This man not only revealed a not-technically illegal surveillance program
Because the mark of a good representative democracy is secret action in alleged-but-unproven adherence to a set of classified interpretations, produced in a one-sided(in FISA court, the state makes its case, nobody takes the role of opposing counsel, and then the judges approve, of what, exactly, we don't know) proceeding, of what the law allows?
I haven't been able to figure out where the story got its legs. It is true that 'The' telegram service, the one with organizational continuity back to the original system set up to handle the logistical needs of Her Britannic Majesty's colonial occupation efforts, is shutting down. Game over, goodbye.
However, since virtually any data transmission mechanism will serve as a telegraph medium(they aren't exactly high-bandwidth or anything), there isn't much stopping other outfits from hanging out a shingle and offering telegram services, as some have.
Does anybody know if the state-run service that is shutting down had some sort of special status for legal purposes(the way the US Postal Service's offerings sometimes count for legal or procedural purposes where fedex or UPS might not)?
Landline penetration was low because it is expensive to run cables. In the 1990s I visited a company who were making fixed phones for houses in Chile. These were big analogue mobiles and dirt cheap compared to stringing cables through the mountains.
It's not just for the sticks and/or brutal terrain anymore: Verizon is looking to move a bunch of Hurricane Sandy-damaged landline customers to 'Verizon Voicelink', essentially a tethered cellular-to-copper bridge. Whether this is a statement on the economics of copper/fiber buildout, or an end-run around the regulations affecting wireline POTS service is a matter of some contention...
Because most of them aren't made by google, They are made companies like Samsung and Acer, these companies will only continue to make them if the hardware is making them money, either that or google will have to heavily subsidize their existence.
This is true; though(with the exception of Samsung's Exynos 5-based one, which doesn't parallel any other product(I assume that its design cribs pretty liberally from tablet/larger smartphone reference designs; but I don't think that it is board-identical with anything), most of the Chromebooks currently on offer are virtually identical, save only the HDD image and the BIOS, to low-end Windows laptops from the same vendor.
I don't suppose that any of the Wintel vendors actually like their lowest-end products, which have fairly lousy margins and make them look bad be being both popular and (necessarily) somewhat lousy; but they all have them, and can't seem to afford to drop them, because people are cost-sensitive and have no taste. The cost of adapting one of the low end designs to Chromebook-dom probably isn't zero; but I suspect that it isn't particularly large.
This doesn't make them immune from death; and it does tend to pigeonhole Chromebooks in a fairly crap section of the market(presumably this is why Google splashed out for their 'Chromebook Pixel' vanity design); but it does mean that the additional cost of offering a Chromebook model is fairly low, especially for Wintel OEMs who have no pet projects of their own to cannibalize and will do almost anything to sell more units.
It probably doesn't help(for the survival of telegraphs) that cellphones encheapen exactly the same part of the process that is most expensive with telegram service.
Unless you want telegram service to be about as useful as media mail, in terms of timeliness, you need a pretty aggressive short-haul postal service running out of the telegraph office. Technology presumably reduced the price of transmission links between offices(at least in places where it was worth upgrading, rather than just milking the legacy copper); but you still have to collect the text on one end, and have somebody run out and deliver it on the other. Even with arbitrarily cheap data transmission, you've still got a postal service hanging off all your endpoints.
With cellphones, the technology and bandwidth requirements are higher; but now the messages deliver themselves from the sender to the tower and from the tower to the recipient.
It's important to keep the RT (WinCE warmed over) and the Pro separate. They're distinct products. Although, I wonder whether the RT is dragging the Pro down with it.
RT is better than WinCE in some respects(although it strives to hide it): it is actually a direct port of the WinNT line, kernel and at least enough userspace to run a nearly-normal version of office, to ARM; unlike WinCE's 'totally different and maybe OK for really resource constrained systems with some vaguely win32-ish stuff on top' approach.
