Seeing as I am a computer science major I could not help but laugh and share this with you. I managed to find this little story of what would happen if a electrical engineer and a computer scientist ended up in the medieval times, and the king asked them for advice. Here is the link.

If you don’t know much about computer science then you probably won’t understand the story, but the world of computers can get very complicated at times. But i’ll vouch for it and say it gets complicated for good reason, the more complicated the programming of things is, the more user friendly the end product… of course, simple is best sometimes… like in the case of this poor scientist, whose fate I would not wan’t. Enjoy the story!

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These news are fresh out of the oven and I’m sure all of you have already heard of it, it’s simply outrageous. It turns out that everybody traveling into the United States has been subject (and of course this will continue on) to a special kind of profiling. Everyone coming into America by plane is being rated on how likely they are to be terrorists.

The Automated Targetting System is a score generated by a computer that rates you (well, your terrorists self), on how dangerous you are, based on… How you paid for your plane ticket, what country you are coming from, previous flights, and even the food you ate on the plane. Now how bad can it get, how can we be considered terrorists for eating a ceirtain kind of food on a plane?

This shouldn’t only worry people and Civil Liberties activists, it should worry the whole travel industry as a whole. After all “America’s share of the growing worldwide travel market dropped by 36 percent between 1992 and 2005″ [source] already, and it will keep declining. After all, who wants to travel to a country where they will be unfairly labeled as terrorists (by a computer algorithm) because of some silly things?

For further reading check out Yahoo!

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