You need someone's cooperation, so you send a letter demanding they do a bunch of things you know they object to on short notice and then demand money at the same time? Good luck with that.

Every major field that's taught in university has vastly more information than can be taught to students. The STEM fields are hardly unique that way.

What's odd is that the science and technology majors make an effort to push students as hard as possible, and the other majors choose not to. Look back on the standards at schools 100 years ago and you'll often see that the liberal arts curium seems way more difficult and thorough than it is today.

A lot of ad platforms already have a non-cookie mechanism working. Storing hashes of user agent and IP address is common. You have to go through a proxy or otherwise change IP address for that not to work. It's easy to find services advertising this as a feature: http://www.ipfingerprint.com/we_dont_use_cookies.aspx The truth is that cookies aren't that great for tracking. People want to know your activity across browsers and devices. That requires using additional information like phone unique identifier (sent by apps), website logins, billing address fields, coupon usage, and so on. That information can be tied together to track you. You're not going to be able to prevent that kind of tracking by messing with cookies.

If a friend and I alternate driving each other, we've still made a financial transaction and are competing with taxis. It's just a barter based transaction.

You're falsely assuming they want average. They probably want excellent service only. If you want to ensure people only get excellent service, you're going to have to have a harsh cutoff built into the system somewhere.

I suppose this is a problem, but we have to be realistic here. The FBI has failed repeatedly to complete large software projects. They have trouble handling even clear-cut data. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Case_File

Google's cars already have some social interactions like this built in. If it's at a 4 way intersection with stop signs and people aren't obeying the rules to let it through, it will eventually assert itself just like a human driver would. Any defensive behavior a human does is programmable. They're all fairly simple when you get right down to it.

This reads like a press release from IEEE-USA. It doesn't sound like they have any clue why the employment numbers have changed, but they want to complain about visas.

There is definitely less risk taking, but there is a big issue of perception. Things just don't seem mind blowing after a while, even if there is tons of work left to be done in that area. You see this again and again: cars got boring, planes got boring, nuclear energy got boring, space flight got boring. Everything gets boring eventually. Most computing related areas have lost their cultural edge. It's hard to pitch things as being innovative, even if they really are, and have people buy the idea.

I'm going to go ahead and suggest that most people know the message they are sending when they like a page like "Republican National Comittie" or "GAY SEX CLIPs". The whole point of liking it is to 'tell the world'. In fact, if my wall is any indication, that's the ONLY reason people like things. Okay, that and websites that trick them into it.

If you examine Figure 1 in the report, there was a downward slide from 2001-2007 and an increase from 2007-now. That mostly matches what is seen for all majors in Figure 2. The real story here seems to be the overall education trend, not CS specifically.

That assumes you hit the web page with a browser. I'm sure a lot of robots have examined the page. Some of them probably even made cached copies of the content.

People underestimate how much is spent advertising to them. At one point the New York Times had an article on Facebook that noted you were only worth $5 a year to Facebook, when the NYTimes was getting $1000 annually per subscriber with their "declining" print business.

Would you pay $1000 annually for the New York Times? Probably not. Newspapers used to be very expensive and people rarely bought them. The model of putting ads in them caused a huge surge in sales. The ads were annoying as hell, they didn't cost you anything personally.

There are paid competitors to many Google products. People chose to use free versions with ads instead.

The behavior tracking services that I've seen also anonymize it . They generally require that you use some gibberish ID for the person, or do some sort of ID sync where you tell them what IDs you want to use for each person.

Where you often see a mapping to individual humans is with opt-in databases. Think of the act of signing up for an Amazon account, Safeway card or something similar. You've told them your name and where you live and they know exactly what you've purchased.

You probably get bugs in your food pretty much regardless of what you eat. It's hard to avoid considering how small some bugs are, and the obvious tendency for them to be attracted to food, or other bugs.