On the minus side, while WinCE was(on most retail devices, custom embedded was up to the vendor) treated as a largely open platform, for the relative few who actually cared to develop for it, WinRT is Windows Store and Metro(for third parties, as noted, enough of normal Windows lives on for it to run Office, and a variety of other test payloads that people have hacked onto it, the lockout is firmly artificial) only.
MS has made it fairly plain that the horrors of Metro and the app store are the Exciting! future; but it is more mandatory on RT than elsewhere.
It would be hard to imagine why Google would 'pull the plug' on a device that exists pretty much entirely to give you cheap access to whatever products Google has on tap.
Now, you may or may not be happy to hear about the changes in product lineup available when you turn the thing on, and if they really stop selling well you can probably say goodbye to anything more than the same Chrome updates that mainline Linux gets; it it would take quite a shift for Google to kill something that is basically a web browser with their preferred defaults baked in.
What I find surprising is that you'd even be able to buy/operate container lift cranes that don't provide feedback on the weight of items they are lifting.
That's a big, expensive, high-throughput, piece of capital equipment; and if it breaks down outside of a scheduled service window, there's a strong possibility that a container port, one or more shipping companies, and whoever owns the stuff in the containers is going to be giving the crane operator, and the poor maintenance minions, hell until it's fixed and the disruption is cleared.
When my $50 POS hard drive is monitoring a dozen-ish variables to try to predict its own death so as to avoid inconveniencing me, I'd have assumed that a container crane would be providing all sorts of feedback on power consumption, motor condition, strain on various important bits of the structure, etc, etc. such that it would be fairly trivial math for the crane operator to automatically compute the approximate weight of each container loaded as they load it.
I don't think that anybody is arguing that Chromebooks aren't a self-serving product for Google, just that they are a popular-with-users self-serving product for Google.
As best I can tell, Google has diffused most of the serious-nerd hate by making it pretty trivial(not supported as in 'sure, we'll be happy to do customer support for your custom linux distro'; but supported as in 'there are official directions on how to bypass the Google-Blessed payload and boot your own') to turn them into quite competent(and very cheap) full linux machines if you don't like the 'chromebook' stuff, and the less serious end of the market (A) doesn't actually care all that much and (b) is choosing between multiple self-serving products, not between utopian products and self-serving products.
Microsoft can't kill off its legacy OSes overnight, so scoring a Win7 system isn't rocket science; but 8 and 8.1(doubly so for RT) make it abundantly clear that the Redomond Future is app stores, Microsoft accounts, and Skydrive integration. Over in Cupertino, your iOS device makes the app store and Apple Account Exciting and Mandatory!, while your OSX device starts at $1000(barring only the mini, which isn't portable and doesn't even come with pack-in peripherals, making it a questionable buy for consumers, though attractive for lab/kiosk type work) and makes it increasingly clear that anything outside the app store is a second class citizen. Plus, of course, be it Windows or OSX, probably a good half of the users are going to have Gmail open pretty much all the time anyway, so they aren't exactly shying away from Google even if they choose otherwise.
None of the major vendors give a damn about your desire(if you have one, and a good many people don't) to be free of the mothership, so it's understandable why Google's limited(but stalwartly idiot-proof) and crazy cheap offering would be popular.
The rot goes deeper than that... Regardless of whether those pointy-headed intellectuals end up deciding that the universe is fundamentally stochastic at some low level, and basically all matter is fundamentally suited to games of chance, or they end up deciding that it's fundamentally deterministic; but with limits to observability, in which case the designers will have to work a little harder; but basically all matter is fundamentally suited to games of chance.
Florida itself presents any number of exciting betting opportunities!
"Nobody has ever been in a dogfight with a drone."
Arguably, anybody hit by a guided missile has just lost a dogfight with a small, suicidal, drone...
The WWII examples were (with the possible exception of a few very-late-war German prototypes) all human controlled, RF or wire; but the US had IR-seekers in something resembling usable shape by the 1960s and they've only improved since then.
As our testing in Afghanistan and Pakistan has demonstrated, you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs; but you can break a fuckton of eggs without making an omelette...
