Leaving aside the fact that an IQ score in the 190s is absurd (no one has curved a test over a large enough population for such an answer to reflect actual score distributions), as far as actual, normed IQ tests conducted by actual psychologists go, it's hard to find a test with a ceiling higher than 160 these days. The Weschler, easily the most popular among these, has a ceiling of 160, and getting a score above the low 140s requires doing very well across most of the individual batteries, some of which aren't especially g-weighted. No, the quiz in Omni is not, as far as most psychometricians are remotely concerned, an IQ test. To define it as such is to destroy most of the meaning of the term.

Occasionally, you see high scores due either to very old versions of the Stanford-Binet that did reach above 160 (it's likely that Ted Kaczynski got such a score) or the use of extensions of the old Stanford-Binet to investigate young people who hit or near ceilings, typically on verbal parts of these tests where raw scores tend to have a little more variance, but extrapolations to actual IQ scores aren't valid today due to the Flynn effect (ie: more young people are properly nourished and in intellectually stimulating environments than were in the early 20th century) and the fact that old versions of the Stanford-Binet weren't necessarily normally distributed along the 15-point sigma most tests are today. Though people have attempted to write on the upper echelons of performance on tests of cognitive ability, there's remarkably little that is peer-reviewed.

The tl;dr of all this is that whenever you hear reports of IQ scores above 160, you can more or less assume someone is talking out of their ass.

I breathed a sigh of relief upon reading this headline.

The latest TLS version Firefox supported until now has been broken in principle--and increasingly in practice--since almost a year ago

Here's Matthew Green, JHU cryptography engineering professor/researcher, with a full account: http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/03/attack-of-week-rc4-is-kind-of-broken-in.html

As an enthusiastic Haskeller, I think the correspondence between elementary algebra and Haskell is weak at best. Haskell would shoot way over the heads of most people taking early algebra. Applicative functors? Monads? Eta reduction? I don't see any analogs in early algebra. It would frankly reek a bit of new mathematics.

Haskell might have strong utility in teaching the theoretical end of computer science, but I don't think it's developmentally appropriate for middle schoolers or high schoolers. It would interest one kid in a hundred and turn everyone else off of computer science.

I cannot for the life of me understand the reason(s) behind the cris de coeur that we should be teaching all school children / all unemployed / as many as possible computer programming. It's as strange as trying to teach everyone differential/integral calculus with the knowledge that it will provide a foundation for many STEM jobs, or demanding that everyone learn Greek and Latin because it will open doors to a classically styled education. Despite the merits of each, each is time-consuming and specialized enough that in most cases, it won't be worth the time. Seriously: knowing the history of mathematics will be far more useful to most people than learning Weierstrass substitution (assuming, falsely, that everyone could learn Weierstrass substitution).

Rather than regurgitate the already well-articulated objections of others (read through 3+ rated comments), I'd like to offer that the only useful way I can imagine computer programming being incorporated into a K-12 curriculum is by showing how it can be used to trivially automate useful work and arrive at results in other domains, but I'd again say that the time needed to do so could be better applied to other things.

Does the industry simply want to drive down wages that badly? There must be some recognition on their part that they'll never turn software creation into a dime-a-dozen job--at least not on the scale they'd like.

Oh, and for the last time: computer programming != computer science, irrespective of what interest groups have told you. I know because I've done (some of) both.

Per this, I feel comfortable saying cry me a river.

The outrage over foreign spying--in particular Chinese backdoors--on the part of the American intelligence community is really a form of the same thing: it's okay when we do it, but as soon as anyone else does the same thing to us, it's a gross affront to our privacy and the relationship we have with the spying party and possibly an act of war. I realize intelligence agencies are trained to think this way, but is it really so terribly difficult to grasp that if you don't want it done to yourself, it's probably a sign you shouldn't be doing it to others?

People aren't getting their news from Facebook yet, but don't worry; in two decades, all news will originate in, propagate throughout, and develop solely on Facebook. Facebook will be the new geopolitical sphere. For all intents and purposes, that "real world" thing won't exist anymore.

I think the title could be broadened to say, "News Media Are--And Always Have Been--A Joke".

The news media have always existed to serve political ends either overtly or covertly. The slack of the American mainstream news has largely been picked up by independent news outlets, which have their own political agendas. If I were to guess from the title of your post, you get a lot of your news through BBC/Al Jazeera/RT. Are you really convinced any of those organizations is impartial? I grant their coverage of certain kinds of news you care about may be more objective than their mainstream American counterparts, but if your current events knowledge comes solely from them and Slashdot, I'd put forward that your impressions of some things are very one-sided.

I'm not saying you're wrong to look for non-American coverage of news--far from it. I've observed that my own perceptions of world events become problematic when I confine myself to learning about the world through one channel of information. This would certainly explain the state of American politics.

I have mod points but will not be modding you down, though I hope I can show that your case is misguided and unsound.

You're not wrong in saying that there are sociopaths--or at least very empathy deficient people--in Silicon Valley. Friends of mine work with business magnates in that area, I know for a fact that they're are. I'm not convinced, however, that there are a higher proportion of sociopaths in information technology or software engineering than in, say, law or petroleum engineering. The way you've tried to fit the information technology push into some broad, overarching conspiracy to convert America's young people into thoughtless worker drones makes no sense.

Consider the following: If an outsourced workforce, otherwise competitive with American labor, is prepared to work harder for less money, why hire expensive students trying to pay off student loans at all? For that matter, why encourage them to seek an expensive computer science education at Cornell or Rice or Carnegie Mellon, especially considering that such an education is likely to make them less effective drones if they have any exposure to political history in school? How does being saddled with debt for a technical education make you more likely to seek a disposable job (one you could be trained to do at a technical college in two years for a few thousand dollars) or less likely to start a competing company?

