Whether this becomes an excuse for shrinking carry-ons is a different story, and that's how the news organizations have tried to field it. But if you look at their latest press release, they try to be clear:

The Cabin OK guideline is smaller than the size set by most airlines as their maximum acceptable for carry-on baggage. Thus, passengers with Cabin OK carry-on baggage can travel with a greater assurance that it will be acceptable across the different airline requirements. And, when travelling on a participating airline there is a further benefit: those bags with a Cabin OK logo will have a priority (determined individually by each airline) for staying in the cabin should its cabin capacity be exceeded and some baggage need to be moved to the hold.

What they're trying to say is the following: thanks in part to airlines charging for luggage, passengers often encounter situations where the plane is full and some bags are gate-checked, at no additional cost to the passenger. On some of the smaller aircraft, many "perfectly legal"-sized bags are out of necessity gate-checked. The "Cabin OK" logo is IATA's way to signal that, barring exceptional circumstances, that bag need never be checked at the gate. The idea is that the gate agent need only grab the trolleys without the logo to ensure space on a full flight.

Keith Bristow, the director-general of the National Crime Agency, said: “Some of what we would like to talk about to get the debate informed and logical, we can’t, because it would defeat the purpose of having the tactics in the first place. Frankly, some of what we need to do is intrusive, it is uncomfortable, and the important thing is we set that out openly and recognise there are difficult choices to be made.”

Translation: "It is important that we be completely transparent on this single fact: we are not transparent, and we will do bad things, because reasons."

Indeed, but from an academic/evolutionary perspective, the non-falsifiable guys have an advantage - they can produce publishable material without the expense of experiments. Plus, most people don't think science is Three-valued. So So, win again .

What do they have to sell here? All you need is a legitimate business case to be on the network, and you have access. That's the point here: PillPack immediately changed their procedures, but if they were able to call up a full prescrption record using only name and DOB, any number of other businesses with a medical component can too. All you need is to associate names and DOBs (Facebook anyone?), call up the prescription records, look for something chronic, desperate and lucrative, and fire off an automated, personalized email. Profit!

It also is, as Mr. T. said, an ancient practice that was well respected before modern science. Mind you, there have always been astrological crackpots, those who don't apply it scientifically, but just make stuff up. And, yes, the inference is "the sun's position in the sky has a direct and obvious effect on existence below the sphere of the moon; the moon's position in the sky also has an influence, although less strong (think: tides); therefore, the position of the other celestial spheres - mercury, venus, mars, jupiter, saturn and uranus - against the sphere of fixed stars, notably the constellations of the ecliptic, should have an influence.

Of course, it doesn't quite work that way. The inference is false, and the whole thing collapses.

And only a month after the first public posting of the vulnerability, in their own forums.

Some guy accurately describes the vulnerability, complete with screenshots showing a Superfish-signed online banking page, and posts it to the public Lenovo Security-Malware support forum, and they take no public action for 29 days; yet around the same time, they stopped installing the software on new machines. Only when it's a scandal do they first make statements that are designed "to defuse the situation", which, in this case means trying to convince their owners that their dangerously compromised and possibly already-exploited machines are safe, and then (perhaps when someone points out that such statements are only going to increase the price tag from the inevitable class-action suit) do they start behaving properly.

So, no, that's not a speedy response. As a company selling a product, they are ultimately responsible for everything that product contains. They have a duty of care to make sure that the goods they are supplied do not place their customers at risk. If one of their trusted partners wants to load a Root CA onto their machine, it better have a good security case for it. "Used by major commerce sites", for example, is a good reason; "allows us to break SSL" is a bad one. Ignorance is not an excuse. If Lenovo is not loading up their machines with all the crap they put on it and auditing their installed certificates, they are not doing their duty to the customer.

If Lenovo tells people their machines are secure, when it has known for a month at least that they weren't, it is making things worse for itself. Saying they don't read their own public support forums, or that the information didn't get to the right person doesn't amount to an excuse so much as an admission of guilt. Claiming that PR flaks are there to give these kinds of messages slanders the job of spokespeople: specific people are assigned precise messages to communicate to the people exactly to avoid statements that would open them up to litigation.

Right now, we don't know of any security compromises that occurred via Superfish. We may never hear of them, but that doesn't mean that they never occurred.

Right now, Lenovo seems to have their best PR approach underway: release the uninstallation tool, contact every anti-virus provider on the planet, contact everyone who registered a product with them, and then shut up and start saving pennies for the settlement.

So they have video of the abduction, they have the victim, they have the place where he held and abused her, and you think, after the police made public appeals for information, any judge is going to toss the whole case because the car dealer installed a tracking device? They didn't discover the crime subsequent to installing a tracking device. They had a crime and a life in danger.

Actually, if they put their cash in a box, local police can seize it, as that much currency is only hoarded for criminal purposes.

