The title (of both the slashdot post and the original article) is misleading.

The article cites one Eugene Spatford who observes that, "software makers churn out products riddled with vulnerabilities." That's not the security industry's fault.

He goes on to tell us that law enforcement is inadequately equipped and that criminals protect themselves by bribing government officials. That's not the security industry's fault either.

Of the tools the security industry does use regularly he says that, "We’re using all these tools on a regular basis because the underlying software isn’t trustworthy." Again that's not the security industry at fault.

And the solution?

"... an investment in computer programming education and a major move by software manufacturers to embed software security concepts early into the development process."

Sounds reasonable to me. Also sounds like a task for the software development community generally, NOT just those specialising in security.

... it's just the way people use it.

Perl was designed as a powerful, flexible, loosely typed scripting language for munging text files and streams, and that's exactly what it is.

It's great for those scripts that you write for a particular task and never use again after the few days it was necessary. It's also good for writing glue code on occasion, to tie the inputs and outputs of other applications together, and when shell scripting just won't quite cut it.

The trouble was that it was such a useful scripting language people started writing applications in it. Then they had to jump on the object-oriented bandwagon, which was done clumsily. Sort of like gluing a dog to your horse so it can fetch. And yes, it can be difficult to read, but it doesn't have to be.

Use Perl for the tasks it was originally designed for. If you're going to write real applications, use a more appropriate language. Don't kick your dog because he can't sing.

There have been serious studies of the reliability of wikipedia as a reference compared with the Encyclopedia Britannica at least.

Although I am aware of irony of Wikipedia as a reference for the reliability of Wikipedia...

Interesting. Illinois police certainly do have a repuation. I'm not actually from the U.S.A. but nevertheless Amnesty International sends me emails about petitions such as this one about the Chicago police .

Sorry if that looks like a shameless plug for Amnesty International (well I guess it is) but WTH, they do good work.

The bar itself is illusory. Intelligence is not a discrete quantized quality, and certainly not binary in nature. It's a continuum. There won't be a point in time where "real" artificial intelligence is created.

One day we will stop arguing whether true artificial intelligence can be created and start arguing about when it happened.

Nor has he shown that books are not fungible. He has only shown that books are not necessarily fungible between titles. (Of course even that is debatable, as it depends on the personal sensibilities of the consumer.) Two copies of the same book are clearly fungible. This is implicit in the fact that Amazon sells "the same book" to two different people in two separate transactions. Presumably the two readers don't care which book rolled off the press first.

This is the most blatant straw-man argument I have ever seen. You don't target the actual study named in the story, but some nebulous cloud of "... majority of [all] criticisms."

You imply this is a criticism of intervention policy generally.

It is not. It is a specific criticism of the current use of drones as a strategy.

And finally I take issue with your assertion that a criticism should be required to suggest an alternative.

I am wearing a dead toad around my neck to ward off the plague. You argue that all available statistical evidence shows that wearing dead toads has no effect on whether or not a person will contract the plague.

The fact that you don't provide an alternative to dead toads doesn't change the fact that my dead toad is completely ineffective.