Apparently, your experienced C developer is still leaving holes for arbitrary execution, despite all of the tools (fuzzing/NX/ASLR) targeting this specific issue. Managed languages (like Java and C#) give you a "secure-by-default" memory and execution model that's a lot harder to accidentally mess up. The more "stuff" (languages, libraries, operating systems, etc.) that's secure-by-default, the less security holes we will have.

Jet fuel is to gasoline what gasoline is to diesel. It burns very quickly which as you can imagine makes it useful for an engine of this type.

Jet fuel is actually so much closer to diesel (and heating oil) than you imagine. Now, I know nothing about jet engines, but I did know that. Mainly because I tend to remember "interesting but useless facts". Link to Wikipedia

Give me a factory and a team of engineers from the 1860s

Typo? 1960, I buy, but in 1860? Not so sure... The birth of the car is generally put at 1886.... The Wright Brothers did they first powered flight in 1903.

Spartan! Kraken! ... Gotta love those codenames. You get a pretty good impression of what kind of movies the crew at microsoft has been watching lately. :-)

Guarantee? What guarantee? Both DSL and cable internet service are provided on a "best effort" basis. If you want a SLA, you have to pay through the nose for it. Guaranteeing a SLA means the provider has to provision dedicated circuit capacity, instead of letting you complete for channel space on a first-come, first-serve basis.

With DSL, the uplink and downlink depends on the DSLAM-to-CO channel capacity, because DSL is implemented using ATM and virtual circuits in fiber rings. The differing up/down rates are a design decision, based on how many of the sub-carriers are assigned in each direction. Oversubscription is the carrier's choice.

True cable service is another story. The downlink is managed by the head-end, so the feed onto the cable can run at top rate. Yes, the more users who are on the subnet in your neighborhood, the slower things can go. The uplink, however, is a single channel shared by a number of sources, so the upstream channel acts like AloahNet back in the 60s: a fractional load can saturate the uplink because of contention. (ThickNet and ThinNet suffered from the same congestion problem...which is why most people use twisted-pair star networks, even in our homes.)

POTS is 64 kilobits/s in the ideal case, 56 kilobits/s when the path is digital, about 48 kilobits/s when there are analog diplexing amps and such (which continue to go away, thank goodness). But not let's get caught up in nits...

When you talk about video, you are assuming a single stream of high-quality 1080p video. How many American homes have only one television? (Especially when there is such a glut of analog-only TVs available for a song with the switch to over-the-air digital.) (Or as large-format laptops continue to hit the previously-leased used computer stores.) You can easily have two streams in the poorest of homes, one for the alleged "grown-ups" and one for the kids.

When you start talking about VoIP, you need roughly 100 kilobits/s to handle a single voice conversation and side-channel control, considerably more if you have side-channel "whiteboard" traffic. That's per phone conversation. It adds up when your household has a number of people, and more so in SOHO.

And the cable companies in particular want to keep 1990 pricing as much as they can, because Internet is a cash cow for them when they get CCIEs to maintain the network gear -- an absolute necessity when the cables sell 100/100 fiber to larger businesses.

It's about profit and rate of return. And, unlike the other parts of their business, the rate of return on Internet is (for now) unregulated.

I don't stream anything, because the short-term packet loss I suffer all the time would clobber streaming. I have "business" cable service, which is fine for mail servers, web browsing, and file transfers, but not VoIP or any real-time applications such as gaming. Skype is just...painful. Even VPN access can be dicey...and that's talking to a 100/100-fibre-connected-through-same-cable-company site.

Instead, I will find DVDs/BluRay at the pawn shops, used-"record" stores, and for things I just can't wait for other people to discard (or movies that people tend to hold onto forever), Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

"Normal cable companies don't need $100/month for Internet, consumer lobby says.

"The consumer lobby is opposed to a cable industry plan to keep sub-standard Internet server at or above $100/month. Cable companies do just fine with lower rates, the Internet Consumer Association wrote on SlashDot this morning. It wasn't that long ago that Internet access was available for one-fifth the rate, and the cost burden to the cable companies to provide service continues to drop as the Internet access piggy-backs on existing cable infrastructure, especially in the face of cable company promotion of so-called 'triple-play' products: television, telephone, and Internet.

