(4) An excellent judge of character in spotting a mob boss who gained office

(5) Someone with the moral integrity not to give a personal oath of loyalty to an "El Presidente" figure.

I wonder how long Dirty Donald will be able to continue to abuse and debase his political office and menace the world. Personally I can't wait until Mr. Mueller subpoenas his emails and makes him eligible for the extended jail service he so tantalisingly keeps evading.

Mr. Bosworth's memo is a classic example of corporate thinking, and brilliant in its clarity and brevity.

It's a classic because it identifies certain ethical aspects of his company's conduct and then proceeds to declare all and any ethical considerations irrelevant. Ethics is placed in its proper corporate place, i.e. totally absent. The company is not malicious (there's no benefit in that) just completely a-moral.

The one and only thing that matters is what affects the company's continued economic success: growth. Growth which in turn hinges on whether a user's social circle ("friends") are on facebook. It is the clearest and most perceptive and most succinct statement I've yet encountered (from a manager) on how the "network effect" affects companies whose business it is to provide (and sell) connections.

This memo is also valuable from another perspective. Time and time again it's demonstrated that the question: "Am I being cynical?" is not relevant in conjunction with the corporate world. The correct question is: "Am I being cynical enough to accurately reflect reality?".

It also shows why corporate communications had better be phrased with both eyes on ways such communications expose the company or the sender to repercussions. Coming out and saying "We make money from connecting people, so that's what we will do, for good or for ill" is a bit crude. Not to say blunt. Mr. Bosworth might be due for a refresher course in proper corporate communication technique.

A more conventional phrasing of Mr. Bosworth's message is something like this: "We believe in connecting people. That's what we do and what continues to make us so successful. We will continue to serve the world in personal connectivity because we firmly believe that the good we do far outweighs any negative aspects. So for us the case is clear: we must expand our business as much as possible, as per our mission statement and the Good of Mankind."

There. Some people get that intuitively. It's part of them. Just look at Mr. Zuckerberg.

Last but not least it shows why certain things (like personal privacy) can only be achieved insofar as they are enforced by law.

Corporate self-regulation never works when corporations that don't follow self-regulation will simply outgrow and take over the ones that do. On the other hand, corporate self-regulation can work well when there is a high enough probability that the consequences of not following the rules are devastating for the rule-breaker.

If I look at wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), I read that Mr. Cruz was mostly known for being crazy about weapons and holding extremist views on blacks and muslims. And yes, there is his comment of "Im going to be a professional school shooter" on youtube. Apparently it was too difficult to trace him based on that.

I'm totally in agreement about not selling repeater rifles to the general public. I feel you can hunt all you like with a simple bolt-action rifle, but it's a lot harder to massacre a crowd that way. At the very least I would advocate tying licenses for repeater rifles to an in-depth psychological test plus a background check (rather than the automated no-known-previous-convictions-and-no-known-history-of-drug-use checks). That view does not seem to have have majority backing though.

I'm also in favour of disallowing gun ownership for racist wingnuts and confederate flag wavers. In which I seem to be in a very small minority indeed. Understandable, I must admit, for on basis of that criterion you ought to strip tens of thousands of their firearms. Not worth the hassle, right? Apart from running into constitutional challenges.

Let's not go overboard on this one. As long as repeater rifles remain so easy to get and as long as we have loads of people with mental health issues, we will continue to face school shootings. It's just the price of doing business.Sad if it happens to you personally (or someone close to you) but it can't be avoided unless we want to take gun ownership and mental health issues seriously. So let's not pretend we care too deeply, shall we?

Oh, and shall we skip the ritual dance about "da police oughta have picked up dat nutjob long before" ? The police and the FBI have quite a lot on their plate already. From terrorism to drugs criminals to domestic violence to muggings. Their resources aren't infinite.

Republicans, in their current composition, don't like education, don't like people who aren't millionares, and don't like people to be upwardly mobile. We got it.

So, that's one less avenue to university education. The remaining ones are: (a) be frightfully good and get a full scholarship, (b) have rich parents, (c) join the army and try to qualify for a paid-for education.

Everyone else leave for Canada, the UK, or Europe. Don't worry, we'll make good the shortfall with Indians, Chinese, and Europeans in the software and engineering R&D jobs and PhD. classes.

