The essential elements of a good developer lay in your personality.

• Are you willing to admit you are wrong or don't know something? If so, how readily?
• Are you willing to learn a completely new technology; i.e, if you are a Javascript developer, are you willing to learn C#?
• Are you emotionally attached to the technologies you use? If so, are you willing to use different ones if they perform the job more effectively, or are you going to use a hammer in every situation?
• Do you understand when something needs to be "good enough", and when something needs to be flawless, and are you willing to be flexible with either (i.e., will you accept that some things must be perfect and some things must be imperfect)?
• Are you willing to put yourself in someone else's shoes and describe technical problems in a "human" way to the business, without sounding ingratiating or condescending?

All of these things, good developers make and none of them are found in a math test. You might even say that these math quizzes do more to screen these people out than let them in. You don't need to screen programmers for math skills; if they were so bad at mathematics that simple algorithms confused them, they wouldn't even try picking up the trade, and advanced algorithms can't be divined on the spot anyway. There's a reason most of them have names.

I've never been to the St.Patrick's Day Parade, so, I couldn't make a comparison on that basis, even though I bet you guessed I was of Irish decent by my handle. :) Also, I was not present during the protest over the weekend. So I couldn't give you any first-hand numbers.

Thousands of people walk through New York City's streets in the financial district every day - by the videos, it would be hard to figure out who the 'bystanders' and 'protesters' were, for me at least, especially after having visited the park - a lot of the protesters don't really "look" like protesters - some of them are just kids, there are a few people who are well into or above middle age. The protest was enough to warrant at least one police helicopter and what I like to term as an "AT-ST", and a good contingency of police officers (more than were there at the park today), so I would guess it had to be substantial.

As a point of reference, the last time I saw a police deployment that large was at the West Indian Parade in Crown Heights (where, sadly, three people lost their lives), and there were definitely thousands of people there.

I just took my lunch break off from work to check out the protest in Liberty Square. There seems to be about as many people there - staying with sleeping bags - as the small park can hold. It's no bigger than a block, and a small one at that. The estimates of about 200 people staying in the park are likely accurate.

From my understanding after talking with some of the protesters there, the incidents in New York happened when they attempted to march through the streets. In addition, I found out that the numbers of people over the weekend were not just limited to the people staying in the park; there are a lot of people who are not roughing it in the concerete jungle of NYC and are staying with friends or relatives during 'off period times' of the protest.

I can't speak to any police brutality during my brief visit. The protest was extremely peaceful while I was there (unless you consider a drum circle violent), but I did see several of the officers in the YouTube videos present at the square - although noticeably they were not the ones who perpetuated or committed any act of brutality (although you could argue they did nothing to prevent it). In fact, the officers I did recognize were the ones who had doubtful expressions on their faces in most of the videos. The officers were mostly staying out of it. There were also no "white shirts" there - the higher ranking officers whom, over the weekend, seemed to be largely responsible for the more egregious assaults. I also heard that some 100 officers refused to patrol the protest after the incidents over the weekend. I wouldn't be surprised if the commissioner or someone else "gave the department a talking to".

IMHO, it's really hard to discount the video evidence that there was unjustified force, given the multiple angles of the YouTube videos available.

I've heard some people say that some of the protesters' were "over-reacting" to the actions of the police. I think that is ridiculous. I would love to see how anyone would react to being pulled across a concrete street by four armed men. Additionally, one of the women maced in the YouTube video was deaf , and thats why she was screaming at a great volume.

It's not unheard of for police officers to attempt to arrest people videotaping them - and given a recent ruling in a Federal Appeals Court that declared video taping a police officer a constitutional right, the actions of some of those officers was foolish and irresponsible, a fact probably made more evident to not just the public, but their superior officers, by their absence today.

If by "pulled out of someone's ass" you mean "they engineered the test to perform best with Internet Explorer 9", then completely.

The main center-point of this test was evaluating a "cloud based trust ranking algorithm". But the study provides no evidence that these algorithmns exist in any of the browsers; its a simple assumption which is likely false (especially when you look at the graphs). What the graphs are really showing is the performance of each browser's black list versus a set of URLs they selected, and not randomly.

If you look at the graphs themselves, they actually don't show the action of any algorithm (which would likely linearly increase or show volatility); in fact, IE9 (With App Rep) is simply a straight line. It's pretty clear that the URLs they used were already in the black list before hand, and that straight line is a continual rejection of them.

Testing a browsers ability to 'blacklist' websites is fine, I guess, but my first problem with this study is that's not the only way to measure 'security'. My second problem is that there's no evidence that the browsers themselves actually perform this activity, making the tests in the study feel like "studying the maximum (flying) climb speed of humans, rats, horses, and bats". My third - and the most troubling - problem is that they don't provide any information as to how these lists were obtained. They only say they tried to "mix URLs so as to make sure that certain domains were not overemphasized", and "NSS Labs operates its own network of spam traps and honeypots.", in addition to "In addition, NSS Labs maintains relationships with other independent security researchers, networks, and security companies,".You can assume without being overly bold that this list could have been a list of URLs that they knew IE would block. Conversely, you could probably easily design a similar test that would have Chrome at 100% block rate, and IE 9 at 10% - it's merely a measure of "what sites were in our test pool that are also in the browser's black list"

Pffft.