mylesm

Part (most?) of the damage isn't contained in the numbers you cited. Wells Fargo used customer identities to apply for and open credit cards, which could have affected their credit scores and thus potentially the interest rates they paid on loans (that could be a lot for something like a mortgage). It's hard to know what the dollar figure of this is, but it probably raises the damages a little bit.

Looks like some good suggestions:

- Glad they're recommending a stop to the pointless "password must be no longer than (16, 20, ...) characters". Aren't you storing a constant-length hash anyway?

- Why do some logins restrict which ASCII characters can be used? When I see that I can use any symbol from '%!#&' or whatever list they provide, I can only imagine it's a really naive SQL-injection defense. Is there any valid reason for this?

- And glad to see they're recommending against "security challenges". Half the time I'm forced to pick a security question, either none of them apply, a bunch of them are ambiguous ("what's your favorite movie?" - uhh, I'll give you a different answer depending on my mood, etc.), or they're easily searchable ("where did you go to high school?")

Unfortunately I doubt the bad actors will pay too much attention to this. I know Google is planning on dinging sites that don't use HTTPS, is it possible they could ding sites for poor password policies?

I'm the same way, I find a good series of lectures to be the best way for me to wrap my head around something. I think it's a combination of "visual" and "global" learning styles. A global learning style means you work your way from the big picture down to the details as opposed to "sequential" style where you are better off diving into a detailed problem and building your knowledge outward from there [0].

[0] http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/ILS...

That's actually a great question and I don't think I can really answer it yet since I've only done internships and I'm set to start my first full-time job in January. I find some satisfaction in trying to optimize the small problems I've faced so far but it's mostly been bug fixes and glue code. I like the answer Feuilles_Mortes gave, hopefully I'll find some useful scenarios in the future.

I'd say it's bachelor level. It definitely requires some prior knowledge of digital logic and general computer systems concepts. Here's a link to the course page where you can find the prerequisites and a syllabus and some other info:

http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ece447/s14/

I highly recommend MIT's 6.006 for a good intro to data structures and algorithms. My college's course wasn't great, but watching the MIT lectures and working through CLRS helped me gain a really solid intuitive understanding of complexity and approaches to different classes of problems. At the very least it helped a lot with interviews!

Here's a list with a mix of different kinds of courses:

https://github.com/prakhar1989/awesome-courses

Yes! I've been watching his lectures as a supplement to my own comp architecture class.

I agree with you about the European parliament example, but speaking of the U.S. situation specifically, we already have a bicameral legislature with disproportionate representation for lower population states in one of its houses. We also have federal courts to step in when any laws are stepping on the rights of minority populations.

You've also touched on one of the longest-running debates in American politics: should we treat states as independent and semi-autonomous or allow the federal government to dictate policy direction for the nation. You can probably tell what side I'm on. People still claim that the American civil war was about the South defending "states' rights" when I, and many others, feel that it was about defending the rights of many people actually in those states.

That might be a little off topic. Anyway it's an interesting debate, but it's just hard to see how a candidate for national office can win more votes across the country and come out the loser.

Nate Silver actually wrote a post about the LA Times poll. I don't think it makes sense to compare individual polls with poll aggregates. A single data point being accurate/inaccurate can be due more to luck than methodology, while an inaccuracy in a probabilistic model like Silver's indicates more of a systemic bias across all polls.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-leave-th...

Serious question (and I think the source of the confusion as to what direction has been chosen): if all those philosophies have been rejected, what exactly are we left with? What was being advocated?

I don't think any citizen's vote should count more than another just because they're part of a minority, geographic or otherwise. Imagine the uproar that would ensue if a politician suggested that a racial, ethnic, or religious minority group would have their votes count for more.