You're right about possibilities of monopolisation. However, as long as the right legal systems and enterprising businesses exist, ventures like Android will keep popping up to balance out (and eventually crush?) 'monopolies' like iOS.

As for young aspiring coders, they can use a free student certificate to develop and deploy their software on their own (and their friends') devices. It doesn't need to get approved by the OS developer. The real issue in this regard will be the effect on the open-source market. Then again, even Linux users are heavily dependent on online centralised package repositories, which could start adopting screening schemes.

Of course, there's also the advice I always give my clients: gift horse or not, make sure them teeth aren't rotten. In other words, if your can't read code then you're not going to be able to leverage one of the most important aspects of open-source software, which is determining for yourself just how safe it is.

With regards to countries being marginalised by big software vendors, you're right about people using the excuse of disenfranchisement. But they (we, since i'm in such a country) are not willing to accept that their legal systems are too corrupt and unpredictable for software vendors to trust them. What software enters the market does so through various regional distributors, in order to reduce liabilities. Appstore has not come here because they could never settle disputes without lining the pockets of a judge. In these countries there are much more important issues that people should be concerned with than the latest flappy bird clone. If they want to enjoy the software available in mature global markets they too have attain the same maturity.

Like I said, I'm in a country where we don't have a legal Appstore or Google Play presence. However, instead of resorting to Cydia, I get store credit to buy my apps and stuff. Of course, not everyone in my country gets paid well, so not all can afford to spend money on software. As such more than 95% of mobile software in the market is pirated. Should we continue advocate this piracy with the excuse of disenfranchisement, and desensitise the community to criminality of the act? Or should people live according to their means, which they can start improving by putting an effort (the effort that goes into piracy?) into improving governance of their countries?

Network address translation happened. Devices with the capability became cheaper and more user-friendly. About a dozen years ago NAT devices that could serve hundreds of users efficiently, on even a 10mbps consolidated Internet port, were both hefty and unfriendly (either they required the attention of a specialist or there wasn't enough documentation). Now a smartphone has the processor throughput required to handle NAT for thousands of employees on a 1 gbps Internet port.

Somebody just got too excited when he/she reported the 'exhaustion' of all IPv4 addresses. People will still get by, and there won't be much of an effect in terms of congestion. The only outcome will be that IP addresses will become more expensive - bet it'll be a more expensive commodity than truffle within the next decade.

Agreed, Snowden should have sought other avenues of seeking justice for the violation of civil rights. In fact, if I were him, I'd actually have stayed in the US whilst I published all the documents (not in batches but in one go). But I would have done so only if civil rights (pertaining to the US only) and/or human rights (pertaining to the world as a whole) were at stake.

The fact that Snowden is ranting about the US spying on trade negotiations or conversations of global political big-shots clearly a lack of interest in civil or human rights. It suggests the involvement of a sinister partner hellbent on discrediting and destabilizing the US. Showden's commitment to such a cause, being a US citizen, indicates that he is a mentally unbalanced egomaniac looking to establish a legacy the quick and easy way (doesn't help that news agencies all over the world are motivating this type of behaviour, just so they can sell more advertising space). Most of what's being leaked by Snowden has nothing to do with the protection of civil rights. What civil rights violations his leaks do expose are already being recognised by NSA and other intelligence agencies and there are reform programs (or at least the initiatives of some) under way (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/17/obama-nsa-reforms-end-storage-americans-call-data).

In answer to question 1, NSA and their partner agencies should just keep on doing what they do. There have been plenty of leaks in the past about clandestine operations of intelligence agencies, who have later gone on to re-establish their integrity. This is not much different, other than the fact that we have something to rant about in these forums :).

Did I imply that? I know their intelligence apparatuses are even less ethical than the US, and those are the countries where their oligarchies basically own the administrations.

Also, has the attempt at ridiculing someone with an 'LOL' ever really helped?

My dad was in military intelligence (the human kind, not the techno kind) and mom a housewife who didn't have a day of schooling. Yet, I caught the programming bug pretty early on (there were triggers which generated that interest of course, but most of it did not come from within my nuclear family). To date I'm the only one who's developed a fully functional Turing-complete programming language in my country. My parents could not help me with that, nor some of the very first programs I wrote as a little boy.

Sometimes we fail to realize that children do pick up interests with very little motivation, which isn't always provided by the parents. No matter how much we may want our child to become a chess grandmaster, he/she might decide to become a professional ballet dancer. What is important is to make sure that their interests are nurtured and celebrated. We as grown-ups should not feel threatened by it, but rather give support so that the child grows in confidence.

As for this particularly 'invention', I have to say that the article is a little too emphatic as well as inaccurate. Had master Banerjee developed his own hardware interface and the codec to control it, then it would be very impressive from a 'new software and hardware' perspective. However, he has only written software that (most probably) interfaces with the Mindstorms software drivers. I bet you anything that there are plenty of children out there who've developed lots of clever software for Mindstorms, and created clever mechanical devices from the EV3 kit. Why should they not be celebrated as much as master Banerjee?

