The company I work for has had good results with our anti-phishing efforts. Our IT folks now have about 10 yrs of data showing that the fail rate dropped dramatically once they started sending fake phishing emails that forced you to take a 10-minute waste of time training course every time you fell for them. When they let up on the frequency of the emails the fail rate went up. When they increased the frequency of them, the fail rate went down. They even stopped the program for a couple of years and then started it back up, and the initial fail rate was high, then dropped precipitously when the "punishment" for failure started to be enforced.

For our company at least, knowing that any suspicious email we get could have been sent from our own IT folks, and that if we click on it could result in a 10-minute waste of time, appears to be a deterrent.

I used to be pretty pissed with the nickel and diming of the whole industry until I realized that maybe we've just had it too good due to an antiquated model. When you go to a sports game, are all seat the same price? Do they give you free food and drinks? Do you have tons of legroom?

There's no fundamental rule that says all seats on a plane should be the same price, or that passengers are entitled to jam an oversized bag into overhead luggage without a fee, or that passengers are entitled to a snack and drink.

I predict there will be lots of complaining about the little annoying fees for the next few years, then we'll all adapt and just remember fondly those days when you didn't have to pay for nuts on a flight.

"unelected eggheads" have brought you cancer treatments, atomic clocks, humans on the moon, nuclear power, genome mapping, rovers on Mars, fewer deaths from heart disease, new chemical elements, the neutrino, and thousands of other discoveries. They did all that for Democrat and Republican presidents.

But I guess those achievements didn't make America great, so it would have been better if we hadn't put taxpayer money toward them. Yeah, definitely would have been better if China or Russia or Europe had figured that stuff out instead.

The investment loss is, in my opinion something that should really be resonating with people that are worried about reducing the federal budget, yet doesn't. Billions of dollars have been spent investing in government scientists, like those at NOAA, NASA, NIH, EPA, and other agencies. They have become highly skilled workers, trained and paid with taxpayer money starting in grad school. Firing them is a statement to the taxpayers that the administration doesn't care about their investment. On top of that, if they leave the U.S. for Canada, Europe, China, etc, we're providing taxpayer-money-trained scientists to other countries. That's a gift to those other countries.

If those scientists are working on something that doesn't align with the government's policies, then the government could alter the direction of the research internally. Stop providing internal funding for project A, and instead offer funding for project B. If the government feels that there is too much investment in a particular organization (e.g., NOAA), then they can freeze hiring to reduce the workforce as older scientists retire. In both of these cases (redirection and hiring freeze) you're either spending taxpayer money differently or slowly stopping the spending, but you're not abandoning the investment.

I work with many of these government scientists in the environmental sciences. They aren't so narrowly skilled that they can't shift gears. Of course there may be some that prefer to leave rather than shift gears to other projects. But that attrition will be far less than mass firings that get rid of people that could still be doing science that the government wants them to do.

This is, of course, predicated on the assumption that the administration is a) interested in federal research and truth-based policy-making, and b) is trying not to waste taxpayer money. I concede that both of those are questionable assumptions with this administration.

Because 10-15 years ago smartphones weren't in every high schooler's hands. It has become an ever more pressing issue in recent years with the explosion of social media platforms.

I'll believe this argument when there's actual evidence, as opposed to teachers' and school counselors' organizations that have been advocating for this for several years. As someone else said, high schoolers aren't using their phones the way adults do. They don't read the news in school, they don't care about current events in the way adults do. Cell phones are the mechanism by which they form their social structure. And since social interaction is so important to teens, it's what they primarily use their phones for.

My wife is a high school teacher. Her school enacted a policy this year that has the kids put their phones into little cubbyholes upon entering the classroom, and they grab them on their way out. She's seen a huge difference in attention, even among the kids using laptops. The kids can still use their phones between classes and in an emergency they can get to them. Her biggest issue now is kids with smart watches that are still connected to the phones, and ones with a non-school-issued laptop, where she can't see what they're looking at.

Lots of research shows this is beneficial from a learning perspective. Modern teachers would love to adapt and incorporate modern tech into their teaching approach, hence the enhanced use of graphing calculators when I was a kid and the current use of laptops loaded with learning apps. But cell phones are a double edged sword: they have a ton of potential for learning, but also a ton of distraction, moreso than laptops and TI-83's. Current high school students view the phone as primarily a social media device, not an educational resource that helps them learn.

You clearly don't know any high school teachers. Cell phones have massively affected students ability to focus. This is all about prying kids away from screens.

I'm sorry you're fighting cancer. Best of luck to you.

I think your example is why these number seems crazy at first blush. 90 million CT scans is an average of 1 in 4 Americans getting a CT scan. That's not reasonable. But of course it's not a normal distribution, it's one thats heavily skewed by people with serious health conditions for which CT scans are providing a benefit, and could die of other causes (or maybe cancer) if they didn't get the CT scans.

By this argument, one could say that chemotherapy is linked to all sorts of future bad health effects. But it's a net positive for the patient who needs the chemo. Surgery could also lead to major side effects (eg infection) but is nonetheless net beneficial.

The real question is whether those 100,000 "new cases" of cancer are truly "net" new. That is, if the 90 million CT scans resulted in 200,000 fewer cases of cancer, and contributed to 100,000 new cases, that's still -100,000 net cases.

Here's to hoping that you're one of the -100,000!

How often do you watch a movie and go "wow that actor's accent was terrible", vs how often to do you say "wow that actor's accent was just too good". The former happens a lot, the latter doesn't.

A bad accent doesn't support good acting, it can only take away from good acting.

If you can make it so that the viewer isn't focused on the bad accent but instead focused on the actor's emoting, facial expressions and/or physicality, then you could make the argument that AI actually helps a performance rather than takes away from it.

Just another reason on an already very large pile of reasons to never buy HP products. I'm not sure what else they could possibly do to demonstrate how little they care about their actual customers. I can't imagine the ridiculous board meeting that lead to this policy. Good god, what were the other, less palatable options?

This is also double insulting because if the typical user is like me, I'm calling the company because I've already exhausted the online support options. So that 15 min wait is a punishment for doing what they wanted me to do in the first place.

I actually like the ping pong ball reference here (from NYT article), because I could imagine actually feeling a 5 m/s ping pong ball hit me. The fact that a single fundamental particle could create the same sensation (if it actually interacted with me) is amazing.

Maybe ping pong balls might not be well known. What about a raisin? This is the amount of energy of a raisin traveling 10 m/s. Or a grain of rice at 60 m/s.

I wrote TFS, but the part about the ORCA array was not in my submission. The ARCA array detected the neutrino.

I grew up in southeastern PA, in the hometown of Commodore International. So my elementary school had a single Commodore 64 in every room. My middle school has two computer rooms: an Apple lab and a C64 lab. No Windows labs (early 90's).

I love the idea but not the implementation. If this were a real captcha, you should be invincible, not able to die and have to start over.

Of course people might not like the idea of killing as part of the captcha, but you could think of doing other more family-friendly games like Mario, Tetris, or Sonic. If you want to keep it less PG, I'd love to see Carmageddon!