By my reading of the summary, it seems to me that a coin (which can be used in the noble game of Two up) would be considered a "Device that can be used in Games Of Chance."
Not only have they banned computers. They seem to have banned currency. I wonder how they will pay the police to police this.
'Device that can be used in Games of Chance' would seem to cover all RNGs and all but the most trivial PRNGS, as well. Luckily nothing important uses those.
Sir, sir, Aliens is a pretty good movie; but quite distinct from Alien. The rest of the series is... unfortunate(Though the original AvP game was pretty good).
Obviously, it is fairly likely that academy participants will be improved as game developers to some degree; but it seems like that doesn't really address the problem as described in the interview, which is people with good ideas getting shot down by bean-counters who want predictable sequels.
One would think that, rather than polishing developers, the logical line of attack would either be tinkering with funding models or reducing the cost of game development, which are the only two possibilities for either cutting the risk-averse out entirely, or causing them to adopt a 'games are cheap, so the ROI on experimentation is better than the ROI on derivative sequel schlock' philosophy.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm combining my love for Alien and my inexplicable whoring for 'funny' upmods(that don't even net me the 'karma' I don't care about), rather than phoning in a reliable 'insightful' rant about THem Gummunit Union Beurocrats! in part because it amuses me more, and in part because (especially if your hardware is old shit) a sledgehammer is probably the best approach if you actually think that a state-caliber attacker is on your ass(for larger jobs consider a shredder rather than a hammer).
In this specificcase, given that their analysis found only a small quantity of chickenshit malware, and because the EDA is kind of a low-priority target for the really cool attacks, I strongly suspect that it was an overrreaction(and, if it wasn't an overreaction, doing more aggressive analysis, in order to better understand the adversary's capabilities, in terms of OS, Application, and hardware/firmware level malware would have been more responsible than just shredding it all).
That said, though, you'd be hard pressed to be paranoid enough about the potential for even seemingly innocuous devices, in the hands of a capable attacker, to be malicious. The BIOS has had slightly unnerving powers ever since SMM; but these days it's a second OS, more or less, USB devices are highly likely to be full, potentially reprogrammable, devices that are just implementing whatever they are supposed to be in software(OEM cost-cutting reduces the risk that there would be space/power to hide anything really cool; but some pretty weedy microcontrollers can handle being whatever flavor of USB slave device they are set to emulate. Even monitors get a full i2c bus for DDC, no idea how well your graphics driver, occupying its position of relative privilege within the system, watches that interface...
I would say that they screwed up, because if they genuinely suspected the worst, shredding the evidence rather than analyzing it is unhelpful in preventing future attacks, and if they didn't suspect the worst, dumping clean images on the systems and getting on with life would have been a lot cheaper; but it is true that, if you suspect a genuinely capable attacker, you are sufficiently fucked that just burning it with fire is probably the cheapest option...
That's fair enough. I suspect that leaks differ in seriousness, and there are probably more than a few companies who think too highly of 'ideas' and too little of 'execution'.
My intent was really to distinguish two classes(there are probably a few others) of leakers: your mercenary doesn't give a damn whether you are doing good or not; but also won't try anything that doesn't (at least appear, they may be unaware of how difficult selling the secrets actually will be, as with the Coke losers you link to) benefit them. Your idealist is much more resistant to material inducements(both for and against leaking); but vulnerable to disillusionment. Very distinct flavors of risk.
As a matter of practice, are cops dangerous gun owners, or are they mere dangerous gun users, with nominal ownership of the hardware lodged in some municipal entity?
I assume that(at least in theory, I assume that it will swiftly degenerate into some mixture of 'round up all the guns!' and '2nd-amendment-keyboard-warrior-trolls', leading to a rather useless dataset), the mention of 'parents' implies a concern about improperly secured guns, a favorite of dumb children, with some side functions for 'We are pretty sure that this guy has a foundation composed largely of dead hookers' and 'these are the woods were people get wasted and shoot at absolutely anything that moves like a mammal every fall'.
