Well, the obvious difference is you can't use "correct horse battery staple", because the NSA knows about that one. Their CIA colleagues probably managed to extract it using the $5 wrench decryption algorithm.

I guess I was thinking about "device" in terms of electronics rather than pet rocks. The biggest manufacturer of the magnetic/copper bracelets actually got in trouble for making them out of potentially hazardous industrial waste.

It's not the buttons themselves, it's using them to execute more than one command at once. If you seem to manage to press some key combination with perfect timing all the time.

EVE players get banned for programmable buttons. You really can pick your poison.

Selling people homeopathy wasn't enough, now there are medical devices. That Thync thing looks like pure snake oil. Unless you walk around with it strapped to just the right spot on your head.

I'm pointing out that there is certainly quite a bit of mass hysteria going around. Sometimes that manifests as whackos killing innocent people, as per your definition. Other times it manifests as whackos engaging in multi-year legislative and regulatory exercises.

The OP was talking about cockpit door regulations. I tend to think that's a good idea, but it obviously has a downside; his point isn't unreasonable. Lots of other "legislative and regulatory exercises" are harder to defend: the random stuff airport security comes up with seems to be borne completely of overreaction. Also things like special border zones hundreds of miles from a border, domestic spying to make Orwell blush, decades long wars, that kind of thing.

Idiots killing innocent people and overbearing regulators: different sides, same mass hysteria coin.

I also found this interesting:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/n...

Yup, no witch hunts at all. http://rt.com/usa/231839-musli...

It's tough for an untrained person to kill another in a confined space without a weapon. It makes noise and takes a while. The rest of the crew would notice.

It's my understanding that the flight deck by international regulation is a "no alone" zone, meaning that when the pilot left, a flight attendant should have entered the flight deck so that the copilot was not alone. This rule is why it made sense to have a "Locked" position on the door.

The real question, to me, is, why was the flight attendant not on the flight deck while the pilot was away?

Even creepier. The ketchup slithers out of the bottle top like a red high-temperature Helium II... and all over everything. And it keeps going... seeking something only Cthulhu knows.

OTOH, who can resist the opportunity to revive the phrase "anal leakage"?

The Python code

s = ''
for i in range(0,1000000):
    s += str(i)

will be painfully slow too, for multiple reasons. Both Java and Python have ways to do this that aren't dumb.

One of them looks like a chemical engineering PhD student and the other is a tech, so maybe not. The third is an electrical engineering professor who's supposed to be doing software performance research though. He should definitely know better.

Although, when I was at the U of C the people doing software stuff in the EE department had some very interesting ways of doing things.

They're not doing something weird, the article is crazy.

Basically, they wrote some shitty code to do highly inefficient string concatenation and, wow, it turns out that it's less efficient than the caching code in the operating system. They're not comparing in-memory versus disk operations at all.

They don't need to give a crap about how developers feel about the platform - they're printing money and the fanbase will bounce anyone critical of what they're doing.

Seriously; try voicing any sort of well-reasoned logical criticism of the brand - in short order some kool-aid guzzler is going to try like hell to make you feel like your problems with OS X or iOS or Final Cut Pro or QuickTime codecs ("using Apple products for more than five years," basically) are your fault and not Apple's.