That's a really bad analogy. Peering at someone's credit card - even if it is under a napkin - is quite obviously very bad manners indeed. If you're saying unauthorised penetration testing is like peering at someone's credit card, then it's clearly wrong.

And speaking as someone who has his own little toy server out in the cloud, I'd very much prefer to do my own damn penetration testing, thank you.

Dead reckoning - navigation where you have no accurate fix - has been around for literally hundreds of years, and it is spelled 'dead reckoning' - because it's reckoning (of position) without a live fix. When I learned to navigate small boats fifty years ago, it was still pretty standard - because sun sights are awkward, and in any case using sun sights alone you can't get two position lines at the same time, so you have to do a running fix (which involves some dead reckoning). Even in coastal navigation you can't always get bearings on two good landmarks at the same time.

You're not thinking at all, you're just emoting.

If you were thinking you would realise that drone strikes on a civilian population - on women, on children, on funerals, on weddings - recruit a thousand terrorists for every one they kill. Of course the CIA and the military promote this policy. More terrorists means more money for the CIA and the military, terrorism and counter-terrorism are inherently symbiotic. But foreign policy should not be dictated by the needs of inter-agency pissing matches in Washington DC.

I have never, ever bought an Apple product of any kind, but considering build quality the MacBook Air is probably better value for money than the very similar Asus Ultrabook which I do have.

I suspect because the part of their system which changes passwords is seriously overloaded. I'm trying to change mine, but so far can't even get the page to load.

In the modern world, only those who are harmful to society are financially successful. Sad, but true.

The whole purpose of these treaties are to carve out new opportunities for special interests and rent seekers to harvest wealth from the small folk like you and me. Whatever you think of the benefits of free trade, these treaties are created to prevent it, and for no other reason.

I used these things. They really existed. And they made modern IDEs like Eclipse and IntelliJ and Netbeans and Visual Studio look really crude and primitive. The Lisp machines were horrendously expensive, though. The last one that the nice Government bought me cost £25,000 at a time when a Sun workstation cost £4,000. And so we really have forgotten what was possible.

However, the machines we have now are enormously more powerful than the machines we had then. My Xerox 1186 in 1987 had (I think) 8Mb of real RAM and about 80Mb of disk, and ran at two MIPS. My desktop machine at home has 16Gb of RAM and runs at 18,000 MIPS. We really could begin to run the big software development environments of the 'golden age' again, on machines everyone can afford. Clojure and LightTable are a real step in the right generation; but they're still a long way behind where we were thirty years ago.

InterLisp (and a number of other things coming out of Xerox PARC in the early eighties) had the same feature. You saved the running state of your system to file, you invoked the function (sysout). To restore the running state of your system from a file, you invoked (sysin filename). Essentially this was a memory dump of the heap, but it had the special property that the 'spaghetti stack' - the branching stack structure through which InterLisp managed multitasking - was implemented in the heap rather than as a separate structure, so loading in the heap also loaded in the stack, for all threads.

Obviously, in InterLisp as in Smalltalk, everything in memory was inspectable and editable, and when you edited a function that didn't mean editing and reloading a file, the source code was an in-memory structure. It wasn't entirely without problems - there were small semantic differences between interpreted code and compiled code (if I remember correctly interpreted code implemented shallow binding while compiled code implemented deep binding), so that when you compiled your code its behaviour could change. Also it was possible, if you added a comment in the wrong place, that it could change the semantics of a function. For example if you added a comment as the last form in a function body, that function would always return nil. Nevertheless in terms of programmer productivity these environments were streets ahead of anything that's commercially available now; and although I love LightTable and hope that it is the shape of things to come, even LightTable isn't a patch on InterLisp's DEdit.

A small minority of companies, with very special needs, are using NoSql databases for a small proportion of their operations. Those companies do include some big ones, such as Google and Twitter, but still in absolute terms the numbers are small. A tiny minority of companies have moved away from relational databases altogether. But the numbers are statistically insignificant and are likely to remain so for decades. And the relational model does have some real and enduring benefits which will make it the right tool for many jobs far into the future.

Remember this is an industry that advances very slowly indeed. Your bank, and your utility companies, are still using programs written in COBOL - technology which is fifty years behind the curve.

RTFA! It's not used for storing manuals.

Not if you're even considering this legislation, you're not. Your state may not be corrupted by the commercial sector, but it is surely corrupted by the security sector. Not all corruption is financial.

OK, so a pedal bicycle is a very low powered road vehicle, but the same equation applies. To achieve a better power to weight ratio, you can either increase power or decrease weight - and decreased weight has the added bonus of lower loads on suspension and tyres in fast corners.

... that stocks have any intrinsic value?

If we continue burning coal at this rate, human life as we know it won't see 2100. Civilisation? Well, probably cockroaches will one day develop civilisation.