Regulation of Interstate and International Commerce? They could ban the importation of devices which do not have this feature. Maybe they can't require you to purchase a phone that has it, but they can make it impossible not to. Or, do you know of a cell phone that was made entirely in the town/state you live in and which doesn't at any times cross state borders? Didn't think so.
At least, that's the argument that they'll make -- the same one they always make when people claim that the Federal government doesn't have the "constitutional authority" to do something. Arguing against it isn't going to get you very far, whether or not you're right.
With Rolex, when you buy it the jeweler usually registers it with Rolex for you. If it is ever sent for servicing (which legitimate owners should do about every 5-7 years if they actually care about the movement of the watch), Rolex checks the registration and check to make sure that it hasn't been stolen. Pawn shops could (but many probably don't) call Rolex and ask. Other thing is -- don't forget to have the registration updated in your will or something, otherwise your children might be in for a hassle if they send it for servicing. At least, this is how the dealer explained it to me.
So, assuming the watch gets sent for servicing (most likely by whomever buys it after the thief hocks it), there is sort of a remote kill-switch for Rolex.
The USSR was no where near as powerful as the USSR that was presented via propaganda (from both sides). I would argue that Russia has much of Europe in a tighter noose now via natural gas exports than they did during Soviet days. Many of the gas lines also run through Ukraine by necessity, which is probably what this is really about as opposed to any feigned concern for Russian speakers in Crimea. It is true that Russia doesn't have as many satellites in its sway as it once did, but that's also largely to do with the evolution of the EEC to the EU as well as US and British pushes to get former Soviet states into NATO. However, while Russia doesn't have the political sway that it once did, that doesn't mean that regaining as much of that sway as possible isn't a motivator for Putin.
Regaining degraded national prestige and empire has been a motivating factor for both Hard and Soft dictators throughout history. Not to Godwin this, but the precursory actions in WWII involved annexation of German-speaking areas that were lost to the German Empire after WW1. Likewise, Mussolini laid claim to much of the non-European territories formerly held by the Roman Empire (There is a reason why he adopted the fasces and why man hole covers in Italy are stamped SPQR these days). I believe that it is short sighted to say that because Russia does not have the influence that it once did that Putin will not try and gain as much of it back as possible.
The major difference is that the USSR was an Ideology State, much like the United States is. It was meant to be the shining beacon for radical, revolutionary socialism and communism and as such enjoyed the support of left-wing workers' groups, academics and politicians around the world, whom they also supported in turn. The Russian Federation is a nation state based on the historical territory of a specific set of ethnic groups bound together by history, blood and language. It's much more like South Korea in that way, and that lack of ideological status is what will keep them from regaining Soviet-era sphere of influence. Beyond money, it isn't like anyone will be driven to spy for Russia these days who isn't a Russian. There are no Reds lurking in the halls of power looking for juicy secrets to pass to their ideological brothers in arms.
With regards to your initial points, I'll accept my overstatement on Ukrainian deaths. I had that number stuck in my head for a long time. I may have been confusing it with similar Chinese issues (Communism tends to kill large numbers of people via stupidity as well as malice). However, I don't think that Yeltsin stating that he chose Putin to be his successor can necessarily be taken at face value. If a stone-cold killer had one over on you, what would you do? The fishiness comes from the resignation as opposed to a coupe. A coupe can be attributed outright. The fact that Yeltsin resigned, put a former intelligence officer with ties to the legal and illegal oligarchy (many of whom were also former KGB officers who leveraged those positions for economic gain after the fall of the Soviet Union), who then was able to play a shell game of power to where he has been either President or Prime Minister since 1999, smacks of strong-arming to me. However, that is supposition. I'm not in possession of any intelligence on the matter that hasn't already been made public.
