Like cryptography, it comes down to the value being protected versus the cost of protecting it. For a 777 worth a quarter of a billion dollars, a couple of transponders located wherever (outside, inside, in the tail fin, wing) would increment the cost of ripping the plane off just a little - mostly by including a few more people to bribe to ignore problems.

What I'm saying is that given how expensive the asset is, what is the real added value of a few enhancements (all the suggestions boil down to more locator beacons)? I'd argue bypassing a handful of locator beacons would cost less than say $25 million in more bribes and so on, making a 777 theft still profitable.

The point is somebody willing to ripoff a hundred million dollars is willing to invest several million doing it.
If your anti-theft device can't resist millions of dollars of effort, then it is pointless.

As for putting it outside the plane and whatever, the ring of thieves merely has to bribe an extra person or two in the maintenance hangar and air traffic control, to sign off on a non-functional device and then clear the plane for takeoff. Then the reasonably impervious device is bypassed altogether.

Again, the asset being protected is worth hundreds of millions. It comes down to how much are you willing to spend to steal it? Google tells me the "list price" of a 777 is around $250 million. Could 5-10 key people splitting 25 million do it?

If somebody is willing to ripoff a hundred million dollar plane, as the OP mentions, they are also willing to invest millions in stealing it.
Your car with an anti-theft device isn't the same reward to effort that motivated people interested in stealing a 777 would be willing to put in.

So the cost of bypassing the anti-theft device needs to be very large, or there isn't a point in having it.

How would you guarantee such a tracking device resists all possible sabotage efforts?

They should try Kickstarter!

This is some pretty shitty investment advice.

The first case had an investment of ~$1200 a month since that was how much less their monthly payment was. You think borrowing against your home to invest is the same thing? Man that's stupid, the risks are quite different.

Brilliant! Talk to Wall Street and start buying CDOs and other derivatives for risk management. I mean, those things never lose value.

Working link to the "Mother of All Demos" wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

Slashdot doesn't appear to like a missing "http://"

Please, this is hardly about politics, as far as Democrats vs Republicans - as if the GOP would have done things differently. And if libertarians were in charge, same thing.

Everything in U.S. politics is about protecting corporate profits. The outsourcing in this story is about profits, the MPAA exists to help protect profits, the administration not doing anything about it is likely due to private lobbying (to protect profits).

Well, then private corporations, such as your employer, should lead the way and emphasize they are looking for candidates with XYZ certifications instead of college degrees. Industry certs like MCSD, CompTia Network+, Java certified developers, CISSP, whatchamajig and on and on.

Oh wait, the consistent feedback about those certs is they are worthless and corporations don't care about them, or corporations do care but they aren't willing to pay the fees involved for their own employees to get them.

So there's a bit of a catch-22 here.

This goes back about 30 years to the original Mac, which came with a 512x384 monitor. A global menu made eminent sense.

I like the idea of universal education. As others here have noted, the problem in the U.S. is the positive feedback loop between a government guaranteed loan, which cannot be discharged through bankruptcy, and college pricing. The makes the incentives all wrong, similar to the housing crisis where mortgage brokers got paid getting people into loans - they didn't care if they were unaffordable, that was "somebody else's" problem. Colleges admit warm bodies in order to saddle them with prices that grow faster than the market can bear, because this market is underwritten by a government loan.

What is needed is a multi pronged change in the system:

Colleges currently charge the same per credit hour for all majors. Not throwing any field of study under the bus, but some majors enable more job prospects than others. Therefore, to better reflect actual earning potential, colleges should start charging different amounts depending on the field of study. Basically, a business major should pay more for their classes than a medieval literature scholar.

On the loan side, the government should only allow a student to borrow an amount of money based on their planned field of study. This amount should vary only by field of study, not college they were admitted to. So Harvard can keep charging its high rates, but average student X who has a choice between them and a good public school in their state, will either need to supplement with scholarships, work, private loans, family money, or by taking the more affordable option. Also in this scheme, the amount the government will loan will be tied to the average starting salary of students with that particular degree.

