A more interesting study would be to see how many of those dollars actually reach the student, or the teachers - as opposed to administrators or other positions that have less direct influence over the quality of education.

Not all noise is gaussian. And the fact that the noise is random while the signal is not, is useful when you can average and drop your noise floor. But you need multiple measurements to do that.

The people who couldn't create their keypairs may have had the raw material, but they were trying perform at a level they weren't yet capable of - they couldn't google a simple task and follow instructions. They needed to go back to square zero and learn basics when they were in a graduate program. And because the graduate program was dumbed down, they weren't going to learn the basics in the program.

The government outsources things to contractors because they have no idea how to manage those projects. Do you want your mayor as the foreman for the crew paving your roads?

As with most businesses, the government has the money but not the know-how so they need to outsource or contract.

I tried to put together a team of students to compete in one of MITRE's cybersecurity competitions, but struggled to get other students to create SSH keys so that they could get access to the competition server. Not hack into the server, just follow instructions that I gave them to create keys and give me the public ones so that they could log in and participate.

The industry has a similar problem that the military does: It's very difficult to take non-technical people and train them to be cybersecurity professionals, much less hackers.

You need to start with an engineering background, and it almost has to be electrical or computer engineering, or at least computer science. Of those people with that background, hacking in particular is a type of thinking, problem solving, and mentality that not everyone has.

If you want to defend, attack, or manipulate cyber infrastructure you need an understanding of how that infrastructure is designed and operates. An engineering background will at least give you the building blocks for that.

Being disingenuous is just a bad first and only data point to give someone about yourself.

Also, what are the US GPS satellites listed under? I saw Beidou, GLONASS, and Galileo but I couldn't find the GPS satellites.

Lots of universities will let you sign up for graduate level classes as a continuing education student or certificate program. Sign up for one and see if you can keep your head above water. Even taking a Python class at a community college would help a lot.

Also, just because you get a null result doesn't mean that nothing was learned, that something new (and unexpected) wasn't stumbled on, or that some innovation didn't happen.

There are tiers of publications and journals. Even if you get a null result and you're not going to get it accepted in Nature, it's very possible that you can get a conference paper (sometimes peer reviewed) out of something that was learned.

The IRA is trying to address climate change, yes. But there's the problem of relying on government to have any idea of where to inject money to make the most difference, trusting the government to not just inject money wherever it benefits the most politically connected, and avoiding massive fraud (see the SBA loans during COVID). Not to mention the insane irony of something called the "Inflation Reduction Act" being a massive spending bill.

Point being: Number of bills passed and billions of dollars spent will be terrible metrics for how effective a politician is because of all those nuances.

And an issue with just spending money is that we have to wait a year or two to figure out if the spent money was effective (unlikely?).

We already have UBI, it's just the overblown bureaucracies housed by American corporate structures.

I would say that the end user is modifying the behavior of the hardware, that they own and are fully in control of, by choosing to run software that they purchased. But I'm fully aware that regulatory agencies probably have their own way of thinking about that.

Point taken about how we need some regulations, but isn't everyone sitting in an MBA program right now being trained to identify this exact kind of workaround?

As for displaying a device that isn't certified yet, who's the victim? What's wrong with saying "We can't take orders on this yet, but we're working on getting cool new product certified as fast as possible"? The article said displaying a device, not turning it on.

From your post, it seems like you're painting this guy as a malicious bad actor who going to destroy society when, to me, he seems like someone who's trying to find an efficient way to sell a solution to people who might find it valuable.