True, which is why you should include that reason in your cover letter. I applied for a job that was specifically looking for an experienced C programmer. I'd had a 2-day C class through my previous employer, but I'd never actually used it for anything. But I wanted that job. I sent them my resume along with a letter explaining why my experience was relevant despite not having used the language. The weekend before the interview I sat down with my copy of K&R and taught myself enough to write a print driver. I took that and code samples in other languages along with me, and was completely honest about my experience level -- and emphasized that languages are fundamentally similar, that I knew others and could learn this one. I got the job.
I'm a fairly intelligent individual and I'd be absolutely sure to take anything they reported about my genetic profile with a grain of salt.
Me, until I see evidence to the contrary I'm going to assume that this test is every bit as accurate as calling Miss Cleo. No more, no less. At least her commercials had to have a "For entertainment purposes only" disclaimer at the bottom. IMHO, unless 23andMe are going to stick that phrase on the boxes I'm all in favor of the FDA requiring that they demonstrate accuracy. (And yes, I wish the FDA did that with herbal supplements and other snake oil. Or at least make manufacturers prove that the contents of the pill match the label on the box.)
Unless you're going to be dragged into the cinema against your will and clamped into the chair with your eyelids propped up a la Clockwork Orange, no, you're not going to have to put up with it.
Cue shift in pedo code words. "Anyone know where I can find a farm stand with underripe melons and bananas?" "Looking for a late model used car, less than 13 years old. Must have tiny headlights." "Need small pizza, smothered in sauce, no sausage."
Tom Lehrer said it best: "When correctly viewed, everything is lewd!"
Well, in this case it's a direct quote from the lead investigator.
"We were literally dumbfounded when we saw it," said lead investigator David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles in a statement.
And while I'm not sure a scientist would say "I'm just so gosh-darn BAFFLED!" I have heard them say, "Beats the hell outta me." I guess "Scientists baffled by new sighting" is a more accurate headline than "Scientists get the hell beaten out of them by new sighting."
I agree that Obamacare is bad economics, and I have the opinion that it was rammed down our throats by a Socialist mob,
That's funny. I have the opinion that Obamacare is bad because it's nowhere near socialist enough. It's trying to take the basically socialistic concept of spreading financial burden over a nationwide population and twist it to fit the mold of the mythical "free market". A single-payer system would have been much better. IMHO. Well, better for everyone except the insurance industry and the lawyers, that is.
At this point I'm so fed up with politicians I think they should all be fired for not focusing on solutions that work for everybody, or at least almost everybody.
Why does anybody think that a tactic no more sophisticated than sticking your finger and inch away from your little sister's nose and chanting "I'm not touching you!" is going to work? You mom didn't fall for that shit when you were 10 and the courts aren't going to fall for that shit now. There's probably even some language in the NSLs that says that you may not inform others by acts of either commission or omission, just to cover this kind of stuff.
The only reasonably sound suggestion I've heard is that Apple is deliberately baiting the NSA to get this dragged into public view in court. If so, good luck with that. All the NSA has to do is say "But, security!" and it'll get shunted off to the land of sealed records.
I see the test as being full of jargon to which I've not been exposed. I've never heard of a "number sentence" or "part I know / missing part" before, but they way they're used sounds like those phrases have specific meaning. Presumably these terms were taught to the students as part of the curriculum.
I can only speculate that at some point someone said, "Equation? How the hell's a 1st grader going to know what 'equation' means? They're scared of math because of all the unfamiliar terminology. Wee need to make math more accessible by replacing the mathematical jargon with words they understand. Read this equation out loud. 'Three plus four equals seven.' That's not a scary equation, that's a friendly sentence. A... number sentence!" Come on, you know it went down like that in some focus group trying to determine why kids do poorly at math.
So "number sentence", "the part I know", and "the missing part" become simple substitutions for "equation", "addend / subtrahend / minuend", and "sum / difference". The trouble is that despite being "common words that the kids already know", in combination their meanings are every bit as precise and jargonistic as the actual mathematical terms. Worse, since they are familiar words those of us who've never been exposed to this particular dialect of jargon think we should know what they mean and are frustrated because they don't actually seem to mean what they say. Like Lisa Simpson on seeing a sign for the "Yahoo Serious Festival": "I recognize all three of those words but that statement doesn't make any sense."
