Section (1) bans things broadly. Section (2) lists exceptions that are legal. The judge cites Section (2)(g)(i), which makes interception legal if the communication system is configured so that it is readily available to the general public. An unencrypted wifi base station at a location where no physical trespass is needed certainly appears to meet that standard. If things were to go farther, I read Section (2)(g)(v) as saying that even if the wifi is encrypted, anyone who is given the key by the operator can legally intercept the encrypted frames. As soon as the users do their own end-to-end encryption of the packet contents, everything would change.

Cites, please? And is the statute (illegal implies it's either in statute or a regulatory rule with the force of law) specific to cell phones? Back in the day, when I paid some attention to this type of thing, the case law was pretty clear that if you transmitted unencrypted material you had no expectation of privacy, hence no wiretap order was needed.

...as he has more than 2^32 files.

4.2 million, not billion. About 2^22 files.

The article has been updated to indicate he's at the University of Miami, not FSU.

The next step in the dance appears to be dispute between the UCI and the USADA over who has final say. USADA is saying that Armstrong is guilty as charged once he declines arbitration and the WADA code forces UCI to strip him of his titles. UCI is saying that the same code requires the USADA to lay out its case in detail before UCI is forced to do anything. No one knows how this is going to turn out yet.

That's hearsay bullshit, and not how justice works.

Let's be precise. "A says 'I saw Lance shooting up,'" is eyewitness testimony and is admissible. "A says 'B told me that he saw Lance shooting up,'" is hearsay and is not admissible. In a court of law, the prosecutor would probably decline to go with only the eyewitness testimony, unless it included enough to show that said injection was of banned drugs. It seems telling to me that several governments have conducted investigations and none have filed charges. Not that Lance is clean, but that there's insufficient evidence to file criminal charges. The USADA is a civil rather than criminal matter at best, and has a much lower evidenciary standard.

Simple, unobtrusive text ads? Sure.

Let me qualify that. Simple, unobtrusive text ads, delivered at high speed so that they don't interfere with the rest of the user experience? Sure. What I've always noticed when I enable Adblock is how much faster the Internet feels.

Here.

Colorado is in the lowest sixth of US states for overall cancer rates. This despite being in the top third for skin melanoma. When you go in for a check-up, the docs don't ask you whether you've checked the radon levels in your house. But they will ask you if you wear sunblock, and UV-blocking sunglasses (UV has been linked to cataract development). Cause the UV levels that go with living at 5,000 feet are much more dangerous than the other radiation exposures.

The Comcast cable service my wife has us subscribe to for other content gave me access, so can't fuss about that. The NBC site prompted me for my cable provider the first time I tried to view a stream, and apparently got all the info they needed from my IP address. After the first access everything was transparent. The listing of when the live streaming of the (fencing) events I was interested in was accurate. Streams started promptly and played smoothly. Even for modest sized content (480p rather than high-def), decoding was compute-intensive, requiring the cycles from about 1.5 of the two processor cores on my Mac. That seemed excessive.

I'm a sport fencer. Epee if it matters. I wanted to watch the later rounds of the various epee events -- men's individual, women's individual, women's team. No men's team epee event at the Olympics this year, as the IOC has limited the number of fencing gold medals that can be won. None of the epee events were on US television, only available by streaming. Every minute of all the events were available, at least on replay. Except for one, the live events were either too early, or conflicted with the rest of my life. What was available in replay was the nearly raw video feed from the venue. The action, then a quick slow-motion replay of each touch. The director(s) obviously knew something about the sport, since the slow motion was generally the correct one of the two or three options for camera angle. Audio was the microphone for the referee of the bout being shown, plus ambient noise from the venue (including the PA). No announcer. No color analyst. No commercials. When the Koreans appealed the referee's decision and there was an hour of dead time from the venue, every minute of the dead time was included in the stream. As an aside for those who saw pictures of the Korean woman sitting on the strip, it wasn't a "protest" -- international fencing rules require the fencer to stay at the strip until the appeal is settled.

For an epeeist, that's really terrific coverage. I know what I'm looking for, and the announcer/color commentary are just a distraction. For a non-fencer, it must have been terrible.

If I were looking 20 years out (emphasis on at least that far in the future), my first questions would be whether the country/region has a high tech level broadly distributed today and is likely to have reliable local sources of water and electricity then. Yes, I know that puts me out on the lunatic fringe, but the arguments in Limits to Growth are still relevant and we're just now entering the period of interesting times in their forecasts. IMO, that rules out Africa, India, China, and most of the rest of Eastern Asia including Japan (in that order). I'd stay clear of isolated urban city-states (eg, Singapore). New Zealand seems a reasonable bet, also parts of Canada, Northern Europe, and select parts of the US. Brazil and Argentina if they can finish getting their acts together soon. Water may be in issue in Australia, but my main concern would be that they've got an awful lot of resources that China would like to more directly control. Canada may have that same problem with the US.

I gave my own kids the advice that within the US, they ought to stay in the contiguous states, roughly west of 105 W longitude, north of 40 N latitude.

I mean seriously? What's the attraction?

From the perspective of someone putting on a sizable conference? World-class expertise at dealing with any unusual aspects of your conference. Daily inexpensive flights from almost everywhere. Plenty of inexpensive hotel space, and plenty of expensive space for the executives. By comparison, New York or San Francisco or Chicago are much more expensive. Venues guaranteed big enough to handle your crowd -- for things like CES and NAB, there's probably nowhere else in the country that can handle them. Off hours, entertainment ranging from free (a walk up and down the Strip at night is an experience -- tacky, perhaps, but unique) to expensive. Cheap cabs to and from everywhere, so there's no need to go through the hassles of a rental car. Gambling for the people who want it (I'm not a gambler, but I love watching strangers play blackjack).

If you know where to look, good food at reasonable prices. For example, don't know if it's still there, but there used to be a steakhouse buried in the depths of Circus Circus. Quiet, excellent service, very good food, very nice wine list, and didn't cost an arm and leg. But if you didn't know, you'd never find it by accident. And if you didn't make a reservation at least a couple of days in advance, you'd never get in if you did find it.

You'll also be aiming at a professorship, some research gig, or being woefully underworked and underpaid for your education until you've got enough hours in the trenches to make a good senior analyst or senior architect. [Emphasis mine]

My experience is that you mean overworked there. Otherwise, spot on. I might push some discrete math for code monkeys, if only because it's a rich field for algorithms.

Liberal arts is not useless.... Math is a beautiful thing, it helps us explain the world.

So how much math are you going to require a liberal arts major to take? There are academics writing serious pieces like this one in the New York Times that suggest the proper amount of college-level math (calculus or above) to require is none. Math as a language to describe the world would seem (at least to me) to require a minimum of differential equations and a real statistics class, both of which require a couple of semesters of calculus as a foundation. Or you could simply require them to pass a couple of "topics" courses to demonstrate that they understand there's a lot of different kinds of math out there -- but I certainly wouldn't trust them to actually use that math.

As to the question in the original post... it depends on what kind of software you develop. Much of mine was either real-time (where algorithms for solving discrete math problems and the math for computational complexity were useful) or tools to solve specific applied math problems (where I needed to know the problem-specific math).

I always enjoyed his science fiction, but it always struck me as good, not great. OTOH, reading Three Hearts and Three Lions when I was a kid hooked me on fantasy forever.