Out of curiosity, what universities have CS programs which teach how to write maintainable, extensible, and self-documenting code as a required part of the curriculum? I'm not really familiar with any which do. I mean, I got a BS in CS from Carnegie Mellon in 1998 and although I learned a lot of useful stuff about data structures, algorithms, artificial intelligence, programming languages, computer architecture, networking, compilers, and operating systems, I didn't learn much about writing good code.

For example, I never received any instruction on any of the following: how to write good comments, how to choose appropriate variable names, version control, style guidelines, javadoc (or doxygen or similar), design patterns, logging, or designing extensible code. I learned some things on some of those topics from my fellow students, but I really didn't learn any of it from my instructors. Every instructor I had did a good job of covering the material for the course they taught, but that material just wasn't in the curriculum. So what universities do have it in their curriculum?

Well, as you likely know, most bagpipes have two or three drones, and Ian is a common Scottish name, so I'm pretty sure he's a Scotsman who managed to hijack some American bagpipes in transit. Clearly, the US needs to protect them better when they're transiting through the UK.

Well, thanks for the kind words anyway. Honestly, I thought that modding up my second comment (which was mostly just meant as an error correction) was excessive. If I'd known it would've been modded up, I might've not made it as I don't want to be a karma whore. But, oh well, I guess I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Err, I just meant divide by 0 error, not overflow. The fun bit of that attack is that the reason it effectively bricks it is that the divide by zero error crashes it and it reboots, but it logs its data into flash, so as soon as it finishes rebooting, it starts reprocessing the stored data, thus it reads the 0 again and crashes and it just gets stuck in a loop like that forever. It's a fairly fun and clever paper.

The paper isn't really about attacking GPS infrastructure. It's about attacking GPS receivers. Some of these receivers may be part of other sorts of infrastructure. I was at CCS when the paper was presented. It's all about sending fake GPS satellite signals to receivers to exploit bugs in the software in the receivers. The work is interesting and includes attacks which can desynchronize the clocks on some devices and there was one device you could essentially brick by telling it at the satellite was at radius 0 (center of the earth) resulting in a divide by 0 overflow. I liked the paper and thought it was neat, and it could do serious damage to particular systems which rely on GPS if they have the right type of flaws in their software to be exploited by this attack, but it was not an attack against the GPS satellites or anything like that.

Umm, that's not what the videos from their YouTube channel shows. It shows that many of the wounder birds are not collected to be killed and instead escape with their wounds. It also shows that in at least some cases, wounded birds were killed inhumanely. You're theorizing about what they do based on what they ought to do rather than based on the available evidence of what they actually do.

Yes, but if you watch some of the videos they took from other events, you can see people doing things like kicking wounded pigeons and one adolescent who would pick up the wounded ones and then smash them against things (his knee, the ground, pigeon crates). That would generally be illegal animal cruelty. There's a difference between hunting animals and torturing them. I think that they're saying that their footage of this event contains similar abusive actions. The article doesn't say that every action at the event was illegal, just that they had been videotaping animal abuse. Unless you were there, I don't think that you can know that they didn't record animal abuse.

(As a side, someone should really monitor that particular adolescent. He appeared to be smashing the pigeons against things until they were dismembered and then cackling with glee. That's a pretty big warning sign of the potential for becoming a psychopath. I'm not saying that he is one or will necessarily become one, but if I were someone who knew him, I would keep a really close eye on him going forward.)

I've read the DMCA. I've followed the court cases. I don't understand how jailbreaking a phone or modding a console would violate the DMCA, and I don't understand why people keep legitimizing the idea that it would by asking for DMCA exceptions. The DMCA says "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." And it defines "(A) to `circumvent a technological measure' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and (B) a technological measure `effectively controls access to a work' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work."

What work are we talking about if you mod your gaming console? Video games aren't scrambled or encrypted and they don't require the application of information or any process or treatment. You can run a video game in an emulator without doing anything to it. You just load it and run it. And you can easily copy a video game using a DVD or Blu-Ray reader and writer and an emulator will happily play the copy. The technological measures in a video game console are about preventing the console from running unauthorized software (including unauthorized copies of games), not about protecting the content on the gaming discs. As such, I don't understand how you would be violating the DMCA by modding your console. (Mind you, video game console manufacturers could change this if they started encrypting their discs, and they might next generation, but the current gen ones don't. They're signed, but they aren't encrypted.)

Likewise, I haven't seen any evidence that jailbreaking a smartphone would circumvent a technological measure meant to protect a copyrighted work. Now, once you jailbreak a phone, there might be software on that phone which you could circumvent, but that would be a separate act. Is there logic here that I'm missing or is no one else looking at what the law actually says?

Yes, that's what the summary is saying. They had a chance to make it legal (at least from a copyright perspective), and they decided not to. I read the summary. I'm clear on what it says. I don't need you to repeat it to me. I'm not sure why you feel the need to repeat it with a weird, condescending tone.

If this course is very much like similar courses I've seen, they don't really teach you anything anyway. They just give you the book, tell you to follow it, and are available to help if you're really stuck.

I don't think that's what he's saying at all. What he's saying is that we have two problems right now. The first is that patents are being granted on general ideas rather than the steps to cause those ideas to happen. His analogy is that right now you can get a patent on the idea of sorting a list (which given some of the patents, I think is about right) even without any details of how you do it. When someone else finds a new, better way to sort a list, you can sue them and win. This argument, if accepted widely by the courts, would remove that.

The second problem is that patents are being issued for algorithms which simply shouldn't be issued because they're not novel or too obvious or because they're basically just math (and math isn't patentable). His analogy here is that you could still, if the argument wins, patent something like quicksort which he's saying shouldn't be patentable.

Once they run out of the name of real cats, the correct solution is clear: Thundercats. Personally, I'm looking forward to OS X 10.17 Snarf.

That's what I was going to suggest. They're bound as kids books so they're a little more likely to hold up to being read by a three-year-old than real comic books. They contain basically no words, so he can read them as long as he can figure out to follow the pictures in order. And if he's not quite up to reading them by himself, you can read them together.

Of course, that's assuming that takeoff and landing are 30 minutes. Sometimes I've been on a plane which had to wait out on the tarmack for as long as an hour (and there have been other cases which were quite a bit longer which I didn't personally experience). How do I deal with all that time? Well, if my seatmate doesn't feel like conversing, I usually read a book. I don't think that wanting to read a book when there's nothing else to do means that I have a sad little life, but maybe you think that makes me some sort of information freak or something. Except that books are big and bulky, so I've switched to a happy little ebook reader which is like half the size of a paperback and holds several hundred books. Except that I can't use my ebook reader because it's a gadget, even though, being an e-ink display, its emissions of any sort are really pretty minimal. People don't have to turn off their hearing aids, and those are probably about the same level of emissions. So, perhaps, if they reevaluate things, then I'll be able to read my ebook while waiting patiently and quietly for take-off. Is that really so terrible?

The stuff you'd rather not have breathed is just stale corn starch, nothing exotic. I'm sure it wasn't fun to breathe (I know I didn't enjoy it), but it isn't dangerous.