that we not get it all at once please.

A fun part of this is that the government employees at ARPA back in the 1960s explained it all to us. They firmly rejected building any sort of encryption into the network itself, on the grounds that such software would always be controlled by the "middlemen" who supplied the physical connectivity, and they would always build what we now call backdoors into the encryption. They concluded that secure communication between two parties could only be done via encryption that they alone controlled. Any encryption at a lower level was a pure waste of computer time, and shouldn't even be attempted, because it will always be compromised.

This doesn't seem to have gotten through to many people today, though. We hear a lot about how "the Internet" should supply secure, encrypted connections. Sorry; that's never feasible, unless you own and control access to every piece of hardware along the data's route. And the ARPA guys didn't consider that, because that first 'A' stands for "Army", and they wanted a maximally-redundant, "mesh" type network that would be usable in battle conditions. They went with the approach that you use any kind of data equipment that's available, including the enemy's, and you build in sufficient error detection to ensure that the bits get through undamaged,. Then you use encryption that your team knows how to install on their machines and use. And you probably change the encryption software at irregular intervals.

Anyway, the real people to direct your anger at are the PR folks in both industry and government, who keep trying to convince you that they can supply encryption that's secure. Yeah, maybe they can do that, but they never have and they never will. And the odd chance that they've actually done so in some specific case doesn't change this. The next (silent, automatic;-) upgrade will introduce the backdoor.

Unless you have all the code, compile it yourself, and have people who can understand its inner workings, you don't have secure encryption; you have encryption that delivers your text to some unknown third parties. It's the US government's own security folks who explained this to us nearly half a century ago.

It used to be that any degree would get your "foot in the door" with HR. Some of the best programmers I worked with over the years had degrees in English, Philosophy, and even a History major.

University teaches you how to learn new material, how to prioritize it, how to summarize, how to reach the meat in the middle of the chaff. It does not teach you how to program. While there are benefits to knowing computing theory, it's not theory that gets the job done -- experience does that.

I'm surprised you're having such a tough time finding work if you're actually good at programming. Perhaps it's the way you're presenting yourself in your resume, because, as I said, it doesn't really matter what your degree is in for getting your foot in the door.

It's far easier to just have the cops shoot the white people, too. Then they'll know what it's like to be a "person of colour." :(

So you think tourists shouldn't be protected by US law?

There are a lot of people and companies in the tourism industry who would strongly disagree with you. Not to mention the shipping industry, whose employees often make short visits to places where they aren't citizens, as part of their jobs.

If your suggestion were put into effect, it would be a disaster for a lot of valuable businesses. For that reason, it's not how the law works in the US or in any other country.

I hope the more rational part of you realizes that this wouldn't be good for anyone.

Because they didn't have any evidence against the guy.

Remember this when you hear (or use) the argument "If I'm doing nothing wrong, I have nothing to fear."

I was wondering why someone was still employed after reading the story myself. Next they made an ad?? Yeah heads would roll in today's more hostile work environment.

Maybe I just worked for shitty employers recently? But I heard back then you stayed with a company for 30 years. So different today where firing 15% every year is the new rage. Sigh ...

Great idea! Now we all only need to agree on which language to standardize on. I'm sure that worldwide discussion will be calm, focused and productive. Please post the results here in the thread once it's been decided.

I suggest Swedish. It's just about equally well known by almost everybody in the world, so nobody is starting out with an unfair advantage. I get a lifetime gig teaching Swedish to everybody. And you get umlauts! Win-win.

Oh, and by "suggest" I of course mean "absolutely demand or I will refuse any part of this scheme".

This is cool for a project I am working on. I plan to see if I can create a .com that will do business transactions. I need no latency but at the same time require ACID to ensure each transaction will be written to disk :-(

My Idea is to have no sql and sql databases where something like this will do the transactions to ACID.

And in 1...2...3...

Cue all the math junkies who claim that there is "proof" you can't hear the difference between 44.1/16 bit audio streams and higher quality rates like 192/24 or analogue. Because the math "prooves" that thousands upon thousands of people who claim to hear a difference are "delusional liars."

I am neither delusional nor a liar. I hear the difference. It's clear as night and day.

I disagree completely. Good science fiction has never been about the technology, but about human and alien personalities and moral questions brought about by the technology. Good science fiction explores interpersonal relationships, character traits, philosophical stances, and other such subject matter.

The science fiction of the mid-late '80s made good movies because the directors and script writers were selecting stories with deep connotations, instead of viewing them with an eye towards turning them into CGI action flicks emphasizing trivia like "the technology" instead of the plot.

There is still a tremendous amount of good science fiction written over the years that would make terrific movies. But hollywood won't back those "risks" -- they're too busy investing in action movies pretending to be science fiction. There are exceptions to that, but for the most part you know it's true: hollywood doesn't want to discuss morality, philosophy, and personal interactions in a script. They want a nice "safe" piece of pablum that will make audiences go "ooh" and "aah" over the mindless special F/X, not cause them to think for themselves.

I still use an Ipod Gen5 with RockBox, because a) it works and b) I get to use an open source firmware, which means I don't have to worry about whether $BIG_VENDOR has bothered to support OGG/FLAC/etc files.

Admittedly technology is moving on, but from the standpoint of a device that does one thing and does it well the older Ipods with RockBox do just fine. Why upgrade just for the heck of it?

Heck, i've still got an old iRiver T30 tucked away somewhere that takes AA batteries, which I'm not inclined to get rid of either... small, functional, and does the job.

As computer technology matures, hopefully we'll start to see at least some boutique shops crop up whose goal is to make the IBM Model M keyboard equivalent of things like music players - I'd gladly pay a premium for a device engineered to last 30 years instead of 3.

The problem has been the same since the PC first came out: users can "do things" with a PC/laptop/smartphone/tablet and think that "doing things" makes them an expert on IT. So when they come up with a "great idea for a new application", they can not and will not fathom the fact that it can take months or years to implement, is going to cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars, and will be obsolete before it ever hits production due to changing business needs.

There is no cure for the "wisdom" of people who tell you how to do your job, or how their 14 year old nephew could write the application in a few weeks. They've made up their mind that you're just a lazy SOB trying to milk the company for money and a cushy job, and will never, ever, ever understand just how much effort goes into security, design, testing, porting, etc. To them, everything is "easy."

The real problem is that companies let such users and managers make business decisions based on "their gut instinct" instead of properly planned and projected schedules. Because heaven forbid you should ever tell the marketting manager that he can't have his shiny Sharepoint solution because it doesn't provide anything useful to the company that can't be accomplished with a properly organized set of folders on a shared drive/server somewhere.

No, they're the ones who sign for the budgets, and they're the ones who like the "shiny", so you're the one who gets stuck trying to make the shiny work with all the line of business systems that are actually important to the operation of the business.

And if you even hint that you can't do it, well, there's a company overseas that's promising to do it in a month as an offshore service, so you're fired.

Which, in a nutshell, is how the bean counters and their ilk get away with their bad business decisions: they constantly hold the threat of offshoring and termination over your head to beat Mr. IT into submission.

I play D&D and plan to get one to print custom game pieces / figures. Maybe even dice.