"Hey, look what I bought. I used my tax refu--"

And the next thing he knew, he woke up in an alley. His wallet, keys, phone and shoes were missing. For the life of him, he could not figure out why they didn't take his cool new toy.

He didn't say there would be no women. He said there would be no "ladies". Think "Lady Diana"s. He also said there would be no gentleman--but that doesn't mean everybody would be rude. Remember, this is a 19th century reader. The language is a bit different.

our future begins with tomorrow!

According to signs on the wall at several bars I've been to, there will also be free beer.

I'm an Apocalypse speculator. You might think I'd be at the bottom of the list; but we have been in business since ancient times. We're probably in the top 5 oldest professions. The people who run Slashdot are whoring out to something here, so apparently they will do well also.

The setting, a lecture hall in the 23rd century. "Years ago they thought there were limitations on these things. There were even proofs that things could not be measured with certainty. It was thought that transmutation would not be economic, and that the light barrier was unsurmountable".

You're likely to get modded Troll; but this really does remind me a bit of Ford vs. Toyota. For years Ford was fixed in peoples minds as the exploding Pinto company, and Toyota was high quality. Now Toyota isn't what it used to be, and Ford is better... but neither is perfect.

If nothing else this is a good argument against monoculture. We have different systems with different bugs, so it's not a total loss. If the market shares were evenly distributed among 10 different vendors, the black-hat task would be even harder, their impact of success that much less.

All these higher level virtual machines and interpreters are ultimately written in C

And C runs on top of a processor. Intel FPU bug, anyone? IIRC, there were also some suspicions regarding hardware RNGs possibly being back-doored.

There are no silver-bullets, and a corollary to that is that there isn't just one monster you have to kill.

Does he have an Ivy League degree too? Let's make him Pres... oh... crap.

I see this old semantic game blooms anew on Slashdot. "It isn't stealing". Fine. It's fraud. Don't worry that your reputation is shot and/or somebody else is trading on your good name. It isn't stealing. Oh... the victim feels much better now.

Are we going to train them to write PHP

Improv. GO!

... yes, because there aren't enough qualified people here, get them H1B ASAP.

... Backward tribes already use PHP.

... Many of them can only count to 3, so... oh, no problem. Carry on.

... for FacePaintBook?

OK, that's all I've got. Thanks for the setup.

It's not like I've never heard of that. You could file a suit; but I don't recommend doing that until you're close to retirement, have the money, and don't care about ever working in The Valley again.

Well, you seem to be forgetting that we had a system where companies systematically refused to hire people on the basis of race. Even when they were equally or better qualified, no hire. That's why we need to regulate employment on some level. Of course absolute control is bad. Absolute anything is bad.

Bonus points for the first Slashdotter who finds a Mars-shaped rock in Australia. Picture or it didn't happen.

Yes, bounds checking is a hassle in C but throwing out the whole language isn't necessary. We could default to smart pointers and add a new type qualifier for people who want the old behavior. Dangerous code would look like:

int unbound * foo=malloc(1024);

It might be required to have a compiler switch to avoid breaking ABIs that are expecting simple pointers. The bounded pointer would have to be a struct with a slim pointer and a size in it that gets updated whenever the pointer mutates, and raises a signal whenever you add or subtract too much or try to index outside of it. I'm just spintballing. I'm sure there are some detail devils but it doesn't seem impossible or even unworkable. It doesn't sound like an excuse to re-write everything. You could even do something like this as a non-standard extension RIGHT NOW.

For years people complained that C was actually slower than Fortran because of the aliasing problem, and we eventually got the restrict qualifier. So. Don't just dump the whole thing. Fix it.

Yes, but you *can* tell the difference if you play the recordings on the original vinyl with a tube amp. That's how Stradivarius intended his instruments to be heard. He even held the wood close to a fire for a few minutes, to give it that warm sound.