I happened to see this on local news, and it as usual with local media, they praised the TSA and only showed interviews of TSA agents and pro-TSA people who were "happy they caught the guy". No questions were raised about violations of rights, or whether or not the watch was actually an explosives trigger device or just looked strange to the TSA. Glad the mainstream media encourages everyone to bend over for the TSA...

What's wrong with states' rights? Personally I think any group of citizens in any nation should have the right to self-determination. Assuming they are not doing anything morally bankrupt (like slavery), I think pushing the power base down to the state level has several benefits:

1. oversight is easier, as the centers of power are shifted closer to the local level

2. people would have a greater stake in their government - it is a lot easier to interact with your state officials than your reps in Washington

3. it makes it much easier to vote with you feet if the state you live in is politically intolerable (compared to having to move out of the US entirely)

4. the US is politically polarized with most states strongly red or strongly blue, if the states had more authority they could really unleash their own respective philosophies

Personally I think a number of states (California for example) would be well-suited to leave the Union entirely, and master their own destiny. Oh and it _would_ be nice if the US played well with the international community :p

No, definitely not. Boston to DC is a far larger area than the bay area. It takes around 7+ hours to drive from DC to Boston (I've done this drive many times). In 1 hour, you can drive from San Jose, through Oakland, and into San Francisco. So yes, it can count as the same metro area. Note that these drive times assume traffic is light.

It's funny you should say that. Last time I was in France I wore a Fedora (ok, actually it was a Panama-hat) to a night club, and 5 separate individuals approached me throughout the night and asked me if I was selling drugs. They also pulled me out of line at the airport to search my bags before boarding the plane, and I think it was the hat that led them to select me. If you want to look like a drug dealer in France... be a young adult in a Fedora or Panama hat.

Climate Change? Seems like a fairly significant impending crisis to me. Why is it that trusting the private sector over the government, and lack of long-term planning for the future, seem to go hand-in-hand?

Another reason not to get too hung up on your university: if you don't get into a top-20 CS school for undergrad, you can always work hard wherever you end up, and then either transfer or get a graduate degree somewhere with a stronger reputation. There are also plenty of solid programs where you can get a Masters in a year (albeit a hellish year), and in my experience it pays itself off in a few years because of the higher starting pay.

Radical idea: have them write code for a few hours to solve a given problem - then see how their solution looks. This goes a long way towards judging their fit for the job. You can even give them a couple of data structures and algorithms references - on the job we use references all the time, and being able to implement something from a reference and apply it to a problem is a real skill.

That is frighteningly optimistic. Any truly free market naturally gravitates toward a plutocracy of monopolies, as companies continually get bigger and buy each other out unchecked (see Big Oil, Big Media, Big Telecom, etc). Then what power do consumers have? We might a government that can provide and enforce regulation to prevent this.

For me a big disadvantage that facebook is unlikely to change is in its nomenclature. I like that G+ avoids the use of the word "Friends", and was never quite comfortable with facebook friend requests - always having to mull whether or not I knew someone well enough to accept their request.

For G+ it is explicit that not everyone is your "friend". It is a much better design for people who think twice instead of blindly sending and accepting friend requests.