However, for the sake of comparison, since Putin assumed control of the Kremlin, the United States has been through 4 Speakers of the House (Gingrich, Hastert, Pelosi, Boehner) and 3 Presidents (Clinton, Bush, Obama). Obama will be out of office in 2016, but I am willing to bet that Putin will be around one way or another for some time to come. As the swap to Prime Minister showed, he is only limited by the conservativeness of his terms, not the number.
Putin is a former KGB officer (Lt. Colonel) who once referred to the fall of the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." Communist or not at this point, it almost doesn't matter. Call it the will to re-establish the Russian Empire. Putin likely sees himself as a latter-day Peter the Great, and is currently operating unchecked by a US executive branch and foreign policy apparatus that at best can be said to embody the culmination of Khrushchev's promise to "bury [the us] from within."
Do you not consider it fishy that Yeltsin, who was largely responsible for the dissolution of the Soviet union, and who was seen as having had the support of the US in doing so would "unexpectedly resign" to make way for a hardliner with strong ties to the intelligence services? There is a reason that people call his approach to governing "Soft Stalinism" -- Stalin was crushing opponents and literally airbrushing them out of history before Photoshop was remotely on the horizon.
Twenty million Ukrainians starved to death during forced collective farming in the first five-year plan of the Soviet Union. Leon Trotsky [Lev Bronstein] was a Ukrainian by birth (in much the same way that Joseph Stalin was a Georgian, the Bolshevik Revolution wasn't particularly Russian in nature). The animosity between Russian-speaking and non-Russian-speaking peoples in the Ukraine CANNOT be separated historically from rise nor fall of the Soviet Union, nor with the Crimean War when Russia first conquered Ukraine and brought into its fold the first time -- hence why Trotsky was able to participate in the revolution at such as senior level, and why Ukraine was there to suffer so greatly so early under the Soviet system.
And regardless of any status of moral authority after the Iraq war, the fact that the US got involved in Iraq in the way we did doesn't take away from the issue at hand in Crimea now, any more than "But NSA!!!" makes actions by FSB (or, more likely, criminal organizations who have quid-pro-quo agreements with FSB) any less bad.
I get contacted on linkedin a few times a month by recruiters. Half the time it is people who work for companies and actually want to talk to me. The other half it is third-party head-hunters, and what they want is for me to tell them anyone who may be interested: ie, they contact me, a stranger, and ask me to do their job for them. Of course, they usually offer a finder's fee of some sort, but if a recruiter/headhunter doesn't have his or her own bag of tricks, or even an hr professional subscription to LinkedIn, then what good is he/her?
As for recruiting internally, I have had to coach the recruiters at the company I work for as to what the look for, what type of candidate is acceptable for different departments, etc. I nearly have the company record on employee referrals, and now managers in other departments will often times come to me and ask if I know anyone rather than relying on "talent acquisition" to find them someone suitable. But hell, at $2500 a pop, its almost like a nice little part-time job, so they can keep being as useless as they want to be as far as I'm concerned. There's never going to be a substitute for a vouch from a trusted source, no matter what type of "screening" HR ever gets a hold of.
Yes. And RoC had the permanent seat in the UN Security Council until we (the US), decided to change our recognition of 'China' to the PRC instead of the RoC, in order to try and open divisions in the Communist Bloc during the Vietnam War. I know what Taiwan is and where it comes from. She's a Mandarin speaker and definitely 'Chinese' in an ethnic sense. She just hates being called Chinese for some reason, probably political. I don't know... maybe it's like calling a Scot and Englishman or something, but I've never been brave enough to try that:)
My wife was born in Taiwan. She and anyone in her family gets extremely angry if you refer to them as "Chinese," despite being ethnically Chinese, speaking Mandarin, etc. Good luck convincing her, her family, or frankly anyone else Tawainese I've ever met that they're "part of China" and that there is "nothing they should object to."
That said, this is a result of using ISO codes instead of FIPS codes. We had a customer escalation come through a while back about Taiwan being listed as a province of China in our geolocation information. We had switched from a FIPS 10-4 source to an ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 source, which ad the side effect of pissing off our Taiwanese customers.