Pointing fingers at The Government, or The State, is a popular argument, especially in the US, but I'm not at all convinced.

Where you talk about "concentration of power" in government's hands that goes wrong I see the sum-total of pervasive actions by individuals as the root cause, with a Government merely being set up to codify and channel the momentum caused and made inevitable by the free will and decisions of millions.

Take the issue of introducing African slaves into the West Indies now. Started, carries out, abd brought to fruition by thousands of individual traders and plantation owners.

The eradication of Indians in North America: the effect of the collective choices of millions of white US citizens over the years. Ofttimes supported by he government simply serving those it represented.

The Industrial Revolution that unfortunately led to the improverishment and marginalisation of hundreds of millions, stripping them of all perspectives and hopes of betterment, was driven by the collective choices of millions of private enterprises. Leading to what ideologues call "the proletariat", which in turn caused a century or so of bloody revolution (you mentioned the USSR, China, Pol Pot).

Those phenomena (in which "The Government" really did engineer the death of millions) were merely (as I see it) the political echoes of societal developments caused a century or so earlier by the collective actions of millions.

Therefore I think you absolutely miss the point when you finger-point at "The Government" as the perpetrator of atrocities. Sure, it forced compliance and spilled the blood, but it was never the root cause.

I think that we can dimly see today that the game-theoretic setting in which decision making takes place (the current US political situation w.r.t. the place of campaign donations, corporations being accorded rights of "individuals", lobbying and the influence of big enterprise on politics (above and beyond that of voters) is an excellent illustration.

As such I see the phenomenon of one-dollar-one-vote politics as much more of a root cause than any "government" involvement.

Indeed I think that enterprise would have made its weight felt even in an anarchy (of the type Libertarians are so fond of and keep telling us we should have). For example by throwing its weight behind some sort of warlord or crime lord capable of providing, you guessed it, Government.

End-users whose hardware is used to run a botnet should be liable say some. The manufacturers of the IoT device should secure their devices aver others. ISP's should not be allowed to just provide dumb pipes chime in some. It's a cultural issue says the paper referred to in the article.

To make things interesting, for each candidate scape-goat there are apologists. End-users are too clueless, you can't expect them to take responsibility say some. The market precludes manufacturers from putting money in (security) features nobody wants say some. ISP's shouldn't be press-ganged to play network cop say others,

All of them are both right and wrong I think. There are areas of responsibility for everyone. Just like with driving a car. Car manufacturer are responsible for providing a car with certain minimum quality and safety features.They're liable if the brakes don't work or if the turn indicators are shoddy. Dealerships that do shoddy or incompetent maintenance may face liability claims too. Road owners (municipal, county state, and federal) can all be held liable for unsafe situations if they're careless. And nothing protects individuals drivers from making mistakes or driving under influence.

So it's not a contradiction to say that every actor is liable for a subset of the risks.

The government can do a lot by adopting a law that all and any IoT devices must be capable of being secured among others against unauthorised access. No more no less. No specifics, no technicalities: the market will figure that one out. That gets the manufacturers in a position where they can afford to put minimum levels of security in because nobody is going to undercut them on that. ISP's shouldn't be saddled with police duty, but they might be obligated to detect and report port scans and widespread probes for open ports. And finally, consumers could be held liable if they install hardware that's not "approved".

It will take awhile to get that far, but it looks like a stable and sensible equilibrium. As long as people agree it's not an "either or" but an "and and" proposition.

Besides, there could well be money in it too.

What if we can come up with a legal framework for a realistic apportionment of responsibility, strike a sensible balance between cost and security, introduce an "FTC-approved IoT device" stamp and market that entire framework as a solution. I think it will find takers in the EU, Japan, Korea, Taiwan at least.

Then we could start putting diplomatic pressure on "irresponsible" countries that don't have this framework in place. Ought to generate a market for "FTC-approved" gear, consultancy, and perhaps even assistance in adopting equivalent legal frameworks, no?

Of course China would rush to copy it, but they'd be copying us again (not the other way round) and lots of countries (especially those with purchasing power) might have reservations about installing a PRC-approved communications infrastructure as opposed to an FTC-approved one.

