Got a citation for that? I tried searching for the case, and the only thing I found that was similar was the case of Tyrone Brown, who was sentenced to life imprisonment (and eventually pardoned) after failing a probation-mandated drug test.

Yeah, I like syntax highlighting (and color screens in general), as well as interactive debuggers. Certainly, we can write code faster and find bugs more efficiently with all the tools available today. But it's the "silver bullet" claims that I'm skeptical about.

"I remember how, with the advent of terminals, interactive debugging was supposed to solve all our programming problems, and how, with the advent of colour screens, "algorithm animation" was supposed to do the same. And what did we get? Commercial software with a disclaimer that explicitly states that you are a fool if you rely on what you just bought."

From http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~vl/notes/dijkstra.html.

There's still a "Caffeine Meter" on their website:

http://www.celestialseasonings.com/products/herbal-teas/morning-thunder

I don't see any source for your claim, though. All I found was a couple of people on usenet saying that Morning Thunder is different than they remember, and that they thought it used to have more caffeine. I can't find anything that definitively states that Morning Thunder's formulation was changed, much less that the FDA mandated such a change.

It's not just ensuring that "Football is safe." The Super Bowl will have on the order of 100k people in and around the stadium and more than 100 million people watching. We can argue about whether the specific measures will be effective, or whether they invade privacy, or whatever, but don't dismiss a high-value terrorism target as just a football game.

I doubt it. As far as I can tell, the prohibition is on recording; it's legal for one party of a telephone conversation to transcribe the conversation. Also, do people usually understand that they're talking to you over a relay? (I assume your friends do, but I don't know what the protocol is if you were, say, calling your credit card company.) If someone knows they're talking over a relay, then I think you could argue that they've implicitly consented to the transcription. It seems like explicit consent isn't necessary, just notification (i.e., "this call may be recorded..." or a specific beep tone).

Nope, that's wrong. California is a two-party consent state:

"without the consent of all parties to the communication..."

The DOE tried to push polygraphs on its cleared employees, and met with a lot of resistance from the scientists:

http://www.spse.org/Polygraph_comments_Livermo.html

The DOE can require polygraphs of its cleared employees in some circumstances, but to my knowledge it's rare that they actually do this.

I wanted to be an FBI agent, and went through part of the hiring process a few years ago when they were aggressively trying to hire people with advanced CS degrees. I dropped out of the process due to the salary: ~$50-62k (depending on location), including the extra "availability" (overtime) compensation. At the same time, the FBI was posting >$100k positions for (non-agent) computer scientists.

This is a routine trick in a security audit: drop some USB sticks in the employee parking lot, and see how many folks just plug it into their computer.

If someone wants your data and they have enough access that they can actually swap platters and smuggle the data out, then you're already in trouble. Destroying a hard drive makes it a lot less likely that data will be inadvertently leaked.

That fact that nobody publicly proved that they could do this does not mean that it can't be done. If NSA had the capability to do this, do you think they'd share that information? If the data is sensitive enough, why risk even a very small chance that it could be recovered by the wrong party?

This requires a) proving that the software is correct and b) verifying that the compiled result hasn't been tampered with. For the latter, I'll refer you to http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html.

Sure, the process can still be subverted, but it's a lot easier to verify that a hard drive has been destroyed (along with inventory checks on all hard drives being removed from a facility) than it is to verify that a hard drive has been properly wiped.

How do you verify that the software does this correctly, and that it hasn't been tampered with? What if a drive is mishandled and doesn't get wiped? And if there's a process to do this correctly and with no chance of failure, is it worth that effort to recycle some old hard drives?

Where I work, hard drives with less-sensitive data can be reused; other ones are ground up into little bits. Data cannot be recovered(*) from a thoroughly destroyed hard drive. What assurance is there for a software solution?

(*) To the best of my knowledge. Maybe NSA can piece together the dust of a hard drive, but I highly doubt it.