No, that's 3 lives saved (yours, the intended victims, and the assailant you just shot). Killing the dude who was just trying to murder someone saves 2 lives, and saves the taxpayers from having to feed and house the murder for the rest of his life.
Can you find me someone on there whose actions don't constitute engaging in politics? Most of the winners are politicians or activists, but winners such as the EU, IPCC, UN Peace Keeping Forces, etc, aren't even people and shouldn't have been allowed to have it in the first place. They were clearly picked to make a political point.
In fact, you pretty much have to go back to the first winner in 1901, in which the founder of the International Red Cross was awarded the prize to find someone who didn't do something overtly political, and even then he had to share the prize with a politician.
It's not like they could really enforce a "ban" on feds anyway. Any jackass with $100 can get a badge if they want to stand in line long enough, and not every "legit" hacker has tattoos, piercings and a techno fetish, otherwise 'spot the fed' wouldn't be any fun anyway.
Median salaries for new JD and MBA graduates is pretty low these days, because schools minted a boat load of them and then the economy went to pot. Much like anything else, things are still OK for the best graduates from the best schools, but the average aren't doing so swell because there are too many of them. Marketing and politics both generally require being attractive to succeed (although in politics, you can substitute wealth for attractiveness, but if you're already rich, why are you worrying about a "career"? Jobs are for poor people and suckers).
Frankly, unless you're on a watch list for something else, or acting completely suspicious, I can't see that they would bother you. I've made several international flights in the past 2 years, and each time I've just given over my customs declaration form, which wasn't looked at, and waved on through.
Of course, now the NSA is probably going to tip of ICE to your evil plot to bring illict digital copies of 'Men at Work' records into the US.
I've participated in a few 'MOOC's in the past, and have thought about a few more. The ones up until now all seem to be adaptations of courses offered by universities, and using the university's name recognition and NOT the professor's to attract students. It would be interesting to see how many people would be attracted to a class by "Dr. Joe Schmoe" and not "XXX 200 from Harvard University as taught by Dr. Joe Schmoe".
Will schools allow instructors to advertize their affiliation in the descriptions of their courses? Will sites like Coursera be allowed to group by university courses which aren't actually taught at those institutions, just taught by people who work there?
Also, this really seems more about the schools threatening academic freedom, not the 'MOOCs'.
The school called the cops, and the cops called the DA. If the school didn't think it was that big of a deal, they could have just left the legal system out of it. Did the police and prosecutor overreact? Probably, but if the school didn't call them, they would have had nothing to do with it (unless, of course, angry parents went to the media and demanded action)
It's only an apparent lack of consistency if you use the two items to create the context in which to judge the responses. Here's the more likely scenario:
* There was no punishment forthcoming in the accidental shooting case because, after determining that there was no intent involved, and that it was, in fact, accidental, no punishment was deserved. Since there was no possibility of the parents suing themselves for damages, or that affecting the greater population, it got left at that.
* The incident on school property was punished because A) There was clearly an intent to make the explosion and B) it was on school property. That means lots of children who could potentially have been harmed, and that means lots of parents who could potentially sue the school system. Even if no one got injured, the potential for injury might be enough to have a jury in a civil suit feel that the plaintiff is "entitled" to "damages."
In that second case, everyone suffers. If the school has to pay out money to one set of irate parents, other suits will likely follow as everyone thinks they need to "get theirs," too. But guess who is on the hook? The school district, funded by property taxes or whatever they use in Florida. Thus, the community is the ones putting up the money to pay out to some jack-ass members of the community who want to take advantage of the situation. Being able to say "Look, no one got hurt but we have dealt with the perpetrator to the fullest extent of the law" goes a long way in staving off civil complaints, or having them be validated by a jury if someone thinks of doing it anyway.
