Maybe you're right. Hey, did you see this?. For all we know, the reasonable budgets of a national space program with a Moon mission are a bargain for the new technology this mission might discover, and someday provide to prevent mass population die-offs due to poverty. But I really doubt it and I can't agree. India's space program is a bad idea considering they have such severe national problems. If the US in the 1960's was half as bad as India is today, the Moon missions would probably not have happened, even if Russia's program was putting pressure on US dominating races to every possible technical achievement. First feed your kids, istartedi... THEN you can go to the Moon.

You are clinging to your misconception about what CS is by arguing something entirely new: there are no CS "jobs." You are mistaken, btw. And what we are talking about is not a negligible chunk of change, as outside academia the starting salary of a B.S. computer scientist with zero experience is close to $70-80K these days, while I think you know any software developer graduating with any degree with zero experience won't touch that. Your ignorance of any positions for an actual, bone fide "computer scientist" is not a good foundation to argue from, IMO.

My point really simply was (sorry for the feigned ignorance) that maybe the Clinton Foundation, certainly Slashdot editors, and obviously you, mistakenly believe that the purpose of "Computer Science" in society in practice, is to fill the jobs for software developers. This is absurd on its face, and your academia-vs-real-world strawman does not change this.

Please refrain from limiting computer scientists to the labor of developers. All developers can do is code. Computer scientists have a much larger bag.

I truly believe they have misnamed the subject in question, and couldn't possibly be talking about CS, but perhaps skills, incidentally related, often attributed to CS incorrectly. IT WOULD BE AWESOME if some CS got into lower education. It shouldn't be expensive... no PCs necessary. But symbolic logic corses would be just as useful. Again, I don't think this is their (Clinton Foundation's) intention, but (perhaps slashdot editors) are misusing CS to mean either programming or confident graphic interface operation and document creation, or both. It is maddening the damage Slashdot has done to Computer Science, relegating it to "the stuff you can do with computers," instead of what it is, the science of computating.

Why would a CS grad want to be a software developer? That doesn't make any sense. They should have studied software development and programming. That's like an MD hoping to get a job as a medical tech... a noble profession, but the MD can earn much more, be more fulfilled properly applying their education as a doctor, and the same is true of a CS grad. Their ideal employment will have little to do with coding.

Headline is wrong... should not be "Lack of CS Savvy" but "Lack of COMPUTER Savvy." Once again, Computer Science has been misunderstood and its title abused by those that cannot understand... computer science IS a science... and it has hardly anything to do with computers... the "computer" in computer science is NOT A DIGITAL MACHINE, per se, but one who computes... it is the science of reckoning, not the science of (or application of) advanced programming techniques.

I'm surprised, too, but not by that. Well, thinking positively, I hope India can get off the ground and get to the Moon and can there find safe drinking water, sanitation, housing, health infrastructure as well as something to reduce the malnutrition for the hundreds of millions in their country that find they are still in very short supply.

Losing data goes with the territory if you're going to use RAID 0.

In particular, RAID 0 combines disks with no redundancy. It's JUST about capacity and speed, striping the data across several drives on several controllers, so it comes at you faster when you read it and gets shoved out faster when you write it. RAID 0 doesn't even have a parity disk to allow you to recover from failure of one drive or loss of one sector.

That means the failure rate is WORSE than that of an individual disk. If any of the combined disks fails, the total array fails.

(Of course it's still worse if a software bug injects additional failures. B-b But don't assume, because "there's a RAID 0 corruption bug", that there is ANY problem with the similarly-named, but utterly distinct, higher-level RAID configurations which are directed toward reliability, rather than ONLY raw speed and capacity.)

It happens I could use remote USB port functionality.

(Right now I want to run, on my laptop, a device that requires a Windows driver and Windows-only software. I have remote access to a Windows platform with the software and driver installed. If I could export a laptop USB port to the Windows machine, it would solve my problem.)

So NetUSB is vulnerable. Is there an open source replacement for it? (Doesn't need to be interworking if there are both a Linux port server and a Windows client-pseudodriver available.)

I skimmed the start of the paper. If I have this right:

  - Essentially all the currently-deployed web servers and modern browsers have the new, much better, encryption.
  - Many current web servers and modern browsers support talking to legacy counterparts that only have the older, "export-grade", crypto, which this attack breaks handily.
  - Such a server/browser pair can be convinced, by a man-in-the-middle who can modify traffic (or perhaps an eavesdropper-in-the-middle who can also inject forged packets) to agree to use the broken crypto - each being fooled into thinking the broken legacy method is the best that's available.
  - When this happens, the browser doesn't mention it - and indicates the connection is secure.

Then they go on to comment that the characteristics of the NSA programs leaked by Snowden look like the NSA already had the paper's crack, or an equivalent, and have been using it regularly for years.

