Set a timer for 24 hours. Until that timer expires, attempt to determine if the code is malicious, or not malicious.
If you determine the code is or is not malicious, cease testing the code.
If you determine the code is not malicious, or if the timer expires with no decision either way about the code, release the villainess.
If you determine the code is malicious and the villainess is still in custody, do not release her, and notify the proper authorities to try her for her crimes.
If you determine the code is malicious and the villainess is no longer in custody, notify the authorities to have her found, arrested, and tried.

Habeas Corpus and Innocent Until Proven Guilty.

The authors started with a conclusion they wished to reach, and found pretty much the most absurd possible argument that seemed to justify their desired outcome.

"The current panic around Ebola shows how people are ill-informed about risk. While stressing over Ebola, the media is oblivious to true public health threats like obesity, heart disease, drunk driving, diabetes, and the like."

Nonsense.

The media are focusing on Ebola because it is a relatively *unknown* risk for most, which makes it novel, which makes it news. They have extensively covered all of the other risks, and the public are generally well informed of the risks - or as informed as they are individually capable of being informed without one-on-one tutoring or coaching.

Why not just merge the Start menu and the desktop once and for all, with all the best features of both?
Hold down the Windows key to instantly hide all but the desktop.

Basically like clicking in the lower right corner on Win7, but much faster, while bringing in some of the UI features from Win8.

Get rid of the various "hover/slide in from the edge" Win8 conventions - put those options on the desktop.

Make the task bar default visible only on the Desktop (optionally always visible, of course).
For touch, keep a transparent Start button hovering in the lower left - hold touch on it if you don't have a Windows key/button to show the desktop.
Apps could request true full screen to get rid of the button, of course.

It sounds like this sort of thing takes a scale of resources to accomplish that wouldn't be used idly.

So why are we hearing about a lot of cracks lately that get huge amounts of payment information, but apparently don't lead to massive numbers and dollars of thefts from accounts?

Is someone testing experimental weapons for a future cyber war that would aim to create enough financial chaos to crash our economy?
Or conversely, is there a secret government project to deliberately crack corporate financial systems, to scare them into getting more secure?

We've long known what will likely avoid these sorts of problems - create a rotating environment to simulate gravity.
While the physics principle is simple, engineering a safe rotating station is probably quite challenging.
The sort of thing NASA was created to investigate...

But it'll be perfectly OK if you do it for the Dutch government.

So, it's legal for Americans to spy on the Dutch? Who knew!
Next it'll be found perfectly OK for the Dutch government to take kickbacks from American criminals that rob Dutch citizens.
Hurrah for the newly authorized power of crime laundering!

If we decide not to allow the public to fly drones around peeping into back yards, the same should apply to the police (without a warrant). The limits on casual/easy police surveillance should be pretty much the same as the limits on the public. The police should be no more than citizens that we have authorized to act in our name.

That said, it may be time to be realistic, that technology is expanding our powers of easy observation beyond historical limits. Create new laws regulating personal and commercial drone camera use, including allowable flight altitudes, linger times, recording and viewing resolutions, etc under various circumstances - with the same standards governing police use without a warrant. Balance new benefits against the loss of a few old privacy benefits. Same goes for things like Google Glass.

The key is to avoid allowing politicians to carve out any special exceptions/powers exclusively for the police - insist that police powers be based on those of the general public.

IMO.

OK, I missed that it was trying to implement memory-mapped I/O, because I only looked at the "Duff's Device" code.
The rest still applies, with apologies for the ranting.

Um - maybe my eyes are just skipping something - but isn't that (Wikipedia) implementation completely 'bugged'?
I.e. it seems that it only increments the source "from" pointer, not the destination "to" pointer?

Not to mention that the idea that "tricky" code is "elegant" is pretty much completely backwards. Coding in odd ways just to be tricky, or to minimize lines of source code for the sake of 'compactness', or pretty much any other 'clever coding' goal - tends to create buggy code that is hard to debug and hard for anyone else to understand if they need to modify it. As evidenced by the many good programmers here who looked at that "clever" code and didn't notice that it continuously overwrites the same location in memory...

It was such 'cleverness' that led to the bad reputation of 'goto' from people writing spaghetti code. At least in the early days of programming, programmers had the excuse of slow processors and limited memory and poor compilers, to justify coming to equate 'tricky' with "clever and elegant". Unless you're coding for some ultra-tiny system, such thinking is simply obsolete, and anyone engaging in it ought to be embarrassed at their misguided priorities.

Elegant code is functionally correct, will create a fast/efficient/compact run-time (assuming a decent compiler / interpreter and depending on settings appropriate to the project), and above all must be READABLE and MAINTAINABLE.

Where old-time programmers abused GOTO, modern C++ programmers tend to abuse inheritance and templates, creating code that is often nearly impossible to follow even with the aid of a good development/debugging environment - let alone follow by reading the static source code. And the sad thing is, they think they're engaging in "good programming" even as they create incomprehensible, unmaintainable monstrosities.

Just tell them that the vaccine is fully organic, low sodium, fat free and gluten free.

Also, it's got Electrolytes.

One of my personal long standing predictions has been that when we finally get really cheap "good enough" robot muscles, personal robots will take off much like PCs did, even if the muscles have significant problems to be worked around.

I presume that with use these muscles will stretch and lose strength. But that's OK - just pair them with control software that adapts automatically. If the muscles get too weak, replace them. The main question will be how fast they degrade. If they could last in an intermittently active robot for a month, that's probably enough to get started.

Another question is how fast they can cycle without over heating and ruining them. Given the sorts of applications they describe, I suspect there are issues with speed. But one good thing about this development is that anyone can experiment with it in their garage, and many will, and solutions for fast cycling muscles will be found.

Most likely, the NSA would be split along the lines of their three core missions:

- Spy on and sabotage information systems of enemies of the United States to disrupt their operations.
- Spy on and sabotage information systems of friendly foreign nations to maintain and enhance US hegemony.
- Spy on and sabotage information systems of US citizens, to chill free speech that might threaten the NSA with budget cuts.

Then the first could be downsized as not an essential contributor to their primary goal of maintaining the power of the NSA.
Use the freed resources to step up the last, as obviously they've gotten too lax there and it is starting to threaten the primary goal.

The FAO food price index doesn't appear to be especially "up" right now:

http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsi...

So how does this model work again?

...you nazi libertarian communist illiterate whack-job faux liberal neocon conspirators!