So, problem 1 would make a lot more sense if we knew that the kids had been taught using the example of pouring pancake batter from a measuring cup. Problem 3 makes sense if you consider "cubes" in the physical sense of six-sided blocks, such as we seen in problems 2 or 12. Problems 6, 7, and 8 are more meaningful if you know that the "circles in a divided box" symbology is specifically taught as a way to visualize the problem.
I'm not saying that this is a good way to teach. I think it's well-meant but ultimately misguided. But look at the test again in that light and see if it doesn't make more sense. (Although nothing can explain why problem 12 talks about a "subtraction sentence" even though it has no actual subtraction anywhere in sight.)
My only argument is that *if* the security measures are actually effective they need to be applied to everyone. Perhaps they could give the elderly assistance removing their shoes, putting them back on, or whatever. But if removing one's shoes is important enough to require it of most people, it's important enough to not make a known gaping security hole by allowing a class of people to skip it.
I don't claim there's any benefit at all in removing one's shoes. Quite the opposite, I think that allowing the elderly to avoid it is an admission by the TSA that it's a pointless exercise. Ditto everything that's skipped by the Pre-Check line. They ought to just give up all the nonsense.
I'm all for baiting the TSA. Most of their security measures are just plain ridiculous. I swear that after the shoe bomber got them to make us take off our shoes, the underwear bomber was sent in to see if they'd strip search us. (And they responded with backscatter scanners. Discuss.)
But, applying the same security measures to everyone -- old, young, crippled, whatever -- is not among their failings. That's the only part of what they do that makes sense. Once you declare a "safe" class of passengers who get waved through the searches, you're tempting The Bad Guys to enlist members of that class. Do 90 year old guys get a pass? I'm sure The Bad Guys can find some disgruntled nonagenarian to stuff some C4 down his pants or carry the dreaded 3.1 ounces of liquid explosive. The only way security searches work is if they're applied to everyone.
Of course, the TSA can't even get that right. They introduced their Pre-Check program which reduces the checks to pre-9/11 levels for pre-approved travelers. So how hard would it be to recruit some guy who qualifies for the Pre-Check lane to be the bomb mule?
Psssst! Hey Bad Guys! Want to cripple air travel in the US? Just bomb a couple airport security checkpoints. Lots of people, tightly packed together, all standing in a nice line, and no chance of being discovered early. Hit a couple of those and we'll shit ourselves trying to figure out how to strip-search passengers without causing big, vulnerable holding areas. It's a pretty damned obvious target. The fact that it hasn't happened in the past 12 years is the best evidence that there really isn't a legion of Bad Guys out there just waiting for the chance to attack. They've had the chance. We've gift-wrapped it for them. Now let's just admit that the bogeyman is mostly in our imaginations.
FAKE! Come on, this thing is obviously 'shopped like crazy. The shadow on the rings is much to crisp compared to the shadow on the planet. Plus the ring shadow is entirely opaque. To make it realistic they should have given it some transparency so you could see the rings faintly behind it. Also, there's color banding in the "planet", and some weird hexagonal artifact that looks like this thing was originally rendered as a 3D model with bad tessellation. Go back to drawing Tippy to get into art school, you pathetic hack.
Okay, not everyone is forced to buy car insurance. Only people with cars. And it's done at the state level, not federal. Yes, you are correct.
But, what difference does it make? It's an established model of insuring a very large population, including people in both high-risk and low-risk categories. It seems that in both cases the goal is to insure everyone in a given population (the population of people with cars in one case, the population of people with bodies in the other). Given that as a goal, why not model the new health insurance program based on the existing and working car insurance program, rather than coming up with this whole complex system of exchanges?
Those are the choices we're discussing. As a nation we are currently pointed in the direction of universal health insurance. Discuss why the ACA is a better or worse implementation than existing universal auto insurance implementations.
If you want to tell me "it's different because one group is limited to people with cars while the other group is everyone" I'm willing to listen, but I'm afraid you'll have to explain it to me in a little more detail. I don't understand why that would make a difference.
If you want to tell me that "it's different because one program is by the states and the other is by the feds" I'm also willing to listen, but again you'll have to explain to my why it makes a difference. I can see where you could construct an argument about states' rights versus federalism and that we shouldn't be trying for an insurance program at all on the federal level. Is that where you're going with this? Or do you have some sort of argument that it's feasible to implement at the state level but not at the federal level?
If you want to argue that there are better ways to achieve improved health care than an insurance system I certainly won't disagree with you. In that case the whole question of "should we model it based on auto insurance" is meaningless.
All the limitations of mobile, now on your desktop!