Given the author's bio(he appears to be part GIS-dev, part performance artist) the app seems like a pretty logical outcome; but not something of any use except to get people worked up(which can be useful, and entertaining; but this isn't god's gift to informative maps).
Are VMS and mainframe admins allowed to shave even if the system hasn't gone down, or do you eventually have to replace them when their beards engulf and devour them?
My sympathy is with the 'start at the bottom and work up' approach; but I suspect that one advantage of choosing some abstract but 'real-world' example would be to keep a greater percentage of the class on task.
At some point, you have to decide on a level of abstraction(or just go directly into a mixture of solid-state physics and theoretical CS). Even something like a humble resistor, much less an entire AtmegaXYZ with happy convenience libraries, is an abstraction, and one that people spend their entire careers chipping at so that we don't have to do any more than specify "10Mohm, 5%, carbon film" and go from there.
Here's an idea, how about teaching about contracts, real estate and financial planning as well?
We've already seen, in both the US and the UK, where having people skilled in contracts and finance dicking around with real estate can lead us. Let's not try that again, please...
It won't work. It's too early. My impression is that most programmers don't start programming until their teens. I've tried to teach my kids algebra, and before 6th grade their brains are teflon, it just won't stick, but after that they get it. Ya gotta introduce things at the appropriate times.
It would take a long time, and probably be wildly unethical; but I'd be fascinated to know whether selective breeding could optimize humans for acquiring useless-in-the-wild abstract skills at yet earlier ages, or whether the old neural net can only grow so fast, barring fundamental improvements in cell biology...
After, say, a dozen generations of breeding the fastest algebra-learners with one another, would you see further improvements? Nothing? Epic autism? How about 100 generations?
Even better, any broadcast affiliates whose cameras were disabled by the power outage would be able to convincingly synthesize the needed footage with nothing more than a lens cap and some pre-canned scream effects!
Slashdot Mirror
This man not only revealed a not-technically illegal surveillance program
Because the mark of a good representative democracy is secret action in alleged-but-unproven adherence to a set of classified interpretations, produced in a one-sided(in FISA court, the state makes its case, nobody takes the role of opposing counsel, and then the judges approve, of what, exactly, we don't know) proceeding, of what the law allows?
I haven't been able to figure out where the story got its legs. It is true that 'The' telegram service, the one with organizational continuity back to the original system set up to handle the logistical needs of Her Britannic Majesty's colonial occupation efforts, is shutting down. Game over, goodbye.
However, since virtually any data transmission mechanism will serve as a telegraph medium(they aren't exactly high-bandwidth or anything), there isn't much stopping other outfits from hanging out a shingle and offering telegram services, as some have.
Does anybody know if the state-run service that is shutting down had some sort of special status for legal purposes(the way the US Postal Service's offerings sometimes count for legal or procedural purposes where fedex or UPS might not)?
Landline penetration was low because it is expensive to run cables. In the 1990s I visited a company who were making fixed phones for houses in Chile. These were big analogue mobiles and dirt cheap compared to stringing cables through the mountains.
It's not just for the sticks and/or brutal terrain anymore: Verizon is looking to move a bunch of Hurricane Sandy-damaged landline customers to 'Verizon Voicelink', essentially a tethered cellular-to-copper bridge. Whether this is a statement on the economics of copper/fiber buildout, or an end-run around the regulations affecting wireline POTS service is a matter of some contention...
Because most of them aren't made by google, They are made companies like Samsung and Acer, these companies will only continue to make them if the hardware is making them money, either that or google will have to heavily subsidize their existence.
This is true; though(with the exception of Samsung's Exynos 5-based one, which doesn't parallel any other product(I assume that its design cribs pretty liberally from tablet/larger smartphone reference designs; but I don't think that it is board-identical with anything), most of the Chromebooks currently on offer are virtually identical, save only the HDD image and the BIOS, to low-end Windows laptops from the same vendor.
