A nice step ahead would be the establishment of a new set of root certificates and an accompanying authority that signs other peoples certificates. All located in a country that doesn't play ball with NSA and other thugs.

This would do a lot to dampen the routine man-in-the-middle we see these days.

Don't you need to keep the original file and the code you used to transform it, so that you have an audit trail which shows how you got the current data?

Only if it gets down to covering your ass and then you're fucked anyway. Nobody gives a shit how you contributed to a success.

That shit is almost ancient. Who gives a damn?

If something that old haven't burned your house down yet then it's likely to be safe.

Stupid gits.

The story of the loss of the Challenger is much more complicated than simply "stupid managers, saintly engineers", and there's a lot of blame to spread around all parties.

Sorry for using Challenger this way. It's borderline trolling/flamebait but an established, although incorrect example.

My point is that engineers need to take a stand. Our actions or inactions can put the public at risk and that is a burden we have to respect. We are the experts and we have to make certain that the best possible knowledge is put forth in a way that management can't dismiss easily.

You get a Challenger disaster.

In my experience, You have to use exactly these words in order to get management to take problems serious. Turns out it was because they put management in a legal bind.

Any engineer who follows GM's edict should be flogged. Bad stuff happens because good men do nothing.

I hang around in survivalists circles a little bit and there's a little bit of a saying there "If you can survive a zombie apocalypse you can survive almost anything".

Can we have a disturbing mod please?. I don't know if it's up, down or by how much but DAMN I need it here.

Not saying I'm representative of the whole group, but I'm a rocket scientist, and I'm pretty pants at information security.

Getting them up there and not having them fall down is not half bad. I still try to keep my kerbals from blowing up. But seriously, at least accept that info-sec is important. There might be a business case in not being totally p0wnd.

This is all Python centric but that's where the jazz is these days:

1. Codecademy. My 12 year old son just passed it.
2. An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python (coursera.org). Games and great fun. Also in python.
3. Udacity.com. Do all of their software subjects. Just ditch the Java stuff. The 90's are long gone.

I've got a 15 year old masters in CS but I went through the coursera and udacity stuff and learned quite a lot along the way. Good stuff.

I also don't want to take the risk of torturing somebody who was wrongfully convicted.

I don't want to torture anyone. Period. It permanently mentally mutilates both victim and perpetrator. Just say no.

Don't even get me started on torture light...

Economy -> ???

Economy is the precursor to reading tea leaves, everybody knows that. They teach that in B-school.

Why is there a foreign language requirement anyway?

Yesterday, my best friend spoke to an american supplier and told them that he wanted the goods shipped to Europe. Not some weird, small country but Europe. The supplier asked where Europe was in the US.

I think You guys could do with a foreign langue or two. Not to mention geography...

Is America planning on invading Denmark?

Damn. We thought we could keep our puny little oil production secret. Those pesky NSA types blew our secret.

My primary attraction is the strengthened random number generation for cryptography. This eliminates the NSA introduced weaknesses in the underlying hardware.

That alone is enough to turn me into a rapid FreeBSD supporter.