That was my first thought, too. It looks like the mobile version. At least the comments don't show a huge number of worthless entries that read "Filtered due to preferences." like the mobile site does. (Here's an idea, guys: If a comment is filtered, don't show it at all! I understand that when I have the reading threshold higher than -1 I won't see some things. That's kind of the point. You don't have to tell me about each of the things you're not telling me about.)
That said, I'd actually come here to defend the new layout. I chalked up most of the actual problems to things not yet implemented, and most of the visual mess to just being unfamiliar. But since the reply link is one of those things not yet implemented I had to go back to the old layout to post this.
Wow.
The difference in readability is huge. Compared side-by-side, the old format is much, much more readable than the new format. The new summary does not include the text from the main page, just the "read more" text. Bullets are missing from the list of changes. (list-style-type: none; Really? You went out of your way to achieve this?) I thought maybe the text was printed in a lower-contrast color, but that's not the case -- it's that the font-weight has been reduced to less than normal via CSS, presumably to emulate the skinny unreadable text in iOS7. (At least Apple provided a way to change the default font to bold in the accessibility preferences.)
In short, it's not just that it's new and unfamiliar. It's objectively less readable, by design. Knock it off, Slashdot! Maybe (maybe!) choose a non-default font, but once you do don't try to tweak it to make it look hip. It looks like ass.
Jobs are very important to politicians, albeit indirectly. Without jobs people go hungry and homeless. Now the politician can do one of two things: 1) Let people starve to death, or 2) implement some sort of pinko social programs to help them. Starvation is a poor option because (jokes about Chicago notwithstanding) dead people don't vote. Social programs are a poor option because then the corporate investors (that is, the only people who do real work in a capitalistic system) need to be taxed more and they'll remember that when they choose to give financial support at the next election.
Jobs are the one thing that will keep the masses just far enough out of abject squalor to think you're helping them, while keeping your hands out of the corporate guys' pockets so they'll give you money to continue keeping your hands out of their pockets.
Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!
Basically, everything in that article is predicated on the claim that "we can't keep data", when in fact they can and do keep all manner of data. It's nothing but a disingenuous attempt to shift the blame away from the TSA and onto privacy groups and the public at large.
This reads living tissue under the skin, which is more secure than a simple fingerprint that can be found anywhere.
You've asserted this in at least three different posts in this thread. What exactly do you mean by "reads living tissue under the skin"? What is it looking for there? How does it differentiate between the living tissue of my finger versus the living tissue of your finger? And here's a big ol' [citation needed] tag for the claim that it's more secure than a fingerprint scanner. What's the basis of that claim?
It was mediocre. Certainly not Scalzi's best, but I haven't read any of the other nominees so I can't say how it compares. Assuming none of the others was better I'd have voted "no award". It's enjoyable, but not Hugo-level (IMHO).
It didn't help that I read it just after watching Red Dwarf: Back to Earth, which has a very similar plot! I'm not accusing Scalzi of stealing; characters coming to life is an old idea and he had a good take on it. But between Red Dwarf and Galaxy Quest I couldn't help thinking, "I just watched this..." as I read the book.
In other news, automatic telephone switches might one day put telephone operators out of business. And the car itself is a serious threat to the buggy whip industry!
Yeah, well, that's because they want to portrait him as a brilliant evil genuis who should be incarcerated for the rest of his life (as he's obviously so dangerous) rather than just a guy who downloaded stuff on his thumbdrive because their internal security was shit.
This. A thousand times this.
Read the two articles linked in the summary. They're both on NBC news and published within three days of each other, and both are essentially the same story. The difference in the articles?
The older one (byline "Richard Esposito and Matthew Cole") says, "Duh. He's a sysadmin. He's capable of creating accounts with arbitrary permissions, and of violating the air gap between the secure and insecure sides. Of course he can do that, it's in his job description!"
The newer one (byline "Richard Esposito, Matthew Cole and Robert Windrem") says, "Whoa! This guy knows how to impersonate people on a computer! No one but a brilliant uber-hacker could do that! This guy is a menace! An evil genius of a degree seen only in Bond villains!"
I don't read or watch NBC news, and I've never even heard of any of these reporters before. But my guess is that Esposito and Cole are the tech beat guys, and Windrem is managerial. If we assume stupidity, Windrem simply said "This story is dull. I'd better punch it up a bit." If we assume malice, Windrem said "This makes the NSA sound dumb. Let's play it for the brilliant hacker angle instead." If we assume conspiracy, some nice men in dark sunglasses approached Windrem and said "This story doesn't fit with our narrative of Snowden being a dirty rotten traitor. Fix it."
