Disabling the security check is a bad idea though. It's just better to run all your malware in userspace. :)

You should not have to choose between using 3rd party hardware and having a secure system.

It's nowhere near as hard as you're claiming. Those are bad practices even if you only ever intend to run on Windows. And .NET has had portable ways to do these things since version 1.0, and always encouraged their use.

To me the correct, portable code looks easier to read and write. You don't have to check if directoryname already has a trailing seperator, for example. The Path APIs will also handle .. (and ~/ on linux).

In practice there are only a handful of things you need to know to write portable code in .NET. It was always designed to be cross-platform.

There is no interpreter -- .NET code is never interpreted. The output of the C# compiler is CIL (Common Intermediate Language), which is akin to the output of the front end of the LLVM compilers (called IR "Intermediate Representation"). (note: .NET is older than LLVM)

In both .NET and LLVM, the intermediate language is not suitable for interpretation. It is always translated into native machine instructions before execution. In .NET that can either be at runtime (JITed) or install time (NGENed).

I'm simplifying of course. They don't need to write an interpreter, they need to write a back-end and port the runtime components.

Also, I don't think there's much if any C/C++ left in it, it's C# all the way down.

Give it a little time, you won't like your kids either.

I totally agree. I've conducted dozens of interviews for software engineers. I couldn't hire a black developer if my life depended on it -- I've never had a black candidate. I know the recruiters aren't to blame -- they're desperate for qualified candidates. There were no black people in my university classes either. The dearth of women in IT gets plenty of headlines, but I've known lots of women programmers, including 3 bosses over the years. In my entire career, I've only ever known one black programmer.

It must start long before high school.

That is just categorically wrong, in any industry. It's laughable in the software industry where getting and keeping employees is one of the biggest challenges.

You obviously don't work in the software industry. Employers not only tolerate all kinds of non productive things, they actively encourage them. Software engineers are treated like spoiled, geeky royalty.

OK, now I know you don't work in software engineering. Or any engineering. Trying to convince our employer to do things that are less profitable but more interesting is what we do.

I think it's a myth that people aren't learning C. I interview a lot of devs, many just out of college. Most of them know C/C++. They may be more comfortable with Java/C#/whatever, but they at least know C++ syntax and understand the memory model, etc. It would make no sense for universities to ignore C/C++, if for no other reason than the huge amount of code out there in those languages that you may need to understand. Kids in CS these days are still writing their own compilers, toy OSs and memory managers.

High level languages are more productive, no doubt about that, so it makes sense to learn them. But lower level knowledge is not made obsolete. You're still better off knowing C/C++ and some machine-level things, at least enough to read the code, understand a stack trace, memory dump, single step through compiled code, etc. So learning the high level tools is in addition to the traditional tools, not instead of them.

Yeah, I miss the days when we coders worked closer to the metal, calling getelementid directly instead of using some high level abstraction like jquery.

I'll second that. I've been coding professionally for almost 20 years. Even done some assembly. Yes the tools are much better and more is automated, but the amount you need to know is only growing, and the expectations have never been higher. I don't think the automation is even keeping up actually. Making software is not getting easier.

True enough, but that says nothing about what kinds of processing can be realized in either. There are so many layers of abstraction between the brain and the mind that it doesn't make sense to say that minds are made of neurons. Minds are made of abstract things which are made of abstract things, (which are... etc, etc), which are eventually made of neurons. But they could eventually be made of transistors, what does it matter how the bottom few layers work?

They're just playing the game that's being played, they all do it. For example: Apple's Tax Strategy
They'd be incompetent if they didn't. You can order your own tax sandwich here (pdf)

Oops, I guess I did imply that. I just meant that their are good reasons why the tax code is complicated, and that shouldn't prevent the taxation of intellectual property. The whole system needs massive reform anyway; companies that own a lot of IP already put them in holding companies and then licence them back to themselves.

Hmm.... Maybe they should do this with intellectual property.

The owner of intellectual property would be taxed based on a value the owner specifies annually. The government would have the option to purchase it for that amount, perhaps with an added premium. If the property is sold, the purchaser is taxed initially based on what they paid. Licences & royalties would be limited based on the taxed value.

I was about to say maybe this would be too complicated to get right... then I remembered our tax code.

Found a nice simple explanation of how this works here. There is a secret somewhere that isn't compromised, but it is ephemeral and isn't ever stored anywhere or transmitted. So that's what you meant by "long term". It's very clever. Makes perfect sense now, but it's counterintuitive, at least to me.

Anyway, thanks. I learned something new, which is why I still come to /.

I can't wrap my head around that. The way you've described it, it isn't possible, unless the original intended recipient also can't decrypt it. There must be at least one secret somewhere that isn't compromised (the recipient's private key maybe).

BTW, does your sig ever get you modded redundant? :)