I am trying to figure out the newsworthy part in this - it's been known for ages that you can get details out of reflxions and high-def images...

For the practical implications - we're not going to get any benefit from users' twitpics, blog images and fb photos, as those are rarely ever uploaded in full high-def+highest-quality, 41MP camera notwithstanding: I'd like to see

• the resolution and quality actually used by the camera (user setting rarely push the camera to its max capcity to save on storage)
• the resolution and quality of the image after the sharing app has had a go at it to improve bandwidth performance
• the resolution and quality of the reflexion when the person photographing is more than say 6ft away
• and finally, the quality of the reflection in sub-par lighting - which is generally the case for most average-Joe users

Yes, it is possible to get data out of reflections on small shiny objects (and I suspect forensics teams have been on top of this ever since cameras reached consumers), but the lighting conditions and capture mechanisms have to be set up perfectly.

In the UK, there are price comparison website who've been doing this for ages. With no pre-sign-up.

If the US gov asks nicely, maybe they can provide them with a readily designed platform...?

From the Raytheon article key figures: "Young men (35 percent) are far more interested than young women (14 percent) in a career in cybersecurity." If that many people are interested in cybersecurity, I'd call that "an overwhelming proportion" of persons being interested in cybersecurity. By that count, that's an enormous population of paranoid technofreaks.

"The survey also found less than one-quarter of young adults aged 18 to 26 believed the career is interesting at all." And how much of the total population gets employed in computer security AS A WHOLE? Less than 0.1% easily. How many other types of jobs, areas of interest and careers are there WITHOUT EVEN leaving the IT world?

The study page even highlights that they didn't target IT graduates. This is from a general, untargeted smattering of 1,000 members of the population. That's not even a proper sample size.

Bad journalism. Bad study report. Bad.

It is accepted that she never actually wrote the programs under discussion - the OP was Babbage, though she was certainly highly enthusiastic about the workings of his contraptions and their implications for the world, and studied the topics sufficiently to write insightful and interesting commentary to high degree.

Of all that is published though, only a selection is ever read by the masses.

.... a fair retort. May I respond:

1) Indeed you can't just do "what you want" - but when what you do is lauded and desireable, is it really that much to ask to be able to make a living from it? From a zen buddhist perspective, we could also simply do what we do and let people benefit from that without thought of reward, be that making art, tables, or farming the land. It works when everyone is as altruistic and zen-buddhisty - but it doesn't pay bills that are at a baser, more real level than idealism and philosophy.

2) I'll wager you never actually talked to an artist beyond firends who "like to draw." I'll also wager that you've never earnestly talked to someone who had an goal that was not aligned with your ideals for goals. Saying what they want to do is merely a "hobby" is rather belittling - we may as well state that anything we do before it becomes an idea of a career - planting tomatoes in the garden, knitting... installing an experimental Linux - is a hobby and should just be left as such. When a hobby becomes a career goal, you can't just brush it aside in your head. No, TV is not a hobby, and my hair is black, the point is moot. TV is however an industry that employes lots of technicians, accountants, writers, actors, cleaners, builders, journalists, etc. And in small doses is no bad thing either. If you can temper yourself, good on you.

3) Many activites came from humble roots, farming, sewing, washing, hunting, all of which were community activities that weren't "careers" or "employ" and were performed to maintain a community with no exchange of funds but the share in the fruits of labour. But hey, things changed, we operate differently. On the point of art, even if we disregard the "masters", there were also small time painters and sculptors milennia before the Internet. They still wanted to make it a living. They provide stuff we like, why shouldn't we give them something in return?

I guess in all of that, it can still be argued that things change, and the age of the paid artist may be drawing to an end. But isn't the point of our modern society to find better ways of being, to allow everyone the ability to work towards a dream - especially if its product is something we admire? (not that that is a requirement - we have scientsist spending vast amounts of cash on research that won't amount to anything useful but the sheer act of learning).

