Einstein DID say, "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them", which may be what confuses people.

As a matter of fact, I *am* a grumpy old man, introduced to computers around the time paper tape went out of style. I stopped tracking Windows after Win2k. I'm glad Microsoft has made some changes. As to whether or not I'm obsessed with a trivial little thing that happened decades ago? Security defects can lie undetected in the most inoffensive seeming places until they are either exploited or someone with the subtlety to tickle the bug finds them.

Is Windows 7 still running the graphics driver in Ring 0? They moved it from Ring 3 (least privileged) to the most privileged mode in NT 4.0 as a performance hack. Still reaping the 'benefits' of that decision today.

MOD PARENT UP!!!!!

RTFA: banking information. What could possibly go wrong?

Or better yet: ;DROP table users; --

People still watch this "Television" thing?

COBOL got most things wrong. The one exception seems to be the fixed point math used for financial calculations. It often comes as a surprise to COBOL programmers learning a new language that there's not built-in support for the same kinds of operations. They're also likely to be tripped up by trying to use double/float and expecting exact results.

We could go back to using LISP...

True, except that HR people and hiring managers neither know nor care about doing things correctly, they just want cheap and fast. Just make sure you have all the right TLAs on your resume, you'll get a job. You can put "IEEE 754 expert" down though. They won't recognized the reference so maybe they'll be impressed by it.

I was brought in a bit after the start of a state project to write a system to track about a half billion dollars in money for elderly and disabled indigent care. I was horrified to find that all the money variables were float. After raising the issue and explaining the technical details, I proposed a Money class and if they didn't want that gave them the option of a simple fix: just change all the floats to long and keep the amounts in pennies, inserting the decimal point only when displaying numbers. The tech lead (nice guy, not the sharpest crayon in the box) and the DB architect (who was the sort for which Codd was God and for which the DB2 NUMERIC datatype was all we needed) determined that they could find no discrepancies, so the problems I cited must not apply to their code.

Fast forward several months later, when the numbers started to not add up, just as I explained. Killed a significant amount of time retrofitting the code to use BigDecimal. Even then, there were problems. Not the only reason the project was shut down before tackling the remaining planned features, but certainly a factor in it.

Honestly, and I'm certainly no libertarian, I don't want the FAA to have anything to do with space or commercial space travel AT ALL. OK, they do manage to keep the air travel in the US somewhat stable, but really they move so slowly and are so co-opted by they airlines they are supposed to regulate. Just ask anyone involved with trying to get the FAA to implement Direct and other flight path changes to improve on-time performance and fuel usage. Or anyone who has ever worked on any project to upgrade air traffic control computer systems.

I still see boxes of floppy disks in the office supply cabinets of big companies. I suspect somewhere high up in corporate purchasing they have a supply purchase schedule that still says that every month they need to restock their cabinets with some large number N. Eventually in a corporate cost-cutting move someone might go through the list and trim it. Then again, they might try, only to have it come back that someone IMPORTANT needs those floppies and no the company can't stop buying them.