People make mistakes. Everybody makes them, everybody does it all the time, and they do it even when they should know better, when the consequences are high, and when they've received training specifically aimed at avoiding those particular mistakes.

Aviation, process and other industries know this by now, after many, many hard-earned lessons. They know you have to design your interfaces under the assumption that people will screw up, push the wrong button, or misread the situation. The general software industry, on the other hand, seems amazingly resilient against accepting this simple fact.

Did you read the paper? I did. That's what the research does. It turns out that there isn't a lot of malicious MITM out there, and what little does exist is done by malware on the same machine. The other MITM "attacks" are things like corporate proxies, etc.

The most interesting thing about this research is that it rather decimates the oft-repeated meme that SSL is broken and gets busted all the time. The data doesn't show that.

Pax Americana as a theory might hold water, if it weren't for the fact that the USA has spent most of the latter half of the 20th century fighting wars that it started itself. How many active wars did the USA decisively stop by itself? None? Bosnia might have been an example, except that would be better described as being ended by NATO, in fact Operation Deliberate Force had 15 nations take part. It would probably have worked out the same even if the USA did not take part.

It's deeply unclear that the USA is single handedly responsible for a net drop in state-on-state violence. Certainly just looking at surface facts would suggest it's the opposite: the world would have been even more peaceful if the USA had a less aggressive foreign policy.

It's easy to say we want to make the rural areas as attractive as the big cities. Notably, I've yet to see any credible ideas for actually achieving it.

Big cities are amazing. Because of network effects and the efficiencies of small distances and dense accumulation of resources, competing directly is extremely difficult. It's like deciding you want to make a new, fledging social network as attractive to users as the current big ones. The only thing you could feasibly do in both cases is to push it as a niche for special interests.

It's actually a bit of a muddled critique ("I will say 20% of jobs are BS but I won't say which ones") that attempts to convince people that they shouldn't criticize other jobs they might think were overpaid (like unionized auto workers, as specifically cited) just because the complainer has a job they are unhappy with. In short, it's a load of academic twaddle, but interesting as a conversation starter.

Right on the money. Actually he does identify some job categories he thinks are BS at the end - an entirely arbitrary list that labels actuaries as having BS jobs, but poets not! Right, because insurance is so useless!

That said I agree it's useful to start interesting conversations, even if the article itself is largely nonsense. The question of why we aren't all living lives of idle leisure is an interesting one to explore. I can think of several explanations. One is that many of us are essentially idle. Unemployment figures exclude people who have stopped looking for work. If you look at raw data series (graph here) you can see that actual employment has been steadily falling since the 1960's in the USA, typically taking a dive after each recession, then regaining some but not all of the previous employment. This is not what futurists envisioned because this is a form of enforced idleness, but then again, in a world where machines do all the drudge work wouldn't we expect that to surface as unemployment? We'd only see this as a problem due to a hard-wired cultural expectation that unemployment is immoral and working is ethically superior. The transition to a world of leisure would require rewriting of that fundamental component of our psyche which clearly has not been happening.

"I don't know anyone who just has a serial converter just lying around unless they're an engineer"

This is not a first project for anybody. Chances are high that you've already played with Arduino a fair bit, and built your own on breadboard as well. In which case you most likely have a USB-serial cable or board already, in order to program them.

Selling you something at a higher price than you'd like to pay is not "extortion".

Regardless, issuing certificates involves real work. If you'd like to do that work for free, in perpetuity, eating the costs on your own, then please do! The internet community will love you for it.

Mexico has a tight restriction on guns yet their murder rate is 23.7, Switzerland where every adult over 18 is issued a true assault rifle has a murder rate of 0.7. It is not the gun laws that cause problems it is the culture.

Mexico has tight restrictions on guns yet are flooded with guns from the USA. This effect is so severe that researchers have actually studied the effect on Mexican homicide rates from the lapsing of the US Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which had a ten year sunset rule.