Slashdot Mirror
http://xkcd.com/171/
True, which is why you should include that reason in your cover letter. I applied for a job that was specifically looking for an experienced C programmer. I'd had a 2-day C class through my previous employer, but I'd never actually used it for anything. But I wanted that job. I sent them my resume along with a letter explaining why my experience was relevant despite not having used the language. The weekend before the interview I sat down with my copy of K&R and taught myself enough to write a print driver. I took that and code samples in other languages along with me, and was completely honest about my experience level -- and emphasized that languages are fundamentally similar, that I knew others and could learn this one. I got the job.
Me, until I see evidence to the contrary I'm going to assume that this test is every bit as accurate as calling Miss Cleo. No more, no less. At least her commercials had to have a "For entertainment purposes only" disclaimer at the bottom. IMHO, unless 23andMe are going to stick that phrase on the boxes I'm all in favor of the FDA requiring that they demonstrate accuracy. (And yes, I wish the FDA did that with herbal supplements and other snake oil. Or at least make manufacturers prove that the contents of the pill match the label on the box.)
But now I have a backup in case I die...
Hey, who's up for a Clockwork Orange reboot?
So why don't you ever hear about "crazy dog ladies"?
Cue shift in pedo code words. "Anyone know where I can find a farm stand with underripe melons and bananas?" "Looking for a late model used car, less than 13 years old. Must have tiny headlights." "Need small pizza, smothered in sauce, no sausage."
Tom Lehrer said it best: "When correctly viewed, everything is lewd!"
Well, in this case it's a direct quote from the lead investigator.
And while I'm not sure a scientist would say "I'm just so gosh-darn BAFFLED!" I have heard them say, "Beats the hell outta me." I guess "Scientists baffled by new sighting" is a more accurate headline than "Scientists get the hell beaten out of them by new sighting."
That's funny. I have the opinion that Obamacare is bad because it's nowhere near socialist enough. It's trying to take the basically socialistic concept of spreading financial burden over a nationwide population and twist it to fit the mold of the mythical "free market". A single-payer system would have been much better. IMHO. Well, better for everyone except the insurance industry and the lawyers, that is.
At least this we can agree on!
Why does anybody think that a tactic no more sophisticated than sticking your finger and inch away from your little sister's nose and chanting "I'm not touching you!" is going to work? You mom didn't fall for that shit when you were 10 and the courts aren't going to fall for that shit now. There's probably even some language in the NSLs that says that you may not inform others by acts of either commission or omission, just to cover this kind of stuff.
The only reasonably sound suggestion I've heard is that Apple is deliberately baiting the NSA to get this dragged into public view in court. If so, good luck with that. All the NSA has to do is say "But, security!" and it'll get shunted off to the land of sealed records.
I see the test as being full of jargon to which I've not been exposed. I've never heard of a "number sentence" or "part I know / missing part" before, but they way they're used sounds like those phrases have specific meaning. Presumably these terms were taught to the students as part of the curriculum.
I can only speculate that at some point someone said, "Equation? How the hell's a 1st grader going to know what 'equation' means? They're scared of math because of all the unfamiliar terminology. Wee need to make math more accessible by replacing the mathematical jargon with words they understand. Read this equation out loud. 'Three plus four equals seven.' That's not a scary equation, that's a friendly sentence. A... number sentence!" Come on, you know it went down like that in some focus group trying to determine why kids do poorly at math.
So "number sentence", "the part I know", and "the missing part" become simple substitutions for "equation", "addend / subtrahend / minuend", and "sum / difference". The trouble is that despite being "common words that the kids already know", in combination their meanings are every bit as precise and jargonistic as the actual mathematical terms. Worse, since they are familiar words those of us who've never been exposed to this particular dialect of jargon think we should know what they mean and are frustrated because they don't actually seem to mean what they say. Like Lisa Simpson on seeing a sign for the "Yahoo Serious Festival": "I recognize all three of those words but that statement doesn't make any sense."
So, problem 1 would make a lot more sense if we knew that the kids had been taught using the example of pouring pancake batter from a measuring cup. Problem 3 makes sense if you consider "cubes" in the physical sense of six-sided blocks, such as we seen in problems 2 or 12. Problems 6, 7, and 8 are more meaningful if you know that the "circles in a divided box" symbology is specifically taught as a way to visualize the problem.