It's all a CYA move. Does it suck? Yes. is it fair? No. Is life fair? Hell no. But unfortunately, we live in a chicken-shit, overly litigious society where these things happen. My mother is a public school teacher and the district where she teaches has had to deal with things like this in the past. "Science" wasn't involved, but the schools have been sued in the past, and in one incident $5,000,000 was awarded for "negligence" by the administration because two guys were fighting over a girl and one went through a plate glass window. Public schools are strapped enough for cash as it is, and losing $5,000,000 when you're already in budget shortfalls due to declining real estate values (and thus property tax revenue) is tough.
I would wager anything that was what they were concerned with above anything else.
Additionally, having 5 web browsers installed and triple-booting operating systems might mean you get board easily and won't stick around at the job as long. I mean, still being on IE6 does show incredible staying power and loyalty, right?
Who wants to bet that the ultimate outcome of this talk becoming known to the public at large will be to close duty-free stores at international airports? Frankly, while I agree that airport security as it exists is basically theater which provides little-to-no meaningful increase in actual safety, I sort of feel like pointing out what you can do with items you're allowed to purchase on the "secure side of the fence" as it were, is akin to the people who point out that more murders are perpetrated with hand guns than assault rifles: they think they're making a logical point, but all they're doing is creating a causus belli for their opponents to expand their reach to target handguns, too -- NOT providing a rational argument for passing over banning assault weapons.
On the other hand, as a security industry professional, I'm naturally inclined to find things like this kind of cool. But seriously, I don't think anything good will come from this from a policy standpoint.
Re:Collateralized vs Non-Collateralized Loans
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What good is universal literacy in a society where the written word is severely restricted? (Goes not only for Cuba)
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Regulation of Interstate and International Commerce? They could ban the importation of devices which do not have this feature. Maybe they can't require you to purchase a phone that has it, but they can make it impossible not to. Or, do you know of a cell phone that was made entirely in the town/state you live in and which doesn't at any times cross state borders? Didn't think so.
At least, that's the argument that they'll make -- the same one they always make when people claim that the Federal government doesn't have the "constitutional authority" to do something. Arguing against it isn't going to get you very far, whether or not you're right.
With Rolex, when you buy it the jeweler usually registers it with Rolex for you. If it is ever sent for servicing (which legitimate owners should do about every 5-7 years if they actually care about the movement of the watch), Rolex checks the registration and check to make sure that it hasn't been stolen. Pawn shops could (but many probably don't) call Rolex and ask. Other thing is -- don't forget to have the registration updated in your will or something, otherwise your children might be in for a hassle if they send it for servicing. At least, this is how the dealer explained it to me.
So, assuming the watch gets sent for servicing (most likely by whomever buys it after the thief hocks it), there is sort of a remote kill-switch for Rolex.
The USSR was no where near as powerful as the USSR that was presented via propaganda (from both sides). I would argue that Russia has much of Europe in a tighter noose now via natural gas exports than they did during Soviet days. Many of the gas lines also run through Ukraine by necessity, which is probably what this is really about as opposed to any feigned concern for Russian speakers in Crimea. It is true that Russia doesn't have as many satellites in its sway as it once did, but that's also largely to do with the evolution of the EEC to the EU as well as US and British pushes to get former Soviet states into NATO. However, while Russia doesn't have the political sway that it once did, that doesn't mean that regaining as much of that sway as possible isn't a motivator for Putin.
Regaining degraded national prestige and empire has been a motivating factor for both Hard and Soft dictators throughout history. Not to Godwin this, but the precursory actions in WWII involved annexation of German-speaking areas that were lost to the German Empire after WW1. Likewise, Mussolini laid claim to much of the non-European territories formerly held by the Roman Empire (There is a reason why he adopted the fasces and why man hole covers in Italy are stamped SPQR these days). I believe that it is short sighted to say that because Russia does not have the influence that it once did that Putin will not try and gain as much of it back as possible.
