Having written in perl for the past 20 years, I started out trying to find something that perl can do that ruby can't (ruby is the only comparable language I have in my toolbelt). After a few minutes, I decided that, for the work that I do, the single feature that perl has that ruby doesn't is that I'm very familiar with how to write perl.

I've liked some of the things that I was able to do with Ruby on Rails, and could see how having a MVC framework in perl would be useful, but quite frankly, most of the coding I do these days is emergency, one-off parsing jobs that need to be written yesterday. Under those circumstances, I reach for the tool that I know best, I'm sure I could probably become equally familiar with ruby, but since I've already got one tool that does the job, why?

If you're in a state where the vote isn't "choose between Person X and Person Y to be a judge", chances are the vote is to retain an existing judge for another term. My philosophy has been that, unless I become aware of gross misconduct (i.e. bribery, criminal prosecution, failure to recuse self when obviously interested in the case, etc.), I vote to retain

The rationale is that the judiciary is supposed to be apolitical. If they have to go through campaigning, the way other candidates do, they become subject to campaign contributions and all the evils those entail. Leave them where they are unless they've done something obviously wrong.

I do, so I only saw perhaps 3 of the on-page blocks the first time through, which pissed me off enough that I closed the page. I then decided to vent on /., so I opened the page in IE, which showed the ads in all their full, unadulterated glory, thus allowing the full count.

I'm bemused that the story about people padding their fan list is broken up into four separate screen pages, with only 5 paragraphs on the first page (I didn't bother to go any further), but the story itself was prefaced with an ad, had 8 full-fledged ad blocks on the main page, plus many more blocks with links to other stories and the various "Like me on X" buttons.

As much as I agree that everyone should have the opportunity at an education, I'm not convinced that everyone needs THE SAME education. So, I guess I agree, at least superficially, with the original article. I'm a bit surprised with chemistry being the demon here, as I would have expected advanced math classes as being more problematic and less applicable to the daily life of the masses than chemistry, but that's probably just my bias showing.

Now, having said that, I don't see any way to accommodate the educational needs of every child in the current system, for several reasons:

• Not enough teachers (or dollars for teachers) for personalized public education
• Expecting kids who haven't had basic education to be able to frame rational, coherent thought processes around what they REALLY want to do for the rest of their lives, let alone what they want to do that will provide enough money for them to live on, is most likely not realistic.
• In theory, parents could be used as proxies to compensate for the previous point, but given their backgrounds and educations, it's likely that the parents' decisions will all be horribly biased, and are thus no less likely to lead to a life of terminal boredom than kids choosing on their own or the Board of Education choosing for them.

Unfortunately, designing an educational system that suits the needs of everyone, all the time, is really, really hard. I've thought for a while now that having a tree-based curriculum (i.e. everyone starts out with the same basics in elementary school, then branches in middle school, maybe along academic/vocational tech lines, etc.) but even that is most likely prejudicial in such a way that jumping class boundaries would get increasingly hard.

Then again, think of how hard it would be to even have this discussion if we hadn't all had to take classes in reading, writing, logic, etc.

I don't know about your company, but I doubt if my HR department has ANYONE capable of installing anything, let alone secret sniffing software that's hiding on a server they don't own/control/have access to.

The reason that SCOTUS decisions can often be predicted is because law largely functions like computer code. Given these inputs, run through this set of logic gates, and it's likely that you'll get this output.

The thing that adds ambiguity is the same thing that intorduces problems in WIndows XP: support for legacy code. The US civil/criminal code is a HUGE beast, probably constituting as many "lines of code" as are in XP, but not all of the lines make sense in the modern environment. In some cases, these bits of legacy code lead to legal decisiosn that, while logical given the inputs and code, are both unpopular and harmful.

Citizens United is a good example of this. While I'm pissed off at the result (i.e. essentially unregulated campaign contributions by corporations), it follows quite logically given the initial conditions of a) corporate personhood, and b) the necessity of assigning Constitutional rights to any person.

Personally, I'm pissed off about the whole corporate personhood thing, but since the SCOTUS has to start with that as existing precident, the syllogisim basically works out to be "people have a right to free speech, corporations are people, therefore corporations have a right to free speech". Unpopular, and harmful in the long-term, but completely predictable without any personal opinions on the part of the justices.

Fire, of various forms, might do the trick for individuals, but when trying to do something officially for a company, employee and facilities safety can be seen as an issue. An enclosed compartment that won't let you put your hand in until after the dangerous operation is done is preferable to random employees starting fires in their waste baskets :-)

It is important to note the section on feasibility in that Wikipedia link... Peter Gutmann did the original (public sector) research on recovering overwritten data on MFM hard drives with very low byte densities (by today's standards). Peter revisited the subject and found that a single overwrite pass, even if only zeroing out every bit, was sufficient to defeat the technique on "modern" drives (i.e. drives larger than 15GB and made in the past 5-7 years).

