Age of consent in Spain is 13 though they plan to raise it. Seems like a 14 year old is an odd choice to emulate for that reason.

That said, an AI capable of simulating a 14 year old girl? Hard to imagine they could even simulate a 5 year old successfully. This doesn't seem like a good use of a universities resources.

This programming contests have nothing to do with real world programming or the skills need for most CS fields. Certainly, these are fun algorithmic challenges, but the timed nature of these contests encourage quick and dirty solutions that have no place in the real world.

Could be.

I did really well in these competitions during high school. Now I look back in horror at some of the code I came up with.

What slows me down today is all the second guessing I do now that I know what can go wrong.

There's a parallel in entrepreneurship. Many immigrants in the USA start businesses in part because they just don't know just how vulnerable they are to lawsuits and regulations. Many native citizens are much more cautious for fear of what the legal system or government might do to make their business life more difficult and they sit on the sidelines.

It's possible programmers in other countries are still in that exciting stage where they can code without fear.

College might be considered a waste of time by the best programmers.

Another possibility is that the very clever are washing out of school before they even get to college. I once saw a study that suggested (not proved) that something like 20% of high school dropouts in the USA might be gifted.

In my experience most of the attention in public school goes to those that are ultimately ineducable. Gifted students are just expected to be fine without help. If they dropout, though, they're less likely to be programmers at a university.

There probably is a correlation between obesity and a slothful mind, present company excluded, of course.

Very true. IT was one of the vectors how mitnick got lazy and got caught. Manning simply was dumb and was bragging about it to someone, Rule #1 of what you never do. Rule #2 is never brag to a known government mole, again another mistake he made.

"There's of course the entire DNS issue"

It is not hard to run your own DNS locally, plus you can always use a connection elsewhere to do a DNS lookup from outside the USA via IP address.

Add one more step, high gain directional antenna. I can be 500 meters away from the starbucks and use the wifi there, or pick another open or public wireless source. Easy to fit in a backpack and works even if it's inside the backpack, so nothing is visible and you dont attract attention.

Lastly, Everyone assumes that you have to use a web browser.

Says someone that has never said anything of value here on slashdot.

"Wake up, the only way to SAFELY run a reactor is to put operational safety ahead of making money"

But that is not highly profitable.

Can we at least use minimum wage workers and temps?

Yes it is. even as simple as using a 3mm screw on one end and a 5mm screw on the other end. attempting to install it wrong will instantly cause a problem because one screw will not go through the hole.

Problem is, most places are hiring lowest wage workers, so you do not get people that have the IQ to understand that if the screw does not fit then something is wrong, they just get more 3mm screws or more likely the even more stupid foreman or manager tells them to.

Same goes if you use a keying hole and peg, easy to make improper installation obvious, until that manager tells them to grind off the peg.

But did you test it with absurd conditions? I rarely see any software testing that they say," ok let's install all the sensors backwards and see what it does" They assume that never happens and never test for what is assumed as "impossible to ever happen".

The computer could certainly shut down a rocket given bad information. IT probably wigged completely out and simply shut down that engine.

When you try to make things cheaper you get failures.

Yup I'll bet a bunch. It is not hard if you have a clue as to what you are doing to hide in a public net connection.

Professional hackers do it every single day. And yes it takes more knowledge about networking and computers than 80% of the population has to do it, bit it certainly can be done.

Any application intended to resist modern government surveillance is going to be extremely difficult to write, because it has to be resistant to bogus secret "court orders". The only way I know to do that is to have many independent developers engage in multi-party signatures of reproducible builds based on audited and reviewed open source code. If they're just going to run a company that develops it in a proprietary manner how will they achieve that?

I am more interested in Pond. It's being written by an actual cryptographer and he already has real, working code (though it's nowhere near releasable). It's up front about its security model and which threats can break it. It's built on top of Tor and even supports using the TPM chip so that when you press delete, the data is really really gone beyond the ability of any forensics tools to recover. It's even designed to resist traffic analysis. Anyone can run a server.

The main differences are that, obviously, Pond is not developed by a company, and it is focussed on asynchronous email style messaging rather than instant messaging. It's also got a very strong threat model that means it compromises on usability - for instance, there are no addresses in Pond, instead you are expected to hand out small files (perhaps on NFC tags?) to people who you want to be able to receive messages from (this is an anti-spam measure).

Despite all that it's a very interesting piece of research.

Read history that is not westernized. Poly is actually quite normal in the past. Just like how it was expected that you got your sister in law pregnant if your brother dies and they don't have a kid.