The major difference is that the USSR was an Ideology State, much like the United States is. It was meant to be the shining beacon for radical, revolutionary socialism and communism and as such enjoyed the support of left-wing workers' groups, academics and politicians around the world, whom they also supported in turn. The Russian Federation is a nation state based on the historical territory of a specific set of ethnic groups bound together by history, blood and language. It's much more like South Korea in that way, and that lack of ideological status is what will keep them from regaining Soviet-era sphere of influence. Beyond money, it isn't like anyone will be driven to spy for Russia these days who isn't a Russian. There are no Reds lurking in the halls of power looking for juicy secrets to pass to their ideological brothers in arms.
With regards to your initial points, I'll accept my overstatement on Ukrainian deaths. I had that number stuck in my head for a long time. I may have been confusing it with similar Chinese issues (Communism tends to kill large numbers of people via stupidity as well as malice). However, I don't think that Yeltsin stating that he chose Putin to be his successor can necessarily be taken at face value. If a stone-cold killer had one over on you, what would you do? The fishiness comes from the resignation as opposed to a coupe. A coupe can be attributed outright. The fact that Yeltsin resigned, put a former intelligence officer with ties to the legal and illegal oligarchy (many of whom were also former KGB officers who leveraged those positions for economic gain after the fall of the Soviet Union), who then was able to play a shell game of power to where he has been either President or Prime Minister since 1999, smacks of strong-arming to me. However, that is supposition. I'm not in possession of any intelligence on the matter that hasn't already been made public.
However, for the sake of comparison, since Putin assumed control of the Kremlin, the United States has been through 4 Speakers of the House (Gingrich, Hastert, Pelosi, Boehner) and 3 Presidents (Clinton, Bush, Obama). Obama will be out of office in 2016, but I am willing to bet that Putin will be around one way or another for some time to come. As the swap to Prime Minister showed, he is only limited by the conservativeness of his terms, not the number.
Putin is a former KGB officer (Lt. Colonel) who once referred to the fall of the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." Communist or not at this point, it almost doesn't matter. Call it the will to re-establish the Russian Empire. Putin likely sees himself as a latter-day Peter the Great, and is currently operating unchecked by a US executive branch and foreign policy apparatus that at best can be said to embody the culmination of Khrushchev's promise to "bury [the us] from within."
Do you not consider it fishy that Yeltsin, who was largely responsible for the dissolution of the Soviet union, and who was seen as having had the support of the US in doing so would "unexpectedly resign" to make way for a hardliner with strong ties to the intelligence services? There is a reason that people call his approach to governing "Soft Stalinism" -- Stalin was crushing opponents and literally airbrushing them out of history before Photoshop was remotely on the horizon.
Twenty million Ukrainians starved to death during forced collective farming in the first five-year plan of the Soviet Union. Leon Trotsky [Lev Bronstein] was a Ukrainian by birth (in much the same way that Joseph Stalin was a Georgian, the Bolshevik Revolution wasn't particularly Russian in nature). The animosity between Russian-speaking and non-Russian-speaking peoples in the Ukraine CANNOT be separated historically from rise nor fall of the Soviet Union, nor with the Crimean War when Russia first conquered Ukraine and brought into its fold the first time -- hence why Trotsky was able to participate in the revolution at such as senior level, and why Ukraine was there to suffer so greatly so early under the Soviet system.
And regardless of any status of moral authority after the Iraq war, the fact that the US got involved in Iraq in the way we did doesn't take away from the issue at hand in Crimea now, any more than "But NSA!!!" makes actions by FSB (or, more likely, criminal organizations who have quid-pro-quo agreements with FSB) any less bad.
I get contacted on linkedin a few times a month by recruiters. Half the time it is people who work for companies and actually want to talk to me. The other half it is third-party head-hunters, and what they want is for me to tell them anyone who may be interested: ie, they contact me, a stranger, and ask me to do their job for them. Of course, they usually offer a finder's fee of some sort, but if a recruiter/headhunter doesn't have his or her own bag of tricks, or even an hr professional subscription to LinkedIn, then what good is he/her?
