I sincerely hope you misspoke here, since based on what you've said, you're suggesting we block every news site that reports on censorship. We'd be left without a single good source for news within a month if we did that. Slashdot would be delisted within 24 hours. All we'd have left are news sites in bed with the governments or "news" sites dedicated to utterly banal topics.

You can take Florida out of the States, but you can't take the States out of Florida. Moving it to Spanish control wouldn't fix anything, since half the population will still be snowbirds.

No, I don't have it backwards, since they both were Coast Guard veterans, but that's not how it was being portrayed in the media prior to the video, which was the point I was making.

Yeah, it was tadpoles in the drainage ditch out behind the backyard for me. Uphill both ways, of course. ;)

Anyway, I wasn't meaning to suggest I had loads of experience or whatnot, just that whatever lessons I learned as a child have stuck and that between grad school and working in the industry, I've committed myself to this field. I.e. I'm a success story of introducing a child to programming at an early age and having that effort bear fruit later in life.

Logo was my first thought as well, since I realized years after the fact that it and its use of turtle graphics was how I was first introduced to programming, way back in 3rd grade (I'm now in my 30s and have been in the industry for awhile). I didn't recognize it as programming at the time, but in retrospect I can recognize that it laid the foundation for the sort of thinking that became important later in life.

In that same vein, when you're talking about introducing programming to someone at that age, it probably shouldn't be "programming" as most of us think of it on a daily basis. Instead, you might consider activities that get them thinking in the sorts of ways that they would use in programming. Asking them to move a turtle through a maze and other such things in Logo is one way to do that, certainly, and it worked for me, but it's not the only method. Another might be to play a game like SpaceChem, which is essentially a graphical means of programming algorithms that assemble chemicals to meet objectives in the game. Other visual languages might be a great start too. If you're on a Mac, download the free developer tools and check out Quartz Composer, which can produce some immediate graphical results with very little effort. Likewise, if you felt comfortable teaching Swift (it seems fairly approachable, but I've never used it), XCode provides "playgrounds" in which developers can immediately see their results played out.

But yeah...I'd focus laying the groundwork for programming-like thinking, rather than jumping straight into programming proper.

http://www.motherjones.com/env...

California produces 99% of the US' walnuts and almonds, at 5 gallons apiece and 1 gallon apiece, respectively, in addition to a number of other fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Let me repeat that: five gallons of water for a single walnut. Enough water to sustain a person for 5-10 days in an area that is having its most severe drought in decades...in exchange for a single nut. Ridiculous.

They didn't mention it in that article, but a few months back I saw a number related to all of this: 10% of California's water is going to almonds. Whether it's correct or if I'm recalling correctly, I can't say with certainty, but I remember being blown away by the research when I found it. Don't get me wrong, I love almonds as much as the next guy, but when your state is continuing practices that will be unsustainable in the immediate short-term, it's time to make some changes. We can live without our almond milk. They can't live without water.

Because someone (presumably the lawyer) gave a copy of it to the New York Times.

Prior to the video, the media was spinning the situation as a case of self-defense by a military veteran police officer against a ten-time convicted criminal. Never mind that he served in the Coast Guard and that the victim hadn't been convicted of anything violent since 1987. After the video, no one can deny that that account is quite incorrect. Moreover, the video makes it clear that evidence was planted (the officer can be seen picking up what we assume is his Tazer and then dropping it next to the victim), that he lied on the police report (he claimed that CPR was administered; it wasn't), and that his partner was in on all of it (his partner is standing next to him as he plants the evidence).

There's this thing called the "court of public opinion", and the lawyer probably recognized that it was important to get ahead of the issue, stop the spin the media was putting on it, and put national public pressure on the police and DA to deal with this correctly, otherwise it would have turned into another nameless guy getting killed in self-defense by the police. Instead, they now have a real chance at winning their case against the officer.

At least the first level of Bit.Trip Beat is pretty easy (I've nearly had perfect scores on multiple occasions, having made it through the toughest parts and then missing easy ones late in the level, all while only playing it casually). But yeah, for those later levels...guh.

