I would say it was only amoral if exploited for one's own gain or to others' detriment.

So if a hack gives reputation to a security researcher while embarrassing the website owners - how is this not exploitation for the researchers gain to the website owners detriment? You go there and pull off an I-am-smart-and-you-are-a-moron on these folks that are trying to make a living. How is that different from being an asshole?

The argument that security researchers are actually doing good is just an unsubstantiated assumption that needs closer scrutiny, and it is quite likely not true in many situations. For example, the SCADA vulnerabilities have not led to any major or even minor problem, yet they have generated a lot of FUD and maybe even given ideas to criminals and terrorists. Researchers have gotten their nice reputation out of this, but what has the world gained? And look at how the credit card industry works. A lot of their shit is fundamentally flawed from a security point of view, yet it works and is quite convenient. How can that be?

Security researchers make a nuisance of themselves in many situations, and don't even realize it. Their "told you so" can be extremely costly to a company when there is trouble, because of how it affects liability issues. Most companies would not be viable if they had to fix every bug unearthed by researchers or face full liability claims when their unfixed code fails. The kind of talent needed to get security stuff right is just not available in the needed quantities at a reasonable price (i.e. hourly rates comparable to that of a janitor) so it is unreasonable to expect things to be secure. The alternative to insecure stuff is no stuff. Everybody who's not a propellerhead knows this.

If you're doing C++ everything by Meyers.

If you are doing C++, you absolutely must read the Frequently Questioned Answers:

It's a little (though not much) out of date, as it does not cover C++11. But the author has some comments on it, too.

Obviously I am going to be modded down, but hey. Truth is truth.

If your Fortran program ran correctly on a PC it would run correctly on a mainframe, mini, or supercomputer. More importantly, it would produce the same result. It didn't matter which compiler you used.

This isn't true. As in C, optimizations might have changed the order of fp operations resulting in subtle differences that often matter. Memory allocation (yes, the static arrays) has some really funny weirdnesses across compilers that make buggy programs produce very different results on different versions of the same compiler. The F77 language has very little support for avoiding bugs, and quite a few booby traps. Most F77 codes are just riddled with bugs and depend on undefined behavior that varies a lot from one compiler to the next.

Just look at all the code generation flags of gfortran to get an idea.

This is a very real problemâ"it's not just some rich people being assholes, but rather some rich people who stand to become substantially less rich if things go the way they seem to be going.

I thought the actual story was that if you or me dislike some policy we can go fuck ourselves, whereas if the Kochs dislike it, they get a real chance to change it.

An oligarchy indeed.

What I also find a little unsettling is that most commenters, including you, don't seem to think much of that power imbalance (or even be aware of it) directly jumping to the solar vs. no solar issue.

3) Start writing alternatives in safer languages

Like Ada.

I expect Ada to make a comeback. It is a safe language, but without the bizarrness of a functional programming language, so it can be used to do actual work.

Your law may not be properly upheld in practice but that does not change the situation of Germany being in the very small club of countries where the art of street photography is effectively illegal or at least very cumbersome.

Yes, and they keep constantly weeping about all the street photography they miss out. Well, actually, they don't. It seems they like their law like that. For some reason, people assume that street photography, or being able to shoot photos of whoever you want, is a right nobody would object to. Well, I do, especially in times of facebook, and it seems I am not alone.

Things like google glass belong, as far as I am concerned, banned, and its use in public places punishable by jail. In the same vein, cell phones should be forbidden from having a camera.

There is this thing with privacy. For some reason, everybody is for it as long as it is not them who have to respect it.

The best tools in the worst hands are far worse than the worst tools in the best hands. Yelling for tools is a specious argument. Someone has to do the work, and that someone may well bone the job.

A similar argument was put forward against the use of seat belts in cars. It just does not hold water.

The point of safer tools is to keep the reasonably good programmers from shooting themselves in the foot. Because as good as they may be, they are human and make mistakes. C needlessly invites a lot of mistakes, and even good programmers fuck up in C all the time.

Again one needs MOTIVATED AND QUALIFIED eyes AAAAAND good QA and test cases.

Perhaps using a safety aware language like Ada would be helpful too. C is known to be brittle, yet people insist in writing all sorts of mission critical code in it. I really wonder why.

The more troubling element of your claim is that regulation somehow solves the problems. What if a regulator makes a mistake?

You make it sound as if regulation was something completely exotic. Regulation actually exists, and there is plenty of it. To answer you question: If regulators make mistakes, they are eventually corrected. Happens all the time.

When it comes to something like donating money to help poor kids, I don't care who is doing it or why.

This is myopic at best. Part of the reason corporations get away with so much is that there exist people who are happy to let them off the hook as soon as they spend a little on charity.

The issue is that by giving a little to poor kids, this behemoth of a company can get away with the continuing destruction of the neighborhoods where there is affordable housing. It really is a PR move that does not solve any problems on a medium to long timescale. It is important to understand that charity is the sort of thing that just perpetrates problems and is only good as a stopgap. It would be much better if things could be aranged in such a way that charity wasn't necessary.

while we can argue the merits of AGW all day long that isnt what I saw here. I saw a smug son of a bitch tell an owner to go fuck himself.

No, the owner went way too far. Being an owner does not entitle you to behave like a pig.

[link] Has some relevant information.

Thanks for the link. I find it especially interesting how careful you need to be to not risk getting robbed. See this email on the bitcoin dev list for some details. Among other things, it permeates that the problems that bit MtGox haven't been solved conclusively.

Clearly, the average person on the street should stay clear of things like bitcoin, because you really have to understand the protocol and know exactly what you are doing. The folks at MtGox surely spent some thought on this, and now look at this fuckup. They are in huge trouble right now.

Do you have a right to an attorney in a constitution-free zone? Do you have any rights at all?

It might be tangentially interesting in this regard that, technically, all of britain is a constituion free zone.

Also, you do not have many rights even outside of those buildings. The UK has been steadily degenerating into a police state out of a SciFi movie.

If you tried before December 21, 2012 that was a pre-release. The 0.17.0 release was on Doomsday.

Well, I tried 0.17.0 and, heck, it managed to freeze my display. That didn't happen to me for years nor did it happen since. And lots of other things kept crashing.

Many of the themes were unmaintained, and the black one that came bundled had this gross faux-racecar aesthetics of a "pimp my ride" episode gone wrong. Well, IMO, anyway. But I didn't manage to get the others working. You could claim that it was my fault, but frankly, I don't think so. And I will not install a special distro just to use WM, because I actually work on my computer.

That said, I'll try again with 0.18.0. The promise of E is too good, even though the realization isnt (IMO).

It's not always laziness. I added outgoing filters to my routers so that it only allowed source addresses from my network. That was great at stopping DOS attacks, but as I found-out the hard way, several of my customers were sending outbound traffic with source addresses not on my network.

Interesting. What where they doing?