"[A university economist said,] 'If people want to go out and get a master's degree in [anything but economics] and then [do something other than economics], that's fine. But I don't think the public should be subsidizing [things from which I don't personally benefit].'"
Kundra is great, but this wasn't his brainchild. This is 20-somethings fresh off the campaign getting inside government and fixing it. Change I can believe in, indeed.
I recently read Peopleware, where they said that in their coding war games experience had no correlation with performance. If experience costs more and has no benefit in development, why would a firm be willing to pay more for it?
(Caveat: Maybe experience has beneficial effects outside of raw development.)
Still, just deleting inappropriate characters is a pretty trivial case of what they are proposing - having something that would say, let you type 999-99 but not 99-99 is trickier, and that is still a very simple digits plus one character situation, where their patent is for arbitrarily complex regexes.
Was this based on a regex? It seems non-trivial to me to be able to validate an incomplete string against a complete regex intelligently. It sounds like that's what IBM wants, which would not be easy and would be pretty cool.
If you read the warrant, the accused allegedly created a profile on a gay hookup site for the alleged victim, pretending to be him. I'm not an expert, but it wouldn't surprise me if that is illegal. I know it's fun to beat up on cops for not knowing what linux is, but in this case I don't think it is at all obvious that this search warrant was without, err, warrant.