The OP for this topic, with whom you seem to be siding, was suggesting providing the CA with his private keys, and there's a massive difference between asking someone to verify your identity on a one-time basis and trusting someone to protect your identity in perpetuity. Going off of some of what was said by you and the OP...

A) I don't need to "trust them to issue [me] a non-compromised certificate", because that's not how compromised certificates work. When a CA issues you a cert, the first thing you do is check over it for errors. If there are any, you don't publish it on your site. You get a new cert. That's it. Compromise averted.

B) The primary problem with the current system is that fraudulent certificates for your site/service can be issued by unscrupulous/compromised CAs to people other than yourself. They'll be able to pose as you until you get the cert revoked, potentially compromising a subset of your users, but your idea does nothing to address that issue since false self-generated certs could be held by CAs just as easily, so we'd continue dealing with it as we do now: revoking certs, delisting CAs (e.g. CNNIC), etc..

C) Another annoyance with the current system is that if the issuing CA gets compromised, you'll probably want to procure a new cert from a different CA. Annoying, but not catastrophic...unlike the OP's idea. More on that in a moment.

D) The worst thing that can happen in any system is that your private keys get compromised. Anyone (e.g. hacker, nation state with a court order, etc.) who gets their hands on your private keys can not only pose as you or eavesdrop on your current and future encrypted communication, but can also decrypt any past communication they may have managed to collect. The current system we use has a single point of failure: you. The OP's system introduces the CA as an additional point of failure, with the end result being that when the CA gets compromised, it goes from being the nuisance it is now to being an outright catastrophe.

E) Now multiply the catastrophe by tens of thousands, since when the CA got compromised, it wasn't just you that the bad guys gained access to: they also got the same level of access to everyone else who was issued a cert by that CA.

That was my gut reaction as well. Doesn't the US put around $600 billion annually into military spending? If so, that would suggest that 98.33% of the money they spent was not considered a waste. Given the nature of the field (i.e. very cost and research-intensive), having only 1.67% of the dollars designated as having been wasted means that they've either had incredible success or have been doing a poor job of recognizing failure.

I couldn't agree more. I think we're going to see a bit of a rough transition time before things migrate to being fully automated, and that during those growing pains there may be a number of abuses going on.

The link he provides seems to indicate that it is indeed a trademark and that it is indeed valid. They're calling it a hoax, but then they describe what sounds like a simple misunderstanding of IP law, where someone referred to a trademark as a patent. Happens all the time around here. Doesn't make it a hoax.

Yeah, this is a trademark issue. Moreover, the suggestion that Apple can't launch the Apple Watch in Switzerland until later this year only holds if:
A) Apple hasn't already worked out a licensing agreement with the rights holders that we don't know about, and...
B) Apple isn't willing to trample the trademark and then settle with the rights holders in court

Considering that they have a history of doing both of those (e.g. Apple secured the US rights to "iPhone" from Cisco a few days after the Apple iPhone was announced, but they trampled over a different company with the Brazilian rights to the name, before finally settling out of court with them a few years later), I think it's fair to say that Apple will launch the Apple Watch in Switzerland whenever it damn well feels like launching it.

Just a funny aside (since I don't think a full response on my part would add anything of value to the discussion): when my family lived in California back in the '80s, sago palms were routinely stolen from yards that had been recently landscaped. People would drive up with pickup trucks in the middle of the night, grab the newly-planted palms, throw them in the back of the truck, and drive off to sell them on the black market. At the time, they were fetching around $500-1000, apparently, depending on how mature they were.

Wish I was kidding.

So yes, people can fence trees. But I had actual lumber in mind, like what you'd use in construction, and there are plenty of contractors willing to purchase materials from someone shady if it means saving a few bucks.

In the long-term, absolutely. In the short-term, it may be cheaper just to keep the drivers on for the entire trip until we can get to the point where we don't need them for any part of the trip.