It's a good test if students are taught to separate quantities from units (kinds). You'd be amazed how many can't do that, even college-educated adults, and who will fail such an elementary question. They won't see past the confusing and incompatible units. It's probably not suited for 5 or 6 year olds though, unless the purpose is to identify the exceptionally gifted.

Observing is essential to identify threats in the first place. Naively sitting and assuming that without an express threat sent to you in a pretty envelope, wrapped with a blue ribbon, all is good a fine means you'll quickly become a footnote in history. That's the sort of juvenile, childish assumption that just doesn't work in reality on any level.

Observing is essential to deescalate conflict early and maintain good relations.

Lack of response to a potential conflict means the other party may assume in return there really is no conflict and make the situation worse - until you finally wake up to a far worse problem than if you had paid close attention all along.

Observing and paying close attention is just as important with friendly nations as hostile ones.

Back when I had a GSM phone I could hear incoming calls before it rang, if I put it on the desk within a couple of feet of my computer. The speakers would buzz. It's not why I switched to Verizon but it made that particular annoyance go away. (I only use GSM these days when traveling. Usually by air. With my phone shut off.)

It's also not all about a properly functioning device, but what about a defective one? What are all the different failure modes for something containing a lipo battery, a transceiver, and an antenna? It could have a bad wifi transceiver or antenna, or poor shielding without the owner even noticing anything wrong. Or they just think poor wifi reception is normal. When turned on the owner is completely unaware it lights up the EM spectrum.

Clearly there is no way for cabin personnel or even a pilot to determine which device is a potential problem and which isn't.

The U.N. should move to Geneva and we should stop paying for it. We also should make a point of denying entry to people who bitch and whine about how evil we are, then come here to shop, work, publish, and attend conferences. They can stay at home. Moving the U.N. will make this easier. We should also close all bases in Europe and leave NATO. Why is it in our interest to spend billions to be prepared to defend these ingrates? Hardly our problem that euro-fascism is on the rise and they'll end up killing each other in yet another big war. Next time we stay out of it. Repeat after me: not my problem, none of my business.

The key distribution and storage is often, but not always, the weakest point of attack. The exception is if you have plaintext or some pattern to look for (like an http or email header). This is why secure communications frequently are free of keywords and just contain a bunch of fields.

Snowden is a clueless kid.

Why do you say the NSA "is evil"? They have no operative arm, or actually *do* anything. If they come across criminal activity they can tip off the FBI, but what they have isn't admissible evidence, so the FBI gets to do its own investigative work. Their job is to uncover and watch for activities by people who wish to harm the United States or its people - exactly what we who pay their bills want them to do, as well as to act as an expert advisor to the federal government. Do you think governments shouldn't look after the safety of their nations? Do you think any responsible government doesn't? Maybe after airplanes are flown into skyscapers, or there's a mushroom cloud over Miami, or hoover dam blows up, we go "oops, maybe we should have paid a little more attention to people who wish to harm us?" Problem is, it's a little late then.

You have to realize that security classifications depend on the time something needs to remain secure. For battlefield comms this might be 6-8 hours, for HQ comms 5-10 days. The classification then is used to select a cipher based on a professional estimate of how long it takes someone with the resources of a major government to break it. Information that needs remain protected indefinitely goes under lock and key, in a cabinet, safe, vault, with or without a guard stationed. Maybe inside a protected facility. Access is registered (so compromises can be tracked down) and based on whitelists. Keys are numbered and tracked. Physical protection is the only way something can be protected indefinitely. So saying something like AES is safe because "the NSA uses AES for its own encryption systems" is meaningless without knowing which security classification it's for - i.e., how long they estimate the cipher can withstand a sophisticated attack by someone with the resources of a major government.

You never want a compiler to vectorize code. You want interfaces to vectoring hardware that you use to vectorize operations on your data. Just like you don't want compilers to provide multidimensional arrays - memory isn't multidimensional, so there's no natural layout. Instead you implement the arrays you need - even if they look the same the complexity contract and implementation is completely different for statically dimensioned (e.g. template params in C++) vs dynamically dimensioned (can be resized); sparsely populated either an entire row in a dimension, by specific dimension, or by any dimension (for instance only have data in rows 0, 5, 10383484387373, colums -4948484, 0, 338383 - implying sparsely populating only the intersecting cells); where indexes are arbitrary types (say complex), etc. NONE of this has a natural representation. Just like vectored operations in a NUMA architecture require careful data management for maximum throughput - so if you want to apply this to a sparse data set for instance you need to think through how this is to be done rather than just think a compiler can spit it out for you (other than in the most trivial demos that lack real-world requirements).

The people who are smart and knowledgeable enough also aren't concerning themselves with the NSA. They already know someone with the resources of a major government can brute force or less any cipher. This is why security classifications are based on the time duration for which a secret can be assumed to stay that way. For most battlefield comms it's a few hours.

So what if the NSA can use a billion-dollar grid to crack a handful of key pairs or TLS session keys per day? We expect them to be able to. It's their job to be able to, so we can find out what our enemies are up to. And they're no different from any other intelligence agency on the planet in this regard, except they work for a country at war (the Taliban still hasn't laid down arms or shown a willingness to discuss cease-fire terms) so have the resources and plenty of enemy communications to break.

All ciphers can be used as random number generators. The seed is the key, and to get a random number you encrypt zeros. Works with any cipher. If you need to generate a PK pair to exchange a symmetric, revolving session key for a stream or block cipher, you can collect entropy (e.g. urand) and use that to vector the cipher, then use the cipher to generate random numbers for the PK generation.

- Doesn't meet the 'reliable' standard as adopted by the nuclear industry

This is already part of their regularly scheduled work. It's easy to sell research and enhancements to an existing product, and there's staff to do it. This is a non-issue.

This is also already the case. If your 20% project gets internal traction it will likely become your 80% job.

I completely disagree with the notion that the 20% back burner stuff isn't important to Google at this point. In a big organization it's hard to sell ideas without accompanying them with a working prototype. So the 20% research and prototyping new product ideas is more important than ever, or Google will cease to evolve. There's no benefit in large corporations stagnating; in fact, they represent a massive focus of resources. The corporate normal shouldn't be a slow fade into the eternity of history - the normal should be constant product evolution and progress.

This is because a business is not allowed to compete with the USPS. You can't compete with a better mail delivery service more than you can compete by printing better money. It by definition has to be something other than mail, which includes charging so much no one will confuse you for the USPS. The USPS is an anachronism in the first world and it's embarrassing that our government still runs our mail service.