Just when you start to think that all the parties are as bad as each other, the other lot gets in and proves that no, they're even worse. Rinse (preferably with disinfectant) and repeat.

Well, that sort of argument by itself will just get you into deep trouble. (Taking the piss with a court is a good way to get into trouble, and your argument is hardly plausible in the first place.) Steganography might work, but then you've got the problem of distributing the baselines so that the other party can decrypt; sending lots of visually-identical-but-not-bit-identical copies of the same image would usually be a dead giveaway that you're using steganography.

Or that you use Google+; I keep seeing the same old shit resent there.

It's far better to ask why the AG Hates Australian Business, given that he's trying to make all online commerce impossible. Or that he hates medical privacy because he's making it impossible to securely transfer patient records between doctors and hospitals. Find things that show why encryption is an important basic part of doing things online that is used for nefariousness only because it is used for masses of other things too. ("Cars are used to commit smash-and-grab raids! Ban them at once!")

The reason why radians are what they are is because then the length of the arc (of a unit circle) that subtends the angle R is exactly R. That's really convenient. (You could use diameter, but in real work you've got the radius far more often than the diameter.)

And any other ratio (especially tau!) doesn't satisfy the Eulerian identity, so can't be nearly so beautiful.

The other issue is, though, how much would such a system contribute to flight safety. Information about what went wrong may contribute in the long term to flight safety, but in the short term such systems won't prevent crashes. They will just tell us where to look for the bodies.

Compared with the startup time reported (90s!) even a 10x speedup would leave it being SLOW.

Actually, it sounds like something is critically misconfigured; I can't imagine any situation where a 90s startup is acceptable. Well, not in the last 20 years. (I remember using LispWorks when I started waaay back, and that had that sort of startup time. I dropped that commercial system for a lightweight open source solution and never looked back.)

I came across this password strength detector the other day. It really cheered me up, as it uses a scientifically-justifiable approach (information entropy FTW!) and it laughs in the face of a number of tricks that many people recommend despite them being actually weak (replacing "o" with "0" only really adds one bit of security, which is nearly nothing, whereas adding another word adds far more despite being easier to remember).

Anything that's actually fair should be proportional to the damage caused to the roads by the vehicle, so that's approximately the first power of the distance traveled and the fourth power of the axle weight. (I think.) Expect the road haulage industry to be utterly against any form of fairness, despite the fact that they objectively cause the majority of problems (due to miles travelled and weight moved).

No, it's just more than you can currently envisage using. What about streaming 3D interactive entertainment? The bandwidth requirements of such things are rather high, beyond what is practical now (and we also don't have all the other hardware required yet) but it's still reasonable to consider how to provide that.

Expanding capacity has an additional benefit in urban areas: sharing of capacity between multiple users becomes easier. Maybe you live out in the sticks, but lots of people don't, and lots of them want fast internet.

I'd like to add to that:
Fool me every two years, politics as usual!

One of the key differences is that taking a formal course on it forces you to study the boring and hard parts as well as the fun bits; often they're important for gaining a real level of understanding. (I suppose that's true for pretty much any subject.)

If you do intend to use it for the purposes of obtaining employment, you'll need to actually take the exams at an accredited institution. Otherwise the employers won't know you from some random jerk walking in off the street claiming something which isn't true. No accusations, but from their perspective, self-taught is indistinguishable from untaught (unless you've got a solid portfolio of work or a good history of working in the area, in which case nobody will really care about the degree).

Anything to do with user interfaces will have a fair chunk of applied psychology as well (and some appreciation of parts of physiology too). What's more, people doing theoretical CS tend to go much deeper into discrete math than the normal math student does.

The major problems that most people have with PHP stem from the metric buttload of problems with SQL injection and XSS bugs that they're infested with. I know these are not the language's fault exactly, but it's usually very close to the epicenter of trouble and pain. I suspect that it's the legacy of poor community practice that's the biggest troubling thing in reality (as opposed to what people perceive), and that's very hard to fix; all those badly written applications and tutorials need work.

True 100%? In something that can fly under its own power? Then you can use in an atmosphere and you're powering it all by fairy tears and unicorn farts, because you're using magic and not technology.

We can observe that there must be something there (from the gravitational effects) but we can't actually see it (though there's been a few hints of annihilations that might be consistent with something like a sterile neutrino). It's like looking for a black cat in a coal cellar: we might not see the cat, but we can feel the mice it has killed and (maybe) hear the meow.

If there is a sterile neutrino out there, directly observing it is going to be absurdly hard.

Only if you also include "venal".