"Notably, no party provides any justification for adopting increased tarriffs for providing service. All the companies provide bogus justifications for charges for service that go well beyond the 'current' and regular' amounts that were in place during the dial-up and DSL days."

(I wonder how the NCTA would respond to such an article, were one such as this parody were ever to appear in print)

Wasn't that the other programming language whos users would look down on us Basic programmers? My good friend from school was one of those. Now he's a teacher and I'm a software developer.

Pretty much sums it up, doesn't it?

OK, jokes aside: Seriously, who cares how a PL is "rated" - whatever that's supposed to mean. How much it's used and how it gets the job done, or, more precisely, how much do I get paid for using it is what counts.
Example: I love Python. I'm measurably more productive in Python. But I do PHP at work. Why? Wordpress and Typo3 are built with PHP. Python only has Plone and that has almost no market here in Germany.

Its that simple.

And to be honest, there are many neat exotic programming languages out there - all of which I would love to have the time to look into, but don't. Pascal definitely isn't on that list.

My advice to anyone today would be to let go of Pascal and however it is "rated" and learn some other flash exotic language - perhaps one of those countless new ones that run on the Java VM (Scala, Closure, etc.), no?

My 2 cents.

Seriously guys, this is fucking outrageous! I' writing my first post on my brand new tablet just a minute ago and you're abysmaly flaky mobile version double posts again. So it wasn't android 3.2 after all.

And why can't I turnoff ads in the mobile version?

Rob, what's going on? .... You guys need to get your shit together man - it's 2015, mobile web is standard now. Get with the effing programm. ... Do you need help?n

Perhaps you need help? I'll build a professional mobile version for credit alone.

(Please don't mod down - this needs attention folks. Seriously.)

Need to run special software tied to the OS? No? ... Install Linux.
Really, it's that easy.

Ubuntu can be a drag, in more ways than one, but it's worth a try - and it does look really cool. Seriously.
Suse and Redhat are hassle-free to install aswell. All three are definitly more hassle-free than any Windows installation you can do thesse days.

I've got Ubuntu 14.04 on my ThinkPad. And while it can be anoying (which OS isn't?), it is way ahead of Windows in usability and you can get tons of books and free info on the web for it.

Other than that I'd recommend Mac OS X or Chrome OS - but since you already have your laptop I guess that's ruled out.

Welcome to the camp. Enjoy.

Need to run special software tied to the OS? No? ... Install Linux. Ubuntu can be a drag, in more ways the one, but it's worth a try. Suse and Redhat probably are hassle free aswell. All three are way easyer to install than a fresh Windows.

Here's a link to one of their articles which shows the contents of a cartridge. Hopefully that'll work?

Why is the tax code so convoluted that there is an entire industry devoted to following the code? It's because Congress keeps piling on the laws, exceptions, work-around, and "social engineering". Instead of adding law to the US Code, they should be removing pages from the US Code. To make things simpler, start eliminating "targeted" deductions and exemptions/exceptions to deductions, so that individuals and married people can play by the same rules as the businesses, companies, and corporations. If insurance premiums are tax-deductible to one class of taxpayer, it should be the same for all classes of taxpayers.

Completely remove the "negative tax liability". If you are going to give people money, give people money directly, and not via the IRS. The IRS is not a social agency. Their job is to collect taxes. I'm not sure what to do with tax-exempt organizations in the current climate, but the IRS shouldn't be making that determination off their own bat. They should stick to the "revenue" part.

The IRS regulations published in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) are to implement the statues passed by Congress. The IRS does not do this off their own bat. Court cases balloons the number of pages of interpretation, because there is no requirement to "backfill" the CFR or the USC, and stare decisis increases the amount of law surrounding tax -- another source of law bloat. That's why WestLaw and Lexus/Nexus is so necessary, and why tax attorneys demand -- and get -- such high fees. Those fees can be chickenfeed compared with the interest and penalties that their clients have to pay out when they don't use an attorney.

I don't have an opinion of the Fair Tax proposal, because I'm not sure I understand it yet. But I do know that there are way too many densely-printed pages in USC Title 26. Shrink that down to something the size of a magazine, and many of the tax ills will be solved. Ordinary people will be able to understand the law they are supposed to follow.

As a consequence, the IRS itself would shrink. And the new IT systems would be far easier and quicker to implement.

(pipe dream, for sure)

Gleaming the Cube