If this campaign is self-interested, and I have every reason to think that it is, I see two possible motives: one, they aren't able to find enough skilled people to fill the positions they have anywhere, and in certain pockets of their industry, this may well be the case; two, they recognize that a stagnant economy is unlikely to support growth in their own ventures and want more people starting innovative businesses to fuel a cycle of economic growth. In either case, I fail to see how, at least for the foreseeable future, this isn't in the interest of the young people being involved. I remember having corporate propaganda funneled into my head through public schooling on a biweekly basis (with which parents seemed perfectly fine, I might add), and I can honestly say that this would easily be the most welcome and constructive supplemental material for the year.

As a young person, I often hear thoughtful parents complaining about the influence of corporations skewing the public school system as a whole towards the creation of worker bees, but a minority of even them seem interested in doing anything about it that takes meaningful work or commitment. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you're a parent (and you may well be): what are you doing to ensure your children are being taught to think critically, recognize and self-protect against the sociopathic (to use your word) behavior of their employers and develop scarce skills that will make them good citizens and globally competitive workers/entrepreneurs? If you could easily and thoroughly answer this question, then congratulations, you'd have very little to worry about! Otherwise, I'd offer that you were blaming people you know to be self-interested for behaving predictably and doing little to prevent it.

This is extremely well-intentioned advice and very correct in big-picture terms but not at all appropriate for cold-starting the ability to read and write simple programs for numerical scientific work. If the OP intends to become a programmer specializing in scientific computing and must manage a substantial code-base, this will prove good advice to take as some tertiary measure; if his/her goal is to become proficient enough to write a few hundred lines of code for a cross-component patch in some specific scientific context, it's frankly a waste of time--and I say this as an apologist for learning both Smalltalk and Haskell (along with possibly Scheme) if you intend to call yourself a computer programmer and/or especially a computer scientist. I don't deny understanding several paradigms of programming is invaluable for any programmer; I'm just saying that if you treat your time as precious and programming as one small part of what you do, this isn't the best use of your time.

I think it's easy to show that Julian Assange is a prima donna, but I hesitate to describe Edward Snowden as one. He isn't crying for more attention or more political power; he just wants to make sure he's safe from targeting of political adversaries. He hasn't offered a lot of commentary besides explaining his reasons. Whether he is or not, though, I don't think it matters all that much. What can be shown--and does matter--is that the media interested in maintaining the status quo wants to make the revelations about Edward Snowden. Turn it into identity politics and relatively few people will care about the underlying issues, then you can destroy Edward Snowden's credibility and cast the issue as irrelevant.

All governments know that the best way to roll out an oppressive measure is to talk about it endlessly as "purely hypothetical", purchase support (not necessarily with money, mind you; soft political is more than sufficient in many cases) for it in popular media to condition people to accept it. Eventually, you slowly implement it, outright denying the most egregious parts of it and amorphously implying that this is how things will be from now on--or at least in the near future; times have changed and eventually this will be the new normal. Ostracize anyone complaining about it or pointing it out by attacking their character, ridiculing them, or really any kind of ad hominem that doesn't address the underlying points being made. The human tribal identity heuristics will eventually cause most normal people to associate dissent with lunacy. If the system of oppression in question, or revelation of its true nature, is embarrassing, you can use this to mark people opposed to it as destructive or unpatriotic. If you have an economic system and entertainment complex that pressures people away from putting in the time to organizing politically, through a combination of longer hours and the looming threat of unemployment, say, they're then unlikely to actually demand changes (the Occupy Wall Street model, whether you agree with its goals or not, does not represent a serious demand for changes. Rather, it embodies a sink on political frustration. You just tweak the direction the oppositional movement takes until they degrade themselves in the eyes of the public or tire themselves out--so much better than political attrition because they match their own energy reserves dithering rather than sapping yours). The news media can be another Occupy Wall Street: Joe H. Typical can get frustrated and scream at his TV and feel like he's doing something before drinking himself into docility and deciding that there isn't really anything sane he could do to show just how unacceptable whatever-it-is is. That's the press's job, after all. This is assuming Joe H. Typical still watches the news; I wouldn't put it past him to be reading several news sources not owned by the friendly neighborhood media oligopoly. Now the best thing about this entire political structure is it actually demands relatively little management; all you need to do is tip things far enough in your favor that the system becomes self-reinforcing. The intervention needed is minute compared with the leverage it provides.

I think the NSA revelations are were outrageous enough at just the right time that there's serious potential for change, but notice how effective the campaign of psychological warfare has been. The thing about institutions is they have a ton of political momentum; changing them quickly is hard and often dangerous. This is what today's NSA's powerful apologists understand. Americans distrust their government, of course, but I don't think they appreciate how carefully tuned the net political force is, both in the US and in other countries. If they did, they might be scared and not simply uneasy in some vague, inarticulate sense.

I already know how to write unmaintainable software. This hardly needs to be written about. If there were a good list of practices for writing maintainable software, that might be more constructive.

Probably. Hell, producing more homegrown STEM talent is, in significant part, about lowering wages/curtailing benefits/forcing longer hours out of STEM people by making them more replaceable. That ought to show 'em.

Foreign universities do cost considerably less, but notice how few of them appear in listings of top schools. There is a huge infrastructure of high-end post-high school education in the US. It just isn't accessible to most people.