I'm pretty liberal and fairly progressive, but I'm not 100% anti-gun, so your statement is certainly not broadly generalizable outside of conversations in the media, in my experience. I voted against a gun law just a few months ago, though it passed anyway. I wanted to vote for it, because the requirement that weapons be stored securely (either in a safe or with a trigger lock) was good, and the requirement for timely reporting of stolen firearms was good, but I couldn't vote for it because it also contained a ban on large magazines, which violates the fourth amendment by depriving people of property without due process—in other words, eminent domain all over again.

We do, IMO, need to mandate some changes, like gun safety classes for anyone purchasing a firearm for the first time, electronic fingerprint safeties on all new firearms, etc. And I wouldn't personally want to have a firearm in my house because I think the safety risk exceeds the safety benefit, at least in my neighborhood, but that doesn't mean I think that my opinion should be forced on everyone else. That's part of being a true liberal. Anyone who believes otherwise is a progressive authoritarian, not a progressive liberal.

And that's why he won't. The whole point is to avoid homogeneity, because homogeneity strangles progress and provides a single target for the spread of malware.

In my experience this is nonsense. I agree that maths is pretty universally badly taught - after all, if you're good at maths, your career choices are being a quant paid in millions, an engineer or computer scientist paid in hundreds of thousands, or a school teacher paid in a few tens of thousands. The market (and we know that the market is never wrong, don't we, children?) systematically selects people who are bad at maths to teach maths. The results are not surprising.

But maths isn't hard. Maths is very, very easy; it is a natural way to think about more or less everything. If you take the school teachers out of the way and let children get on and learn the physics of whatever it is that interests them (for me it was sailing boats, but it really doesn't matter - we live in a mathematical universe) from the books in their own time, they will be good at maths. I really don't believe anyone is born bad at maths; we're taught to be bad at maths.

You're assuming that the speed at which the problems are solved is positively correlated with fundamental understanding of the concepts. For problems like multiplication, this isn't really the case.

Not only is it not the case, in highly intelligent people, for large problem sets, it is often reverse-correlated. When I was a kid, if you gave me 50 math problems, I'd take longer to solve them than the folks who were making Fs in the class—not because I was struggling, but because after the first five or ten problems, I was so bored that I'd spend a few seconds working on a problem, followed by fifteen minutes daydreaming about anything else but the subject at hand.

What part of 'also did not take any alternative form of compensation (stock options, bonus, etc.) since 2003' do you not understand?

Steve Jobs reckoned he was rich enough. He was working for fun, not for money. Most good engineers are not especially money motivated. We like making things, and he did that. Well.

I had one of the very first Archimedes boxes, back before it even had a proper operating system (it had a monitor called 'Arthur', which was really very primitive). But it was a really good feeling sitting in my university bedroom with a computer which in terms of raw processing power was faster than the two fastest machines the university then owned put together. Those original ARM boxes were, by the standards of their time,very remarkable: much faster than contemporary DEC VAX, Motorolla 68000, or Intel 80286 machines. The DEC Alphas which came along at about the same time were faster, but they were also hugely more expensive!

Well, as a matter of fact, the process you propose has been in use for over a year ...

No, it hasn't. My parents have gone through security as "TSA Pre" travelers. There's remarkably little difference between that and normal travel, from what I've seen, and at most, no more difference than the difference between buying a first-class ticket and a coach ticket (separate line). Yes, in theory, you have to do a few less things, but you still get in line, stick your bag on a belt, walk through a magnetometer or a porn scanner, then wait for your bag.

What I was proposing is a separate line in which you hand them a card, they swipe it, verify your face against the data from their database, and you walk straight through security and out the other side. No putting bags on a belt, no magnetometer, no porn scanner. Just walk through.

The true answer is to allow people to get through a full background check in exchange for skipping the screening process entirely. Frequent travelers (the majority) would do so, and this would cut the number of people waiting in line to almost nothing.

But they won't do that, because the TSA is primarily a jobs program, not a security screening service.

Even if you're right, the fact remains that security researchers have shown that the bug in question didn't exist in Secure Transport as of the 10.8.5 sources. Because Secure Transport is open source, you can verify that yourself if you don't believe me.

Snow Leopard (10.6) is not vulnerable to this bug, since Apple did not switch from OpenSSL to their own SSL/TLS library back then yet.

No, that's not correct at all. First, it doesn't affect 10.8.5, either, which blows that theory. Second, Secure Transport was introduced way back in 10.2, and has been used for Foundation and Core Foundation SSL negotiation since at least 10.4, according to various security vulnerability reports (and probably earlier). In other words, this has absolutely nothing to do with Apple "switching" anything. It's just a bug, and a fairly recent bug at that.

If you give regular lectures or presentations as part of your life - and many of us do - something like this will probably pay for the whole kit fairly quickly. The ability to give presentations without fumbling with notes, the ability to walk around while talking and not be stuck behind a lectern, the ability to change slides with perhaps just a subtle nod of the head, make for very much more fluid and effective communication.

If I was still teaching regularly, I would buy one.

... and then carve a face in it.

When I use the internet from home, my little dish lights up the satellite so effectively that not only can the satellite distinguish it from all the other radio frequency clutter emanating from northern Europe, I can push 6Mb/s up the link. Yes, I know you city folk think that's absurdly slow, but I find it mind boggling. What's even more mind-boggling is that it only eats 38 watts to do that. Of course if everyone was trying to light up the satellite at the same time it almost certainly wouldn't be able to discriminate all the different signals, but even so comms satellites are awesome technology.

The problem is that the legal limit is (in the UK at least) 60 watts. As there lasers will emit many more lumens per watt than the incandescent bulbs in use when the law was written, this doesn't stop them being much too bright.