But, with a browser and a web server capable of better encryption technologies, forcing them down to export-grade LEAKS INFORMATION TO THEM that they're being monitored.

So IMHO, rather than JUST disabling the weak crypto, a nice browser feature would be the option for it to pretend it is unpatched and fooled, but put up a BIG, OBVIOUS, indication (like a watermark overlay) that the attack is happening (or it connected to an ancient, vulnerable, server):
  - If only a handful of web sites trip the alarm, either they're using obsolete servers that need upgrading, or their traffic is being monitored by NSA or other spooks.
  - If essentially ALL web sites trip the alarm, the browser user is being monitored by the NSA or other spooks.

The "tap detector" of fictional spy adventures becomes real, at least against this attack.

With this feature, a user under surveillance - by his country's spooks or internal security apparatus, other countries' spooks, identity thieves, corporate espionage operations, or what-have-you, could know he's being monitored, keep quiet about it, lie low for a while and/or find other channels for communication, appear to be squeaky-clean, and waste the tapper's time and resources for months.

Meanwhile, the NSA, or any other spy operation with this capability, would risk exposure to the surveilled time it uses it. A "silent alarm" when this capability is used could do more to rein in improper general surveillance than any amount of legislation and court decisions.

With open source browsers it should be possible to write a plugin to do this. So we need not wait for the browser maintainers to "fix the problem", and government interference with browser providers will fail. This can be done by ANYBODY with the tech savvy to build such a plugin. (Then, if they distribute it, we get into another spy-vs-spy game of "is this plugin really that function, or a sucker trap that does tapping while it purports to detect tapping?" Oops! The source is open...)

The inadequately-configurable trackpads, in positions where they detect the palm resting on the laptop (or brushing them) and randomly jump the cursor or highlight whole paragraphs so the next keystroke replaces them, are no help, either.

What do you mean by inadequately configurable? There's usually an option to disable while typing somewhere.

It's there. It's on. Didn't help. Don't know if it's that Ubuntu 14.04 doesn't support it properly on these two machines or if it doesn't do the job I want done.

What I'm looking for is NOT there: A threshold level for touch sensitivity. If you're going to put a BIG touchpad on a laptop's palm rest, you need to either put it where the palms won't brush it, or you need to make it possible to turn down the sensitivity so that a feather-light brushing of the pad doesn't register as a mouse motion or button click.

Two different manufacturers (Lenovo and Toshiba) have used exactly the same layout, and exactly the same hair trigger, non-adjustable, touchpad sensitivity. (Also exactly the same sort of wafer-thin flat tile keys, which is how we got into this digression.)

FTFY

Simple, but unnecessary. They found Flight 370 in his garage. This guy is in a lot of trouble.

Agreed. I control all commercial flights with an Atari joystick from 1982 that I customized to be on the same frequency as the InFlight entertainment system of all commercial aircraft. So this researcher is a fraud, or the FBI is lying. I know, because its me. I'm doing all the flying. Now... all I need to do is get the FBI to repeat this, then everyone will start asking "how does he do it?" without asking "why would anyone believe something so nutty?"

The problem I have with current keyboards is not just the short travel and lack of clickyness, but the tiny height of the keys.

Instead of the tall keys with space between them for fingernail clearance, there are these thin squares maybe an eighth of an inch above a solid surface. If I don't keep all my fingernails cut short, when they go past the side of the key they hit the panel and the key doesn't "strike". Letters get dropped. (So I get to pick between typing well and playing the guitar. I pity those who must keyboard for a living but want long nails to maintain their social life.) The short travel means there's little margin for finger variation, so some letters, where my fingers don't depress the keys as far, normally, don't strike, while others, where I support the weight of my hands, do strike when they shouldn't, or strike multiply.

After over a year I haven't been able to adjust. You may have noticed that my spelling has gone to hell as a result: I have to do a lot more correction and sometimes miss fixing things up.

(The inadequately-configurable trackpads, in positions where they detect the palm resting on the laptop (or brushing them) and randomly jump the cursor or highlight whole paragraphs so the next keystroke replaces them, are no help, either.)

On the other hand, when the nails do hit the key, they quickly wear through the top level of black plastic, exposing the backlit transparent light below it. I replaced a laptop about a year ago and after about six months about a half-dozen heavily-used keys had their pretty letters obscured by the giant glow of the scoured away region.

I had been running on older thinkpads and toshibas, with classic keyboard-shaped keys, or at least the little fingertip cup and substantial fingernail clearance. Switching (in a two-dead-laptops-in-two-weeks emergency) to a lenovo z710, then to a company-supplied toshiba s75, both with the stupid "I'm so thin", square, low-travel, no-finger-cup keys has been a disaster.

Let me know when your scientists discover Tuna.

Of course, none of those things are among the criteria for what causes something to be classified as a religion, ...

That depends on what set of criteria one is using to classify something as religion, doesn't it? B-)