The US has a population of almost 320 million. Between 1% and 2% of the US population has a doctoral degree. Let's use that as a proxy for people with a STEM degree of any kind. That suggests that there's somewhere on the order of 3 million people in the US with a tech degree. If all if them were looking for jobs, then only about 1 in 6 would be able to find one. That being said, I can't tell you how many currently-filled positions there are. This probably accounts for the rest.

Let's keep in mind that most tech degrees aren't worth the paper they're written on. There are universities turning out uneducated graduates in droves. Even the good schools manage to graduate plenty of morons with passing grades. If this weren't the case, then companies like Google wouldn't feel motivated to put interviewees through these grueling, demoralizing, dehumanizing interviews. I don't like that approach to interviews, but it is an effective way of eliminating the huge numbers of college graduates who managed to pass without acquiring any skills. If the colleges had higher standards, this wouldn't be necessary.

People who can't find jobs say there aren't enough openings. Companies with plenty of openings complain that there aren't enough (good) IT graduates. Both are true. There are inordinate numbers of IT graduates. There are also plenty of jobs (open and filled positions combined).

We hear about a lack of IT jobs because the majority of IT graduates can't find jobs. When a majority complains about something, we hear about. What's left out of this is that the majority of IT graduates are also woefully unskilled at IT, although they either don't know or don't care. They spent more energy on cheating than studying, but they (or their parents) paid for their degree, and they feel entitled to get a job. Too bad they're completely unemployable.

Back when I got my bachelors degree, there was a major employer in the area that hired a lot of local graduates. Mostly they would hire them with only a cursory interview. Every single hiree, regardless of skill, was paid $30k/year (this was the mid 90's) and put through an extensive training program. Think of it as 3-month interview or probationary period. If you couldn't hack the training program, you were let go. If you passed, your skill level still didn't matter, because every one was stuck at the bottom of a waterfall design process. All you would do all day, every day was go through a stack of papers, where each paper corresponded to one function or procedure, and you would code them one at a time. Completely mind-numbing. But this company was successful at meeting predictable deadlines by employing thousands of relatively mindless IT graduates. There are still lots of companies like this, and they have to be, because this is the quality of the typical IT graduate. Those companies that adapt to the lowest common denominator do well. People get hired, and they get plenty of employees.

But we're in a super star culture. Companies want super star engineers, and engineers (however unskilled) want super star jobs. And that's where all the complaints (from both sides) are coming from.

(a) The linked article doesn't list the good and bad species. Does the original? Is it behind a paywall?
(b) How can I order some probiotic pills with just the right good ones?
(c) Why are probiotic pills so limited in the species included?

Depending on the frequency band (i.e. not terahertz), it's not that hard to make an arbitrary digital signal encoder that produces an analog signal, after a little bit of filtering. For instance, it's common enough to do audio by wigging a single bit and then passing that through a low-pass filter.

If they're claiming to do it without ANY analog hardware, then I call BS. However, there is filtering inherent in the digital circuits. I could imagine using a genetic programming to learn code sequences that produced desired signals as basically cross talk. However, process variation could really muck with that.

As for receiving, that's not too hard either. Say you want to receive a wide band of frequencies. You can make a band-pass filter in the analog and convert that to digital using an ADC. Once in the digital domain, you can separate the channels using fourier analysis or Taylor series.

Let's face it, people: Hacking is boring to watch. At the same time, do you think they weren't going to do a cyber-inspired CSI show in the Internet era?

My wife's (an attorney) gave me another example of something that would be as interesting as a technically accurate "CSI: Cyber":
"Law and Order: Bankruptcy Court"

And that's about right.

I like SmallTalk, and I like C. However, their syntaxes are very different. Objective-C mashes them together in a way that results in a very inconsistent feel to the syntax. C++, on the other hand, is just a logical extension of C syntax. Sure, there are some advantages to Objective-C's message passing approach. Well, if you consider silent failure when you pass a message to a null object to be an advantage.

Objective-C predates C++, and it shows. Someone shoehorned in OOP in a way that was borrowed from a totally different philosophy. Then Stroutrop came along and did it right. Some people may have complaints about C++ at an abstract level, but at least the language is internally consistent (or more so than Objective-C anyway).

