I would't call this"missing the point", as the title of your reply says; rather "not adressing the points I believe are more important..."

What you adress are parly symtoms of a whole different and bigger problem with govermental organisation. i've seen this all over the place where I lived and worked...it's by no mean a TSA issue.

I don't assume anything... I just observe.
What I observe is that pretty much the same people (from the same security firm) screen my luggage at the airport and my bag before I get into a night club. I don't like it a clubs, but accept it. But I find it close to unacceptable at airports. I've seen a lot of incompetence, lack of respect and abuse of power at German airports (especially at FRA).

In Canadian airports, the pre-boarding screening is also partly done by private firms. The situation is hardly better. I've seen a huge difference in handling there as well. Most of the time its is very professional and the standards of CATSA at obviously higher than by the Bundespolizei. I think that a major difference, is the the on-site oversight remains under the control of the CATSA in Canada, whereas in Germany, the Bundespolizei is only there for show. They just stand there (if at all), but don't seem to supervise the screening activities. This observation may be wrong, as we, as passenger, hardly know what goes on behind the curtain, but it would explain the service quality in both countries although but employ private firms.

I couldn't care less about the screening itself; it beings little more than the feeling something is done for security for those who somehow need that feeling. What I do care about is how my belongings and myself are handled in the screening process, what ever that process may be.

Not only at Frankfurt, but in general in German Airports, I've always been surprised by the use of private security agencies to screen passengers. I have nothing about these private security providers, but just like for anything else, I recognise that their are activities well suited for them; other not so much.

I have no doubt that private security firm could do that task adequately, but I seriously doubt they could do it well and in a cost effective manner at the same time. There is a lot of pressure to reduce costs at large airports in order to further reduce fares. That's the reason why they have those private firms there at the first place. In turn, these firms offer the service at lower cost... salaries and overtime rules are definitely one reasons for these lower costs, but lower training and selection standards as well.

I can imagine Falcon 9 mistakenly trying to land on that ship. A not so happy end for both the ship and the rocket.

[citation needed]

I'm pretty sure, although I have no scientific facts to show for this assertion, that throwing zombies in vacuum and then starting a rocket engine over their head will solve the problem.

I don't know why you sigh me, but I doubt you have any idea how it is to turn your back on a already started multi-hundred million dollar contact. It's not as walking back in to the car dealer and saying "sorry, I changed my mind on the sports car... I need a mini van instead". Penalties are often so high it is cheaper to do exactly what they did (build and save for future needs) than cancel the project. And before you sigh at the concept of penalties and go all "omg tax payer money", the companies involved must invest a lot of time, money and energy to build something like this. More importantly, a company has to reject other project to bring such a major work to end. A project cancellation of this order without warranty and protection would most likely ruin even a stable and established company.

I hate it when people qualify infrastructure as useless. Especially infrastructure destine for research and development. Even if the foreseen use is deprecated, it doesn't mean it's useless. A test stand can always become of use, even if it's not for the originally planed engine. If they are wise about it, they could even rent the infrastructure to third parties such as Space-X.

Stopping the construction in the middle after 100% of the costs were already incurred, and then destroying the structure for even additional costs would have been a real idiot move.

Your understanding of their last statement is mistaken. The 1 over 11099 has nothing to do with the above statistics. It only says that of the 11099 browser tested, there are only 1 with the union of the above elements. How big a set is, is irrelevant when considering its union with one or multiple other sets.

However, what the statistics do tell you is which of those parameters is more or less common with the ensemble. Eliminating a rarely occurring parameter could move you to a more common set intersection, making you thus less traceable. But deducing the union probability from the set statistics is not trivial, if possible at all without further constraints.

But I am wondering if 11099 trials can be considered significant in this case. There are looking at 6 or more parameters which have countless possible values.

The aim of signing is to ensure users that the software their install is authentic (and assumed to be safe). Most users will blindly thrust non-signed software and drivers... almost no user will suspect a signed package. That already something.

Furthermore, it also adds a bit to the drama of the whole story. For the hackers it's a bit like sitting on the throne with the crown on their head after having killed the king. The obviously like to humiliate their pray, and to that effect compromising their certificates in this way is wonderfully effective.

It's about the US taking a similar approach to employment and foreign workers as Qatar does. Not very glorifying to say the least.

Why wouldn't he? Giving a decent work to a past felon shouldn't be a question at all. I'd even say that not giving him a job because of its past is a strict contradiction to the justice and rehabilitation process.

Giving him a job is not just good for him, its also good for society. And he might even be good at it!

That accident occured in Belgium. Their drivers are known all over Europe to be... Belgians. That really says it all.

Inline comments are awkward in latex. It's one of the biggest flaw of tex IMO. A commenting method that comments out everything to the next line break will inherently break the text flow in the source file. This make production difficult and authors often fall back to non-commented notes in-line -- with the consequences seen here.

This also the reason I will never to text iterations with co-authors (especially in the later production phases) on the tex files, but always and only with pdf files.

The nature of the file format (binary/text-based, open/closed/proprietary) has nothing at all to do with the quality of the commenting system. For example, the commenting system associated with docx or pdf are excellent. Latex commenting system fails lamentably... its actually not a system at all.

And I am not a fan of Microsoft nor of Adobe and I do most of my work (unless forced to by project specifications) with Latex.

Going through a proofread process doesn't necessarily mean it was actually proofread.