Don't forget about all the Bush admin people that lied us into the Iraq war. Lots of those folks were the ones that STARTED all these surveillance programs.
Plenty of politicians you could repeat your phrase about:

Bush is under no compunction to tell the truth. And there's no reason to expect he would.
Cheney is under no compunction to tell the truth. And there's no reason to expect he would.
Rice is under no compunction to tell the truth. And there's no reason to expect she would.
Rumsfeld is under no compunction to tell the truth. And there's no reason to expect he would.
Wolfowitz is under no compunction to tell the truth. And there's no reason to expect he would.
etc.

Not to dispute the rest of your quote, but Nixon wasn't immune from prosecution. He resigned and President Ford pardoned him.
I guess that is a fine/moot distinction, but the President (and governors) are allowed to pardon people so.... that's just the system.

Targeted donations are great and all, but I think corporations that NEED this security layer should step up. Banks for example - oh hell, the clearly don't give a crap if they can cry to Congress for a bailout.

If I were Zuckerburg, I'd go big and throw in 50 million for a rewrite effort. The publicity alone would be gold. Facebook could brag for years how they take their user's information and privacy seriously enough to pay. God, they already spent billions on a photo sharing app and VR glasses, 50 million would be round off in comparison.

Or the compiler might helpfully optimize out your buffer clear : http://www.viva64.com/en/d/020...
Or in general: http://www.viva64.com/en/b/017...

There's just a ton of landmines to avoid while coding in C. Including the tools themselves.

Yes... but at the hiring authority of corporations first. Whatever credentials they demand, job seekers must provide.

I did something similar. I signed up for the twitter account in order to follow a handful of others, and get event results (not all of which I am interested in). Of some use is an education account I follow for occasional tips learning a foreign language.

I think twitter is great for "one to many" information dissemination.

All these problems you attribute to NASA are actually congressional problems. NASA budgets are are the chopping block every year. The only way they get stuff passed is by distributing the work to every Congress member's districts. That's fucked up as you would expect, but we're a country that doesn't give a shit about funding science, paying scientists very well, or even listening to scientists. In fact there's a whole industry around discrediting climate scientists, since that threatens corporate profits, and a huge number of adults Americans don't believe in evolution. Entertainment and sports are the heroes and finance is where the big bucks are.

Because the average anti-government libertarian retard neckbeard doesn't want to deal with the followup to accepting the science: behavior change, banned products, infringement on their god-given right to burn all the oil they want, conservation of resources, etc.

They just don't give a fuck and the simplest way to resolve any cognitive dissonance or guilt or rationalize not doing anything (i.e. living the same lifestyle they are accustom, unwilling to change change anything), is to simply pretend it doesn't exist and claim the science is bullshit and a conspiracy. They latch on to counter arguments presented to scientists funded by energy companies and the Koch brothers and figure screw the poorer parts of the planet, they didn't get to my massive consumption lifestyle early enough so they lose out first while we all go over the cliff.

Their "cyberdefence" mission is to defend DoD systems, not the entire world's computers.

If you don't like it, gripe that NIST and DHS aren't doing their jobs (they are the agencies actually over commercial internet security and non-DoD government sites) or transfer/alter their authority. Everybody thinking the NSA is there to protect their banking and email all have the wrong idea of what they do.

You are confused as to what NSA's "defensive" mission is. They aren't there to be the defenders of the internet. They aren't there to be corporate America's QA department. They aren't there to review open source and provide fixes. They aren't there to "make the country's computers more secure".

They are there to protect DoD classified systems. That's the defensive mission, as an agency under the DoD umbrella. Protect DoD classified systems and anything that deals with military activities. All this extraneous whining - none of it is their mission.

It's a simple calculation on their side as far as the defensive mission - does "vulnerability X" involve classified DoD systems or ones that have military information? No? NOT THEIR PROBLEM.

Don't like it? Well too bad, you don't get to gripe when they don't follow their mandate and also gripe when they do.

If you want to complain, take that up with congress or the president to alter their mandate/directive. Or, take it up to congress to provide more funding for the agencies that are actually supposed to be looking out for commercial internet use and regular gov sites - NIST and DHS. Or, lobby congress to create a fully civilian non-DoD agency that's there to provide an extra security layer for the world at large. And in that last case, don't bitch about the government spending money when clearly the free market is failing to provide a solution, since it appears greedy for-profit corporations are happy to use but not contribute any resources towards this critical software infrastructure.

With the constant complaining about them and government in general from all the anti-government libertarian neck beards here, why would they even bother producing a fix? Who would trust code they released? This would not be like the selinux release, which is optional and provided new capabilities - if they produced a fixed openssl nobody would use it until code reviewing for years. They'd spend more time with PR and a ton of bullshit than doing nothing at all which is free from their perspective. If they disclosed the bug, they don't have any power to compel "the internet" to upgrade to a fixed version, so they'd be blamed for exploits and vulnerabilities during the time servers were slowly upgraded.

Whatever they do, somebody would gripe and given it ISN'T THEIR JOB in the first place, doing nothing looks like the game-theory resulting best call.

Slow weekend at Ars? Had you actually looked at the Ars article, you may have noticed it was from one month ago, March 4 2014.

The fact it's here now (and is also a dupe of a previous article here) reflects more on Slashdot and its submitters and editors, than Ars.

This whole comment doesn't even make sense.

The Fibonacci examples at Rosetta Code are all longer for Ocaml than C, iterative and recursive.

And are you implying ML "encourages economy of expression that's actually antithetical to maintainable code"... but C doesn't? Seriously?

If you replace "functional" with "object oriented" and went back in time 20 years ago, your dismissive, skeptical attitude would have fit right in that era as well.

As in: many languages have benefited by gaining object-oriented aspects, haven't found a reason to use an object-oriented language, nothing compelling enough to apply elsewhere, fully aware that a month isn't long enough to master anything but it were cool and earth-shattering then it would obviously manifest.

Sure, maybe the functional hype machine is cranked a little high, but what are you expecting - a concise summary of the years of improvements knowledge, experience in software development and language research, summarized and tailored to highlight the personal benefits to your workflow?

I would suggest picking up a few books and investing more than one month in figuring anything out. Start with the functional support in a language like Python (https://docs.python.org/2/howto/functional.html). Code stuff up one way and then in another. Basically unless you actually invest some effort you won't believe what somebody comes along to tell you.

>authorization from "installing too much" was Apple to activate iTunes.

I've never had to call Apple for that. Just "Deauthorize all computers" to wipe out the non-functional, no longer owned, temporarily installed, whatever iTunes instances, and then reauthorize my current machines.

Much faster than the times (admittedly small handful) I've had to call Microsoft and then deal with their automatic phone system to get activation codes.

Sad but true; only the government can make this happen, since there isn't any profit to be had via science spending in the next quarter or year (which is all modern corporations look at).