/Python becomes the next latest and greatest thing. It would focus on best practices, communicating with your customers and coworkers, documentation, source control, and transparency.

This. This. For the love of all that is good and holy, this.

Learning to code is the easy part. Learning to design good software borders on a lifetime learning campaign by comparison.

I actually entertained doing exactly one month of Creative Cloud to get a full copy of Acrobat so that I could have tools for visualizing which parts of my cover art exceeded a preset ink coverage limit. But then I thought about it some more, and realized that even though I can't figure out how to get a CMYK representation out of a PDF file using NSImage, I *can* successfully open CMYK TIFF files and access the raw CMYK data. And, of course, in Photoshop CS6, if I save a CMYK Photoshop project as a TIFF file, it produces a CMYK TIFF.

In short, I realized that I'd rather reimplement the wheel and spend an hour or two writing some really hackish GUI code than pay Adobe one more cent. So I did.

Apple's rich enough to duke it out with the other Big Boys over patents. But they don't want to dilute their high end hardware brand.

It would do more than just dilute the brand. It would be an entirely incompatible ecosystem that they'd have to somehow graft in support for, which would mean huge engineering overhead. It isn't like BMW building a copy of a Ford. It's more like living in a world in which there's a network of overhead tracks that run above all the roads, and BMW deciding to build a second version of their cars that hangs from those tracks and has to be driven by pushbuttons and a trackball instead of a steering wheel, so drivers have to relearn how to drive. And they would somehow have to modify all of their existing cars to add brake lights near the roof so that drivers of the new hanging cars could see them and wouldn't crash into people's rear windshields.

But a Target store doesn't get its network rewired very often, and doesn't get the HVAC cables rewired ever (for some multi-year definition of "ever"). There's really no good reason for those to not be on their own separate physical switch, but if you're going to use a shared switch, it still isn't that hard. You just lock those ports to a nonstandard VLAN, disable tagged VLAN access for those ports, and leave all the other ports on the default VLAN, and you're done. Oh, and label the cables, and stick a piece of tape with the words "HVAC ports" above those few ports so that nobody will yank the cables later, try to plug something else in, and wonder why it doesn't work, or try to plug one of those cables into a different port.

Better yet, color-code your jumper cables: blue for HVAC, red for registers, and white for general use. Do not let any color route to any other color, and ensure that whoever is wiring up a new device understands that the color in the back room should be the same as the cable that's semipermanently attached to the device on the other end, and always plugs red cables into red ports, blue into blue, and white into white.

This really isn't rocket science.

What they get is a huge amount of vacation days and a huge pension.

My parents are both retired teachers. Neither of them ever had a pension. Mind you, my grandfather had a pension from his teaching, but they stopped that system for new employees hired way back in the 1970s. Maybe some big-city schools still have pensions, but that's an aberration, not the norm.

Also, teachers don't just work 180 days. They are actively teaching for 180 days, but teachers often work weekends when grading assignments, which could mean they're working up to 250 days. Add to that the mandatory continuing education, having to do work for part of the summer to update tests and assignments as the curriculum changes (and to discourage people from just copying off their older siblings), and the notion of a "huge amount of vacation days" becomes downright silly.

The thing is, 99% of the time, I don't care about getting things quickly, but I joined Prime last summer because I needed to buy a bunch of things for a trip to Europe, and I wanted to make sure stuff arrived in time. I initially planned to cancel it after a year, but I've tried the Prime Instant Video, and now I'm debating.

Either way, if it goes over the price of Netflix ($96 annually), I can't imagine choosing to stay with Prime over Netflix. The two-day shipping benefit is only significant if you would ordinarily have paid for two-day shipping. Otherwise, it's just not a very enticing perk unless you know you're going to need to buy a lot of gear in a short period of time. And that doesn't lead to continuous customer revenue. It leads to people buying it for just long enough to get the job done, then dropping it, which raises the cost for Amazon, which means they'll raise the price, and then even fewer people will buy it when it isn't absolutely necessary.

What really matters is the streaming service. And in that regard, Amazon's offering doesn't compare too favorably. Netflix has more content, and fewer encoding problems. There was one episode of Buffy where the video was jerky on every device I own, and I've watched a few TV shows where Amazon incorrectly encoded 16:9 content as letterboxed 4:3 content, so I get four black bars on my TV. That was excusable ten years ago. Now, it's just negligent.

And the Netflix iOS app actually works over cellular connections, unlike Prime, which deliberately refuses to work. That means if I were using Netflix, I could watch stuff on my phone while away from home as part of my unlimited data package. With Amazon, I have use my laptop, where I have a tethering data limit of about three hours of video.

So I've been debating whether to continue Prime even at $79 or jump to Netflix for only a few dollars more. Raise the price to $119, and they'll make my decision a lot easier.

How can you NOT know the real age of a HDD made in the last decade?

You're assuming that the person analyzing the data is the person who owns the drives. If you're working with aggregate data provided by somebody else, you might not have the manufacturing dates.

... it gives you at best an approximate worst-case age.

Exactly.