I'm reminded of the book "Confessions of an Economic Hitman", particularly since Indonesia has been brought up. Listening in on dialogues relating to trade disputes has capitalism written all over it. What's the bet that the US administration has less control over its intelligence machinations than the capitalists (wanted to say oligarchy...)?

No one with a gigabit port will allow a single IP (spoofed or not) to make infinite consecutive NTP requests. You'd not even let a single IP do more than 1 NTP request without some form of throttling. The only way you effectively launch a massive reflective attack is if you have a whole lotta IPs under your control, and you don't achieve that (without raising suspicion) unless you have a botnet.

As for your 2 hosts on 10 gig ports, you wouldn't be running them unless you were doing some serious networking work (service related?), which means you have the skills to make sure that those machines are safe. Also, I bet you've got redundancies in place to ensure that a compromise is rectified (perhaps a daemon to completely neutralize the server using if a given semaphore is not set before a set timeout?).

Since Windows started issuing certification warnings for third-party software, fewer relatively fewer trojans have effected Windows boxes. The same tactic has always helped reduce the infection rate for Mac OS. iOS fairs even better because all software approved by Apple for Appstore are screened. This is one way of reducing the bandwidth available for perpetrators: reduce the pasturing grounds for bot-herders.

That 99% of all mobile malware targets Android, as per Kaspersky, is evidence enough that the Appstore model works better (see heading 'Malware for Android' in link http://www.securelist.com/en/a...). With well over a billion Android activations to date, this is a whole new playground for bandwidth bandits to exploit (and are exploiting very effectively). Unless Google does something to ensure that their stores are sanitized this epidemic will continue to get worse.

Finally, penalizing countries that continue to support software piracy will also help. The main vector for the propagation of trojans is pirated software. Some countries have so much malware (take a look at the table under the title 'Local threats' in this link http://www.securelist.com/en/a...) that you have to wonder if their national bandwidth capacity is utilized for any productive use at all. Should these countries be penalized in terms of bandwidth available to them unless they proactively combat their piracy markets?

Clears up this query: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Are they sure it's the lights of the building and not the aura of an angel?

Is the problem really Bitcoin or the businesses that could be using it as a currency? No matter how much Bitcoin fluctuates, the reality is that it will never suffer from hyperinflation because the currency space is limited to 21 million bit coins. The only problem is the speculative overvaluation that the currency seems to suffer from. However, the ratio of demand to valuation varies across a very narrow margin.

So, the problem in with electronic currencies is not the currency itself but how the businesses price their products and services. With electronic currencies looming so large in the horizon, businesses need to develop a pricing mechanism that is more dynamic, which reacts more rapidly to the currency fluctuations. Perhaps valuations can be done based on live data feeds from Bitcoin exchanges. In such a case the products and services of businesses could be directly targeted by speculators to make a quick buck, which may be avoided by quoting those prices for the respective e-currency only...

I was a smoker of 10 years before I quit in September 2011. To anyone who'd like to know how, I stopped cold turkey one day and didn't look back - plan was to stop so my wife and I could have a baby in a few years (which happens to be this year btw :) ). One very helpful part of the process was avoiding everything that I associated with smoking. So, for about three months I stopped having coffee with mates, taking breaks at work (instead of which ordered lunch in), meeting clients outside office premises and other habits conducive to smoking. And, most importantly, I regularly took a multivitamin and kept a mild antibiotic at hand for the occasional flu.

Pretty sure Snowden's not the only clever person in this world. Plenty of paranoid people (including your's truly) are constantly monitoring all of their systems to make sure the authorities (amongst others) aren't snooping in. If the government was caught in the act, there are plenty of lawyers who'd take the case and make a killing. Unless of course the British government decided to call in 007 to take care of the client.

Yes, calculus formulae uses symbols, but they also use weights and measures for the constants, which are in base-10 for convenience. After all, if we wanted to find the rate of change of a stock ticker, we'd feed in numbers in base-10 rather than binary. As for the symbols themselves, we use latin alphabets and Greek letters, never symbols of animals or morse code. Hence, we have preferences when it comes to the 'language' we use for calculus.

Likewise, it's really up to us to decide which language to use for our coding purposes (that is, if you're capable of developing your own programming language). We could substitute the '=' in a classic assignment statement with the image of a butt. Instead of the usual console output functions like 'print', 'echo', etc, we could have a picture of a person vomiting.

However, no matter what kind of language you develop for your coding needs, the underlying principles will stay the same, depending on the architecture of the computer and the paradigm of the underlying host software on which your code will run. The vast majority (I'm willing to say over 90%) of all programming languages have assignments, iterations, selections, logic operators, arithmetic operators and basic I/O. I'm saying that coding should be taught in the context of these basic constructs of a system; as these are the constructs used to actually process data.

This happening on the 30th anniversary of the Mac, and the legendary '1984' advertisement, is interesting (Jobs is definitely turning in his grave). This, and other freedom-neutralizers (and I would personally put Foursquare and Flappy Birds, amongst others, in the category), are certainly proving Blair/Orwell's great foresight.