Yes.

I don't know. It seems to me that even an FPS needs a good plot. Or perhaps the whole genre has declined and not just the plots. I've recently got a free copy of Battlefield 4 with my new graphics card and to me the SP campaign felt like a completely broken and ridiculous sequence of cheap graphics effects. It was just stupid from the start to the end. Compare that to HL2, which had an interesting plot and good, challenging game play. To be honest, I find myself enjoying Arma 3 more than any recent FPS even though I get killed in Arma all the time. I did enjoy Max Payne 3, though.

Even I can do basic math, and I'm a fairly stupid monkey.

Because, you know: If somebody could produce a massive EMP blackout in the US, he could just as well nuke Los Angeles. So it's best to spend trillions of dollars on nuclear shelters now. And constructing a doomsday world destruction device might also be a good idea, because this would act as a deterrent against the terrorists ...

Still works like a charm (and still a bit slow, hehehe).

You talk like a real social scientist there ...

He's sooooo wrong. Every fucking moron on earth should have the right to own a gun! A rail-gun ... and mini-nukes that come with a free backpack!

Watch Snowpiercer - good movie.

I do somewhat disagree with the "insightful" moderation of your post, but also don't care, because I'm not coming to /. very often. Anyway, I feel the need to make a few corrections, since most of what you write about Ada is misleading:

1. It's written "Ada" not "ADA" (The language is named after the first name of Ada Lovelace)

2. Nobody has ever claimed that Ada is a "magic bullet", especially not people who program in Ada. ;-) Ada has its quirks and many annoying features and if you head to comp.lang.ada and ask the (few) people there whether you should use it for project X, they will give you some fairly honest and reasonable assessment - I've seen the answer "not really" come up whenever that makes sense. (Ada seems to be overkill for traditional end-user GUI applications, for example

3. There is no reason to believe that programming a library in Ada would make it obsolete, as long as a proper interface to C is provided - which is very easy. I readily admit that there are problems with the licensing of the GNAT runtime system, though, as it is GPL or MGPL only.

4. Ada source code is always more readable than C source code, provided that you know both languages equally well, of course.

5. Ada can, of course, create libraries with parameter passing conventions compatible with C and callable from C. (To get all benefits of Ada you need a small runtime system, though.)

6. Programming in Ada does not take more time than programming in C. (Actual measurements have indicated the opposite, but let's not get into such details which are always contestable. Let's just say that both Ada and C are both at the slow side of the range.)

7. Ada and Spark were merely meant as examples, but ones I know well enough to be sure about the example.

8. I'm not claiming that C cannot be used safely, but only after an extensive and expensive validation phase (using automatized tools and code review), and for that reason alone it should never be the #1 choice for safety and security critical applications.

I agree with you that many people who talk about a "safe" language have "managed" languages with automated garbage collection in mind, but that many of these languages are not safe at all, nor is dynamic memory allocation a desirable feature in that context. But 30 years experience or not, your claim that security does not hinge on the choice of language is just not true. The language and its implementation (+compiler test suites and validation) are an important part of the overall security and safety. So are management, validation and testing tools, the skills of the programmers, etc., of course.

Why not? At least you should try to give some reasons!

Obviously? Again, care to give any reasons? Why allegorical? It's not at all obvious, especially since shortened != allegorical, concise != allegorical, abstract != allegorical, and so forth. Why should a god dictate us the history of the universe and additionally shroud it in mystery up to about the highest level possible? It makes no sense!

We're in the 21 Century and you are still figuring out ways how to interpret phrases like "women were really created by a rib surgically removed from the first man" along the lines of "people should act this way" (what way? like spare ribs?)? No offense, but you "modern, moderate, feelgood" Christians really make me shake my head.

"superior level"???

Why not talk about about the great Matma, an inferior level, the mysterious Wumpus, or the Flying Spaghetti monster instead?

You're right that skills are very important, of course, but the language matters a lot. OpenSSL would have far less bugs if it had been written in Ada with critical sections in Spark and some formal validation, for example.

There is no perfect programming language for all purposes and languages are more or less suited for different purposes. Beware the language aficionado who has an excuse for every deficiency of his favorite language ...

And there it is, the proverbial premature optimization ...

Wait a minute! Didn't they say 'nearly unbreakable'?

That implies it's breakable. :-)

How do you know that? Clairvoyance?

For all we know by now it's possible and not implausible to assume that MITM attacks are conducted routinely by various intelligence agencies across the world. SSL is broken. You should not rely solely on CAs anymore. Use physically delivered security tokens (such as encrypted random data on a USB stick) and/or the trust model of ssh instead.