It didn't exterminate entire civilizations: leaving a pitiful remnant of shell-shocked survivors to envy the dead and wonder why their gods had forsaken them amidst the ruins of their culture is an important part of the smallpox outreach approach!

It's a trifle less dramatic because most ancient evils can resist conventional incineration...

The tales of "Pandora's autoclave" and "Bilbo 'biohazard' Baggins transports some stuff to the nearest incinerator" just haven't caught the public imagination.

Oh, were you planning on visiting the scenic Hanford Nuclear Reservation?

Wasn't the rule of thumb "Take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."?

Your program's sleep is unaffected by cardiovascular problems or a deep, phlegmatic, hacking cough. You call that accurate?

Can I interest you in a second supercomputer to predict where the smoke from the coal plant powering the first supercomputer will end up?

Ah, but if you are trying to sell supercomputers, that sort of solution is no good at all...

I can only assume that this is another project under the aegis of IBM's 'smarter planet' bullshit, the essence of which appears to be that you can pretend to solve any problem, no matter the type, by throwing enough IBM consultants and systems at it, ideally while invoking 'big data', 'analytics', and 'cloud'.

Exactly how this is supposed to solve anything is a question caused by lack of faith, one which can be answered by installing more sensors and casting the big-data runes once again.

I've seen a lot of different things in aircraft cockpits.

A glove compartment isn't one of them....

OK, what do you think is more effective?

Just having humans searching everything. They would probably be doing that anyway since dogs are not very reliable (not because of inability to use their sense of smell to detect it, but because they are dogs.).

Police don't need to get dogs 'accepted.' They're already accepted. I don't even know what you're thinking here.

Dogs sniffing for hidden electronics is not a commonly accepted practice, and I suspect that this is probably part of a campaign to make it one.

The assertions that underlie a variety of government behaviors are often quite weak; but what would it even mean for a document to be 'not open to interpretation'? Short of a superhuman AI that is the authoritative interpreter of itself, or a not-necessarily-finite document that manages to address all questions within its remit, without ambiguity or contradiction, neither over nor underdetermined, there is no separation between 'reading' and 'interpretation'.

This doesn't mean that all interpretations are valid, or that some aren't trivially bullshit; but there is no such thing as a 'non-interpreted' conclusion from the constitution. Your 'originalists' (allegedly, their adherence to this is sometimes...questionable) attempt to interpret the document as much like one of the people who wrote it would as they are able to, while other judicial schools do not endorse this as an objective; but 'interpret the constitution while pretending as hard as possible to be Thomas Jefferson' is 'interpretation' just as much as any other technique.

There's still a fairly big gap between the interpretive capabilities of the neural networks we manufacture with unskilled labor and anything the computer scientists and computational linguists have been able to achieve.

For very, very, large datasets, that's not terribly relevant because you have no choice; but for comparatively constrained ones(like Netflix's catalog), this makes throwing meat at the problem rather more attractive...

Generally, when somebody is paying for what it sounds like they could get for free, or even get paid for, there is good reason to suspect that the job description is either underplaying the exact level of difficulty and/or boredom involved, or that somebody has already learned the hard way that what they can get for free isn't exactly what they want.

In this case, I'd be inclined to suspect that the job is closer to being a 'machine vision' substitute for stuff that machines can't yet see or which it wouldn't be cost-effective to have an expensive analyst cobble together a ruleset and then cheap labor check for mistakes when you could just have cheap labor classify it (eg. 'movies set in space' is probably something that you could achieve reasonable accuracy on, if you do some futzing with detecting starfields and common flavors of "rocket thruster jet of flame"; but you'd have your false positives and false negatives from things in space that happen mostly inside spacecraft, and things not in space that happen to involve looking at the sky more than usual, and so on).

It's probably a hell of a grind, actually, given that (unlike, say, being a film critic or some film-studies culture critic type) Netflix is going to want everything ground through and tagged on a variety of parameters, not just the stuff you happen to be a geek about, or the stuff that's worth watching, or what have you. It wouldn't much surprise me if, for efficiency's sake, they have you monitoring more than one stream at a time, or working in faster-than-real time, or a combination. You can probably extract the data they want rather faster than you can enjoy the program, even if it is one you like.

The TSA's next step:

"Thank you sir, now, would you please start Crysis for me?"

Yes, free electronics recycling with the purchase of a ticket for international flight.

Would it? Most scans would be 2D scanning, so if you replaced the top or bottom 90% of the battery, it probably wouldn't show up as an anomaly.. If we were being even more thorough, we could have the bomb on the inside with battery on the outside, or use material that would show up the same under a scan.