Or, because the Republican party carefully hoarded its best publicity shots over its (chronically unproven) allegations of misdemeanors for the campaign and had the good luck that the FBI decided to re-re-re-examine Mrs. Clinton's emails a week or so before the election.

Or it might also be because despite good and sensible economic policies the economy doing fine but the job-market sputtered under pressure from automation and overseas competition, making people susceptible to empty rhetoric about huuuuuge improvements.

Incidentally, the economy and the job market seem to be doing Ok now without any meaningful impact of Pres. Tweety's economic policies, which seems to validate Pres. Obama's economic policies.

Or, because certain voters allowed themselves to be blinded to the current President's huge all-round incompetence by his fact-free bombastic reality-TV performance, which dovetailed nicely with their hankering after a silver bullet for all their problems.

Once this law has been triggered, the Dutch police are basically free to use all and any computer burglary tools on the market to gain access and/or control. And once inside the system they are allowed to collect any evidence they like, and transform the system into a honeypot if they feel like it,

Note that the police doesn't actually need to _prove_ anything to anyone in order to be allowed to gain access.

Suspicion alone (I don't know how that works in The Netherlands; it might be something similar to "reasonable cause") is enough. It's only later, if and when the case goes to court, that they might have to convince the judge that they acted responsibly in having suspicions about the system they hacked, and that they didn't actually entrap people (as in entice them to commit any crimes).

If you think that sounds overly broad, I entirely agree. This being The Netherlands however, I fear that they determined this is a cost-effective way of policing and went with it on that basis.

Where he thinks that settling other planets will increase mankind's chances of survival, I believe they will lead to war. Interplanetary war that will see planets being nuked or targeted with swarms of asteroids.

There doesn't have to be a reason, we'll find one. And if we can't find one, we'll manufacture one.

A new religion. Economics. A new way of running society. Differences in life expectancy. Mutations caused by the environment. Genetic engineering leading to a superior strain of humanity.

Leave it to us. We'll find a reason. We always do. Together on o planet we need to show some restraint, 'cause we're on the same planet. Throw that out and why not bomb a world?

Dead people are already being discriminated against already on a massive scale. For example they aren't even legally allowed to own property anymore, but must work through internediaries like foundations, trust funds, banks, and lawyers. And now you want to rob them of their voice too?

That's crass vitalism, that is!

This is something we from the grassroots action group "Dead does not mean buried !" take a stand against !

Beside which, we prefer the term "differently alive", thank you very much.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

It appears the authorities were warned on five (!) separate occasions about this boy being mentally unstable and embracing terrorism by people who knew him personally. They ignored it.

To be honest, they might have thought the suspect was just a buffoon. You can't go round arresting every loony you find. But what you can do is pay such people a visit (you can even use social workers for that if the police has a capacity problem) and/or interview them at the police station, have a mental assessment done, and see who they're connected with.

Well, now is the time to improve procedures instead of outlawing encryption and introducing Internet censorship..

Seriously, whilst C++ (and Fortran) are great to do the heavy computational lifting, most of that heavy lifting that goes on in computational engines can be isolated in, and accessed from, a specialised library.

After that you really don't need C++ anymore.

In fact you'll realise big productivity (and reliability) gains by *not* coding e.g. business logic or HMI's in C++. Use a script language instead and call those C++ libraries when you know exactly what you want done. I daresay that this is why languages like Python are so popular.

In most applications that business logic and HMI fiddling is 95% of the code once you put the heavy computations inside a library call.

The problem for C++ "coders" is that you don't want a load of mediocre C++ coders to build a library.

Instead you want computational scientists and domain specialists to specify the algorithms, supported by a software engineer for systems design plus one or two really good C++ programmers who can both understand the algorithms and what they do, and who just so happen to be able to implement the design plus algorithms in high-quality, robust, efficient, and elegant code.

He's also the man who, after a working dinner with the British Prime Minister called her "delusional" and "living in a different galaxy".

In public.

And whose staffers leaked extensively about this working dinner the day afterwards.

Yes, that Mr. Juncker. His words are definitely to be taken with a grain of salt.

More so after after a few glasses of wine and a copious meal.