It's Apple that have "forgotten" to port Hypercard. They are probably sorry that anybody still remembers it, since it doesn't fit their new business model.

It's a pity really. I think that that programming model (or something similar) would fit the phone/tablet quite well.

And yes, the subsidiary would owe Microsoft $0. But, unless Microsoft passed on the source code and build environment to me, they don't get the "Clause 1" exemption, and are liable under "Clause 2". Or are you talking about the "as written by Microsoft" version of the liability laws?

"multiple offsite backups" aren't the problem. A single "onsite" copy would have served in this case. A pocket-sized USB drive would apparently have held all the data, recent home PC drives could have held multiple copies, for very little cost.

Do you have a reference for that? I'd really like to have a look at it.

As long as I get to define "Crazy".

Non-Crazy hybrid clones are obviously OK.

Like many coders, I thought you were supposed to calculate Hash(password + salt).

I've never seen anyone suggest Hash(password + username + salt) as an option. Is this something that the security industry has shown to be ineffective long ago, and I have just missed it?

To me this looks like it would stop two users with the same password getting the same hash (assuming the salt is system wide, not per user) and make it harder to replace the hash with a known one and get a known password.

If I'm running a mid size company and I hire an ad agency that gets paid for referrals (and it's a fly by night LLC), I'm really venerable now. I guess the anti-spam crowd will tell me not to hire a fly-by-night, but don't most successful businesses start that way? And how am I suppose to know?

If you realy were venerable then I would hope you would know better than to leave yourself vulnerable to a lawsuit by hireing dodgy contractors.

I wonder how many "little deaths" would be needed to satisfy the license?
Or maybe each "little death" gets you a limited time to use the software?
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_Mort

Just be carefull not to wear them inside out.

That's not how Public Key encryption generally works.

Encrypting something via Public Key system is slow, so what is generally done is a random key (128bit/256bit/1024bit/whatever) is generated, and some other system like IDEA/Blowfish/etc is used to encrypt the file with this random key. Then the random key itself is encrypted using the Public Key, and included in the output file (or this may be done first).

Encrypting the same file twice with PGP/GPG will result in different encrypted files. Here is what I got when I encrypted the same file twice:

$ ls -l whycopyrightdoc.ogg*
-rw-r--r-- 1 xxxx users 444876583 2008-12-09 16:27 whycopyrightdoc.ogg
-rw-r--r-- 1 xxxx users 442961134 2009-02-27 13:38 whycopyrightdoc.ogg.gpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 xxxx users 442961133 2009-02-27 13:33 whycopyrightdoc.ogg.gpg.1

$ cksum whycopyrightdoc.ogg*
2090966688 444876583 whycopyrightdoc.ogg
909254713 442961134 whycopyrightdoc.ogg.gpg
121574791 442961133 whycopyrightdoc.ogg.gpg.1