God damnit! What's Gordon done this time?!

As a developer currently working on a project involving an ID card reader, I think this problem *could* maybe be solved with some clever and secure electronic signature infrastructure. I don't know how it is in other countries, but here in Belgium our ID cards allow us to digitally sign documents of all sorts.
It's very much used for tax-papers, in particular, and from a technological point-of-view, I don't think it's unreasonable to build an identification infrastructure for social networks around this.
The obvious privacy issue could be addressed if the verification entity was independent and trustful, much like we see Certification Authorities (CA) for SSL. These authorities migt then be trusted to only hand out the age of an individual signing up for the account. This would, in effect, act like an age barrier.

I'm pretty sure that we're going to be seeing this technology go very very far. In the future, I see invisible displays in regular glasses and contacts lenses, and microscopic sensors and CPU's, also invisible to the naked eye. It may be scary, but it's coming.

This is something that should be handled by his superior. It's his superior's job to slap him on the wrist if he moans about code reviews and doesn't take being up to date seriously. In my experience, management that doesn't have the guts or skills for straightforward communication is one of the worst obstacles to efficiency.

I disagree. The human brain model is a realistic and useful project. In fact, modelisation has always been a very active field in computer science.

Actually, that's good point. On the topic of videogames, I wonder if a very engaging virtual reality would be able to counter this.

I picture this very similarly in my head.

Indeed, it seems weird, but understandable. I can only talk from what I know; ie. Qt development. There, it's technically possible, but often advised against for anything bigger than trivial fixes. It's common to have more than one maintainer of a given functionality for that reason. However, sometimes, a subject simply lacks the necessary manpower of knowledgeable-enough folk for efficient cross reviewing. The maintainer is given a certain amount of *trust*. Not sure about this, but I think reviewing maintainer submissions would simply create too much of an overhead in a project the size of Linux.

You hit the nail on the head. Another blablablahhh story on slashdot. It's called cooperation people, you can't expect 100+ developers to efficiently work on seceral projects interchangeably without coding standards. And no, it's not the role of the text editor/IDE, it's part of the job.

Just for your reading pleasure, Google's cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://synesthesiam.com/?p=218

Just wait for war to break out in Korea, Samsung will be facing down pretty quickly!

Would be nice if Slashdot was a little more international sometimes... :)

If he really was computer-litterate, he would have known that a hammer is less effective than overwriting his drive two dozen times with trash... cops wouldn't have a chance, IMO.

everyone read about this yesterday, slashdot... :(