I programmed professionally for 20+ years and have written code installed on over a billion devices and used every day. I found that software engineers are either excellent programmers in every language or half assed if every language.

The simple fact is, language is irrelevant. Computer science is computer science in any language

Do you mind if I mock your attempt to suggest that a phone which is is probably several million lines of code developed by a company which has a relatively small user base on the new code base and just hasn't been a real hacking target yet is secure?

The old Blackberry might have been secure if for no other reason than it was a glorified PDA without the ability to do much of anything dynamic. The new version is based on QNX makes heavy use of message passing APIs (which I personally have evaluated the code for and will agree that part is secure. At least in transit) but will be coded for by developers who will focus on usability and functionality which will require their apps to become subscribers to many message pipes and eventually will become sources for information which they didn't originate and therefore will become backdoors in the phone allowing pretty much any other program to hack the data when the user really only permitted access to that data to the one app.

QNX IS NOT a UNIX, it is mostly POSIX. It is an embedded real-time operating system. It has a pretty interesting scheduler and I'd love to poke around to see how they managed to get a real time OS to pretend to be a suitable end user OS (a hell of a task if it worked).

Please also understand that sand boxing is only interesting so long as we don't want information to cross between apps. In truth we do. And we want apps to communicate. Therefore it doesn't matter if the OS is the most secure OS on the planet, as soon as you add third party apps and users that use them, security is shot to hell.

As for basic security of the OS, like "Can someone hack it from the internet" or "Can someone hack into from physical access?". The answers are simple. Yes and yes. We may not know how, but if anyone gave a shit about Blackberry, it wouldn't be that hard. I would of course just abuse social engineering instead as it's far simpler, but I have actually hacked a Samsung using a black light on the screen just moments after the user hung up a phone call. It left a lovely smudge in the shape of the password from the fingers tracing it.

Quit talking security as if it's even possible. Especially with the "my system is so secure and yours isn't", paranoia is good and believing that your phone can and will be hacked keeps your nudie pictures off the web.

Damn you... beat me to it<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:)

Who needs a virus when you have new channels run by idiots, staffed by idiots and feeding their opinions to masses of idiots?

SpaceshipTwo builds demand and interst to be able to fly to space. Rich people are often famous people and when they're all taking a fabulous roller coaster ride and making it sound amazing, then everyone will want to.

The Apollo program failed because no one gave a shit after a while. This is a way to build interest in spending to go back. If a few people die doing it, I would be surprised if it will stop the momentum of getting this going.

It was a test flight. Pilots die in test flights all the time. That's a risk of being a test pilot. It's their job to be the idiots who try things out before sending other people up.

Because when you need to have it, a proper credit card give things like insurance and also handles theft protection more gracefully.

On the other hand, you could say that it could be 250% interest and as long as you set it up for auto-pay at the end of the month, it doesn't matter. No one actually says you have to spend more than you can afford. But it doesn't hurt to use a tools which gives you better consumer protection.

Two years ago in Strasbourg France, I ordered McDonalds breakfast for me and my kids on a computer.

Burger King has had iPhone ordering for ages in many European countries.

I think it has taken this long in the U.S. Because it would be too hard to find competent people to deal with computer problems.

That's "Free thinking". Critical thinking requires actual thought. Free thinking let's you spout the crap other people say as scripture

The article is as bad as the summary :/

I read the whole thing and can safely say I gained absolutely nothing by reading it.

Did you seriously just use TCP as an example of what will limit downloads? Honesty... I though we were done with this silliness.

TCP is for little thingies. UDP based file transfer protocols with more intelligent mechanisms are the solution as always.

To be fair, I'm entirely in favor of men and women being equal in all ways which are logical. This means that I think it's nice to be able to pee standing up but I don't see the point in purchasing devices for my daughter to do the same. I also don't have any person urges to experience menstruation or pregnancy. I do think however that for air conditioning purposes, wearing a kilt might not be too bad.

I remember a friend of mine in the early 90s being fired and sued by his company for the fact that he was legitimately researching in a newspaper and the back page of the section he was reading had a full page J.C. Penny lingerie advertisement. A complaint was filed against him for sexual harassment and intentional objectification of women in the work place. Nothing came of it, but he had trouble getting a new job after this.

I know of many teenagers who play video games on the Internet who would likely fall victim to the fact that they lack the elocution when expressing themselves which these measures would enforce.

Also, as an example of an extremely narrow mind, she is thinking in terms of a single government and single country. There are at least 100 countries where measures would have to be implemented to enforce the same standards the U.S. introduced to manage harassment in the workplace. Let's not forget that anonymity is much easier to achieve online.

I think it's best to consider that it should be more easily possible for people to block and report each other on online services.

Isn't Orion a space craft being made by the crooks at Boeing, Lockheed and the other losers who rape the shit out of tax payers, intentionally underbid projects and run decades and billions over budget and laugh at us?

NASA should not be allowed to commission their own spacecraft since the laws currently in place force them to choose contractors like those crooks to build their space craft and when was the last time any of them actually built anything that wasn't a royal heap of shit?

Storage is hardly the issue. Most companies won't have anywhere near a petabyte to move.

The real problem is whether PaaS or SaaS will screw you. If all your data is written to run on a platform which is closed (AWS, Google...) you're utterly screwed. Cloud software is also never updated like proper applications. Improvements are made incrementally and if AWS went tits up, even if you manage to get a copy of the hosting platform, you'll be stuck with whatever bugs were in the last build.

IaaS isn't too bad, but otherwise Cloud is just a BAD idea.

I am have released documents and designs for quite a few technologies in the past. This is a topic which has always interested me, though I simply am not interested in building a business making these robots. Have drawings for multiple designs that when used in conjunction can handle most picking related issues. I will not likely enter this competition. The cost of entering is too high and has too big of a risk walking away without my expenses covered.

I think $100,000 first prize, $50,000 second and $20,000 third would have peeked my interest. But $20,000 for a first prize just isn't enough bother with.

I regularly need to convert from ancient Egyptian cubits which I was lucky enough to learn about in grade school. We should always learn the different unit measures in primary school. They're simple enough. It's not like it takes even a tiny bit of intelligence to understand how to convert.

Of course... in engineering and sciences, we already use metric across the board. It's in daily life which the simpler imperial measure system makes sense. I live in Europe and grew up in the States. I've never been confused by measurements in either, but when I cook, instead of measuring 450grams (my scale isn't that good) I simply grab a chunk of meat which is a pound. It's a proper size for cooking. I also use a cup of water or milk.

Honestly, I know a A LOT of people who moved to America and had no problem with American standard measure and I know many who moved from America or England who had no problem with metric. I just don't see how knowing both is a problem.