I suspect that, among other things, "digital native" means "more comfortable communicating by Facebook and Twitter than by email." Older workers, who started with email and found it to be completely adequate for all their text communication, are completely out of band with text, twitter, snapchat, and this bizarre phenomenon of sending photos of yourself holding hand-written notes.

No one got killed, but even French Christians can be pretty violent over images.

What I want to know is: when did any random loser posting anonymous 60-character messages become a "credible" threat? This seems like the 21st century version of pulling the fire alarm to get out of an exam.

Because threats made by a random driver, often through a closed window, against another random driver in traffic are widely believed not to be serious. If the threatening driver proceeds to follow the threatened around, it does become criminal.

That what the courts are for: to determine whether a "reasonable" person would interpret the behavior as a legitimate threat. eg, actors on stage regularly shout "Fire" in crowded theaters, and you are probably clever enough to shout fire, as a member of the audience, in a way that people realize you're "joking."

That was one of the big changes after 9/11: it stopped being possible to "joke" under certain circumstances. Joking about carrying a (picture of a) gun through security gets your "gun" confiscated. Using the phrase "another 9/11" "another Columbine" (or, at VA Tech, "another 4/16") on the internet gets you a visit from NSA or the local police. There used to be procedures for distinguishing real bomb threats from idle or frivolous threats, but they're pretty hard to apply to 140 characters.

If your cable company is only providing a fraction of the nominal bandwidth, what makes you think that fraction will stay the same when you upgrade? ie, you're buying 100M and getting 10M, and you imagine that buying 1000M will get you 100M. It's just as likely that you'll continue to get 10M, because the bottleneck is somewhere other than the wire between your house and the CO. Are you sure the game company is prepared to deliver their demo to 10 or 100 concurrent users, each at 1G bps?

The problem is that H1-B's aren't really hired. They are temporary workers to whom the company need feel no long-term obligation. They are temporary residents to whom the government need feel no long-term obligation. Bring a few of them in, let them work for a bit, then send them off when the project is done: perfect workforce flexibility.

The H1b program, like unemployment insurance, is a good idea but is subject to abuse. Fraud in unemployment benefits individuals, and we have all manner of documentation, regulation, and verification to minimize that abuse. Fraud in H1b benefits corporations, and we basically trust them to do the right thing.

So, you can design a controller for an automotive assembly line or a controller for a cow dung-fired power station. It's the same basic work, but in one case you're building cars and in the other you're bringing electricity to a developing country. You can design a CNC mill or a CNC embroidery machine, but I'm guessing that you won't find embroidery machines in any class project.

I have many female technical colleagues, and they seem to find math no more difficult than the males. If the social/cultural thing holding women away from STEM is just that they don't find car analogies as engaging as a typical male STEM student, well, would it really damage the male students to have a couple of problems related to more feminine stereotypes? Analyze the stresses in a 4" stiletto heel instead of a tie-rod?

My school used to teach "Statics" to mechanical engineers, "Intro Biomechanics" to bioengineers, and "Physics 1" to everyone else. Each of these covered the same content, in pretty much the same way, but used different examples to illustrate principles. It's surprising how different people respond to calculating the supporting forces of a bridge and the forces required to do a push-up, even though they are the exact same problem.

If you get more women interested in STEM by doing nothing more complicated than replacing some of the car-related examples with emergency shelter-related examples, what exactly is the problem in that?

Because it's better than blindly putting your trust in salespeople. Look, mistakes happen. People have different interpretations of the cost of failure and different tolerance for risk. Things are going to blow up, and post hoc analysis will often identify changes that could have prevented the disaster. But unless you plan to design, validate and build everything yourself, you have to trust someone. So the question you're really asking is whether you should trust someone with quantitative, technical knowledge of the performance and capabilities of the system or should trust someone who just thinks it looks "ok."

Believe it or not, accident statistics and post-failure analysis are part of engineering (regardless of how much it looks like part of regulatory bureaucracy). Performance and failure tell the engineers where its appropriate to revise models and correct designs. This means fewer people get killed by lance-shaped hood ornaments or impaled on steering columns, and it means the next mode of failure is going to be more obscure. It's why we think only a moron would use cosmetically appealing aluminum whiskers to support a steering wheel or put a gas tank directly in front of the rear bumper. It's why traffic deaths have fallen from 150 per billion vehicle miles in 1935 to 15 today. So, yeah: trust engineering, not marketing or accounting.

No, that defines a crash. "Cause" is something that precedes "effect." To say that the effect happened because the effect happened is childish reasoning. Most children learn to relate cause and effect around 3 years old: it's a pretty basic concept.

They are. If you tailgate and wreck the car in front of you, the manufacturer is not liable. If you're switching radio stations and drive into a ditch, the manufacturer is not liable. However, if the your skis were made of balsa wood laminated with PLA, then the manufacturer may be liable when they shatter on the first mogul, and you break your leg.

In Georgia, that will get you a ticket for impeding traffic, not to mention a symphony of air horns and possibly a collection of bullet holes.

Fine by me. Industrial accidents are part of the price we pay for our life of ease. If I have to choose between a 3MI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima spread over 40 years, and a Kingston, Macondo, Valdez, Fergana Valley, Ixtoc, Chevron Richmond - you know, the list of fossil fuel accidents affecting tens of thousands of people is just too long to go through. Nevermind the occasional train derailment and fire.

You design things as best you can against the problems you can think of, and you design mitigation plans against the ones you can't. Every time a new problem comes up, you improve the design. You can not live in a perfectly safe world. If you use electricity, you could shock yourself. If someone produces electricity, they could blow up. If you don't use electricity, a grue might eat you in the dark. Choose your risk, but try to be rational about it. There's nothing inherently worse about the nuclear boogeyman than the coal boogeyman, except that you've been living with the coal boogeyman for 2000 years.

Spoken like a true cargo cultist.

And that's the point. There's a massive industry of snake oil salesmen out there proclaiming their concoction to be "eating right." Only foods that can be prepared with stone tools. High protein. High fat. Only plants raised in virgin soil and harvested by prepubescent girls singing Kumbaya. The app author is exactly one of those people, using the (false) claim that her particular diet cured her cancer. It will probably cure yours, too. And clean your colon and your car at the same time. Sure, you can eat "wrong," but you can also drink too much beer, smoke too many cigarettes, and even drink too much water. Not eating wrong isn't that hard; eating right is a snipe hunt.

I disagree that "no internet" is more censorship. The problem with censorship is that it distorts the appearance of reality. If you can read FOX news, but not MSNBC, then the TEA party look like rational people. If you censor news stories about drone strikes, then bloggers talking about children killed by drone strikes look like conspiracy nuts.

Maybe. As long as you don't violate their TOS. Same with wikipedia, as long as the content doesn't violate their community standards. They're still talking about a small number of organizations, and it's quite clear that those organizations are subject to political manipulation. Even Google had to cave to China, and it's a little fuzzy whether there's any facebook there.

If you can't use an information stream, you'll find one that works. If you have an information stream, you don't know it's distorted.

Are you crazy? There's only a million words in English and only a million six digit numbers, so the combination of real word + number has only a trillion possibilities. 2^40 possibilities, which will fall rapidly to a dictionary attack. It's as "strong" as 6 random, typeable characters.

The point of TFA is that while "12 characters, including three different character classes" sounds like 2^84, the reality is that people meet those conditions by using a real word with the first letter capitalized and a number. (rarely the reverse: Number-word)