Which will be seen by far fewer people than what saw the "error".

When that comes out - I'm buying it regardless of whether or not I actually need to learn or use the language.

"I've got an idea.... formin' in my 'ead."

If you're talking about the Unix epoch, shouldn't it ve 1970? While I know the 0 of the Unix Epoch, I have no idea what weekday it was.

Thank you. I didn't have to think about this ever since college.

I don't know who Jay Cost is, but Ace of Ace of Spades HQ is reliably conservative. I had to look and see who posted that, if it was Gabriel Malor I'd agree with you more as Malor's more of a squishy moderate.

There are also a plethora of "technically correct" answers. You could say: "I scp the file to your server", where you presume the server is secure, and ssh is secure, so the documents confidentiality is guaranteed. (Upload the file using https works as an answer too). Hey, just connect to the companies VPN and copy the file to a Samba share. Valid too!
The question of what kind of file it was, isn't even that dumb. I'm not familiar with PDF, but I could -for example- imagine there is a standard for encryption within PDF. Someone from with a document management background would most likely think of such solutions.

It's a vast field, and expertise of people is usually just a subset. I'm not even sure what the answer you you expected was, but I'd say: I'd use your public key to encrypt the file to you and then send it to you. Personally, I wouldn't know which commands to invoke to do this, but I know that's the theory.

So, should any developer know this? That is debatable. I've had very competent developers who had next to no clue about how DNS works. They could do their job just fine with that. Me? Personally, I'm not up to snuff with the finer points of SQL queries and all the joins that exists and when it makes sense to create an index, etc. Could I find out? Most likely, but I haven't had the need to recently.

The problem is, that you are mapping your knowlegde to "what people must know". I used to do that too, and I probably still do often enough. The DNS example above didn't come from nowhere: I had the case, and I was really thinking "how could such a competent person not know this", but then this person could probably enlighten me about dozens of things I don't know well enough.

It all comes down to what you define as "general knowgledge" for a developer should be and that is highly subjective.

TL;DR Hiring people is hard. Especially, technical people.

I tried the following. On the affected machine, I created a DomU (Virtual Machine), assigned it 4CPUs, 4GB RAM and two disks. A root disk on which I installed a minimal debootstrapped wheezy, and an empty disk for the dd test. I made sure the VM boots from the affected kernel.

The bug doesn't happen in that context:

root@minimal:~# ssh root@othermachine "dd if=/dev/vg0/remote-lv" | dd of=/dev/xvdb1
root@hammerhead's password:
31457280+0 records in
31457280+0 records out
16106127360 bytes (16 GB) copied, 2156,62 s, 7,5 MB/s
31457280+0 records in
31457280+0 records out
16106127360 bytes (16 GB) copied, 2164.91 s, 7.4 MB/s
root@minimal:~# uname -a
Linux minimal 3.2.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.2.65-1+deb7u1 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Of course, the situation is not exactly the same in a virtualized environment.

The thing is, this is the host, not the VM. I haven't seen it happen in a VM yet. (In Xen lingo, it's the Dom0 causing this). However, you're right, I should try to reproduce it in a virtual environment. I'll try to do so.

Throw me the whip and I'll throw you the idol!

As a Catholic, I believe we should be good stewards of God's creation.

However -- CO2 isn't pollution -- it's plant food. And we shouldn't have to pay Al Gore (how convenient!) "Carbon Credits" to exhale.

I've written about this kind of thing before though -- there are two things that the government has to control in order to truly own you -- your health, and the environment. Every choice you make affects one or both of those things. Control that, and government controls you.

Patrick Henry had the right idea. "I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"