As a society, we are more afraid of flying on planes than we are of riding the subway. So we've exchanged our freedoms for what we perceive as security.

Even science has some untestable working assumptions.
1) There is no old guy with a beard in the sky who arbitrarily changes the rules.

Before science came along, most people actually did assume that there was an Old Man in the Sky changing the rules around. That's why they developed rituals to please the Old Man in the Sky, based on patterns they thought they observed. Whenever the patterns were disrupted, they assumed that the Old Man in the Sky had changed his mood and tried something else.

How far did that model get us for the thousands of years it prevailed? How far has science gotten us in the past hundred?

2) Humans have enough intelligence and sensory input to build a consistent model of the world.

Actually, it's fundamental to modern science that humans don't have enough sensory input to model the universe. That's why we have things like electron microscopes. As to the intelligence angle, I'll refer you to Einstein's quote regarding infinite stupidity and an infinite universe.

Yes, and there's a manager at your bank who has the power to open your safe deposit box. Does that mean anyone storing stuff in a safe deposit box is exposing his stuff to the bank on a regular basis?

... but since there is no Apple-approved way to virtualize OS X...

Wrong.

And only if you make less than $65,000/year.

It's even worse than that. They factor in how much your parents made the year before, which is the available tax data. I wound up being denied for a FAFSA loan in 2003 because my dad was employed in 2002 but lost his job after that. So because my parents had a large combined income the year before, I had to get a loan from ShittyBank and pay it back at a variable interest rate. But I put a bunch of money toward it per month and paid the sucker off within 2 1/2 years after graduating. And then, six months after I'd settled my debt, my tax dollars went to ShittyBank to bail them out of bankruptcy caused by their own sheer recklessness.

Have you tried just comparing the files' sizes with respect to the images' dimensions? It'll vary from encoder to encoder, but higher-quality JPEGs will be larger than lower-quality ones. You could just use the number of pixels in the picture and the file size to obtain a rough approximation of "quality per pixel" and choose the image with the higher value. It won't be perfect, but it's a lot easier than trying to pick out JPEG artifacts.

Also, the number of artifacts doesn't tell the full story. One image may have more artifacts, but those artifacts may all exist in the background parts of the image, while the foreground is less blocky. It's a choice each encoder makes.

Basically (if I understood correctly), an ellipse is a structure that is very easy to invert to form some random structure, but it's very difficult to take that random structure and re-constitute the ellipse from it given no other information.

Actually, they do. Apple's strategic plans and trade secrets are covered by the First Amendment. They are free to say as much or as little about their strategies as they want. (By the way, there's no law against lying. There are laws about lying to the cops and federal officers (when investigating crimes), and under oath. There's no law saying that you are entitled to accurate information about a private company's strategic plans.)

Funny, but it's worth noting that double-bagging drastically decreases the condoms' effectiveness. Latex rubbing against latex will tear easily.

That "distraction" is being used to loosely coordinate a revolution. Not to mention that, in the first days after Iran's election, the Giant Distraction was the only way we could get information about what was happening in Iran, since the mainstream media either didn't care enough to cover it, or the reporters there were under lockdown and not allowed to report on anything.

Great author, but sorry, he's being an idiot.

You don't even have to read the whole sentence; the presence of the word "cyberspace" is enough to know it's bullshit.

And under Saddam Hussein's Iraq, everyone had an AK-47. What's your point?

That was my experience as well. I did reasonably well in my computer science courses and busted my ass, but I certainly wasn't a 4.0 student. What set me apart was that I had a job working for my university developing real applications that shipped to real people, and I had real deadlines. So I spent a significant amount of time outside the classroom learning things not taught in the classroom and finding opportunities to apply what I'd learned.

And even then, that just got me in the door at a big company. I was doing QA and tools work for a couple of years. I had free reign to explore new and interesting ideas, but I was still shackled to QA. There were a lot of times toward the end where I just got depressed, doing the same repetitive testing, over and over again, feeling my talent wasting away.

Eventually, I found a problem that was plaguing the company's product that I could latch on to and designed and implemented a solution during a down period in our QA cycle. And even then, I had to get it in front of the right people, that is, people interested in hiring me to work on interesting problems. And even then, I had great timing on my side. They just happened to need someone to take over a major project whose previous maintainer had moved on.

But I managed to get my project into a shipping product. And from that point, it was a (relatively) short jump to moving to the right organization within the company. And now I work on a great project within a great product. I go to work every day without worrying about whether I'll be interested in what I'm doing. I just always am. But I didn't get that overnight, without proving to other people that I was worth the time of day. It's true that some graduates do go straight into working on interesting problems and shipping code, but if you're not fortunate enough to be one of them, you have to make your own career path.

The whole process of making that jump was (for me) incredibly long, arduous and stressful, full of insecurity and doubt. When I wasn't implementing my solution, I was busy worrying about whether I was wasting my time or whether anyone would take me seriously. And when I had a demo-able implementation, I had to design presentations, set up meetings, and justify my design choices in front of people who were way the hell more experienced than me. But it was an incredibly rewarding experience.

Bottom line, my education didn't prepare me for any of that. The fact that I wasn't entitled to work on the exciting stuff, that I had to do the non-engineering grunt work of selling my solution ... those were things I had to learn myself.

Uh, no. An operating system encompasses frameworks and APIs used to write software for it, which live in userland, not the kernel. Please try getting your information from university courses or textbooks instead of online Linux circle jerks.