| Your point is absurd. How does a parent giving blood assess the capability of a child in a way comparable to an academic test?

It demonstrates supportive parents. This probably correlates with the student future success in school. It demonstrates a willingness and desire to advance.

| It's entirely possible that one child of a family will be Harvard-worthy, and the other totally useless. Not to mention that a hard-working individual from an unambitious family absolutely shouldn't be held back by that.

That's great if you have a wealthy educational system as we have (or had) in the U.S.

A hard-working individual from an unambitious family will likely have other opportunities to get a little extra credit. Or, at least, one would hope so.

Oh, while it isn't clear from the article I linked, a local TV news story this morning said that they were apparently targeting medical research data.

And (as was mentioned in the article) the attack apparently came from China via hacked systems in S. Korea.

http://www.utsandiego.com/news...

This goes back 2 years, but just hit the news wires today:

LA JOLLA — UC San Diego has been targeted by a series of cyber attackers seeking access to sensitive research and other data since 2012 and officials say the so-called advanced persistent threat has prompted the campus to take steps to bolster its security.

The initial security breach, detected in June 2012, involved the use of stolen passwords by hackers targeting computer servers. University information technology security director John Denune said that no work was lost and no critical research data was accessed.

I actually got a letter from a dentist saying that their office was broken into and medical records taken. I believe that's a HIPAA requirement.

It's easy to poke fun at this, but maybe it's not so silly.

How much is a "point" worth? (What is the point scale?) If it's a 100-point scale, this might push somebody over the line by a half-grade (in our typical U.S. grading system).

If the parent gives blood as a result, it might mean that they are a good citizen looking out for the welfare of everyone, and that they are concerned about their child's future. This would seem positive for the child's education. If a child is teetering on the edge of some grade category or entrance requirement, then who's to say this isn't as valid as knowledge testing.

Well, it IS an entrance requirement, and so the intent must be to predict future results. So, it seems to have some relevance to me. Sure, it's a bit arbitrary and clearly tied to some unrelated state goal. But might be predictive of future results. The family goes along with the system and pitches-in to help, and so the child will likely do better in school.

It's not much different than considering non-grade aspects for entrance. Yes, the very idea of an entrance requirement for high school (other than making an appearance for n years) is foreign to westerners. But we also do have some tradition of giving some little "extra credit" or recognition for community participation - e.g. clubs and activities, etc. for entrance to college, or to some selective schools, etc. How is this that much different? Yea, it's about the parent, not the child, but I think it is seen as more of a family unit.

At least they didn't hire Barney.

It's nice if you're right.

It's even nicer if you can make money even if you are wrong.

And better still if you can make money while being wrong most of the time.

You are mistaken if you think making money trading equities has anything to do with being right.

While I am out of the game (partner who was responsible for all expenses wouldn't spend on infrastructure improvements - my mistake was not kicking in from my own share of profits... he did not understand simple physics, and could not convince him it was a war of escalation) I did high-frequency trading from 1999 to 2003. When you are holding for milliseconds, you don't care about right or wrong. You care that your winners out-run your losers. We did thousands of trades every day, and made money nearly every day. Probably a handful of days when we had a loss and don't think we ever sustained a weekly loss. Certainly never a monthly one. We had no opinion on direction of the market or direction of the stock. All we cared is that our opening position (long or short) had some advantage.

It's only a concept, but, sure, this is doable.

You could probably do it with a Parrot ar.drone. In fact, I presume it's already been done.

I won an ar.drone 2.0 in a hackathon. I have to be honest, and say that, really, I won an ar.drone 2.0 by wandering down to a hackathon in my hotel seeking pizza and aspirin, found them, and then stuck around for a while. I showed somebody which API call to make to save an image in the Rhodes mobile platform, and got a drone as a contributor to the "honorable mention" Motorola team entry. (The Motorola employees weren't eligible for a prize, and they had a LOT of drones to give away...)

Anyway, I haven't played with it much yet. I was remarking to a friend how limited it is by the WiFi range, and they remarked that it would still be ideal for having the drone follow you around. The ar.drone seems to have everything it would need to do that.

Of course, it won't fit on your wrist.

The device in the video is a very similar configuration in smaller packaging.

| CIS says he bets wrong four out of 10 times.

That's not at all impressive.

Good trading strategies can return positive results if you bet wrong more than half the time. I'd be impressed if he can bet wrong 9 times out of 10, and still make a profit.

SMS is a part of GSM circuit-switched technology (and retrofitted into CDMA). Carriers would like to eventually drop GSM altogether. In LTE, is't SMS supposed to eventually just be a virtual circuit, along with voice?

Then SMS isn't so simple, and loses a lot of it's robustness. An awful lot of stuff has to work vs the simplicity of SMS over GSM.

I wonder how reliable SMS will be when it is nothing more than just another packet, which may have somewhat higher priority over other packets?

You mean that place where they've been building the big factory? That place? The place where work has been ongoing for months?

What a surprise.

If rumors are to be believed, the plant is already under construction.

I find it hard to believe that California state officials are not aware of this. Therefore, they must have some other agenda beyond Tesla. Tesla is a red herring.

The article is short on details, but, in all fairness, the paper is to be presented on Thursday and presumably the details will be forthcoming.

My guess is that there are are two possibilities here:

1. The avionics and entertainment systems are connected on the same local network, and thus if one can gain control of the entertainment system(s) on might then hack into the avionics.

Q. Why might the avionics and entertainment systems be connected? One reason I can think of is so that the entertainment system can be told to shut down or partly shut down during takeoff/landing etc. Just a guess. Plus, it's just very convenient. ;) There is probably some overall "aircraft management" system that would want to be connected to everything.

2. The entertainment systems have one or more satellite communication systems themselves. The entertainment system might use SDR (Software Defined Radio) techniques, and might be re-programmed to interfere with critical onboard communication equipment.

If the graphics subsystem fails, or I have to go to single-user mode, I have nano.

WordStar rules!

NSA's British equivalent observed this procedure being done by employees of The Guardian.

Sometimes they stuff you have.

Sometimes they don't want anyone else to have stuff you have...