As for recruiting internally, I have had to coach the recruiters at the company I work for as to what the look for, what type of candidate is acceptable for different departments, etc. I nearly have the company record on employee referrals, and now managers in other departments will often times come to me and ask if I know anyone rather than relying on "talent acquisition" to find them someone suitable. But hell, at $2500 a pop, its almost like a nice little part-time job, so they can keep being as useless as they want to be as far as I'm concerned. There's never going to be a substitute for a vouch from a trusted source, no matter what type of "screening" HR ever gets a hold of.
Why would programming want to meet kids as young as six years old?
Yes. And RoC had the permanent seat in the UN Security Council until we (the US), decided to change our recognition of 'China' to the PRC instead of the RoC, in order to try and open divisions in the Communist Bloc during the Vietnam War. I know what Taiwan is and where it comes from. She's a Mandarin speaker and definitely 'Chinese' in an ethnic sense. She just hates being called Chinese for some reason, probably political. I don't know... maybe it's like calling a Scot and Englishman or something, but I've never been brave enough to try that :)
My wife was born in Taiwan. She and anyone in her family gets extremely angry if you refer to them as "Chinese," despite being ethnically Chinese, speaking Mandarin, etc. Good luck convincing her, her family, or frankly anyone else Tawainese I've ever met that they're "part of China" and that there is "nothing they should object to."
That said, this is a result of using ISO codes instead of FIPS codes. We had a customer escalation come through a while back about Taiwan being listed as a province of China in our geolocation information. We had switched from a FIPS 10-4 source to an ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 source, which ad the side effect of pissing off our Taiwanese customers.
Well, it would certainly take care of the "who cares? I'll be dead by then anyway!" mentality.
That would be the NSA
http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/executive-order/12333.html
Maybe he couldn't afford the credit hours for Intro to Basic Grammar?
No, that's 3 lives saved (yours, the intended victims, and the assailant you just shot). Killing the dude who was just trying to murder someone saves 2 lives, and saves the taxpayers from having to feed and house the murder for the rest of his life.
The very nature of the peace prize itself makes it inherently political. Here's the list of all the winners:
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/
Can you find me someone on there whose actions don't constitute engaging in politics? Most of the winners are politicians or activists, but winners such as the EU, IPCC, UN Peace Keeping Forces, etc, aren't even people and shouldn't have been allowed to have it in the first place. They were clearly picked to make a political point.
In fact, you pretty much have to go back to the first winner in 1901, in which the founder of the International Red Cross was awarded the prize to find someone who didn't do something overtly political, and even then he had to share the prize with a politician.
It's not like they could really enforce a "ban" on feds anyway. Any jackass with $100 can get a badge if they want to stand in line long enough, and not every "legit" hacker has tattoos, piercings and a techno fetish, otherwise 'spot the fed' wouldn't be any fun anyway.
Median salaries for new JD and MBA graduates is pretty low these days, because schools minted a boat load of them and then the economy went to pot. Much like anything else, things are still OK for the best graduates from the best schools, but the average aren't doing so swell because there are too many of them. Marketing and politics both generally require being attractive to succeed (although in politics, you can substitute wealth for attractiveness, but if you're already rich, why are you worrying about a "career"? Jobs are for poor people and suckers).
Frankly, unless you're on a watch list for something else, or acting completely suspicious, I can't see that they would bother you. I've made several international flights in the past 2 years, and each time I've just given over my customs declaration form, which wasn't looked at, and waved on through.
Of course, now the NSA is probably going to tip of ICE to your evil plot to bring illict digital copies of 'Men at Work' records into the US.
pay some kid $20 to guy buy the burn phone/SIM for you. What kind of tradecraft master or wanna-be actually goes and buys their own burn phone?
