But you are only telling one side of the story. Somewhere else, your competitors are posting about how they are in a small company dominated by engineers that is making tons of money by being innovative and picking off the customers of their dim-witted competition. The engineers at that company are happy and having fun and loving their job.

In other words, you are working for the wrong company.

I think that is just your own bias. Sure, there are lots of dumb shows today. I get over a hundred channels so there is no way that all the programming will be top notch, but there is some really great stuff out there.

"Breaking Bad" is about a high-school chemistry teacher who uses his knowledge to become a drug kingpin. "Dexter" is about a forensic blood pathologist who happens to also be serial killer. Now compare these shows to Gilligan's Island or The Brady Bunch or Leave it to Beaver. There is no comparison. The new shows are smarter, more complex, and much more technical. There aren't many shows from the 60's or 70's that would even come close to what Breaking Bad and Dexter do. Maybe Twilight Zone.

I was listening to a researcher who was talking about pop media recently and they pointed out that modern TV shows are much more complex than in the past. Show like "Lost" have a large number of characters with complex relationships that span over seasons. Now compare that with past shows that had a small number of characters that never developed and story lines that completely fit into a 30-minute or 1-hour show and where each show was completely self-contained and required no knowledge of any previous episode.

This is exactly true. People look at the average salary of a Goldman Sachs employee and then the average salary of computer scientists and try to compare the two. That is wrong because the people at Goldman Sachs are in a very unique position. Most people with a finance degree are out there scraping a living trying to help mom and pop businesses with their taxes. You can't look at the financing outliers and then pretend that they are the mean or the median.

The truth is that financing has a higher earning potential. The range of salaries is much closer to the median for engineers than for finance. When the finance people get involved in multi-billion dollar deals, then they can earn huge amounts of money. But those deals are rare and highly sought after and so most finance folks don't get anywhere close to that level.

Are they? They are not in control of me. Maybe it is because I work in a startup filled with engineers. My VP is a very good engineer; the CEO is an engineer. I've been able to leave jobs whenever I want and find new jobs quite easily, even in a down economy. The fact is that my engineering skills are in demand and I can choose who I want to work with. That makes it impossible for some wash-out to control me.

It is easy to look at a couple of examples of business morons who end up in a pile of money and to think that that is a common occurrence. It isn't. Most of the wash-outs who went to business school are stuck in middle management trying to climb the corporate ladder by shmoozing some other wash-out. They are neither rich nor powerful and when they get laid off, it takes them years to find another job because all they know how to do is "facilitate synergistic deliverables that leverage value propositions".

But maybe I should keep all this to myself. Maybe I should be trying to convince people that engineering is a lousy, low paying job and to steer young people into MBA programs. Over the long haul, that will keep the supply of engineers down which will only make my position stronger.

Clouds work well when several departments can consolidate computing resources on a single data center. That kind of thing does not happen well between government agencies. Part of that may be due to inept bureaucracies, but much of that is due to the way that money is allocated and tracked around the government. The law will often designate funds for very specific purposes so that means you can't have the money dedicated for the Department of Interior paying for the electricity used by a computer for the Department of Homeland Security. This kind of thing requires everybody to have their own servers and data centers. Outsourcing this actually makes things easier because a third party can charge a fixed rate for computer usage and worry about how to best aggregate services without having to tied up with government red tape.

Actually, I think they did a pretty good job with this. This protest generated a lot of news stories about these scanners and that is a good thing. Without this protest, any stories about scanners would be filled with quotes from TSA officials about how much this makes us safe and their would be no counterpoint to this. The threat of a great disturbance on the busiest travel day of the year drove lots of stories with people that are critical of the scanners. It also forced the TSA to answer these criticisms in a highly publicized way. The press seems to sense that the TSA arguments seem week and this has led the press to be more skeptical of TSA claims. These are all good things.

Now whether this momentum will continue remains to be seen. I'm not too worried about the number of opt-out's for this day because there are tons of people who would be willing to protest, but happened to not be traveling on protest day. But if it gets into people's heads that it is okay to skip the scanner, then we will see a longer term trend of opt-outs and that will greatly undermine the TSA's position. It is going to take a long, concerted effort to inject some sanity into the TSA.

This isn't about intelligence, though. It is about fear. Fear is an emotional state and not tied at all to intelligence. There are lots of very intelligent people who know the same facts that we do, and are still scared of a terrorist attack because they have visions of planes flying into buildings. Is it irrational? Sure. But fear has nothing to do with rationality because it is an emotional response. People will go for anything that makes them feel less afraid. Intrusive searches and security levels tend to make people feel safe even when those same people know that these things are mostly pointless.

