Security questions do not work for public figures.

Security questions do not work for ANYONE.

Most attackers know you, and have better than even odds of guessing your security questions. Your ex-girlfriend... She knows your birthday (duh), your mothers maiden name? (she was even at grandma's funeral), she knows all about your first gerbil Roscoe, and she knows your youngest siblings name, your favorite colour, what city you were born in, your first car, your likely answer to favorite food...

Most of your friends can probably do better than 50% on the list above.

And if you are on facebook, good odds a random stranger can get most of what they need to. Even if you don't announce it all or put fake info in your profile. Your mom send you "Happy Birthday" message anyway and you are sunk.

I never once thought about the "God of War" as a living thing as you describe it, but you are totally right.

And of course the rest of the gang are also still out there, from Venus to Dionysus, made all the more powerful by being hidden from view. Any fool could had seen that trying to legislate the "God of Wine" out of existence would be an epic fail, but we had somehow managed to convince ourselves that it didn't exist, thus Prohibition and War on Drugs. Or look at Catholic Church and what their attempts to banish "Goddess of Sex" led to.

I think there's a whole new branch of psychology we desperately need, and could conceivably develop by going through ancient myths, this time without assuming the people who came up with and believed them were blind idiots. Which was pretty weird to begin with, after all, we sum up observed reality by anthropomorphising various aspects of it all the time, from countries to capitalism to the abstract concepts of justice and freedom.

The premise in the summary is wrong. Employers have not learned that actual skill outweighs the fact that someone survived college.

The fact is that such a degree in no way indicates that obtaining it involved actually learning what was presented for longer than it takes to pass the relevant examinations.

On the other hand, if the programmer presents a series of complex projects they have completed, this does positively indicate they have both the knowledge (what the degree should attest to, but really doesn't rise to the challenge) and the ability to employ that knowledge (which the degree does not assure anyone of, at all.) Those completed project should also serve to demonstrate that the required portions of theory have both been absorbed and implemented, presuming the project works well and as intended.

Employers and HR departments are rarely focused on actual performance, except in the very smallest of companies. Most use a combination of bean-counting, related age-discrimination, and the supposedly valuable rubber stamp of a degree to winnow out programming job applicants. After all, if said employee screws it up, that's the employee's fault. Not the HR person.

This, in fact, is why most corporate software goes out the door with so many problems, and it is also why those problems typically remain unfixed for very long periods of time.

It sure would be of great benefit to end users and companies if actual skill *did* outweigh a degree. But that's most definitely not happening. It's wishful thinking, that's all. And if you're an older programmer, even your sheepskin won't help you -- you cost too much, your health is significantly more uncertain, they don't like your familial obligations, they don't like your failure to integrate into "youth culture" as in no particular fascination with social media... or even your preference for a shirt and tie. Welcome to the machine. You put your hand in the gears right here. Unless you've enough of an entrepreneurial bent that you can go it on your own. In which case, I salute you and welcome you to the fairly low-population ranks of the escapees.

No. You're completely ignoring what the 4th says. It says "unreasonable" is prohibited, and then it goes on to explicitly define what reasonable means.

If all it takes is some functionary going "well, I think it's reasonable" then the 4th has absolutely no meaning at all, which is not a sustainable position one can take for the framer's intent.

Verizon can so choose if their contract with me so stipulates (just as a house helper can treat the information gleaned from searching my home as public if I agree they can.) They may not be coerced into this legally, or exempted by the government from keeping my privacy, either. That's just an end run, and it amounts to exactly the same thing: a search without the cover of a properly executed warrant.

I just finished watching the entire proceeding, with a few short rewinds.

I'm appalled even at the suggestion that because the government thinks it "needs" to do something, it can. This theory permeates several of the points made; it is invalid from the ground up. If the government believes it needs something that is constitutionally prohibited, its remedy is found in the pursuit of the processes laid out in article five of the constitution -- not in outright ignoring the hard limits set upon it by the bill of rights or other sections of the constitution.

Likewise, the "is it reasonable" sophistry was very upsetting to encounter again. It's an outright stupid tack to take. The 4th does indeed include the word unreasonable, but it then proceeds to describe what is reasonable: probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, may cause a warrant to be issued though that warrant must be specific as to place(s) and item(s) to be searched for. Those conditions all being met, the search is then both reasonable and authorized. The fact is, if all it takes is someone saying "well, I think it's reasonable that we search fyngyrz premises (or whatever)" and this over-rides the very specific instruction that a warrant is required, then the entire 4th amendment is without any meaning at all other than perhaps, optionally, advisory.

On the subject of who can search what...

If I hire a house-helper to whom I assign the roles of answering the phone, keeping the larder up to date, cleaning and laundering, this person clearly has my permission to search. They will search under furniture, appliances and cushions for debris; they will search cabinets and the refrigerated devices for out of date or missing foodstuffs, they will open my drawers and organize and store my clothing. They will, in large part, know who has called me on my home phone, and who I may have called out to.

Fine. I can give such permission. But this, in and of itself, in no way serves to authorize the government to search my premises -- for anything. The 4th limits the government with regard to my person, houses, papers and effects. It does not (obviously) limit me, or someone I hire a service from and extend such permission to, from searching. The 4th is clearly not limiting action in the public sphere. It is limiting action in the government sphere.

