Most scary thing about air travel? The food.

*drumroll*

I am no expert on machine learning, but isn't this whole approach flawed to begin with because we don't have enough terrorists? To verify your algorithms, you'd need sufficiently large training, validation and test sets, and I highly doubt that there are enough terrorists to build those sets.

What is it that makes everyone think that airplanes must become flying fortresses instead of just being as secure/dangerous as the rest of our lives already is? I can visit any government building, including courts and parliaments with less security theatre than I can board a plane. Nobody does a background check on you before you can walk in front of the white house. Nobody screens your luggage when you board a train, enter a subway station or stand in line at the museum.

The idea that there is something so special about airports and airplanes that nobody must be allowed to bring a container with more than 100ml of liquid in them is ridiculous.

Oh, 9/11 you say? Reinforced cockpit doors, handguns for pilots. Done.

Structured text formats with standard parsers and writer like XML are arguably smarter than than a dumb .c file.

Frankly, I think that plain text is a terrible format for source code. It unites content and presentation instead of separating them. I'd much more prefer to use a system similar to HTML/CSS where one file dictates the actual code, and the other part how I want to look at it. This way, I can have a custom CSS that uses tabs and places opening curly brackets on a new line, and my coworker can have a CSS that uses spaces and puts the curly brackets at the end of a line.

Source code formats could furthermore be in a hierarchical XML structure, making loops child nodes of functions which are child nodes of class nodes. This would save all the guesswork and black magic that currently goes into syntax highlighting and code folding.

No more will my SVN logs and diffs be messed up by a supid text editor insisting on changing all line feeds. No longer will there be any discussions about code formatting guidelines.

This is 2010, why are we sill saving code in dumb text files like in 1960?