I've participated in a few 'MOOC's in the past, and have thought about a few more. The ones up until now all seem to be adaptations of courses offered by universities, and using the university's name recognition and NOT the professor's to attract students. It would be interesting to see how many people would be attracted to a class by "Dr. Joe Schmoe" and not "XXX 200 from Harvard University as taught by Dr. Joe Schmoe".
Will schools allow instructors to advertize their affiliation in the descriptions of their courses? Will sites like Coursera be allowed to group by university courses which aren't actually taught at those institutions, just taught by people who work there?
Also, this really seems more about the schools threatening academic freedom, not the 'MOOCs'.
The school called the cops, and the cops called the DA. If the school didn't think it was that big of a deal, they could have just left the legal system out of it. Did the police and prosecutor overreact? Probably, but if the school didn't call them, they would have had nothing to do with it (unless, of course, angry parents went to the media and demanded action)
Yeah, I took Honors Chemistry in 10th grade, but I didn't really like it much. I'll leave my geek card on the table on my way out :)
It's only an apparent lack of consistency if you use the two items to create the context in which to judge the responses. Here's the more likely scenario:
* There was no punishment forthcoming in the accidental shooting case because, after determining that there was no intent involved, and that it was, in fact, accidental, no punishment was deserved. Since there was no possibility of the parents suing themselves for damages, or that affecting the greater population, it got left at that.
* The incident on school property was punished because A) There was clearly an intent to make the explosion and B) it was on school property. That means lots of children who could potentially have been harmed, and that means lots of parents who could potentially sue the school system. Even if no one got injured, the potential for injury might be enough to have a jury in a civil suit feel that the plaintiff is "entitled" to "damages."
In that second case, everyone suffers. If the school has to pay out money to one set of irate parents, other suits will likely follow as everyone thinks they need to "get theirs," too. But guess who is on the hook? The school district, funded by property taxes or whatever they use in Florida. Thus, the community is the ones putting up the money to pay out to some jack-ass members of the community who want to take advantage of the situation. Being able to say "Look, no one got hurt but we have dealt with the perpetrator to the fullest extent of the law" goes a long way in staving off civil complaints, or having them be validated by a jury if someone thinks of doing it anyway.
It's all a CYA move. Does it suck? Yes. is it fair? No. Is life fair? Hell no. But unfortunately, we live in a chicken-shit, overly litigious society where these things happen. My mother is a public school teacher and the district where she teaches has had to deal with things like this in the past. "Science" wasn't involved, but the schools have been sued in the past, and in one incident $5,000,000 was awarded for "negligence" by the administration because two guys were fighting over a girl and one went through a plate glass window. Public schools are strapped enough for cash as it is, and losing $5,000,000 when you're already in budget shortfalls due to declining real estate values (and thus property tax revenue) is tough.
I would wager anything that was what they were concerned with above anything else.
Additionally, having 5 web browsers installed and triple-booting operating systems might mean you get board easily and won't stick around at the job as long. I mean, still being on IE6 does show incredible staying power and loyalty, right?
Who wants to bet that the ultimate outcome of this talk becoming known to the public at large will be to close duty-free stores at international airports? Frankly, while I agree that airport security as it exists is basically theater which provides little-to-no meaningful increase in actual safety, I sort of feel like pointing out what you can do with items you're allowed to purchase on the "secure side of the fence" as it were, is akin to the people who point out that more murders are perpetrated with hand guns than assault rifles: they think they're making a logical point, but all they're doing is creating a causus belli for their opponents to expand their reach to target handguns, too -- NOT providing a rational argument for passing over banning assault weapons.
On the other hand, as a security industry professional, I'm naturally inclined to find things like this kind of cool. But seriously, I don't think anything good will come from this from a policy standpoint.
What good is universal literacy in a society where the written word is severely restricted? (Goes not only for Cuba)
Ab, vg'f n fghcvq Ncevy Sbbyf tvzzvpx.