I'm not saying that this is a good way to teach. I think it's well-meant but ultimately misguided. But look at the test again in that light and see if it doesn't make more sense. (Although nothing can explain why problem 12 talks about a "subtraction sentence" even though it has no actual subtraction anywhere in sight.)
And that standard is UTC. For everybody, everywhere. Problem. Solved.
My only argument is that *if* the security measures are actually effective they need to be applied to everyone. Perhaps they could give the elderly assistance removing their shoes, putting them back on, or whatever. But if removing one's shoes is important enough to require it of most people, it's important enough to not make a known gaping security hole by allowing a class of people to skip it.
I don't claim there's any benefit at all in removing one's shoes. Quite the opposite, I think that allowing the elderly to avoid it is an admission by the TSA that it's a pointless exercise. Ditto everything that's skipped by the Pre-Check line. They ought to just give up all the nonsense.
I'm all for baiting the TSA. Most of their security measures are just plain ridiculous. I swear that after the shoe bomber got them to make us take off our shoes, the underwear bomber was sent in to see if they'd strip search us. (And they responded with backscatter scanners. Discuss.)
But, applying the same security measures to everyone -- old, young, crippled, whatever -- is not among their failings. That's the only part of what they do that makes sense. Once you declare a "safe" class of passengers who get waved through the searches, you're tempting The Bad Guys to enlist members of that class. Do 90 year old guys get a pass? I'm sure The Bad Guys can find some disgruntled nonagenarian to stuff some C4 down his pants or carry the dreaded 3.1 ounces of liquid explosive. The only way security searches work is if they're applied to everyone.
Of course, the TSA can't even get that right. They introduced their Pre-Check program which reduces the checks to pre-9/11 levels for pre-approved travelers. So how hard would it be to recruit some guy who qualifies for the Pre-Check lane to be the bomb mule?
Psssst! Hey Bad Guys! Want to cripple air travel in the US? Just bomb a couple airport security checkpoints. Lots of people, tightly packed together, all standing in a nice line, and no chance of being discovered early. Hit a couple of those and we'll shit ourselves trying to figure out how to strip-search passengers without causing big, vulnerable holding areas. It's a pretty damned obvious target. The fact that it hasn't happened in the past 12 years is the best evidence that there really isn't a legion of Bad Guys out there just waiting for the chance to attack. They've had the chance. We've gift-wrapped it for them. Now let's just admit that the bogeyman is mostly in our imaginations.
FAKE! Come on, this thing is obviously 'shopped like crazy. The shadow on the rings is much to crisp compared to the shadow on the planet. Plus the ring shadow is entirely opaque. To make it realistic they should have given it some transparency so you could see the rings faintly behind it. Also, there's color banding in the "planet", and some weird hexagonal artifact that looks like this thing was originally rendered as a 3D model with bad tessellation. Go back to drawing Tippy to get into art school, you pathetic hack.
Okay, not everyone is forced to buy car insurance. Only people with cars. And it's done at the state level, not federal. Yes, you are correct.
But, what difference does it make? It's an established model of insuring a very large population, including people in both high-risk and low-risk categories. It seems that in both cases the goal is to insure everyone in a given population (the population of people with cars in one case, the population of people with bodies in the other). Given that as a goal, why not model the new health insurance program based on the existing and working car insurance program, rather than coming up with this whole complex system of exchanges?
Those are the choices we're discussing. As a nation we are currently pointed in the direction of universal health insurance. Discuss why the ACA is a better or worse implementation than existing universal auto insurance implementations.
If you want to tell me "it's different because one group is limited to people with cars while the other group is everyone" I'm willing to listen, but I'm afraid you'll have to explain it to me in a little more detail. I don't understand why that would make a difference.
If you want to tell me that "it's different because one program is by the states and the other is by the feds" I'm also willing to listen, but again you'll have to explain to my why it makes a difference. I can see where you could construct an argument about states' rights versus federalism and that we shouldn't be trying for an insurance program at all on the federal level. Is that where you're going with this? Or do you have some sort of argument that it's feasible to implement at the state level but not at the federal level?
If you want to argue that there are better ways to achieve improved health care than an insurance system I certainly won't disagree with you. In that case the whole question of "should we model it based on auto insurance" is meaningless.
So you're the one who gave me those wolf-chewing-my-arm-off nightmares I've had ever since I was a kid. You bastard !
