this. Just because there are hundreds of thousands of people looking for tech jobs, doesn't mean there can't also be hundreds of thousands of tech jobs. Unless we're just going to pretend tech jobs don't have particular unique skill sets...

ah, well, I hadn't factored that in - you must be correct, that's likely what is occurring.

I know it's a bit late in life, but I was thinking about learning how to make mead. I know it's a bit late in life, but I was thinking about training to run a marathon. I know it's a bit late in life, but I met this woman and we've decided to get married...

You don't have to be the world's best at something, just to do it at all. There's a certain generation of geeks I guess that grew up playing particular games (modern warfare and the like) where those who weren't in the top tier would have a hard time having much fun at all playing with those who were - but that's not how most of life works. Do something for enjoyment and for enrichment, not to be the best at it. Extreme capitalism doesn't have to apply to anything, much less your everyday life.

err...what? (does google image search of chess conventions) ummm...what? The only images that have girls in them at all, much less at as anywhere near a third or more of the population, are images for cosplay where they're playing "human chess" at a convention. The conventions actually for chess...not so much.

There is certainly a segment of the population that really enjoys games like Witcher, Skyrim, and etc - game modding is a big thing now. Having understood engines and toolkits makes that a lot easier, obviously - and yeah, put something in the license that mods can be adopted and merged by the game publisher, so long as some credit is given? Or heck, DOTA was just a mod for Warcraft 3, if I recall correctly...now it's a game on it's own. Sometimes mods just get that popular, I guess. I do wish that somehow, the various studios could create a few standards on things upon which they all agree, and get it to where games could be more about the content, and less about re-inventing a wheel. It's not like the movie industry has to re-invent cameras and video editing every time they make a movie, after all.

there are no "white" pixels on your screen. There's a backlight, sure, but that's applied to the entire screen, to adjust brightness. Color saturation at extremely high levels is black. At extremely low levels, it's white. That there is blue, is immaterial - give it extreme low color saturation with even just blue, it becomes white. There is an extreme difference between seeing something in person, and seeing something on a computer monitor where two degrees of artificial filtration are occurring due to technological limitations. And for the record, I saw blue and the brown/orange color used in the old cammo. I didn't see white :P

given that a color sensor on a digital camera is only sensing RGB (sometimes 1 or 2 more...) and that most monitors are only doing the same....just what would you expect white or grey to be, in the end? How would it be "captured" as an image if not by a sensor which can only detect R, G, or B?

police aren't crime prevention, that's silly. We're not in minority report yet. Police catch people who have already committed a crime and, in some cases, are still in the act of a crime. If police do a single thing to a person who hasn't yet committed a crime, the police are doing something wrong (and are potentially themselves committing a crime). Boarder patrol, on the other hand, has as their entire purpose...patrolling the boarder. If someone is in Mexico still, then boarder patrol can (and should) do nothing to them. If they have crossed, then only then is being apprehended an option. Since there are currently lots of people crossing the boarder, we're not in a situation where boarder crossings are eliminated and the agents are just there to continue preventing new crossings. What you're saying doesn't make any sense, and your examples are just making it worse.

I can tell you as someone who has a hosts file with all the various facebook host names I can come up with, that a whole bunch of the internet has those farking buttons. So yeah, "people used by facebook" - not "people who use facebook" - going to a website that has facebook content forced onto it isn't "using" facebook

Facebook might have intercepted traffic from a goodly number of people via the stupid content that they inject at so many places, but 1.39B people didn't "use" Facebook...that many might have been used by Facebook, but that's a different thing. I also highly doubt a quarter of the population of the planet was on Facebook last month. How can they imagine to justify such metrics? Is making such ridiculous claims the only reason Facebook is able to stay in business? Since when do bots, people using multiple accounts, people who don't have accounts and who have multiple computers (thus multiple footprints in their snooping-people-who-don't-have-accounts nonsense) all count as individual people? Why is what a "person" means such a complicated issue these days? Is there a word which still means what that word meant a decade ago? (end rant)

"A more important question would be whether cost-per-apprehension is even a valid metric for the Border Patrol. "

:blink: That is probably the only valid metric for them. Well that and the accuracy of the determined status, and the treatment of those apprehended...

I'm not overestimating it - the only usefulness they'd have, is if they could do that, and that's the hollywood version of it. If I have to take my card out of my wallet and tap it individually, why the hell not just do it more securely as a contact card, since you've made me go through the trouble at that point? Contactless cards have already been demonstrated to be hackable. You can keep calling it "snake oil" all you want, but having to call and contest it is a hassle, as is losing $50 for some people. If you want to blow off proven hacks, just for a moment consider the possibility that you're the one not looking at the security issue the right way.

"and it is more secure" why on g-d's green earth would you possibly think that, when it can be hacked by someone standing next to you on the bus (as demo'd many times)?

except for the fact that many of the current (and EMV compliant) cards still offer the magstrip fallback info FROM THE RFID ITSELF, because...stupid (see the many hacking demonstrations of such cards). And as others have pointed out, most of the RFID systems don't require a pin. And I also don't want to deal with letting a machine pick which of the 6 cards in my "wallet" I want to use to pay with, since a contactless tap won't tell the difference. Yes, I have 3 different Visas, 2 AMEXs, and a MC. And that's not at all unusual. I really really hate, on a security and convenience level, that the RFID "contactless" stuff is being pushed so hard on unwilling people.

and I really, really don't see how that's an improvement to security. Why the fark are we doing contactless, and not just going with the chip+pin?