I don't suppose that any of the Wintel vendors actually like their lowest-end products, which have fairly lousy margins and make them look bad be being both popular and (necessarily) somewhat lousy; but they all have them, and can't seem to afford to drop them, because people are cost-sensitive and have no taste. The cost of adapting one of the low end designs to Chromebook-dom probably isn't zero; but I suspect that it isn't particularly large.
This doesn't make them immune from death; and it does tend to pigeonhole Chromebooks in a fairly crap section of the market(presumably this is why Google splashed out for their 'Chromebook Pixel' vanity design); but it does mean that the additional cost of offering a Chromebook model is fairly low, especially for Wintel OEMs who have no pet projects of their own to cannibalize and will do almost anything to sell more units.
It probably doesn't help(for the survival of telegraphs) that cellphones encheapen exactly the same part of the process that is most expensive with telegram service.
Unless you want telegram service to be about as useful as media mail, in terms of timeliness, you need a pretty aggressive short-haul postal service running out of the telegraph office. Technology presumably reduced the price of transmission links between offices(at least in places where it was worth upgrading, rather than just milking the legacy copper); but you still have to collect the text on one end, and have somebody run out and deliver it on the other. Even with arbitrarily cheap data transmission, you've still got a postal service hanging off all your endpoints.
With cellphones, the technology and bandwidth requirements are higher; but now the messages deliver themselves from the sender to the tower and from the tower to the recipient.
It's important to keep the RT (WinCE warmed over) and the Pro separate. They're distinct products. Although, I wonder whether the RT is dragging the Pro down with it.
RT is better than WinCE in some respects(although it strives to hide it): it is actually a direct port of the WinNT line, kernel and at least enough userspace to run a nearly-normal version of office, to ARM; unlike WinCE's 'totally different and maybe OK for really resource constrained systems with some vaguely win32-ish stuff on top' approach.
On the minus side, while WinCE was(on most retail devices, custom embedded was up to the vendor) treated as a largely open platform, for the relative few who actually cared to develop for it, WinRT is Windows Store and Metro(for third parties, as noted, enough of normal Windows lives on for it to run Office, and a variety of other test payloads that people have hacked onto it, the lockout is firmly artificial) only.
MS has made it fairly plain that the horrors of Metro and the app store are the Exciting! future; but it is more mandatory on RT than elsewhere.
They wouldn't do that, though. Would they?
It would be hard to imagine why Google would 'pull the plug' on a device that exists pretty much entirely to give you cheap access to whatever products Google has on tap.
Now, you may or may not be happy to hear about the changes in product lineup available when you turn the thing on, and if they really stop selling well you can probably say goodbye to anything more than the same Chrome updates that mainline Linux gets; it it would take quite a shift for Google to kill something that is basically a web browser with their preferred defaults baked in.
What I find surprising is that you'd even be able to buy/operate container lift cranes that don't provide feedback on the weight of items they are lifting.
That's a big, expensive, high-throughput, piece of capital equipment; and if it breaks down outside of a scheduled service window, there's a strong possibility that a container port, one or more shipping companies, and whoever owns the stuff in the containers is going to be giving the crane operator, and the poor maintenance minions, hell until it's fixed and the disruption is cleared.
When my $50 POS hard drive is monitoring a dozen-ish variables to try to predict its own death so as to avoid inconveniencing me, I'd have assumed that a container crane would be providing all sorts of feedback on power consumption, motor condition, strain on various important bits of the structure, etc, etc. such that it would be fairly trivial math for the crane operator to automatically compute the approximate weight of each container loaded as they load it.
I don't think that anybody is arguing that Chromebooks aren't a self-serving product for Google, just that they are a popular-with-users self-serving product for Google.
As best I can tell, Google has diffused most of the serious-nerd hate by making it pretty trivial(not supported as in 'sure, we'll be happy to do customer support for your custom linux distro'; but supported as in 'there are official directions on how to bypass the Google-Blessed payload and boot your own') to turn them into quite competent(and very cheap) full linux machines if you don't like the 'chromebook' stuff, and the less serious end of the market (A) doesn't actually care all that much and (b) is choosing between multiple self-serving products, not between utopian products and self-serving products.