Don't like it? Well, free market folks, corporate America has already decided on the value of every single degree a university can grant. It's called the starting salary offered to student with that major. Across the entire country, the IRS can supply an average every year of what the actual, real salaries of new grads is, and the system can be readjusted every year.

  It's a harsh reality, but somebody wanting to major in art history isn't, on average, going to earn as much as somebody studying computer science. That difference should be reflected in the cost of their classes and the amount they can borrow. Don't like that? Fine, locate a funding source for your desires outside the public trough.

This would force colleges to alter their current pricing model, and also help put a lid on the runaway inflation in tuition. Somebody that just wants a general college degree in something they find interesting can major in what they want to for less money. Colleges can't jack their rates up 15% a year knowing that money is guaranteed, regardless of the ability for the student to repay it, regardless of the value of the degree (again, in this context value means "what corporate America will pay someone with that degree as a starting salary").

Right now colleges get paid for shoveling people into anything they want to major in, and increase costs at will. This needs to be stopped.

There's a boatload of stuff to agree on for better interop. The language itself (c/c++) says nothing about a lot of stuff people kind of expect these days.

  Language extensions specific to compilers (e.g. __user), toolchains (e.g. llvm is working on lld, a linker, to replace the default system linker), security additions (e.g. if I build a library with gcc and specify stack protection and canaries, none of which are in the language standard, will I be able to link a clang built library and executable and actually have it work), etc.

I was a compiler grad student, and my university had its own intermediate representation it did work with. Back then (mid 90's) there was also SUIF (stanford university intermediate form), something I forget from University of Illinois... there were probably others too. But some big-name CS departments focused on other stuff, databases, operating systems, AI, and weren't necessarily up there in compilers or revealing the details of their intermediate form (not that it's was a secret, merely from academia the algorithm is more important than the intermediate form used).

Now, my old school adopted LLVM. I recently checked as I'm working with LLVM/Clang and found that quite interesting. I can't even pull up Stanford's SUIF compiler group research page (suif.stanford.edu, maybe I'm just unlucky or it's gone/moved/temporarily down). And LLVM/Clang is from University of Illinois... so yeah, I'm sure they are using it too.

The benefit to GCC from this is to not become obsolete in 5-10 years, from a steady influx of improved algorithms and tuning from a body of people that can easily contribute. Just from the fact LLVM/Clang is easier to work with, universities using it for their classes/research means that there is a steady crop of undergrads/grads familiar with LLVM/Clang and its set of libraries. They can contribute, and the research community doesn't have to roll its own intermediate form for research algorithm implementation and then throw that out when it comes to implementing the same algorithms in an actual intermediate language that is used in a real compiler. When you're a student, the last thing you want to do when you've got a project due in the semester, or you are trying to write your thesis/dissertation and graduate, is screw with compiler internals that are purposely difficult to work with (GCC).

Yes, GCC has a core group that has done an excellent job. But they are facing commercial interests improving the LLVM/Clang (i.e. Apple and Obj-C) plus now the OpenCL and OpenMP work going on, and on top of that an ever growing population of former students with skills/knowledge and perhaps the desire to contribute.

Agreed. Those years he opposed modularizing GCC might have really hurt the project in a way that isn't done being felt yet.

Post apocalypse, so will most other things we attach value to. For example, today's currencies (dollars, euros, renminbi, whatever) will also be in the "no value" camp. Bitcoin will especially be worthless, unless you think the Mad Max world happens to have functioning computers, high speed networks, and most of all buyers willing to accept it.

It's gonna be a world of all-barter items, simple tools, food especially.

In case you hadn't noticed, Slashdot supplies links to other news articles, and the members contribute the discussion/content. "Nobody works for free" - that's exactly what happens with comments; community members write them for free.

If Slashdot wants a paywall then it's going to need to significantly up the quality of the articles (start writing/researching its own material, rather than just link and have an editor write a summary). Or seriously beef up its various subsites (they are apparently called "topics" now): business intelligence, cloud, datacenter, etc.