Since the no-fly list identifies you only by name to the airline, the government can quite easily claim that YOU are not on the no-fly list, but it's just a mix up with some OTHER John Smith who totally exists and is a terrorist. Naturally, the details of the other John Smith are classified, so there's no piece of identification that you can possibly produce to prove that you are not they. The lovely part is that you only need to be on the list a short time for the restriction of movement to hamper whatever you were doing that the powers-that-be didn't like, so even if this judge were to take the unprecedented step of revealing the contents of the list, they could produce one from five minutes before or after lacking your name ...

While any user-facing application is going to spend most of its time waiting for the user to do something, the latency to finish that task is still something the user will want to see optimized. Further, if a long-running task tops out at 20% CPU, apparently optimization was weighted too much towards CPU and you need to look into optimizing your IO or memory usage.

In addition to its brevity, it also implies the 4 times as many "flags" were taken simply from searches of Google, Linkedin, and others (2x as many points scored, with flags being worth 0.5x those taken via social engineering). Sounds like the corporate website and employees' social networking accounts are the real threat ...

Two questions: Are we going to wind up developing the equivalent of a "USDA Certified Grade A Cycles" sticker? And what is the cloud computing equivalent of Taco Bell "meat"?

I feel like commoditization might provide a level of anonymity to allow both a low grade of service (faking processing with either less accurate processing or known-faulty equipment) and a security risk (While a collection of cloud services are mining your customer data for you, how many are copying it off for later perusal?)

Maintenance activities could certainly be suspended. S&R and fire protection seem like the sort of things that fall under "essential" personnel. As for interpretation and research, in the short term the printed interpretation postings aren't going anywhere ...

In the long term, yes, the national parks cost money to operate. Over the course of a week? They can pretty much be left to their own devices. It's not like there aren't portions of these facilities that are in need of maintenance that there isn't money for even if the continuing resolution were to pass.

There is a certain amount of irony in someone attempting to prove that open access journals publish bad science through the use of bad science. I read the article, and his only mention of testing closed publications is in his conclusion, quoting a colleague who suggested just such a step. He discounts this by restating his thesis (that open access journals are more numerous and publish more papers than closed ones) before shifting topics.

*cough* *cough*

I was one of the kickstart backers for Pebble, and have been using the watch every day for ~5 months. There are two things that keep me putting it on every day, despite having to remember to charge it once a week or so:

- Text messages and incoming calls on your wrist. The difference between looking at your wrist and pulling out a phone seems negligible, but remember that you don't have to hold onto a wristwatch.
- You never miss a vibrate alert that's strapped to your wrist. I'll sometimes have something get between my phone and my leg, or have the phone in a bag on my bike.

Now, there's a big gulf between the Pebble and the device the Samsung showed us last week (I haven't looked at Sony's offering). I think the key is to not replicate a phone function unless it's made better/easier. Case in point: the trend seems to be towards a small color display; this is inferior to the phone. Pebble has a tiny, low res b/w screen, but it's readable in direct sunlight which my phone won't do (unless I two-hand it to shade the screen).

SARS in particular I remember as causing border crossings (at least here in North America) to go absolutely apeshit. Between the direct losses of increased staffing and asinine posters (seriously, until it got Suddenly Acute, the only symptoms a lay person could identify were "like a cold") there were huge indirect losses of increased travel time and people simply not bothering to travel.

The reason on older analog speedos was that they were most accurate in the middle of the range. On modern digitally controlled gauges my guess is a combination of tradition and using the 140mph gauge as a distinguishing piece of trim for the performance package.

Of interesting note, there were rules back in the 80s in the US limiting speedos to display 85mph ... so some sports cars of that vintage stop the numbers at 85 but continue the marks out to 120.

I think that in most listings of developed, high-IQ countries, Italy, Ireland, and Spain would be included, and all fall above the European average (which itself is just over 50%): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism#Europe_and_Russia Now, granted, it is a tiny corner of the continent that touches the 90% figure given (from a different study) for the US further down the page, but I think it's hard to argue that a simple majority isn't "strong".

What I think you mean to say is that evangelical Christianity is strongly identified with the US (and realistically, we're not talking about evangelism in general, but of certain individual churches). The other mentioned in the wikipedia article is the Islamic teachings of specific clerics in a collection of impoverished nations that would not fall into the developed/high-IQ category. I would point out that the other religion strongly identified with the US, Mormonism, actively encourages vaccination.

As an aside, I continue to be amazed at how there are Wikipedia articles not just for every general concept you can think of, but for seemingly every combination of terms, such as "vaccination and religion" above. Encyclopedia Britannica eat your heart out!

I regularly observe in Charlestown, RI, which has fairly good lighting ordinances to protect the nighttime viewing conditions (and thus draws people from miles around). The only big light in town is the police station, to which I regularly say when I pass it, who can trust cops who are scared of the dark to protect them?

At $35, the business model behind this thing is probably similar to a gaming console: sell it at a loss to make customers for your lucrative content. Cutting loose the local content customers is long term a cost savings measure for two reasons: a) as you no longer need to field support calls from customers who don't watch your ads, and b) it's must easier to force software upgrades (ie, less QA needed because you can test builds in the field and force fixes out to the machines that break).

If Chilean labor law actually permits the employer to fire strikers and provides protection against a mob assaulting any new employees, then bravo for Chile. In America, you'd be sued into oblivion, your factory surrounded by a mob, and any scabs assaulted on their way to work, and the police wouldn't lift a finger.

15+ years is a stretch. Even in the 2006-07 era at the end of XP's development, there were brand new machines that couldn't return from sleep correctly. It was particularly vexing since a lot of them were laptops factory configured to sleep when left unattended. I will say that I haven't had any complaints with S3 sleep since the advent of Windows 7, however.