Relating this to Verizon and its peers: By contracting to make phone calls through their capabilities, in no way have I extended the government access to my communications, in any part or parcel. What I have done is arrange for a service by Verizon/peers without extending the government any permissions at all, and the government, absent my explicit permission pretty much identical to that as given to my house-helper, is restrained, intentionally so by the 4th amendment from searching for anything, anywhere, in regard to my communications. Which, in case anyone is wondering, is also the rationale that underlies title communications law with regard to the content of my calls, and also forms the basis for the prohibition of any person monitoring cellular radio links.

Every time the government succeeds in arguments from need instead of authorization, we become subject to the whim of individuals, rather than to a constitutionally limited government. It should frighten the living daylights out of anyone who understands the issues when the rationale is "but we NEED to", as was seen multiple times in the government side of this proceeding; and the more so when the judges don't laugh in the face of the person presenting that argument.

Remember: If the idea is that the constitution is merely advisory, then there is no functional difference between the US government and that of any tin pot dictatorship. Someone says "I wanna", and it happens. That's most definitely not how our country was intended to operate; otherwise the framers were completely wasting their time.

Sigh.

*unreasonable. Fatfinger moment..

Abridged version:

Regardless of how the government acquires the information, is the government performing unreasonable searches against the people? One might argue that inspecting every persons communications is both and reasonable and cannot possibly qualify for probable cause.

I wouldn't say that learning to code necessarily outweighs a degree. But I do think university courses are too heavily focused on theory, and not enough practical application.

They complement each other. The big problem here (having gone though both, most but not all of the college being quite a while ago) is that a computer programmer back in the day HAD to know theory well, because programming was hard work! Input/output was so slow that you had to get it right the first time. Often you would present your code to somebody at a window to run on the mainframe, and if you were lucky you got a printout (!!!) the next day. If you got it wrong, a whole day was down the tubes.

Memory and storage were always in short supply, and CPU time was expensive. So everything had to be optimized. Sometimes for speed, sometimes for size, somethings a compromise of both. Theory was everywhere and you had to use it.

Heavy on theory, short on practice model that university CS was built upon, out of necessity. And they've kind of stuck with it, because universities are slow to change such things.

But I would also say that it is not a waste of time. As a practical programmer, theory will get you far. Look! De Morgan's Theorem just let me reduce those 5 lines of code to 2. You may not need to know linear algebra to work on sets of numbers, but if you do, hey, check it out. Now our program is half the size and our memory usage is down by 2 orders of magnitude.

So I don't think either one replaces the other. They complement each other. But I do think universities could concentrate, at least for their BS programs, a bit more on practical programming and just a bit less on theory.

Use one very strong password for the password manager.

Actually, I recommend using multiple safes/vaults/etc with different passwords; make the passwords appropriate to the contents of the safe; and treat the safes appropriate relative to their contents.

My safe with my passwords for throwaway email accounts and forum accounts, club memberships, etc is fairly simple. (It still counts as strong by all usual metrics, but its easy for me to remember and type in, which is good because I have to type it several times a day on average -- sometimes via a smartphone keyboard. Its sync'd via cloud to my smart phone, laptop, work computer, etc.

My safe with passwords for my life savings, domain registrar, email account and other assets which would be quite devastating to lose is MUCH longer and stronger, and it isn't synchronized with my devices. (Actually I have 4 - 5 safes with different groups of passwords in them.)

If you use a strong enough password then you'll be fine.

Unless you get hit with a keylogger. Then you lose everything. Does it really even make sense to have your online pay-parking app passwords and your numbered offshore banking in the same vault? All protected by the same password?

Its just silly.

And its another reason why I've split things up. If the phone gets compromised, my high value passwords aren't even in it. My higher value password safes get opened less frequently and on fewer systems, so a keylogger will have to be in the right system and wait longer to get into them -- giving me better odds of dodging the bullet, and more time to detect and remove them.

I wonder how such a law would interact with federal mandates that DOT plan for sealevel rise or army corp of engineering projects that require the contractors to do the same? I'd assume that the supremacy clause would mean that the contractors/DOT would have to follow the federal regulations and they would be indemnified by the law being invalid as it is overridden by federal statute, but it certainly puts them in a pickle.

I also suspect that this "standard" would be unworkable with some established de facto industry standards that aren't likely to change.

Until you click "shop", and then its not responsive anymore.

I have the video paused right now at a point (34:43) where the middle-seated judge had just asked, when the constitutional argument came up, if Verizon could not access and utilize these records.

I find the question somewhat bewildering.

The 4th amendment was written to limit the government's ability to search and seize. If you favor an incorporated view of the 14th amendment, these limitations extend to the states, and from there to the legal establishments within the states, the various county and city and town legal structures.

In no way was the 4th amendment addressed to private entities; limits of this type are set by contract, and by over-riding legislation which is not constitutionally based, but instead -- supposedly -- based upon the apparent needs of the community. Even if the constitution is taken as a model for such legislation, it is not the authority for it.

I see absolutely no relevance at all as to what Verizon could, or could not, do with the data. The question at hand is what the government can do with the data.

It is frustrating to see a sitting member of the bench ask such a wrongheaded question, implying that there is any relevance at all between the issue of constitutional constraints on the government, and business practice.

The 4th requires probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, before a warrant may be issued, and that warrant has to specify the place(s) to be searched and the thing(s) being searched for. The clear implication is that the warrant is required or the search is unreasonable, and the prerequisites for that warrant are laid out clearly as I have stated. Here's the 4th itself for reference:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The long underline was an editing mistake.