Microsoft can't kill off its legacy OSes overnight, so scoring a Win7 system isn't rocket science; but 8 and 8.1(doubly so for RT) make it abundantly clear that the Redomond Future is app stores, Microsoft accounts, and Skydrive integration. Over in Cupertino, your iOS device makes the app store and Apple Account Exciting and Mandatory!, while your OSX device starts at $1000(barring only the mini, which isn't portable and doesn't even come with pack-in peripherals, making it a questionable buy for consumers, though attractive for lab/kiosk type work) and makes it increasingly clear that anything outside the app store is a second class citizen. Plus, of course, be it Windows or OSX, probably a good half of the users are going to have Gmail open pretty much all the time anyway, so they aren't exactly shying away from Google even if they choose otherwise.
None of the major vendors give a damn about your desire(if you have one, and a good many people don't) to be free of the mothership, so it's understandable why Google's limited(but stalwartly idiot-proof) and crazy cheap offering would be popular.
The rot goes deeper than that... Regardless of whether those pointy-headed intellectuals end up deciding that the universe is fundamentally stochastic at some low level, and basically all matter is fundamentally suited to games of chance, or they end up deciding that it's fundamentally deterministic; but with limits to observability, in which case the designers will have to work a little harder; but basically all matter is fundamentally suited to games of chance.
Florida itself presents any number of exciting betting opportunities!
"Nobody has ever been in a dogfight with a drone."
Arguably, anybody hit by a guided missile has just lost a dogfight with a small, suicidal, drone...
The WWII examples were (with the possible exception of a few very-late-war German prototypes) all human controlled, RF or wire; but the US had IR-seekers in something resembling usable shape by the 1960s and they've only improved since then.
As our testing in Afghanistan and Pakistan has demonstrated, you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs; but you can break a fuckton of eggs without making an omelette...
By my reading of the summary, it seems to me that a coin (which can be used in the noble game of Two up) would be considered a "Device that can be used in Games Of Chance."
Not only have they banned computers. They seem to have banned currency. I wonder how they will pay the police to police this.
'Device that can be used in Games of Chance' would seem to cover all RNGs and all but the most trivial PRNGS, as well. Luckily nothing important uses those.
Sir, sir, Aliens is a pretty good movie; but quite distinct from Alien . The rest of the series is... unfortunate(Though the original AvP game was pretty good).
Obviously, it is fairly likely that academy participants will be improved as game developers to some degree; but it seems like that doesn't really address the problem as described in the interview, which is people with good ideas getting shot down by bean-counters who want predictable sequels.
One would think that, rather than polishing developers, the logical line of attack would either be tinkering with funding models or reducing the cost of game development, which are the only two possibilities for either cutting the risk-averse out entirely, or causing them to adopt a 'games are cheap, so the ROI on experimentation is better than the ROI on derivative sequel schlock' philosophy.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm combining my love for Alien and my inexplicable whoring for 'funny' upmods(that don't even net me the 'karma' I don't care about), rather than phoning in a reliable 'insightful' rant about THem Gummunit Union Beurocrats! in part because it amuses me more, and in part because (especially if your hardware is old shit) a sledgehammer is probably the best approach if you actually think that a state-caliber attacker is on your ass(for larger jobs consider a shredder rather than a hammer).
In this specificcase, given that their analysis found only a small quantity of chickenshit malware, and because the EDA is kind of a low-priority target for the really cool attacks, I strongly suspect that it was an overrreaction(and, if it wasn't an overreaction, doing more aggressive analysis, in order to better understand the adversary's capabilities, in terms of OS, Application, and hardware/firmware level malware would have been more responsible than just shredding it all).
