But how is a $548.99 subsidy not illegal dumping?

The impact of this is actually pretty wide. Crypt_blowfish has been gaining popularity as a hashing algorithm in PHP thanks to Openwall's PHPass framework. Four years ago most PHP projects that I know were still using MD5 or SHA1 to hash passwords. Today those MD5 and SHA1 hashes can be brute-force cracked by free software running on a $200 GPU in a matter of days if not hours. So even a buggy version of Blowfish is still better by far.

So yeah, it's a wide-ranging bug but not a world breaking one. For starters it only affects passwords that use 8-bit characters, so passwords typed by anyone using a US-English keyboard still produce the same hashes as the correct Blowfish implementation.

For passwords of length n*4-1 (3, 7, 11, 15, ...), 8-bit characters in certain positions will result in some characters being ignored by the hash function. This makes it possible (though still not easy) to produce a collision, i.e. multiple different passwords that result in the same hash.

It's bad, but I want to stress that using even a buggy crypt_blowfish for password hashing is still a quantum leap over the single-hashed MD5 or SHA1 that you were seeing literally everywhere in the PHP world just a few years ago.

Wide. Many major PHP projects have been moving toward Openwall's PHPass algorithm that uses Blowfish as its preferred hashing algorithm. Note that even with this bug it's still better than the unsalted MD5 or SHA1 hashes that most projects were using previously. Today any of those old hashes can be brute-force cracked by a $200 GPU in about a day.

Let me fix that for you:

The Acid tests are demos, not unit tests of HTML compliance. I would rather see real progress in areas where FF is truly weak (like, say, the crappy SVG renderer) than worry about those last three pips on Acid3.

Except that his story isn't that hard to believe. I can remember busting out 20-page papers overnight when I was in college and I'm not a particularly fast writer. It's easy to imagine that someone with enough practice and motivation could churn out papers like this for a living.

Today I code web applications and I recognize the process he describes. He has essentially built a research paper "framework" that lets him quickly build products that fit a baseline set of requirements. In fact it sounds like he rarely even has to come up with a true finished product, essentially building one proof-of-concept after another. It's amazing how fast you can work when you honestly don't care about the details.

How many code geeks will spends hours and days and weeks over meaningless bullshit projects just because they can? This guy does the same thing with words and he found a way to get paid for it.

Go back and read TFA. I'm saying this not to be an asshole but because it's genuinely fascinating.

The author states that:

* He went to college to be a writer and found out that there's more than one way to get paid for what you write.

* He uses mainly Wikipedia (for background), Amazon for the free pages, and Google Academics for the abstracts. Everything else he spins from educated guesswork and outright bullshit with lots and lots of filler.

* He doesn't edit his work at all, this helps him work faster and heads off requests for him to "dumb it down".

* His clients often thank him for making typos (presumably because it looks more authentic that way).

He's not producing high quality work for top honors, he's producing "good enough" work for the sake of graduating at all. It may pay to get A's but C's get degrees, etc.

I've said for years that not everybody needs a college degree. I would guess (I would hope) that this guy is helping along the raft of mediocre graduates who won't ever really use their degree except as resume fodder. Unfortunately this just devalues college degrees even more so that employers keep on requiring degrees for jobs that don't really need special training.

He's right about one thing, blame the colleges that are more interested in collecting tuition fees than in producing actual, competent scholars.

Proper directions make all the difference.

When I was a kid math classes weren't on different tracks until middle school. Near the end of sixth grade I was given a test to see if I could handle the highest track which taught algebra. But of course, I had never seen algebra before so the test itself had to explain some basic concepts. Which it did. In surprisingly clear and simple language that had me solving for "x" in minutes. Each page introduced a new algebraic concept and I was eating it up.

The test was designed to be more work than a kid could finish in the time limit but I got pretty damn far. The irony is that I spent the next year in a basic algebra class that taught me very little I hadn't already learned from that tracking test.

I wish I still had that test. Whoever wrote it deserved a medal.

If Jimmy doesn't know how to run his WiFi then why is he trying to sell it? I know nothing about coffee; if I tried to sell coffee I would go bankrupt. Even if you "sell" WiFi access for free as a loss leader, it's still a product. Stick to products you understand or hire someone who knows the product you're trying to sell. That's Business 101.

"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" is a wretched book. Nobody but the hardest-core SF geek would give a shit about it today if David Peoples and Ridley Scott hadn't turned it into a movie that was 100x better. So just who is riding who's coattails?

It's not as if only PKD's brilliant, visionary mind could have come up with putting a number after the word "nexus" to make a cool-sounding name.

I finally got tired of the $75/month, the cable box meltdowns every three months (Scientific Atlanta FTL), and the generally craptastic quality of over-compressed video from Brighthouse. Six months ago I told them where to shove it and never looked back. Now I get TV series on DVD from Netflix, occasionally catch a new show on Hulu, and use some good ol' rabbit ears to get my local channels (which look great in over-the-air digital, better than they ever did through the cable).

Screw cable. I'm done with paying for a raft of crap I don't need to subsidize their other businesses. And I'm certainly done with their obsessive consumer lock-in.