Canadian citizenship is a privilege, not a consolation prize.

Kerchoff's Principle essentially states that the security of a cryptographic system should depend only upon the secret key and not on the secrecy of the system itself. Indeed in the book Cryptography Engineering, the authors claim that they have reviewed may secret cryptographic systems and all of them had flaws.

Now if only you would apply that argument to cars.

As a Canadian I would be happy with that arrangement :)

Excuse me while I adorn my tinfoil hat.. I don't think this has any anything to do with ISIS, that's just a smokescreen. This is all about power and increasing the reach of the surveillance state, hence all of the deception.

No doubt this will turn into the F-35 of IT security: badly designed, poorly implemented, over budget, behind schedule, and ultimately ineffective.

As long as they teach the Pastafarian creation story.

I got an offer from Apple. The hiring process was relatively painless: telephone interview, coding assignment, and six (not overly difficult) on site interviews.

Who do you think work for? The CIA?

It basically amounts to torture. Should we allow torture behind bars just to satisfy our desire for revenge?

Agreed. I suffer from a mental illness, and I would like to tell Google to go fuck themselves, but in all likelihood they've already mined my Gmail account and inferred my diagnosis.

Intelligence is the ability to apply knowledge to solve difficult problems - at least that's my definition.

That said, there are many methods in the literature that are heuristic in nature and for which there are no obvious theoretical justifications.

I would say you can define most of machine learning as statistical function approximation. I would also add that the theoretical justifications are indeed important and most good texts find some way to justify the computational methods described.

It's always possible to reciprocate in other ways. Life becomes very bleak when every exchange is viewed as some kind of financial transaction. Part of the art of being poor is graciously accepting people's generosity without requesting it in the first place. If your friends feel badly about accepting your offer of a meal then, in my opinion, I would say their perspective is skewed.