That said, though, you'd be hard pressed to be paranoid enough about the potential for even seemingly innocuous devices, in the hands of a capable attacker, to be malicious. The BIOS has had slightly unnerving powers ever since SMM; but these days it's a second OS, more or less, USB devices are highly likely to be full, potentially reprogrammable, devices that are just implementing whatever they are supposed to be in software(OEM cost-cutting reduces the risk that there would be space/power to hide anything really cool; but some pretty weedy microcontrollers can handle being whatever flavor of USB slave device they are set to emulate. Even monitors get a full i2c bus for DDC, no idea how well your graphics driver, occupying its position of relative privilege within the system, watches that interface...
I would say that they screwed up, because if they genuinely suspected the worst, shredding the evidence rather than analyzing it is unhelpful in preventing future attacks, and if they didn't suspect the worst, dumping clean images on the systems and getting on with life would have been a lot cheaper; but it is true that, if you suspect a genuinely capable attacker, you are sufficiently fucked that just burning it with fire is probably the cheapest option...
Best Practices:
1. Take off and nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
That's fair enough. I suspect that leaks differ in seriousness, and there are probably more than a few companies who think too highly of 'ideas' and too little of 'execution'.
My intent was really to distinguish two classes(there are probably a few others) of leakers: your mercenary doesn't give a damn whether you are doing good or not; but also won't try anything that doesn't (at least appear, they may be unaware of how difficult selling the secrets actually will be, as with the Coke losers you link to) benefit them. Your idealist is much more resistant to material inducements(both for and against leaking); but vulnerable to disillusionment. Very distinct flavors of risk.
How about police stations? Will they be tagged?
As a matter of practice, are cops dangerous gun owners, or are they mere dangerous gun users, with nominal ownership of the hardware lodged in some municipal entity?
aren't they?
I assume that(at least in theory, I assume that it will swiftly degenerate into some mixture of 'round up all the guns!' and '2nd-amendment-keyboard-warrior-trolls', leading to a rather useless dataset), the mention of 'parents' implies a concern about improperly secured guns, a favorite of dumb children, with some side functions for 'We are pretty sure that this guy has a foundation composed largely of dead hookers' and 'these are the woods were people get wasted and shoot at absolutely anything that moves like a mammal every fall'.
Given the author's bio(he appears to be part GIS-dev, part performance artist) the app seems like a pretty logical outcome; but not something of any use except to get people worked up(which can be useful, and entertaining; but this isn't god's gift to informative maps).
Are VMS and mainframe admins allowed to shave even if the system hasn't gone down, or do you eventually have to replace them when their beards engulf and devour them?
My sympathy is with the 'start at the bottom and work up' approach; but I suspect that one advantage of choosing some abstract but 'real-world' example would be to keep a greater percentage of the class on task.
At some point, you have to decide on a level of abstraction(or just go directly into a mixture of solid-state physics and theoretical CS). Even something like a humble resistor, much less an entire AtmegaXYZ with happy convenience libraries, is an abstraction, and one that people spend their entire careers chipping at so that we don't have to do any more than specify "10Mohm, 5%, carbon film" and go from there.
Here's an idea, how about teaching about contracts, real estate and financial planning as well?
We've already seen, in both the US and the UK, where having people skilled in contracts and finance dicking around with real estate can lead us. Let's not try that again, please...
It won't work. It's too early. My impression is that most programmers don't start programming until their teens. I've tried to teach my kids algebra, and before 6th grade their brains are teflon, it just won't stick, but after that they get it. Ya gotta introduce things at the appropriate times.
It would take a long time, and probably be wildly unethical; but I'd be fascinated to know whether selective breeding could optimize humans for acquiring useless-in-the-wild abstract skills at yet earlier ages, or whether the old neural net can only grow so fast, barring fundamental improvements in cell biology...
After, say, a dozen generations of breeding the fastest algebra-learners with one another, would you see further improvements? Nothing? Epic autism? How about 100 generations?
My nascent eugenics program wants to know!
Even better, any broadcast affiliates whose cameras were disabled by the power outage would be able to convincingly synthesize the needed footage with nothing more than a lens cap and some pre-canned scream effects!