I hardly doubt that a future employer would hold him accountable for telling the truth under oath.

Was that intentional, Freudian slip, or mistake? I mean, I concur 100% -- there is no doubt in my mind that the most successful US companies strongly favor a willingness to lie under oauth -- but then I've worked on Madison Ave and my brother worked on Wall Street, so I've seen the sausage get made.

detect how intoxicated you were in the photo and suggest that you not post it. Which in the end, is probably for the best.

Not bad. Now if we can just get them to suggest that you not post things when you don't look intoxicated, they'll have covered all the cases where not posting things to Facebook probably for the best.

how can we quantify the effect of simply having *some form* of security...?

Brief aside; of course we should have some security. I'm only saying that the things TSA has done are generally both unnecessary and ineffective.

quantify the effect of ... security to deter the less-suicidal ones?

The way to measure the deterrent effect of a system is by looking at the risk in cases where that system is not in place. In the case of TSA, we can look at cases where the TSA has no deterrent effect and there isn't an analog agency or system. By looking at the probability of attacks that are not deterred by TSA, and comparing that to the probability of attacks in cases where TSA is in place, we can approximate the risk mitigation.

So, for example, we have little or nothing like TSA to deter toxic gas attacks in crowded public spaces. AFAIK, the recent (and possibly accidental) chlorine gas release at the furry convention is the only case since the creation of TSA.

Consider how much terrorism we experienced in the recent years prior to TSA, the level of terrorism in first world nations that don't have something like TSA, and the number of events in the US in areas that are not protected by TSA or a similar deterrent. Compare that to the three minor terrorist attempts that made it through TSA's watch, and their threat level. Even if you take the most pro-TSA estimates you reasonably could, I think we're talking about a deterrent effect that falls somewhere below the life saving benefit of "Don't Run Near The Pool" signs -- at a much higher cost in both dollars and liberty.

is the TSA right to be cautious or have its actions caused unnecessary hassle for passengers?

The TSA has done about ten billion screenings since its inception. They have caught zero terrorists. They have missed three. All three failed, for reasons completely unrelated to TSA. TSA screenings are ineffective and unnecessary. This has been apparent for years, this story is just one more bit of security theater. TSA panders to the terror that is the terrorists' only weapon when we should be fighting it.

Seriously, what is the NSA going to do when the consequences of their arrogance propagate fully through our information culture?

One thing they'll do is get their oligarch friends to deny services to people who use encryption to keep the government from knowing their identities, like they've been doing with banks and TOR, by implying that people who use privacy protecting encryption are criminals.

Ahhh, how delightfully naive we were. Here's the tinfoil hat pessimist's prediction, from that discussion:

More likely, Apple will release a iPod update with COOL NEW FEATURES L@@K which oh yeah, btw, breaks compatibility with real-purchased songs. So then your iPod will not play your Real purchased library, until Real reverse-engineers it again, and who knows how long that'd take. So you'd have perhaps hundreds of dollars of songs on your iPod that you couldn't get to for an indefinite period of time; and Apple would just shrug their shoulders when you complain.

Silly boy, they won't just stop playing competitors' music, they'll burn the crops and sow the fields with salt! Errr, got a little overexcited there. They'll delete the files!

Grumble grumble. I came into the comments section to see reactionary histrionics and all you can manage is reasonable and dispassionate analysis?

Diversity is a good thing. I understand that, with increasing use of Linux as a desktop OS by people who don't run servers, systemd makes a lot of sense for some people.

I am the primary admin on servers in three different states. The benefits of using init for remote admin outweigh the simplicity and user-friendliness of systemd on my laptop.

I switched from Mandrake to Debian almost fifteen years ago when I first started doing heavy remote admin, I'll make a change again now, and the world will keep on spinning. Having both approaches is a good thing.

Every good law has counterpoints. Traffic signals prevent me from driving through the intersection even when there are no other cars there. Assault laws mean you can't punch someone who talks on their phone at the movies. The right to a trial means we can't just execute people we know are guilty.

One of the other examples I've been hearing lately is about Citizen's United. They say overturning it or passing contradictory legislation could hamper Steven Colbert, or limit the ACLU or EFF. Well, yes, it might. But that would be better, overall, than what we have now.

The goal is not to have laws that capture every nuance. Government is a blunt weapon that must operate in a non-discriminatory fashion. Special cases exist that show the friction in every law. The objective is not for every special case to be efficient, but for the law overall to be efficient.

Last mile providers colluding with incumbents to provide preferential access to consumers harms competition in content. Competition is good in the long run, even for the things we like that may appear to be harmed in the short run. There are natural limitations to competition on carriage, we should not extend those competition limitations to making discriminatory deals with content providers.

TL;DR version: Register.co.uk is a serial clickbaiting site, they admit it, and this article is an intentional, blatant misrepresentation of the research. Link to El Reg only for the same sort of reasons you would link to The National Enquirer.

Some have pointed out the explicit invocation of the slippery slope, but it is worse than that.

His comments to the House of Commons came after the parliamentary intelligence and security committee concluded that the brutal murder of Rigby could have been prevented if an internet company had passed on an online exchange in which one of the killers expressed "in the most graphic terms" his intention to carry out an Islamist jihadi attack.

This is not the same as blocking access to child porn sites. He is calling for the content of all packets to be inspected for unapproved speech.

Blade Runner, for example, posited that the skies above Los Angeles would swarm with flying cars by 2019.

It's only 2014. There's still 5 years. Get to work, everyone!

I can't believe I didn't guess that this was the particular flavor of corporate whoring that Gates and Zuckerberg were up to. Get into the educational pipeline with whatever education issue is hot (it started as just STEM, but then shifted to women in STEM when that started sizzling, if you'll remember). Get some big names to attach their reputations to its success. Then start selling ad space to Disney, who can't get much traction buying ad space inside the schools themselves. I should have guessed, but I didn't. I just thought they were after the data.

Pi hundred million. Nothing more to say, but I'm guessing if I don't add more I will run into the lameness filter.

There's a religious refrain, "Pray to God but row toward shore." It means you should ask for God's help, but that doesn't mean you should just sit there in the boat and wait to be saved.

From the Cryptome PDF:
Yesterday the USA Freedom Act was blocked in the Senate as it failed to garner the 60 votes required to move forward. Presumably the bill would have imposed limits on NSA surveillance. Careful scrutiny of the billâ(TM)s text however reveals yet another mere gesture of reform, one that would codify and entrench existing surveillance capabilities rather than eliminate them.

We didn't really lose anything. The government chose not to pass a platitude. That's probably not going to change until we manage to fix the twin problem of fear and hatred, being stoked by those who gain from emotionalism.

In the meantime, we need to row toward shore. Keep working on all the cryptography solutions you have time to help with. If you have an interest in meme propagation on social media or propaganda, see if you can figure out some ways to weaken the grip of emotionalism. I am, and it's fun.

Sometimes your nation calls on you for service. Sometimes you have to know what it needs even if it doesn't know how to ask.