The sudden availability of money does not mean an instant increase in the production capabilities of the economy, but it will increase the consumption of the economy. In other words, there will be a supply/demand imbalance. Everyone will become very rich and be able to buy anything they want and so they will go on a shopping spree. Shops will start to sell out of goods and the factories will be unable to supply new inventory at a fast enough rate, so merchants will be forced to raise prices until they can maintain their inventory at a decent level. This will lead to an inflation cycle throughout the economy until an equilibrium gets reached.

At many government buildings in DC, you have to present an ID to be allowed in. It seems to escape everyone's logic that this does nothing to help security. Just because the state of Texas has given me a card with my name and picture on it that says I am allowed to drive does not mean that I am trustworthy. They don't check my name against a list or enter it into a database for data mining. So what the heck is the point? I guess it employs a few guards which helps the unemployment numbers, though.

I completely agree with this and think that less security would actually be a much better thing. We, however, appear to be in the minority. Immediately after 9/11, the major question was "Why didn't we stop it?". This always made me cringe because it presumes that our government is positioning itself to prevent crimes. In a democracy, the government will respond to people's expectations and if people expect the government to stop crimes before they happen, the government will put on a show. Effectiveness doesn't matter. This is why right after 9/11 you had national guardsmen standing around in airports with automatic weapons but no ammunition. They have no real power, but it looks good.

The security that we have now is spread so thin trying to stop all sorts of absurd attacks (oh, maybe someone can use a 2 inch pocket knife to kill hundreds on a plane), that they really can only stop certain narrow attacks. Huge swaths of our public infrastructure are left completely unprotected because all of the money goes into a few special cases. Eliminating much of the useless stuff would allow a smaller security force to be more nimble and effective.

That is a good point. The Arab world has been hampered by their own poor leadership. One of Al Qaeda's points, though, is that the incompetent, corrupt leaders have been put in place and supported by the West. This is not the whole story, of course, but they have a point. The West often supports poor leaders who seem willing to work with them. It becomes difficult for a competent leader to get a foothold when the local government is supported by wealth foreign powers. This is the whole basis for Al Qaeda's fight against the West. They feel that without foreign backing they could overthrow the corrupt leadership and install good leadership.

It is easy to see how this argument can win a lot of hearts and minds in the Muslim world. I think it is obvious to most of us that the oppressive religious culture that Al Qaeda wants is even worse than a corrupt, modern dictator, but that is not how religious zealots see things. You see similar rhetoric from the religious conservatives in the US.

I agree that every CS student should learn how to use version control systems, but I don't necessarily agree that the professors should teach them. Version control is just a tool and there is nothing CS specific about it. What is wrong with CS students taking the initiative and learning professional level tools to make their lives easier? In my grad studies, I always used version control, automated builds, and automated test suites. These tools exist for a reason; they make your life easier, so students have a vested interest in learning them. I would be completely annoyed by a professor that taught me this, because it is a waste of my time.

Having said that, most students don't bother to learn this stuff. That is fine by me, because I just won't hire them at work. It makes for a great interview question. Any student who can talk intelligently about version control systems has spent time learning useful stuff outside of class. That is the kind of people I want to work with. If a student can't learn something on their own, then what good are they?

From a terrorism perspective, it doesn't really matter whether the plane survives or not. People are going to be scared if planes occasionally get hit by missiles, regardless of the number of survivors. Even failed terrorist attacks are strategically successful. Attempts at shoe bombs and liquid bombs were unsuccessful, but still garnered significant press coverage and instigated changes in security procedures. No one was injured, but it still scared people which is the entire point of terrorism.

Terrorism just needs to scare people so one plane is just as good as another. And the target does not have to be a plane of course. Elementary schools, grocery stores, church picnics, etc would be just as effective. There is no end of public targets with little or no security.

It's not like finding a plane to attack is a difficult task. The routes are not secret. The times are not secret. If you stake out an airport, you will have an endless supply of slow moving targets at low altitude with known flight paths. Having "an app for that" is now just a distraction.

The only use I see for this app is if you want to target specific planes at busy airports. Airports like DFW have so many planes going through them that targeting the correct one can be difficult. But if attackers are going after a specific plane, then they are probably not terrorists. That becomes closer to assassination. To connect this to terrorism, the government needs to explain to my why a terrorist group would want to target a specific plane versus a random one.

Actually, the success rate is much higher than 10%. They win 10% of what goes to trial. But for every suit that goes to trial, there are many more that are settled much earlier on. That is actually where the big money comes from. Patent trolls don't actually want to go to trial; they want a settlement. They end up having to go to trial because someone decides that they think they can win in court and refuse to be extorted for money. And as soon as they win at trial, they know that anyone else that was thinking about challenging that patent will be forced to settle because that defense is a proven loser.