The person I replied to described him as "likely as a typical internet tough guy."

Terrorists generally operate as parts of a larger group. Your argument is like saying "Well the 9/11 hijackers could not have *individually* hijacked all the those planes, so there was no ability on anyone's part to actually commit the crime, so clearly 9/11 was not a crime!" Obviously that's wrong.

If this guy was going to pull the trigger, and another guy was going to build the bomb, and another guy was going to plant it somewhere, then AS A GROUP they have the means, motive, and opportunity. The FBI was supplying some of that as part of a group, which is normal for terrorists.

No they can't do *whatever* they want, but testing him by putting him in a situation that he thinks is real that would be illegal for him to do is fine.

This kind of work does keep people safe. Your bar is set too high.. you want the FBI to actually catch terrorists with their thumb on the trigger after having deployed actual live bombs, with no pre-knowledge. You've been watching "24" too much or something -- it's just not realistic.

These ARE terrorist plots. When you plot to plant bombs somewhere and blow up innocent people, that's a terrorist plot. WTF?

No, and you're right that we have to stay vigilant. This is crying wolf though. It's not entrapment, it's not illegal for the FBI to do. They caught someone who was dangerous to our safety.

Phones can get hacked... so? People are already starting to use phones as payment devices with credit card and banking information stored on the phone (e.g. Google Wallet, Apple Pay). They've long used mobile banking apps where you input your username/password. That ship has sailed... phones contain sensitive information.

Anyway what's to say a bracelet with an NFC chip can't be compromised?

Secretive terrorist cells are just one threat vector. What about the guys who openly want to join ISIS? Or the people who may listen to the openly broadcast messages of ISIS/al Qaeda/al Shabaab/etc saying things like "Rise up and attack shopping malls." There's nothing to penetrate there, it's just a matter of finding people likely to do it.

Somebody who was so radicalized and at the tipping point that they went along with a plot like this is a serious public threat, and not because they might have ended up in a super secret terrorist cell that now we'll never know about.

So do you have some kind of knowledge about how this radical resisted the FBI's advances?

Did he at some point call the police and say "Hey this guy is obviously a terrorist, you should arrest him?" and turn in the FBI agent? No? Then he's already past redemption.

Hard to imagine the leap from "internet tough guy" to "Here's a bomb, just arm it and press this button" in real life without plenty of fodder.

I mean there are a million times the guy could have backed out when he realized it was getting serious.

Having someone out there wishing to die as a martyr is a public safety issue for sure and provides more than enough justification for the operation.

If every wannabe martyr is arrested, nothing of value will be lost, don't worry.

What's the benefit of making it a bracelet rather than a phone app? The phone already has the NFC chip you want.

How do you get the unique identifier from your bracelet to your PC? My PC doesn't have an NFC reader. If it did, again, I'd rather have it tie to my phone than a bracelet. You know what would be cool? A wireless charging pad with the NFC interface, so that you set your phone next to your computer on your desk, and all password requests from the PC are handled by the phone while it's physically there.

What difference does it make where you live if you're talking about making a moral decision about something, and making statements like "we won't tolerate this anywhere in the world?"

This may be what you want. http://web.stanford.edu/class/...

To give you an overview, it's an intro to programming using Javascript and a little image manipulation library. Each page has a series of problems with boilerplate code that you edit and click a button to run.

Head straight to Week 2's lessons (http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs101/image-3-loops.html) and go through it with him.

Kids find it pretty cool that they can change some numbers and that will have an effect on the picture. I did this with my nieces (8 and 10) just a few weeks ago and they both LOVED it. I was showing it to them to gauge their interest for a totally unrelated reason, and we ended up going over it for about 3 hours in one sitting.

Give your kid little challenges and provide most of the code. They just edit the code. It'll be a while before they add their own lines of code (about 2 hours for my nieces). One of the big points of interest was one of the problems that introduced an "If" statement based on the pixel's X coordinate. We made many changes to that block of code and ended up making stripes of different colors across the image, first vertical, then horizontal, then mixed. They thought it was just the coolest thing.

Then there's code that changes pixel values based on the average color of the pixel. So it's doing stuff like taking a picture with a red stop sign in it, and making the stop sign blue without altering the rest of the image. It's really neat, and it's the kind of stuff they've seen in movie special effects (they'd heard of green screens and I related how similar this is), and it's just a few lines of code.

What exactly would that change? Do you think that separating them will magically create competition?

Let's see, right now TWC owns the cable and TWC provides internet. Tomorrow, TWC-A owns the cable, and TWC-B owns the internet. TWC-A leases the cable to TWC-B. TWC-A's costs are the same as TWC's costs to maintain the cable. TWC-B's costs are the same as TWC's costs to run the service on top of the cable. Total is the same.

Ah so maybe a new company comes in and says "We want to provide that service instead of TWC-A. Lease us the lines!" Quiz: Is NewCo going to *underbid* TWC-B, or *outbid* TWC-B in order to lease the lines instead? Answer: outbid, which means they pay more, and TWC-A makes a higher profit. NewCo then passes on those costs to the consumer, who gets absolutely no say in the matter.

It won't be like the highways, I can tell you that. Fedex uses the highways, but so do I, and at minimal cost. Will that happen in your network world? Nope. Fibers will be leased by huge companies that pay millions (or billions if this is a nationwide vision) for the privilege.

In that case, the basic infrastructure will become insanely expensive and it will be in a constant budget crisis. Money raised from network fees will be diverted to the state's general fund to pay for completely unrelated things. Taxes will be raised and bonds issued periodically to cover the "shortfall." Look at the water and sewer systems of pretty much every municipality in the country.

Even ignoring the obvious and inevitable mismanagement of the infrastructure, replacing TWC-A with CityA changes nothing. Someone's going to bid on the lines. Someone's going to win. That person will pay a higher cost than the loser. That higher cost will be passed on.

And to top it all off, there's still no incentive on *anyone's* behalf to upgrade the network. Say your system happened 20 years ago. It's all copper. Why would CityA say, "Hey guys, let's just randomly upgrade everyone to fiber! We'll raise taxes to do it because people love higher taxes. Or we'll pass on the cost to TWC-B and raise everyone's bill." I mean what's the difference? If governments really cared they could do that today anyway by doing things like "Hi Time Warner, we're not renewing your monopoly franchise agreement in the city unless you upgrade to at least 100mbps on your lowest tier." Guess what... they don't do that.

Wow, devastating logic. I'm not sure how to respond. You win this round Mr Haders!

Well you and I as individuals are "in" one society. If we're talking about a multinational company with strong business presence in many different societies, you can't really say that.

I mean if you're talking about the company's headquarters, even that fails because technically the global headquarters of Apple is in Ireland, not the US! What is this Irish company doing criticizing a US state? :)

If they're willing to apply pressure to a US state, why not Saudi Arabia? They have the means, and they publicly state that they have the motive, yet they don't do it. That's exactly what hypocrisy is.

I mean I can see where you're coming from, but it feels like a technicality to avoid feeling guilty (if Tim Cook/Apple/etc actually feel anything about it rather than seeing it as publicity).

Even if you're dumping it to a distributor, that distributor is making money with it, they're paying taxes, providing jobs, donating to politicians, whatever.

And if you publicly call out some behavior and say that you won't tolerate it anywhere in the world (Tim Cook's opinion piece in the Washington Post), then using a middleman does't absolve you of hypocrisy charges.