Marketing works on the principle that those jerks share, if not the same zip code, at least the same corporate culture as engineering. And the turnaround between when they observed the situation, when they made a decision and when we got to see the effects of that decision is several years shorter than engineering. So, yeah, I stand by what I say, and, hell, I'll add: I do not own stocks in any electronics hardware company, but I feel that shareholders should examine the performance of Intel in this case and see it as a predictor of where the company will be in four years.

In any case, if their marketing guy is a such a rube as to be roped in by this, is it absurd to imagine that their 2018 CPU will be powered by an E-Cat?

Alright, to finish things off, here's what someone who actually paid his dues, going out in a blaze of glory for pointing out Games Journalist Corruption, has to say.

I know, nobody's reading this. Well, hopefully someone at Intel is; and if you are, here's another post by that editor so horribly offensive because of her gurl parts that you publicly sided with a lynch mob. This one is on ethics, a word, to judge by their recent actions, so unfamiliar to your colleagues, that I wouldn't be surprised if the SEC levied historical fines against your company.

Yeah, screw Intel. If those morons can't see that this is not a fight where they can associate their brand with either side and win, then they obviously can't make decent engineering decisions either. And it counts as taking sides to pull their ads in reaction to editorials about an internet hitmob masking misogyny behind a self-righteous insistence of "ethics". Yeah, sure, it doesn't bother these same people that games journalists get flown across the world by big games companies, put up in a hotel and presented their game with complete tech support. These guys aren't the ones vociferously complaining when their favorite reviewers give a game 9/10, even when the stupid-ass DRM code means that nobody can play it for a week after release. But, sure, some angry dude claims his ex slept with a journalist, who didn't cover the game, or some woman dares to point out the way in which games we all love make women uncomfortable, and suddenly, the press is corrupt for shoving feminism down peoples' throats.
So, screw Intel. Or, to use the language they clearly prefer, assrape and teabag those assholes.

Uhh... Europe? I know quite a few humanities Ph.D.s who are teaching in high schools out here.

Seriously, when I was in a public HS, we had high school teachers with Ph.D.s, in the STEM classes (well, okay, not the TE part). In the humanities, we had people with M.S. in education, and no clue what's going on. You want to know why history sucks in High School? The teachers were those students who got straight Cs in history at the university and an education degree.

If you made computer science a mandatory subject, and then required that the students be taught to type in, line-by-line, the source code for libreoffice, then what was taught in the course would not be incorrect. It wouldn't be computer science either.

The counterargument here is that "Big HIstory" focuses on a grand narrative without approaching the methodologies used to construct such narratives. Historians try to teach methods, and specifically ways to approach texts and to construct arguments from them about the past; they try to get students to look at histories not as "correct" or "incorrect" (although they can also be that), but rather as someone's attempt at interpreting the data in a way relevant to us.

The fact that most High School history classes suck and feature some nutcase rattling on about pet theories and spewing lists of crap for students to memorize has nothing to do with what history teachers want, and everything to do with the fact that "Coach of a High School Sports Team" is not a full-time job, and most schools have more coaches than gym teachers. So they gotta teach something, and that education degree means they can teach whatever they want; a Ph.D. in history is not so flexible, and (thanks to union rules) costs cash-strapped schools more money to hire.

They don't do SPs any more. Calling them "Mandatory Updates" allows them to get around any promises they made regarding SPs. Oh yeah, and this update? I'm not affected, since my machine is still unable to install the mandatory update.
WTG Microsoft. You should be glad that platforms are not part of your core mission.

Yeah, "Flatten the structure" means, at some level, have fewer bosses responsible for more employees. "Increasing communication" means having more bosses responsible for fewer employees. Doing both together means firing the people the CEO's entourage doesn't like.

reduce time it takes to get things done by having fewer people involved in each decision; = fire people.

quantify outcomes for products and use that data to predict future trends; =If it doesn't sell in the first quarter, kill it. Predict the market by abandoning lethargic products and jumping on the winner. You know, like how the massive Kinect 1.0 sales led to the dominance of the XBone. On the other side, when PlaysForSure fails, replace it with the Zune Store, when that fails, replace it with the next. Then fire the whole team, except for the useless ones. Put them on the next iteration of Windows Phone.

and increasing investment for employee training and development. =hire more of the consultants who write buzzkill press releases. Note it didn't say "increase our emphasis on employee training and development" or "find new ways to enrich our employees' skills and competencies", but rather "increasing investment for" -- "buy new things with this ostensible goal".

Context? Nobody watches in context. If he makes two "light digs" at Android, that's your story. Apple just went from the "industry leader", telling people what they want, to the "industry reactor", telling them what they don't want. It doesn't matter whether it's only a few seconds of a keynote, or whether it's true or not, it fits the narrative.

Master your own narrative or be a victim of other's. Isn't that the lesson here?

I know, you can't hear me over the thumping base of your Beats headphones.