I drive a stick. I expect most car jackers today will manage to get maybe three feet away.

More seriously, this really isn't a big deal. Car thieves use much faster and cruder methods, like hammering a screwdriver into the lock, or just break the window. Car alarms are a joke, too. When was the last time you heard somebody's car alarm go off that wasn't due to a big truck running by, or a dog brushing up against it, or kids throwing rocks?

I'm almost certain the joke is older than that, going back to the seven astronauts of the original Mercury program. Some of the early (unmanned) prototype rockets didn't exactly get into space, and these failures were more public than many of the USSR's failures.

There's a movement around the Bible Belt to home school kids to keep them away from textbooks that mention evolution, or as a general protest of government-run education. At some point, it started to become a stereotype in some circles that all home schooled kids fall into this category.

The term "space opera" is already around for that purpose. When George Lucas is giving an interview with a degree of candor, he'll usually use that term to describe Star Wars. Naturally, Lucas doesn't give many interviews with a sense of candor anymore, but I seem to remember him using it in the interview with Leonard Maltin that was in the VHS versions in the '90s.

That last bit right there is the hard part. Making algorithms was a hard task, to be sure. It took eons before humanity had the right mathematics to make RSA possible, but that work is all done now. There isn't all that much work being done in making new crypto algorithms, because we're pretty sure the ones we have will stand up. Even a breakthrough in Quantum Computing or Complexity Theory wouldn't completely destroy everything out there. There is some work to do in hash algorithms (MD5/SHA1), but that's the exception.

However, putting those algorithms into a practical system is hard, and the work has to be more or less started from scratch with each new system. Every single entry point to the system has to be secured, including a lot of non-obvious ones. DeCSS was done because just one software DVD player mishandled the keys, and that toppled everything else.

In other words, Sony has just gone and proved that the only DRM that remains unhacked is the kind that nobody cares to hack. See also: SACD.

I fail to see how that's a bad thing.

Either way, really. Procedural languages turn into a spaghetti mess. Functional languages won't work at all.

Nay, no, notta. Functional languages make you think completely differently about how the computer operates. Simply wrapping things up like that is how you get spaghetti code. The budding programmer will tend to keep writing this way for a long time. Some never grow out of it.

That's the biggest indictment of CS curriculums I've ever read.

You only see that in Dan Brown novels because it's too dumb of an idea to be actually implemented. Short of a massive breakthrough in computer speeds that they've somehow managed to keep secret, even all the secret government supercomputers in the world would have a hard time breaking AES-128 or RSA-4096 in a reasonable amount of time.

If the government needs to break somebody's crypto, it's done through side-channel attacks. Anything else is a waste of effort.

Came to thread for this comment. Disappointed that it's at the bottom of the page, and left by an Anon Cow.

The herd will be getting t-shirts and bed sheets, not thinking through the implications. But if it's raining money, then money will be useless very shortly. In this instance, it is in my personal best interest to have my assets in something that isn't currency. It's not converting it to land/gold/stocks/whatever that would be causing hyperinflation here. It's the fact that there's a sudden oversupply of money.

It is, in fact, a great argument for Keynesian economics. Things like windmills, solar, and nuclear plants become more and more economically viable as the price of fossil fuels rise. All the more so when the externalities are included in the price. In this situation, there is an oversupply of labor combined with an undersupply of capital. Running up government deficits to solve both problems may sound like a suicide plan, but does anybody have a better idea?

Nonsense. Economics has ideas like "externalities" that tell you that not only is government intervention not evil, but is often necessary. Even Austrian economists do not ignore this point--they just give different suggestions on how to fix it.

Economists actually have thought out these problems. Too often, their advice gets passed off as either socialism or corporate whoring.

You can be finding a more efficient shirt. I'll be running to the bank, to convert my money into directly tangible assets, in order not to be hit by the hyperinflation that will happen shortly.

What I'm arguing against here is what I see as a deeply misinformed understanding of economics amongst the environmentalist movement. I hear arguments all the time of the form "spend the money on solar/wind/whatever once, and it's free forever!". That doesn't work at all.

Economics isn't about money. It's about how to most effectively manage limited resources. The amount of sunlight hitting the Earth, as well as the amount of sunlight hitting a given plot of land, is very much a limited resource. Sunlight cannot be correctly called free under any realistic economic system.

I've never seen a home energy system that actually works out that way, once all the numbers are crunched.