Another suggestion... Have H1B's auctioned, rather than being free. The more you're willing to pay, the greater chance you have of getting an H1B. Break ties in the last price tranche by lottery. Then we'll see what they're really worth and see if it's really worth the price to society.

I'm assuming the MPAA spent good money creating their stupid protocols too; from the Content Scramble System to HDCP.

Spoken out of true ignorance.

Obscurity doesn't work for *any* form of security; someone will figure it out and then it will be broken.

Good security can be published and peer reviewed and is *still* secure.

The only thing that should be obscure is your encryption key.

QFT ... that's all.

And I'm not just talking about creating new ciphers. Even when I go to them with novel requirements that seem to demand some sort of new construction using existing algorithms and techniques, the very first thing they do is go to the literature to see what has been done, how long it's been in use, how widely it's been reviewed and analyzed, etc. The less knowledgeable (like me, frankly, though I'm getting better) tend to start by cooking up some new scheme. Real experts avoid that if at all possible, and if they have to do something new they look really hard at how they can prove its security by reducing it to known constructions.

I reiterate: No one who knows what they're doing creates new crypto for production work.

'Nuff said. The folks able to keep up with rapid attention shifts will survive. Those who take longer? They'll die sooner and breed less. Pretty soon, we'll "evolve" to the point where we'll al ride around in personal mobility units with our view of the real world is through a single sensor protruding in front of us, after which it'll be a short step to fully enclosed climate controlled pods.

Then, when our evolutionary perfection is achieved, we can crush The Doctor and destroy all other imperfect sentient beings in the universe.

Dear Microsoft...

What the letter above said is that he "doesn't like the Firefox (or Chrome) model for updates". I personally have no trouble with it. He seems to want to leave you all behind, anyway.

Sure, I have a love-hate relationship with you, but it's better than the pure irritation and hatred that seems to ooze from the above letter. He must be a system administrator or something broken like that to hate you so much.

I wouldn't pay much attention to him.

even though I couldn't name a single line of code he taught us that year.

Well, I remember some code from my first programming class (in FORTRAN!):

I = I + 1

Man, I remember it like it was yesterday!

"Business users will have the option to set their own update cycle, so they can see if any of the patches accidentally break anything for home users before trying them out."

Stripping away the spin, updates will come out as soon as they're ready (which is probably a good thing on the whole), and business users will have to test and deploy them at that time, whenever it happens, rather than having a monthly scheduled day to do so.

That "option to set their own update cycle" spin is nonsense. If you do that, every single security fix Microsoft ever rolls out goes public days or weeks before you get it -- like what happens when a zero-day goes public and it takes Microsoft several days or weeks to get the fix out, but it'll be like that for you for every single security update ever. Yeah, no, that is not the way any reasonable large business is going to handle it.

This means effectively, if you are a large company, you will really need to have people on call or otherwise available every day in case an update comes out. But, in 2015, are there any large businesses left that *don't* already have IT people on the clock every day? I see this as Microsoft catching up with the reality that at this point large businesses *do* have IT people on staff full time -- they *have* to have them -- and everyone, including the large businesses, is put unnecessarily at risk when security updates that are ready to roll out are held back to wait for a certain day of the month. It does mean occasionally an IT department's going to have to reschedule a day full of department meetings and team-building exercises to test and deploy an update that just came out, but it's worth it.

So it's the right thing to do, but Microsoft's spin is so much nonsense.

... it's the Republican Primary, they dream of finding someone qualified to manage an Arby's.

Why? They've got Herman Cain - he managed a Godfather's Pizza!

And whom I expect to be announcing in 15... 14... 13... Look out, baby, the clown car's getting even more fullerer!

The problem is that, even if the students there at the time are gone and have been replaced by noobs who have no history, the staff and faculty were still there, still remember, and are in charge of the grinding the wheels of justice. People who put out stupid messages should remember that.

Do you count scheme and clojure? If so, that's nine or so...

You should move to Galion. You'd be happy here. We're under some kind of exotic grandfather clause from Hell that has prevented us from ever joining the twentieth century and getting fluoride in our water, even to this day. So we don't have it.

And actually, if you can get past the crazy high dental bills and somewhat low educational standards, Galion *is* a fairly nice place to live, in many other respects.

Better than 14/86? Maybe 20/80? Or is that too much for you?

There's no such thing as 'water proof' -- everything is simply water resistant up to a certain level, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

You live on the equator?