Not entirely true. Say you're protecting a billion-dollar asset. You have 10 million dollars for defense. I have 100 thousand dollars for offense. For 1000 dollars, I can mount an attack that costs you 1,000,000 to defend. You will have to beg, borrow, or steal, 90 million dollars to defend every attack that I can mount. Now you have a real problem.

Even worse, Suppose I can easily obtain and assemble the parts I need for an attack. But your, for instance, Patriot missiles take rather longer to assemble (as they are much more complex). If you have 50 missiles at hand, I only need to launch 51 attacks before you get your next shipment of missiles.

Clearly you are correct inasmuch as you won't spend 1,000,000,000 dollars to defend 200,000,000 dollars of assets. But the relative costs of defense and offense do matter.

When I worked for a major telecom equipment manufacturer in the 90s, we had a monolithic software build for our main switching product (class 4/5 switch), and the total lines of code were 20 million. I find it incomprehensible that a luxury car requires 5 times as much code. If it's true, they need to do a rethink as there's no way they should need that much code. And, frankly, there's no way they will test that code completely every time they update it.

I don't really care what device I use as a projector. What matters to me is whether the projection is bright enough for my audience to see the projected images clearly. If I can do that from my phone, great (one less piece of equipment to lug around).

The other question I would ask is whether using my phone as a projector would drain the battery, precluding me using the phone as a phone. A phone with a flat battery is not much use.

So, assuming that the IOC can require competitors to - temporarily - sign over their names as IP, what happens if the athlete already has a contract with a third party?

Let me amend that to "Learning to program well is hard."

I've been earning a living as a programmer since 1986. I'm continually learning new things about programming, from new techniques (i.e. OOP - they didn't teach that in 1982) to new languages to the psychology of the my end users. Comp Sci school is like learning English grammar. It's really useful, but just like knowing English grammar doesn't make you a great writer, neither does a Comp Sci degree make you a great programmer.

Whomever I hire has to be learning continually about his or her craft. I'm not going to hire anyone who knows it all - that person is an ass.

At least here in North America, our general aversion to unions is entirely rational. Unions here do not foster creativity - they foster group think. Did you ever want to work a couple extra hours because you were really into what you were doing? Try doing that in a union shop - you'll have a very unhappy experience. I've had unionized jobs (albeit not programming jobs). I cannot imagine a unionized programming job being anywhere near as enjoyable as a non-union programming job. Unions suck.

Or maybe not. When I did phone support (never again), most of our reps were young and not technically inclined. That being the case today, most reps probably have no idea who Steve Wozniak is. They are probably more likely to know of Steve Jobs. That said, would they necessarily believe that they were actually talking to THE Steve Jobs? Probably not.

Bars get the game via cable, for which they pay money. The cable companies know who their clients are and what their clients' businesses entail. If some of the content is not for general use, while some of the content is for general use, shouldn't it be up to the service deliverer (i.e. the cable company) to determine what service the customer receives and how much the customer should pay? Why is it up to the end customer, the bar, to determine what programs received legally over the valid cable connection they can (or cannot) show on their TV?

He's reading slashdot, isn't he? What are the odds that he's married?

Exactly. When I saw the announcement, my first thought was that it would be perfect for my mother. Easy to send and receive email, usable for a few simple games, and small enough to stuff in a desk drawer when not in use. It will start quickly. Exactly what my mother would want.

Clearly I don't want to use if for a development platform, but that is not what it was designed for.

There is a good reason for the majority of HTTP traffic to be encrypted: Deep Packet Inspection. If you want to stop your ISP, your government, etc, from using DPI, the most effective way to do so is to negate the value of it. HTTPS negates the value of DPI.

Personally, I hate the idea of DPI from a matter of principle. Therefore, I like HTTPS.

Just because a small subset of the population holds privacy in no regard does not mean that the population as a whole, or even a majority of the population, does likewise. Among my adult friends, very very few bother with online social networking and the vast majority consider their privacy something to be cherished.

DO NOT mistake something popular among the young to be the norm.

We can certainly protect the individual right to privacy while providing for the right of the individual to abrogate his own privacy.

Check out your local weather forecast. "The normal high for today is..." But what's the standard deviation? If they tell you that the normal, or the average, is 15C and today's high is 25C - wow - that's way above normal. Must be global warming. Quick, send money to AlGore. But what if they also told you that the standard deviation for today is 12 degrees? Oh. Hmm. 25C ain't that significant. Cancel the cheque to Al.

Statistics are worse than meaningless if you don't understand how to use them correctly.

From the article: "...shake the handset..." So we really have gone back to the etch-a-sketch? (FWIW, about 10 years ago, when a friend of mine was promoted [demoted?] to a management position, I bought him a new "management laptop" aka an Etch-a-Sketch.)

128-bit keys for symmetric ciphers, such as we use for banking equate to much large key sizes for asymmetric ciphers such as RSA. You are comparing apples and volkswagens.