I am sorry, I am not going to bother engaging in this line of discourse anymore. If you think any of this stuff is anything other than trivial, you have obviously been brainwashed by the security theatre proponents.

Relevant. Must-read short story if you haven't.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

"Now, a successful terrorist must spend an extra $100 on parts and 100 hours on hardware modifications, while still spending the time and money to jump through every other hurdle in the way."

"... the point is to raise the difficulty high enough that the attack isn't worth the hassle."

If you stop and think about these statements you will see how stupid they are. Such statements make sense when the motive is financial and the prospect of fines or incarceration is a deterrent. Or when such people are not extremely well financed. None of these things apply here. If you are an extremest who plans to kill yourself while blowing up an airplane, there is no point at which you stop and say "awww screw this, it's not worth the hassle". And most of these guys are backed by people will millions in the bank.

Just because you can power a device up does not mean it has not been modified.

Anyone with even moderate skills could EASILY take an off the shelf business class laptop, remove 3/4 of the guts of it, replace it with a tiny SOC, fill the case with explosive, and the laptop would boot and display and work just fine. The only way to know it was modified would be to look in detail* at the system specs and compare to an online DB - do you honestly think that TSA is going to do this? Replace all of above with phone / tablet, it is the same story.

* Oh, other than XRay the damn thing, which is what the TSA does anyway do they not? I honestly do not get what this "powering on of electronics" is supposed to achieve. Only the most idiotic of plots would be foiled by this.

At first I assumed that the people were stuck n a room for hours upon hours with nothing to do. Then I read...

"The period of time that Wilson and his colleagues asked participants to be alone with their thoughts ranged from six to 15 minutes. Many of the first studies involved college student participants, most of whom reported that this "thinking period" wasn't very enjoyable and that it was hard to concentrate. So Wilson conducted another study with participants from a broad selection of backgrounds, ranging in age from 18 to 77, and found essentially the same results.

Is it just me or is it a very poor reflection on today's society if people can not just sit and think for 15 minutes?

For the record I would have ZERO problem doing this at all... in fact I could think for hours... although having a pencil and paper to keep track of ideas and plans would be helpful.

Or you, you know, saw the film Enemy of the State 16 years ago and knew even then it wasn't far off the mark.

Yes it did you just weren't paying attention.

No matter what issue you want progress on, you can't advance that issue if there is a superPAC fighting you. Thus, all issues come secondary to the issue of eliminating the superPAC.

And if they surveyed people on how much TV advertising affected their buying decisions I wonder what the result would be? Above or below 30 percent? And what multiple of social media ad spend is spent on TV advertising again? 10x, 100x? By thatmettroic everyone in America better say they are not only affected by TV ads, but they cause them to buy two of everything.

I disagree that it is a component that is needed in computer science. I mean.. one should UNDERSTAND basic statistics just to operate in modern life, but this has nothing to do with CS at all. One should understand what a sample is, what standard deviation is, what mean vs median is, what the normal curve looks like, etc.. everyone should know this graduating from high school nowadays. If they don't then the school system is failing. None of this has anything to do with computer science though unless you are writing a program for or using statistical analysis. Like I said before, I have been working in the industry for over 10 years now doing very complex stuff and I have never used statistics to do it. I don't understand at all what this article is talking about, it seems to confuse the idea that statistical analysis of large data sets is the only thing computer science is about.

A comment like this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of algorithmic theory. You don't have to determine if an algorithm is performing more or less efficient through sampling or statistics, you can PROVE it using math.

IThere is definitely some degree of that, which I why I pointed it out in my post.

As someone with a BCS who has worked in the industry for over 10 years in an environment highly focused on algorithmic efficiency and performance, AND got a near failing grade in stats in university, I fail to see how being proficient at statistics would help one in computer science. What is important is computation theory and algorithm theory, which are not things you learn in statistics. Unless you are trying to write code that does everything using Monte Carlo simulations that is.

While wages I am sure do play a factor, as former a hiring manager I can tell you the GP is 100% correct. Older and younger programmers both have their pros and cons. Younger programmers are nearly always more up to date on the latest technologies and trends and have an innate ability to "churn out" fairly good quality code at a lightning fast rate. However, they are nearly always inexperienced compared to their more seasoned peers, and make a lot of what I would call "elementary mistakes" when it comes to architecture. They also have a tendency to *always* want to use the latest and greatest tech instead of the tried and true, which is not always a good thing.

Older workers have the opposite pros and cons. They tend to take a bit longer to finish a project, but that project is usually of higher quality and better architecture because they have been around the block and know how to code for the long term. They also like to stick with the tried and true technology because they know it, and it works.

Ideal teams have a healthy mix of both young fresh employees and older seasoned ones. A good manager knows how to create this team and get them to work together to bring out the best of the young and old, and how to get the seasoned professionals to help teach the young employees about enterprise architecture, while the young employees can help keep the older employees fresh and up to date on the latest technology trends.

The internet of things referrs to the concept of connecting all kinds of devices and sensors to the internet that have essentially zero processing power.. all they do is serve as inputs to other cloud-based systems. Traditionally, things that were connected to the internet were "smart" - they were computers, laptops, or more recently tablets and smartphones. The internet of things is dumb. It is thermostats, wireless cameras, bluetooth proximity devices, sensors in roads and driveways, in cars, in light bulbs. None of these things has any real CPU or memory horsepower nor do they do much of anything beyond sending data to the cloud, and/or receive a single "ON/OFF" command.

You are looking at this from the wrong point of view. The way you should be looking at is, if you ALSO had the option of calling up Ford or GM or whoever your car maker was directly, and asking THEM if they could beat the dealer's price, could they? Of course they could, they make the damn car.

The idea that dealers create pricing competition for cars is total baloney because dealers don't make cars in the first place, they just mark them up and sell them. Ford competes with Honda and GM, they don't compete with Honda dealers and GM dealers. The thing that keeps the features and functions progressing for Ford while keeping costs low is not their dealer network, it is competition from other auto makers. The only competition dealers are having is who can mark up your car the least.