Intellectual Ventures is an organized crime network. They take out patents on research from universities, which is done on the public dime, and on the dime of students paying exorbitant tuition, and exploit it for their own profit in secret, back-room deals with university officials. It has very little to do with intellectual property; it's just another scam. One day, they'll get too bold, and the FBI will haul them in for something or other, and there will be a brief mention in the back page of the newspaper of an obscure Ponzi scheme nobody ever heard of that went belly-up, and none of the "investors" will ever raise a peep. After all, the "investors" were never in it for anything but "protection" which they won't need once the entity goes belly-up. Because that's all it really is: a protection racket.

If your guild actually had some basic education and standards for what constitutes "professional quality code" independent and irrespective of the marketing buzzword du jour, as well as some good-quality continuing education to keep up with the technology behind the latter, it might actually benefit you, people who want to learn to code, and ultimately the employers who want to hire coders.

But as it stands now, the entire high-tech industry has acquired such a fly-by-night mentality that I don't think there's any demand for "professional quality code". The demand is "do a marketing blitz quick ship it out the door before the hype dies down and let me collect my bonus and move on to the next project." The hubris and arrogance that seems typical of developers themselves doesn't help either. Whether non-coders could or should or would code is a totally minor side-issue, given the amount of professional-quality enterprise-grade crap software out there.

I'm one of those non-coders who code -- I end up writing a few scripts in Perl or PHP or Javascript or R or whatnot for miscellaneous tasks, but I don't want to be a programmer. I'm just glad I get to put my education to use and develop my skills in a different industry, where there isn't quite so much nonsense to put up with.

... based on a grand total of seven data points, and not controlled for the amount of resources that went into achieving an ever-so-brief superposition of, so far, no more than 14 or 15 qubits. The article you linked is very appropriately and clearly not much more than a scientifically excited suggestion that the growing number of qubits is in an exponential trend, and a guess at what might happen if the assumed trend should continue. You've got nerve to say "History tells otherwise." "History" also tells us that AAPL's stock price has reached escape velocity, and it will never return to earth, because all the analysts tell us that soon we'll all be incredibly wealthy and lining up around the block to spend 30% of our income on a mortgage for our next iPhone. Not saying it's impossible, but in either case, past performance in no guarantee of future returns, as that author was careful to note.

That is true. POP, IMAP, or SMTP and many other protocols are often run over SSL, too, but they're all going to use pretty much the same default certs as the browsers, unless you set up your own special-purpose authority, and then you have to distribute and install your custom root cert everywhere you want to use it without a good way to revoke it, and you still have the same basic problem that delegation is all-or-nothing without the ability to restrict signing authority to sub-domains, and consequently there is no way for x.509 to scale adequately to provide an assurance of security for more than a handful of certs signed by a single agreed-upon root.

Vulgar, foul language is not an indication of maturity. On the contrary, it seems to be more closely associated with the pot-smoking, meth-addled, lip-ringed, tongue-pierced, ear-stretched, purple-haired, and tattooed youth of today who can't even keep up with today's abysmally low educational standards, or hold down a job even if the world's economy depended on it.

+1 for spelling "populace" correctly!

There is an entire collection of root certs in your browser that are all trusted unconditionally. Hundreds of them, in fact. These root certs have signed thousands (who knows how many, really?) intermediate certs. All of these intermediate certs are trusted unconditionally to authenticate any SSL server whatsoever. It's pointless to have a key longer than the shortest intermediate cert key length in use anywhere. When you use SSL, you are trusting thousands of unknown parties with absolute cert-signing authority. SSL certificates are known to have been used for explicit man-in-the-middle purposes: Trustwave sold root certificate for surveillance. Sure they revoked that one key because of the bad publicity, but it's common industry practice. How is SSL hopelessly broken? Let us count the ways.

So can you get two tickets, one for obstructing traffic and another for speeding, if you're doing both at the same time?

Yes you can, but both tickets must be tried at the same hearing, because

... [no] person [shall] be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; ...

Generally, that's what 'privacy' comes down to; you want to break some rules (laws, road rules, social norms, whatever) or at least to have some chance of getting away with doing so.

That's the tired old something-to-hide argument against privacy. Way too many powerful corporate and government entities know each one of us in way too intimate detail, and we know next to nothing about these entities. Nor do we need to violate any laws or social norms in order to accumulate vast quantities of private information which could easily be used against us maliciously if misappropriated. Then there is the problem that the supposedly well-meaning people or entities who snoop almost invariably meddle in some way with what they are snooping into, because such people simply aren't going to "look but not touch," (which all goes back to money and power,) and consequently the only way to avoid the meddling is to not let these busybodies know about your private affairs in the first place.

Once automated law enforcement is implemented, people will start realising just how important discretion is, or alternately, just how many laws should be fixed or repealed.

By that time it will be far too late. Try a slightly different situation on for size: do you think the people of, say, North Korea realize "how many laws should be fixed or repealed"? and would it do them any good if they did?

Yes that's possible in theory, but we all know in practice that never happens. There is absolutely no way on earth that a bunch of proprietary computerized networked gimmickry required to be in your car will ever be designed to protect your privacy. Money and power will inevitably demand unfettered corporate and government access to this data as well as extra restrictions on your own access to it.

the marketing potential, as Darling notes, may be significant.

I'd think people were insane to discuss with a straight face such science-fiction drivel as "rights" for robots, but I can just see the greed of Apple's visionaries dreaming about this. This recent ascendency of the Apple cult is one of the most horrifying, bizarre, and sickening phenomena that I have ever witnessed. Is there no limit to how high Lucifer will elevate his throne?

Let me say, CRC32 is a very good algorithm. So good, I'll tell you how good. It is 4 bytes long, which means in theory you can change any 4 bytes of a file and get a CRC32 collision, unless the algorithm distributes them randomly, in which case you will get more or less.

I naively tried to reverse engineer a file from a known CRC32. Optimized and recursive, on a 333 mHz computer, it took 10 minutes to generate the first collision. Then every 10 minutes or so. Every 4 bytes (last 4, last 5 with the original last byte, last 6 with original last 2 bytes, etc) there was a collision.

CRC is only good for what it's designed for: to detect random bit-flipping errors due to noise. It has no cryptographic properties whatsoever. CRC is nothing more than polynomial long division mod 2. It really is nothing more than a straightforward algebra problem to modify the 4 bytes at any given position in any given file to generate any desired CRC32 checksum. Brute force is totally unnecessary.

What a shill!