war continues to invade the realm of SF

http://it.slashdot.org/story/10/11/16/0347231/Stuxnet-Was-Designed-To-Subtly-Interfere-With-Uranium-Enrichment

*sigh*

Fortunately, there are people at Google who are (demonstrably) far more versed in dealing with this kind of problem than I am. And they're welcome to it.

That said, there's unfortunately more than enough related work to go around.

But seriously, I find this kind of threat actually considerably more alarming than the threat of terrorists blowing themselves up on airplanes. Not only because I don't find the latter to be something that is apparently that hard to prevent, but because there's a lot more to be _gained_ by a lot more people that don't have to die in order to carry out the former sort of attack.

And, you know, honestly we've got a lot more interesting problems to solve than figuring out how to keep people from hacking into our electrical grid. Or nuclear launch authorization systems. And so forth. I hate working on problems that I feel wouldn't exist as tasks if some people weren't jerks.

Interesting times, indeed.

cheating as an industry

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/

It makes me feel a little bit better to know that he won't touch math. (Or, presumably, the other hard sciences.) But, you know, not a whole lot.

I've gone on in this space about my own experiences, as a TA, dealing with cheating. (If you missed out, it's not that hard to get me to recap. *wry smile*)

If this really is as widespread a phenomenon as the author suggests--and I suspect that while he exaggerates somewhat, perhaps not much--this really does point to something broken in our educational system.