And what happens when I need to tweak the virtual host settings or tune the database to better meet the demands of my specific application? You want me to f-over every other application running on the production server?

Screw you, man. Just wack off a dedicated VPS chunk and put it behind whatever paranoid tin-foil hat firewall sandbox you want. I don't want to have to open a support ticket and wait two hours every time I need to check the logs on my application server.

- Senior Developer

Sadly a lot of PDF printers will retain javascript code even if you print it and re-assemble it back into a PDF. The problem lies in the fact that Adobe allows javascript to be embedded inside image objects and compressed blocks of PDF binary. It's not as simple as opening the file and stripping out anything that starts with <script>. Code can be fired on almost any user event and it can be attached to almost any high-level object. It's not impossible to create a scrubber but it's a lot more complicated than you might think.

I spent the better part of a week attempting to create a PDF scrubber at my office for this same reason. We had become victim to highly targeted attacks from PDF sources. I wrote a scrubber in PHP using an open-source PDF parser and a series of regular expressions to strip out any javascript. At the end of the day, I came very close to a working solution but I ran into issues with encrypted PDF's.

The project was shelved in favor of making users open all external PDF's on a virtual server that was hardened and re-imaged every evening to prevent any malicious code from running rampant. That's the simplest solution.

Slashdot's User Interface Design Department

Agreed. You may not always need a math background depending on what you decide to do. I have a CS and Applied math degree and I worked in finance for 5 years where the math background was an invaluable tool that helped me excel where my coworkers without it did not. For other jobs I've had developing apps and UI's for start-ups, it rarely came up; however, whether you use the math or not on the job there will always be fundamental math quizzes during technical job interviews and having a higher understanding of mathematics will always help you in that regard.

Also if you ever develop a large-scale database or system, mathematical optimization will always come into play in ways you never thought it would.

If they were true to their motto they should have dropped the project and donated their funding to a children's hospital 10 years ago.

Have you tried the new VS2012? They took a shotgun to the UI and the file menu is still screaming from the trauma.

Correction: ISPs block *outbound* port 80

Also exempt from the cost analysis is the ISP fee for unlocking inbound port 80. I know my ISP blocks it unless you pay for a business account which is nearly $80 more a month. You could try to route around it with dyndns but it's not fun and I don't think a dyndns account is free anymore. That alone puts you over the VPS budget which is why I use VPS hosting.

Been happy with www.vpsnoc.com

I'm not supporting Obama's policy but I don't think this is as evil as everyone is making it out to be. Our country is theoretically "at war" with Al Quada as an organization (whether that makes any sense is a whole other tangent). During World War II, plenty of German-American citizens living in the US flue back to Germany and fought against American forces. We didn't need due process to kill them on the battlefield. Whether you're an American citizen or not, if you're on foreign territory and pose a threat to our armed forces, there's not a large legal barrier to killing you.

Yo Dawg, I heard you like Windows, so I decided to put Windows inside yo' Android being emulated on yo' Windows.

If the requests went up by 70% and the the amount of "no"s dropped by 20%. They are not "getting better at saying no" on a raw numerical basis.

Think about it.

If an individual could break SSL, yes, they would be going after your bank accounts not your hentai porn collection. But you have to keep in mind who the enemy is here and mega's enemy is the government. The government who basically runs the ISPs and could middle-man SSL very easily these days. In this case, the enemy is more interested in your data than your bank accounts and so the flaws in SSL are relevant and an alternate solution is probably not a bad idea.

At least until you buy drugs

I concur. I went to a very wealthy public high school where there were multiple "tracks" one could be in mathematics. Your placement in one of these "tracks" depended on the teacher's recommendations from 6-8th grade. I did no homework, never raised my hand, never studied and still pulled down B+ averages through innate ability. Frankly, I was bored by the material. I was placed in lower tracks by the teachers. Meanwhile these girls who tested at C levels but stayed after school every day, kissed ass had tutors bought by their parents were placed in the advanced tracks.

To this day I am extremely biter about the outcome. I had to take extra courses and summer classes to get myself back into the AP tracks in high school. I went on to graduate with honors in mathematics and received a PhD in Computer Science. I imagine the girls who struggled with 6th grade mathematics material aren't still in technical fields but hey, they were the ones who "worked hard" and accepted the system so they got accelerated.

You mock those who rely on the "old" paper system and then suggest relying on an long-unsupported proprietary computer architecture from the late 1980's.

I think you're missing the point.