One of the sponsors of the Secret Science Reform Act was Rep. Paul Broun from Georgia. Here's what he's had to say on that topic:

He does want a "faith based approach to law making", but at least he's been "forthright about it".

That would outlaw double-blind studies.

Smart article yes, but it's still incredibly stupid to buy a lottery ticket.

Unless you think it's fun to play. Idle daydreaming about what you'd do if you won; the excitement as the numbers are called; the rollercoaster of emotion as you realize you may win - no you won't - oh but you did get a small price.

It's only stupid if you see it as an investment. See it as entertainment and it's no more dumb than paying to watch a movie.

Yeah I can see Linux being important, I just didn't think companies put much stock in the certifications themselves, vs. work experience or interviews or other such screening methods. There was a period in the '90s when certs were a big deal, Microsoft's MSCE and Certified Novell Administrator and Cisco's CCNA and whatever, but in the 2000s the certs started being more ignored, at least in my experience, b/c they weren't that reliable a demonstration that the employee was actually any good. Maybe they're back, or the RHEL ones are taken more seriously?

It works for bombs and tanks, but not for computer networks and communications. It might have even worked in the time of telegraphs and snail mail letters. But for encryption, it doesn't work. A cipher is either weak, or strong. You can compromise a foreign postal system without affecting the security of your own, but you can't secretly build a backdoor into an encryption algorithm that works only for you.

Now you're trying to reverse the chain of causality just to make a cute finishing sentence. :-)

the almost-death of Blackberry may help Microsoft somewhat here. Microsoft's strongest market is basically "business", mostly traditional business that isn't "hip" enough to be using Apple products. People who want nice Exchange integration, connections with Office 365, etc. Previously that market was totally sewn up by Blackberry, but as they're collapsing Microsoft might grab some of that market.

Well, the majority of web-facing servers anyway. According to Netcraft, about 30% of servers run Windows/IIS, and just about all the rest run either Apache/Linux or nginx/Linux (plus a few running *BSD, of course).

I can see companies caring about Linux expertise; after all, the vast majority of servers run Linux, so if you're hiring for someone doing devops you probably want them to know their way around Linux. But 44% prefer people with "Linux certification"? I know some companies care about stuff like RHEL certifications, but I didn't think it was that many.

Everyone knows about the evil bit. That's what prompted me to write the bracket remark. But it's not quite the same as a "we're from the NSA, nothing to see here" flag.

What's with the clickbait headlines? By itself, the headline is total BS. The actual statement made, however, is spot on. The hole in your security doesn't care who exploits it. There's no "good guy" flag in IP headers (though I'm sure some April 1st RFC will soon introduce it).

What worries me most is that we could win this fight, if it weren't for our own governments deciding to betray us. There are vastly more people interested in secure communication and other people not being able to spy on or subvert our computers and mobile devices than there are people interested in compromised communications and systems (basically only criminals and some deluded, criminal-if-the-laws-were-right elements of governments).

There is just one problem to Bruce's argument: The largest and most powerful spy agency in the world disagrees with his fundamental assumption. We often forget that the NSA has two missions, and they are exactly the two things that Bruce argues cannot co-exist: To secure the computing infrastructure of the US against foreign espionage, and to provide espionage on foreign communication.
The NSA believes, and/or is tasked with exactly these two things that Bruce says (and I agree) are mutually exclusive. No surprise they've gone rogue, their very mission statement is a recipe for a mental breakdown through cognitive dissonance.

Doesn't it depend a lot on what you refactor, when and how?

I have 3 year old code that I would like to refactor because I've since switched framework (from CodeIgniter to Symfony 2) and it would bring it in line with all my other projects, allowing me more easy code-reuse and not maintaining two frameworks both on servers and in my mind. But it's largely a convenience factor and I would agree that it will probably not improve code quality very much.

But I also have 12+ year old code written in plain PHP with my own simple database abstraction layer. I'm quite certain that refactoring that would do a world of good.