That was my first thought, too. It looks like the mobile version. At least the comments don't show a huge number of worthless entries that read "Filtered due to preferences." like the mobile site does. (Here's an idea, guys: If a comment is filtered, don't show it at all! I understand that when I have the reading threshold higher than -1 I won't see some things. That's kind of the point. You don't have to tell me about each of the things you're not telling me about.)
That said, I'd actually come here to defend the new layout. I chalked up most of the actual problems to things not yet implemented, and most of the visual mess to just being unfamiliar. But since the reply link is one of those things not yet implemented I had to go back to the old layout to post this.
Wow.
The difference in readability is huge. Compared side-by-side, the old format is much, much more readable than the new format. The new summary does not include the text from the main page, just the "read more" text. Bullets are missing from the list of changes. (list-style-type: none; Really? You went out of your way to achieve this?) I thought maybe the text was printed in a lower-contrast color, but that's not the case -- it's that the font-weight has been reduced to less than normal via CSS, presumably to emulate the skinny unreadable text in iOS7. (At least Apple provided a way to change the default font to bold in the accessibility preferences.)
In short, it's not just that it's new and unfamiliar. It's objectively less readable, by design. Knock it off, Slashdot! Maybe (maybe!) choose a non-default font, but once you do don't try to tweak it to make it look hip. It looks like ass.
Jobs are very important to politicians, albeit indirectly. Without jobs people go hungry and homeless. Now the politician can do one of two things: 1) Let people starve to death, or 2) implement some sort of pinko social programs to help them. Starvation is a poor option because (jokes about Chicago notwithstanding) dead people don't vote. Social programs are a poor option because then the corporate investors (that is, the only people who do real work in a capitalistic system) need to be taxed more and they'll remember that when they choose to give financial support at the next election. Jobs are the one thing that will keep the masses just far enough out of abject squalor to think you're helping them, while keeping your hands out of the corporate guys' pockets so they'll give you money to continue keeping your hands out of their pockets. Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!
I wonder what a program like that would look like?
Basically, everything in that article is predicated on the claim that "we can't keep data", when in fact they can and do keep all manner of data. It's nothing but a disingenuous attempt to shift the blame away from the TSA and onto privacy groups and the public at large.
You've asserted this in at least three different posts in this thread. What exactly do you mean by "reads living tissue under the skin"? What is it looking for there? How does it differentiate between the living tissue of my finger versus the living tissue of your finger? And here's a big ol' [citation needed] tag for the claim that it's more secure than a fingerprint scanner. What's the basis of that claim?
It would make as much sense that way, since neither the summary nor the article ever bother to explain what "Mega" is.
It was mediocre. Certainly not Scalzi's best, but I haven't read any of the other nominees so I can't say how it compares. Assuming none of the others was better I'd have voted "no award". It's enjoyable, but not Hugo-level (IMHO).
It didn't help that I read it just after watching Red Dwarf: Back to Earth, which has a very similar plot! I'm not accusing Scalzi of stealing; characters coming to life is an old idea and he had a good take on it. But between Red Dwarf and Galaxy Quest I couldn't help thinking, "I just watched this..." as I read the book.
In other news, automatic telephone switches might one day put telephone operators out of business. And the car itself is a serious threat to the buggy whip industry!
Technology advances. Deal with it.
This. A thousand times this.
Read the two articles linked in the summary. They're both on NBC news and published within three days of each other, and both are essentially the same story. The difference in the articles?
The older one (byline "Richard Esposito and Matthew Cole") says, "Duh. He's a sysadmin. He's capable of creating accounts with arbitrary permissions, and of violating the air gap between the secure and insecure sides. Of course he can do that, it's in his job description!"
The newer one (byline "Richard Esposito, Matthew Cole and Robert Windrem") says, "Whoa! This guy knows how to impersonate people on a computer! No one but a brilliant uber-hacker could do that! This guy is a menace! An evil genius of a degree seen only in Bond villains!"
I don't read or watch NBC news, and I've never even heard of any of these reporters before. But my guess is that Esposito and Cole are the tech beat guys, and Windrem is managerial. If we assume stupidity, Windrem simply said "This story is dull. I'd better punch it up a bit." If we assume malice, Windrem said "This makes the NSA sound dumb. Let's play it for the brilliant hacker angle instead." If we assume conspiracy, some nice men in dark sunglasses approached Windrem and said "This story doesn't fit with our narrative of Snowden being a dirty rotten traitor. Fix it."