First: In-Q-Tel is the venture capital arm of all of the U.S. intelligence services, including DHS, FBI, etc; not just CIA. DHS, for example, will be blamed for any big security disaster; you should not presume that the motives of the agencies are uniform. Nor is all of what those agencies do bad.... It's the pervasive surveillance we *must* stop, and compromising our security standards. See: https://www.iqt.org/about-iqt/ for In-Q-Tel rather than the Wikipedia entry for Dan.

Second: Dan has never taken a security clearance, over his entire career.

Third: He's actually not a In-Q-Tel employee, but a consultant (full time) for them. This is so that he does *not* have to sign a employee agreement, but can remain able to speak freely. Which he does regularly: See http://geer.tinho.net/pubs for some of his publications. One I sparked him to write recently is: http://geer.tinho.net/geer.lawfare.15iv14.txt in reaction to the information I cover in my Berkman Center talk you can find at: https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2014/06/gettys

Fourth: people who know Dan, who is really one of the founders of the computer security field, hold him in very high regard and trust, as I do.

If you look at Dan Geer's career, rather than jumping to unfounded, ill informed presumptions based on news reports that don't bother to go beyond reading the Wikipedia entry, you will find:
    1) he managed the development of Kerberous at Project Athena (where I got to know him)
    2) he co-authored the famous Microsoft is a dangerous monoculture paper a bit over a decade ago (which Microsoft hated so much they
          got @Stake to fire him.
    3) he is a holder of the USENEX Flame award https://www.usenix.org/about/flame

In short, guys, he's one of "us"....

Don't be ill-informed slashdotters....

The value of something isn't tied to it's ease of duplication, at all. Property is not the only lens by which to view value. For example, property rights are not in play if I hire someone to clean my garage.

I don't know if you can. In the real world, duplicating objects is impossible. However, duplicating information in computers is essentially free. Therefore, I'm not sure that simulating the notion of "property rights" on a computer even makes sense. It certainly doesn't make sense if it costs DRM to achieve it.

The means by which they revoke permissions after the time limit must be transparent. DRM fails to meet this criteria.

Building a business model around time limits requires you to take rights away from the consumer. You can't justify online video "rentals" if they cannot be built transparently.

I'd say the killer feature is pure remote management. You don't need to physically manage your systems anymore.

I'm the opposite. I can't stand lacking the ability to dig in and change software when I don't like the way it works. It's rare that I actually do, but there's a huge freedom I get from knowing that when I need to extend the software, I can.

It's common for commercial software to not do what I want it to, either. I'd love to have a working amazon instant video client for my Android phone.

I think the alternative minimum tax kicks in at some point and imposes a (hefty) flat tax structure.

Crusade : Babylon 5 :: Frasier : Cheers

Babylon 5 ended at the finale of season 4. Not sure what you're talking about :)

I think you're confusing "other stories set in the same universe as the show Babylon 5" with "addendums to the story of the show Babylon 5"

Right, most programmers aren't that great; there's a bell curve. When you encounter a poor programmer who dooesn't have a degree, you might be inclined to think that's why. I'll see your anecdotes and raise you one: I once saw a guy with a PHD in comp sci write a single 10,000+ loc function.

At some point in your career, everyone is their own snowflake. I'm never going to compete against a candidate that is my equal in every other way but has a degree.

I'm fortunate to be a programmer, though, because it's one of the few industries that has woken up and seen what a worthless institution our higher education system has become.

Cleaning the grounds out of a french press is awful. The aeropress completely fixes that problem.

My intention wasn't to be partisan at all, actually. I just noticed how goofy political "philosophies" seem when we set them aside for a minute. It didn't come across in my post, for sure. I should really edit before I submit next time.