No real comparable thing exists, and to expect it is to think in the MS single-microcomputer-on-every-desk mindset. We're networked and clouded these days, so every program is a server which can interact with any other program (or should be) and a single-lump tool is limited to its black box. In the Free/Open Source world, you can get full SQL DB's or NoSQL storage engines free-at-point-of-use, so why would you grab a single solution when you can pick the components which best fit your needs?

I think you've condemned your many clients to no scalability and little flexibility. When it comes to cope with larger numbers of records, more complicated business logic or increased concurrent access, there's nothing like Access in the Free/Open Source world because the big-boy DB's are free-at-point-of-use. You then have the freedom to implement a web UI or a GTK+ UI or a QT UI talking a standard protocol and standard DB query language, and with that comes the architectural freedom to divorce the back-end from the business logic from the user interface -- which makes maintenance and ongoing improvements easy.

It's a device that *receives* information without storing it and generates nothing...It's a cell phone that can't send.

Except, of course, you no longer can. You turned your entire body into red mist, remember? Talk about frustrating! They don't make a little blue pill for that!

My point was more that what the Washington Post puts out is libertine drivel, just like every other paper in the main stream media in America. It isn't conservative of any sort.

From the wikipedia article, it was partially because a return expedition in 1988 failed to turn up any further samples. I think I have an explanation for that, just from the evidence of the original expedition. From the Wikipedia Article "using a sled that was dragged over the sea floor to collect bottom-dwelling animals.". What if their study process wiped out the whole phylum?

The Washington Post is considered NeoConservative.

The sad part is, they don't. There is no method to break a time share agreement. So I'm trying something new: I got out of the mortgage by defaulting on the loan, and then with that paper in my possession, which destroyed my credit rating anyway, I stopped paying maintenance fees entirely on the grounds that I did not own the condo and the damn condo association could take me to court over it.

They never did. My credit recovered after 10 years. New maintenance fees come on every year, I don't pay a penny of them, the ones that are 7 years old get dropped. They can sue my estate after I die, but I have the full amount in savings to pay them off at that point. The company itself has changed hands so often that I could probably make a good case in court for bad recordkeeping. I get 4 letters a year from them- one inviting me to vote in the condo association, three trying to get me to make good on the debt.

Yes, so what? Josephus is the normal source, but so are the court records of Herod Agrippa and Pontius Pilate.

The "Jesus didn't exist outside of the Gospels" is a pious myth of atheists invented in the 20th century.

I don't disagree with your overall premise: bureaucratic 'big design up front' methods don't work except for an exceedingly small subset of problems in the real world.

However, you largely ignore a key point that I think the IEEE is (belatedly) trying to address: our focus from a design perspective to this point has been first meeting the functional design criteria, and lastly security (if you have time to deal with that at all - which in my experience ends up being the first thing that gets cut when time is at a premium and pressure mounts to ship).

Security has to be seen as a core function of every application that plans on communicating across a network, and also for many that don't by necessity, due to their incestuous relationship to other systems running on a machine that do. I also think that if you start your overall design with security in mind - that will influence various factors of the design - from API construction, to modularity, to the design of the tools, and operating systems the resultant applications live on/in.

To do that well without any framework or controls would require every application programmer to be a top notch systems developer. In my experience the vast majority of professionals in the application development space will never rise to that level of expertise. But code must be written - and applications deployed as the appetite for more and more automation does not abate. There are not enough programmers competent in systems development to do the job without any help. So, what do we do?

I have a pretty good idea about what I think should happen - but I'm curious, what you would do given that reality (assuming you can't guarantee deep competency)?

I appreciate the atheist rant, and I think you'd be surprised to find most Catholics share in it. Including the Pope. oh, not the God doesn't exist bullshit, but especially the Jesus showing up in Church (which he does every day for Catholics) stuff, which most Protestants would be incredibly shocked by if they understood it.

There are plenty of records that he existed, perhaps you haven't looked hard enough?

He ran into somebody more disillusioned and in despair than he is, and he doesn't know how to handle it.