The Government has already outsourced its computer security to Microsoft.

Pop music is engineered to be played on cheap equipment. After all, that's what most people have. Practically nobody has ever heard Michael Jackson without a ton of electronics between them. You want a real comparison, use classical or jazz, where folks know what a *real* live performance sounds like.

It's also notable that the people who liked the lower bit rate recording said "more bass == better". "More bass" has been the "gold standard" in pop music for a good number of years -- the harder it punches you in the stomach, the "better" it is.

And, most importantly

• NAT prevents direct attacks on Internet- connected machines
• NAT prevents snooping of internal network structures

Think of it as impedance matching.

[snicker]

How many passwords do you think a system like this has?

If it'd been me, I'd have given them the root password to the network admin box. Let them have fun getting into anything else ....

Election fraud? No. Severe intimidation of possible opponents? Yes. Intimidation of critical journalists? Yes.

The people he brutalizes in his jail are Hispanic. This plays very well with his electoral base -- and costs the county a fortune in civil rights judgments.

Note -- not prison, jail.

The people in his jail are waiting trial or serving time for misdemeanors. Hardly the civilization- devouring monsters of Sheriff Joe's imagination.

All current OSs ship with a boatload of encryption. E-mail programs can handle S-MIME. Browsers use SSL/TLS. OSX and Linux come with gpg/pgp to verify signatures. Even Windows can encrypt folders.

So what's the point? It's already there. Use it.

Also, if you've attracted enough attention that They will notice that you've renamed SooperSekret.exe to BoringWorkStuff.exe (or JuicyStuff.encrypted to GameBackup.dat), you're screwed anyway.

Peak electric use is during the day. Cars will mostly charge at night.

They're using surplus capacity; no new plants needed.

TFA says that 12% of e-mail users "clicked on spam". I take this to mean a URL in a spam e-mail. I'm surprised it's that low -- haven't you ever wanted to see what's on the other end of some of the weirder spams?

But does anybody actually *buy* anything from spam? Has anybody actually come out and said "Yes, I bought a fake Rolex watch from a spammer"? I'd suspect that anybody dumb enough to give a credit card to a spammer is already living in a cardboard box. Who would buy a prescription drug from somebody who can't spell it?

(I'm not talking about fraud -- there have been plenty of news reports about people falling for everything from crude 419s to elaborate phishing scams.)

In general, spam looks a lot more like a DDOS attack than marketing.

1. "Here There Be Dragons" may be anathema to a working quant like Taleb, but it's a magnet for research.

2. Don't assume you'll spend your entire working life refining your dissertation. Don't get too specialized -- a good general background will let you move wherever you want. Remember, most current quants started out as physicists.

3. Quants are the financial equivalents of Palace Astrologers -- they tell the Powers that Be what they want to hear. The current mess is not so much the result of bad analysis as bad management decisions. Prepare to have your results misunderstood, misrepresented, and just pain misused.

4. As others have said, follow your heart. Life's too short to waste on something that *might* make you a lot of money if things don't change radically in the next few years. Which they will -- the current financial system is broken, and all the pieces haven't hit the floor yet. Depending on your own attitudes, this is either exciting or terrifying.