Switzerland does have a lot of guns .... at home, as part of their military system. There is no culture of people carrying around guns with them in civilian life just in case they get randomly attacked for no reason. I live in Switzerland. I've not spent a huge amount of time in the USA, just visits over the years, yet I've seen there a bar with a "no guns" sign outside. This is something I have yet to encounter here.

But even if it is due to culture, you aren't going to turn the USA into Switzerland, so stop blaming culture (which implies that's how to fix it). Instead look to the UK, which has a culture far closer to America's. The UK experienced steadily growing gun crime rates for decades (graph on page 4), with very small occasional falls being quickly reversed by growth again. The big jumps in 1998 and 2002 are due to changes in counting methods - so you can mentally smooth the graph if you like. A few years after the UK passed much stricter gun control laws firearms offences started to fall dramatically and have continued falling every year.

I've noticed that UK statistics are frequently abused by gun rights advocates in the USA. Ways I've seen them be distorted include: chopping off the earlier years and then trying to claim that passing gun control laws made gun crime go up (it was going up anyway and the big jump was due to counting method changes), and claims that the UK has more violent crime than the USA (the category of "violent crime" excludes homicide, because the stats are collected through surveys and dead people don't reply to surveys, homicide rates are over 4x higher in America).

Something else to consider about the UK experience is that the stats cover up a lot of interesting detail, like the fact that whilst there are still firearms offences they are almost invariably committed with used guns and that provides a lot of evidence that can be used to bring the cases to resolution. "Clean guns" that have never been used before are exceptionally rare. In the USA they're the norm because it's so easy to buy new guns, so why leave a trail of evidence? Ammo is also hard to obtain. Some gangs have tried to make their own, but their home made ammo is far less deadly than professionally manufactured ammo.

I do not expect the USA to actually ever shift itself on the issue of gun control, even though it stands practically alone amongst developed countries. Instead American's who don't want to fear getting shot should simply leave.

"Which platforms were Java and Obj-C specific to again?"

The wording was unclear on my part; you pretty much need to use Java to develop for Android, and Objective-C to develop for IOS. Those platforms use those languages specifically, not that they are used only on those platforms. You can use a few other languages to develop Android or IOS apps if you insist, but with more pain, less support, and you'll normally still have to write minor parts in these languages to make it a complete application.

"I'd error on having 3 languages in the shop and that's about all that you'd need for most things."

That sounds on the low side to me. One low-level, hardware-linked language (C or C++); one dynamic language (Python, Ruby); a functional language (Scala, Scheme, Haskell); one for numerics (R, Matlab/Octave); one embedded language (Scheme, Lua); client-side web (javascript); database access (SQL); and of course the platform-specific major languages you can't get around: Java, C# and Objective-C. I'm sure you can add other categories to the list as well.

The endowment is there to serve the university. And the university is plenty sensitive to its public perception; that affects both enrollment as well as donations. It's not a stretch to say that a fairly large proportion of both current and former students and faculty view global warming as a threat and coal as a bad choice for producing power.

Making these people happy is vital for the universitys bottom line - not to mention that "the university" consists of people that themselves share many of these values. So yes, they are acting in the best interest of those the endowments are there to serve.

It's not the end of blogging in Russia. What it means is that Russians who want to blog will blog on sites hosted outside the country, where all traffic is run through SSL.

There's no point for the administration to go fry big names like the NY Times or Washington Post when all they were doing is re-reporting material already obtained by foreign press.

Now imagine what would have happened if Snowden had provided his materials only to the NY Times. Oh, wait, we don't have to imagine. We know what would have happened because previous leakers did that, only to find the NYT was already under the thumb and they chose not to publish. In fact Snowden explicitly said he wasn't going to trust American media to publish things about the NSA because they had a history of self censorship in this regard, causing them huge embarrassment.

They pass their information to the military that assassinates them instead. Is this meant to be better?

The idea is you allow people to delegate their votes by topic to other people, who may be experts or may simply delegate again, upwards in a tree. You can change your delegations (sort of like revoting in the election) at any time or simply cast a vote on a particular proposal directly yourself. At initialisation time everyone starts out with their votes for all topics delegated to their local elected representative, so it's backwards compatible.