Of course not! Remember, CASE (like every other "silver bullet" technology) replaces programmers. So, there's no point in asking programmers what they think - they'll just badmouth it because they're terrified of being replaced. That's bullet point one of any technology cure-all. It's a "programmer killer"... so there's no reason to involve them in the decision making process.

Well, I wish I could share your optimism - here's hoping that you're right and I'm wrong.

Umm... yeah, actually I think they are - if Big Content can't snoop on your communications, neither can Big Brother (whether you think this is good or bad is another matter entirely).

Actually, what they're talking about isn't widespread encryption (that's already in place, e.g. SSL), but widespread anonymity. P2P over SSL is no more secure from a record label sniffer than P2P over cleartext - they just attack the P2P network (that's what they do today - they're not actually doing network monitoring). What the British are afraid of is widespread anonymity (like Freenet, for example) - and with that, neither law enforcement nor Geffen records can see what you're downloading or uploading.

That said, they have nothing to worry about. Widespread anonymity will never become the norm. Any truly censorship-resistant scheme, whatever it may be, will be resistant against ALL censorship, not just selective censorship. So if you believe that .mp3's and scientology documents should not be censored, but porn should, you're out of luck if you want a technical solution. And the (sad, IMHO) fact is that most people support censorship of at least some things and will never buy into a system that makes this impossible.

Well, if their goal was to change world politics by pissing off Americans who are not left-wing fanatical loons, they did a good job of that. So I guess you're right; they are going to change world politics for the better. They're helping to mobilize us "evil neocons" for 2012.

Amen, brother. I actually (try to) take this a step further and say - unless I can write a function that can operate on the base class, without EVER downcasting, don't make a base class.

That may be true... although personally, I find that when I'm really cursing some other programmer's name and wishing disease and misfortune upon him and his family, it's the work of a "ten-levels-of-inheritance deep wrappers around wrappers that wrap wrappers that generate code on the fly" overengineerer, rather than a spaghetti coder. At least with spaghetti coding, I can walk through it mentally and figure out what's going on (although it may take a while) - with "clever" code, I can't make heads or tails of it without a debugger.

"Protecting ourselves with laws is not enough. We must also protect ourselves with mathematics." - Bruce Schneier

So... it's like cocaine, then? "The first taste is free..."

Well, now, it's the dam workers who are supposed to be building the dam, after all.