I consort with artists. I talk with them often. Small fry, who want so desperately to make a living from doing what they love. They fear for their work being lost on the net with no trace back home, and therefore no commissions, and therefore no pay.

I talk to them about Creative Commons. All you need is to submit to advertising and get page views. How many, when anyone can be an artist? Just get a part time job to tide you over. A job to afford making art, that takes so much time away from making art?. It's not as easy a sell as the more famous (and already rich) proponents would have you believe. Artists who are still starting out have to get every penny they can - not out of avarice. Out of necessity.

They're not in a big Studio. They're not funded by organisations. They don't have a paycheck. They operate independantly. Freely. Wihtout agenda. Isn't that the type of art we want to see? Isn't that the type of art we hold up as ideal? Is that not worth paying artists a living for?

I believe artists should be able to monetize the dozens of hours and materials they spend to create a work we can share at the push of a button.

The artists who are my friends: I also feed them the hot meals they still can't afford.

Describing the mechanism as a pay-wall probably does the feature a disservice - of course, one way of unlocking is pay, but it is stil possible to view free, and a more useful corollary as demonstrated in the article is that the artist can more effectively drive the user to a retailer of their merchandise (and a preferred one at that), or to their own store.

As usual, persons who specifically do not wish to pay money will not have to, but ensuring a store link for that particular content accompanies the piece in an otherwise free-distribution format

1. -allows sharers to share, and recipients still have a no-pay way of viewing the material
2. -enables artists to edge persons amenable to the idea of paying towards a store, removing the requirement of said consumers to proactively locate a retailer
3. -which subsequently would make the act of sharing a real free-advertising mechanism

This could work really well, so long as sharing gratis and libere is still possible, and if artists using this can provide direct access to the specific item in an international store.

Elementary OS with the extra trimmings provided by ElementaryUpdate.com, and after switching out some of the standard apps for better ones (Noise for Banshee, Geary for Evolution or Thunderbird, etc...), is great for the "newcomers" to the Linux world -- especially for people of the "I just want to use a mouse" kind of people.

I'm not convinced that any GNU/Linux is for the absolute non-techie, but there are plenty of distros out there with the explicit aim of being newbie-friendly (or in marketing terms, "focused on a great user experience"). Once your user knows how to Google effectively, and knows how to search based on desktop environment instead of distro, they should be able to fly solo fairly soon.

For those who have the patience to look things up and understand the basics of their systems and are not afraid of the occasional CLI operation, the entire Debian family is at their disposition, and the RedHat line is fairly well documented too due to the sheer sizes of both its family tree and comunities. It takes just some initial explanation to newcomers as to what differs between distros from a user perspective to get someone like a developer (or just a plain curious technically-minded person) productive with just about any new distro from one of the large families.

This study fails on two counts: Americans are statistical outliers; the conclusion is fallacious due to poor understanding of causality.

For those for whom this is TL;DR -- Americans are the worst possible population to base any form of human study on (let alone a flawed study) - ref Solomon Asch's conclusion. The short summary @ neuroecology ; the longer discussion @ pacific standard.

Among Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual, leading the researchers to conclude that “American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers among outliers.”

But try this little thought experiment: take some random Anyville, USA. How much have they travelled, how diverse is their population? How do populations move? How many are going to marry from the same town, as did their parents and grandparents, and how many are going to have children and grandchildren doing the same? And even if the population started out with diversity, you can lather, rinse, repeat the marriage/procreation suds and end up with a genetically similar pool of people - the town itself holds massively similar people on average.

Those of us who are more footloose and have moved around further are still statistical anomalies, insomuch as we often hail from outside of these wells of similarity. That is not to say that since we're so different, we cannot make friends with those whose families are long time residents, nor does it exclude the idea of having a multicultural community of extremely different people, DNA-wise.

But at its core, the fault of this study is basic: a textbook example of correlation-causation fallacy.