Honest question: What proportion of complainers just want porn, and what proportion just don't want censorship? And what proportion of those complaining about censorship really just want porn?

Back in the 80's, IIRC, there was a study where people were put into a cave with nothing but artificial light and allowed to sleep on their own schedule. They ended up with about a 25 hour day.

What if you don't like your head? Ugly people could have their brains transplanted into pretty people. Think of the potential for sex changes too! Then just as there's a market for stealing kidneys, there will arise a market for stealing whole bodies. You don't have to steal a rich person's digital identity. You can steal their WHOLE LIFE. Mind you, you'd have to study up really hard on every detail of their life and even learn to imitate their accent and speach patterns exactly, so their friends don't catch on. And then, with everyone knowing about the potential for this kind of identity theft, imagine someone undergoes a personality change due to illness -- everyone will assume their brain was replaced by an imposter, because most people are fucking clueless about mental illness.

Your comment is probably the most insightful here.

Even with extreme optimism about neurplasticity and nerve cells sliced in the middle (not separated at the synapses but chopped like a stalk of celery) deciding to attach to other sliced neurons, the idea of taking one spinal cord and gluing it to another spinal cord and having ANYTHING line up right seems absurd to me. Talk about a registration problem! I suspect the only way to do it would be to be to perform microscopic surgery where tiny machines connect neurons one-by-one. Of course, even if we had that technology, there's a whole other problem of knowing which ones to connect to which, which probably doesn't have a real solution as you pointed out.

There is something peculiar about peanuts in the US that seems to make them more allergenic. Peanut allergies occur less in other parts of the world. (Or so some people tell us anyhow.)

One hypothesis is that we just don't have enough parasites here. IgE immune response primarily targets parasites. Without them, it has nothing to do and starts attacking harmless things like food proteins and environmental allergens like pollen. Elsewhere in the world, those who would otherwise be allergic to peanuts are instead having their immune systems busy with the parasites.

Another hypothesis is that there's something growing on the peanuts here that people are actually reacting to, like a mold or fungus. In fact, that is a commonly offered explanation for corn allergies as well.

I don't know the status on GMO and peanuts, but some people seem to think that genetic modifications are correlated with higher rates of allergies. That's probably just noise in the data, assuming there IS any data.

I don't know if this'll apply to InGaAs, but for silicon, I did a projection based on ITRS numbers. As transistors shrink, they get faster. But at the same time, process variation gets worse, and that uncertainty requires wider safety margins. At what point does the increase in performance equal the increase in safety margin? 5nm.

It's unlikely that InGaAs will suffer less in terms of random dopant fluctuation and lithographic abberations, unless it's less damaged by UV, in which case at least the lithographic problems can be reduced a bit.

I can't find the video, but there was an episode of Tiny Toons or Looney Toons where one of the characters fell into a hole all the way through the moon or an asteroid, and he just kept oscillating back and forth.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.1897v2.pdf

In human language, redundancy is important for separating the signal form the noise. Esperanto, which has less redundancy than organic languages, is harder to understand in a noisy environment.

With programming languages, a lot of the redundancy is for things like meaningful identifier names and type safety. Hey, I've developed compact programming languages before. They're impossible to read and debug.

A company as big as BMW should be able to hire some security experts, so this should be a bit embarrassing for them.

But the truth of the matter is, doing security is not easy. Take web programming, for instance. Back when I first learned PHP, I found over and over that whatever design or coding approach seemed most straightforward and intuitive was inherently unsecure. All sorts of escaping and manual insertion of encryption functions are required, and that clutters up the code to the point of making it hard to maintain. I did manage to implement most of it in a common PHP file that I reused over and over again, but there was a huge learning curve, and it was a pain. Since then, people tell me that it's gotten a LITTLE better. For instance, database wrappers generate the SQL queries for you and automatically escape strings. But for the most part, it still sucks.

If there were a single best book to read on cyber security, then perhaps we'd have fewer problems like what BMW had. But in reality, to get good at it, you have to have a vast familiarity with the literature and tools. You do that much reading, you might as well get a PhD. And my friends with PhDs focusing on security are in academia, not industry, so we get more security papers but not more secure devices.