I agree whole heartedly. The security curve is an asymptotic one. You'll never reach secure. The biggest security risk in any system (computer system or non-computer system) is the person sitting at the desk. This is why secretive government agencies like the US DoD don't let anyone use a DoD computer until they've background checked and taken the requisite training classes.

This is Slashdot. Naturally, there will be amazing advice about elite encryption and protecting your most secretive plans from government spooks. Government? Really? Frankly, I'm more worried about the data that Visa and MasterCard have about me than the government stealing pictures of my kids marching band contests.

The original poster asked valid questions about reasonable outside threats - Malware. I'm a fan of free (as in beer) scanners that detect known threats disguised in innocent looking payloads. That adorable icon that Aunt Betty says is adorable could be an installer for a malware program. Also, subscribe to CERT bulletins or a similar organization that publishes information about emerging threats and vulnerability.

This is Microsoft's equivalent of Steve Jobs saying “You're holding it wrong” when the iPhone 4 case was the antenna.

Excellent to know about Hubble. It's a shame too, I hear the bridges in New York are cheaper now because of the flood ...

That's a very good point - looking down. The luminance levels from earth are MUCH brighter than a distant object. I once heard (translation: totally unverified) that the Hubble team had to be careful not to aim it a the moon because it could overload and/or the sensor. So what will the try to image with it?

The XE6 that my team uses allocates jobs reservations at the node level. Each job gets a whole node of 16 cores with 32G ram. If you have a memory intensive task, you only run use as many cores as will fit in the available memory. It's a trade-off: some tasks will waste RAM, some will waste CPUs?

If you measure operations per second, the x86 chip will win. If you measure operations per second per watt, the ARM chip will win.

I whole heartedly agree with this post.

I'd like augment the remark about WHAT a company does. If your company is in the financial services sector in the US, then there are Sarbanes/Oxley regulations that must be satisfied. If your company is in the healthcare industry, there are privacy laws. If you're in the aviation industry, there's the FAA. And so on ...

Also don't feel like you have to push out updates every week because it's the cool and trendy thing to do. Do it because there is a rational justification for doing so.

On the and-user client side, there may not be much noticeable improvement. But on servers and/or load-balancing front ends this type of improvement could be quite significant.

My mouse left-handed with unswapped buttons. Although I'm not strongly left-handed. My sister, however, is militantly left-handed and she swaps the buttons. Drives me nuts.

Yes, exactly. That was the rational that was given at the time. It was also expressed that it was temporary.

back in the day ...

They used the C++ compiler to compile Linux kernel written because of Name Mangling. Code that tried to pass incorrect parameters got link errors.

Now get off my lawn you whippersnappers.

The Linux Kernel used the C++ compiler for a while. I believe it was during the 0.99.x era. The goal was to improve the code quality by leveraging C++ compiler features like function name mangling while only using C language features. This, however, looks like they want to use a limited set of C++ language features that would be very handy for experienced C programmers.

There's that. There other issue is that every biometric system requires the computer to make a judgment call. A facial recognition system has to guess it's you within a [insert-threshold-here] degree of confidence. That confidence level will never be 100%. A password and physical tokens are the only mechanisms that inherently have absolute yes/no thresholds. Before you start challenging this, I'm not considering the "spoofability" of any of these methods. Of course, physical tokens can be stollen or lost, passwords can be shoulder surfed or guessed. Biometrics have been repeatedly demonstrated to be quite spoofable.

So true. After all, drug dealers and computer companies both refer to their customer base as "Users."

1) One of the original idea was to include a publicly operated and funded insurance plan. The republicans (conservatives) universally rejected this and enough democrats (liberals) faltered when enough constituents from moderate election districts (ridings) broke ranks and lost enough support to push it though. The "individual mandate" was the compromise that came from losing the "public provider".
2) It is a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_maintenance_organization. It's a plan where people are encouraged to sign up with a physician that has an existing pricing relationship with the health insurance provider. The physician acts as a "gatekeeper" to more expensive types of care.
3) It's a widely accepted meme in the States that government is bloated and inefficient because government has no competitor and no incentive to operate effecienly. But, a corporation has to remain efficient otherwise their competitors will out perform them by being more efficient and undercut them. It's also believed that even though the corporation is profit seeking, the efficiencies of a profit-seeking corporation are still great enough to do better than government bureaucracies. There have been enough examples of government buying hammers and toilet seats at over $10,000 each to perpetuate this meme.