Of course not. You don't spend a fortune protecting everything. You figure out what the various things that need protecting are worth, and then apply an appropriate amount of security to them.

What many companies don't recognize, though, is that if you use this model, you cannot have all your data in a single, flat security zone. I could require one-time passwords to access the highly-critical development application, but if that server is in the same effective security zone as the general-purpose web server that's got Internet access, no security, and hasn't been patched in 2 years, then the threats from the low security box dramatically increase the risk on the high security one.

In the end, there's no substitute for identifying what you want to protect, who you're protecting it from, and how much it is worth (both to you and the attackers). Then apply security as necessary.

Speaking as someone with a degree in English Literature, I can safely say that I've only used math two times in my life: when learning it in school, when counting my kids at night, and when doing my taxes.

I used to agree with the idea that corporations shouldn't have rights, but then I read a well-reasoned legal analysis of the Citizens United decision. In that, the lawyer pointed out that certain rights need to be granted to corporations in order to prevent the rights of individuals from being trampled on. One good, clear example of this is the Fourth Amendment.

If corporations don't have rights, then the government would be able to enter any corporate-owned building to search, at will, and without a warrant. The government could also seize any corporate-owned property (i.e. a laptop assigned to an employee under investigation), monitor any corporate-owned resource (all of AT&T's telephone wires, anyone?), etc.

The takings clause of the Fifth Amendment should apply, as well, otherwise the government could simply seize any corporate asset at will without compensating the corporation and, by extension, the shareholders.

First Amendment-wise, corporations have a certain amount of rights. Without these rights, the government would be able to censor what corporate-owned media could print/say, which WOULD be a direct infringement on the individual right of free speech of the writer.

Corporate personhood is fraught with peril, though. Corporations cannot be sent to prison. They cannot be executed, at least not in the conventional firing-line sense. They are, effectively, immortal, which means that they can do things like attempt to draw out lawsuits so long that the opposite party can't proceed since they're no longer alive. They have, by their very nature, the potential of having significantly greater resources at their disposal than any one individual. Because of these inequities, there really should be some form of legal restraint to balance the equation. Unfortunately, it would most likely take a Constitutional amendment to achieve such balance, which is almost certainly not going to happen, especially after Citizens United legalized unrestricted funding of Congress-critters.

So, while I disagree with the result of Citizens United, I can understand the logic that the SCOTUS used to reach that decision. Within the framework that they have to work with (i.e. the Constitution and SCOTUS precedent regarding corporate personhood), this was the only decision that could be made without attempting to draft law from the bench.

For most things, a decent, random password isn't that bad. You can combine a password manager program, like KeePass, with a file sync solution, like Dropbox, and gain several security benefits without sacrificing much (if anything).

In my case, I've got 50-75 accounts on various websites, each one has a different strong password (i.e. 15 characters of mixed-case alpha, numeric, and special characters), but the only password I absolutely have to know is the passphrase for my KeePass database, which is significantly stronger. KeePass handles filling in the login credentials, I don't have to even try typing the passwords, it clears the clipboard when it's done, so it's fairly tough for malware to grab them out of memory, and Dropbox ensures that I've got a cached copy on nearly every device I use, including my phone.

Compare that with the problems of PKI: if I lose my USB, I've lost access to site accessed with those keys; certificates are only really useful if you've done some form of vetting to confirm that I am who I said I am, which means either costly, time-consuming processes for registering or the use of large, "trusted" 3rd parties, which have been subject to a variety of attacks over the years (think: virus writers getting a legitimate certificate from a major vendor with a hostname in the microsoft.com domain).

Why go through the expense, complexity, and risks posed by all keys on a single USB drive when there are perfectly useful password-based solutions already available that don't involve me trusting parties I don't know?

The real fix would be to get users to realize that there's no such thing as a secret when you're yelling loud enough that people a half a block away can hear you. Even if you're talking in code, chances are, if someone really wants to screw with you, they'll figure out how.

Wireless networking is a convenience, and at Layer 2, there probably isn't much that can be done to secure traffic. If you want secure, either use your own encryption (IPSEC, SSL/TLS, SSH, etc.) or use a wire.

Of course, this is why serious attackers on a switch don't try cloning MACs. They send gratuitous ARPs to the systems they want to sniff traffic from and pretend to be the default router. Or they take over the root of the spanning tree on the switch. Or they send an email to their target that says "Click this link to download nekkid pictures of " but actually installs a keystroke logger.

None of that is as hard as the 133t hax0rs want you to believe. Not trivial, and not undetectable, but not particularly difficult these days, thanks to Ettercap.

Of course, it's often cheaper and easier to just slip the janitor a $50 to have them photocopy all the CEO's garbage, but that doesn't sound nearly geeky enough :-)