But the sad truth is that even if you take the trade-school approach, and just teach them java, most graduates still won't be able to produce usable product.

They won't be able to make a robust working app. Probably haven't written a web based app that had more than two concurrent users. Probably haven't written a desktop app that's been tested across a variety of platforms and configurations. Haven't written some server app that can go on for years at a time. They aren't familiar with all the intricacies of J2EE on a real clustered live environment. They aren't going to understand how to code with a team, maybe in theory, not in practice.

They still have to learn all that on the job anyway. People always say (half-joking) that they learned more their first week on the job than they ever did in college.

So how much does learning real-world skills over theory really help you? Not that much.

Low level kernel development will always be a bit of a niche thing. But...

You do realize that ten-to-fifteen years ago, there was this exciting new thing called the world-wide-web that provided a lot of opportunities. And many people were writing stuff for that in perl/php/java/whatever. Writing things like google and amazon and heck even imdb. There were a lot more opportunities to change the world and get rich than writing iBestSushiInAlberquerqie.app or for the iPhone or FreeCell10000 for Android.

That's a pretty bad logical inference...

You said EVERY TIME you go to a bar you get laid. I don't. Therefore, by your original statement, I should be. You're wrong.

But for most people the 'reboot' is still incidental. It's making sure you've saved all your working documents, closed stuff down, etc, that's annoying. Try hitting Ctrl-Alt-Backspace while you have some unsaved documents open. For practical purposes, you might as well have done a hard power down.

Which is why Ubuntu actually disabled Ctrl-Alt-Backspace by default. Too many users were getting screwed over.

The thing is, the requirements are extra-detailed and a little anal, which make them seem over-the-top, but they basically boil down to:

(1) Restrict internet usage to normal times so the kids don't stay up until three am on a school night. Reasonable.

(2) Revoke access as a punishment. Kids have been getting grounded for how long?

(3) Block access to some sites. Entirely reasonable if you're talking really bad sites or malware infected stuff. It doesn't necessarily equate to some active proxy reading their facebook posts. Besides, I'm sure the kids don't want to see goatse any more than you.

I'm sure plenty of good parents keep guns in a safe and liquor in a locked liquor cabinet. Obviously a gun or booze is more dangerous than the internet, I'm not trying to equate them, but there are advantages to a layered system of trust. Technology and good parenting aren't mutually exclusive.

When my kids are grounded, they go in the cage...

The faraday cage...

To 100% certainty, no...

Certain enough for Apple to ban an app or ask to see the source? Sure.

For popular commercial stuff like MonoTouch, they'd just need to come up with some sort of fingerprint or signature. Presumably they're all going to have some boilerplate library code in there, MonoTouch.init_gc() or whatever...

For homebrew stuff, they can probably still look for stuff that clearly isn't written by a human. Not sure how much a name mangling scheme would get exposed in Objective-C, but that'd be a good place to start.

I'm hunting right now. The best case of this by far is:

Visual Studio .NET 2008 - 5 years experience

(1) DO THE MATH! (At least when people were asking for ten years of web development experience in 1995, the web wasn't called WWW-90)

(2) WHAT THE HELL IS VISUAL STUDIO EXPERIENCE?

Am I missing something in your argument?

He said that teaching anyone under 16 about condoms is legally contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

Showing a fifteen year old how to use a condom does not equal having sex with a person under twelve.

(1) Brute forcing a single key doesn't equal 'breaking' an algorithm.

(2) I don't think they brute forced the keys.

All I was saying is that if you're going to attempt to do so, and do so on a single document, you could attack the potentially weaker session key, making the size of the RSA key irrelevant.

So don't just generate your 4096-bit RSA OpenPGP key, and say, "problem solved, no one can hack that." You'll also want to set your symmetric key prefs to use AES-256 or Twofish.

Most asymmetric encryption schemes use hybrid encryption. The RSA key encrypts the randomly generated session key. So if you're only trying to crack a single document, and not a person's actual key so you can access any document encrypted to that key, you can bypass the RSA key and brute force the session key. That could be something like 128 bit CAST5 or 3DES, which still shouldn't be easily crackable, but the complexity of that attack won't change no matter how big the RSA key is.

But as usual, are they brute-forcing the key, or the passphrase? If it's a passphrase, that's almost always weaker than the key. Even if it's twenty ascii chars, that might not translate to 140 bits entropy depending on how strong and complex the passphrase is.

Then they'd just be M's... ;-)

The Mecury Theater show at the time never had commercial breaks, so even that wasn't that exceptional. Although I could see it leading to some confusion if you were just spinning through the dial.

There's a second component to the urban legend. That Welles himself was perpetrating a hoax. That he was trying to 'punk' the audience. That he didn't provide an explanation at the beginning of the show. That there weren't commercials throughout the week advertising Mercury Theater's special Halloween performance of War of the Worlds. He did and there were.