I am. And so are you. In fact, everyone is an idiot in some respect. But so what?

Good point and I agree. There are for instance a few people I would trust telling very personal things although I would never, ever do that over email for instance. There are just way to many ways for such information to leak out in some way, even if the receiving person would handle things perfectly confidentially.

There is no way you can avoid putting trust on something outside your own control, be it the C compiler, firmware on the motherboard or the CPU itself. So what you really are asking is "where should I put my trust level". That depends extremely from person to person and is next to impossible to answer, almost like asking "what car should I buy". You cannot expect good answers to what you ask without providing good indicators about what threats you consider important. However, the slashdot crowd usually does not pay any attention to the original question in any case, so maybe it is not that important :)

Dear interval1066.

I do not know what your intention were in writing the above post. Maybe you wrote it purely for own reasons to blow off some steam or you felt that someone was wrong on the internet. But if you also want to influence other people, politeness is much, much, much more effective than insulting them. And to other people not target for the insult you risk appearing childish by calling the other person douchebag etc. So I kindly ask you to consider being more polite. Not because I felt insulted or think you should not be allowed to say what you want. But because I think the world would be a better place if you did.

BR ZorroXXX

I really did not know, thank you for making me better informed. Although true or not true, that does not change the point that there ought not be any problem for anyone's children to inherit their music collection.

Precisely Bruce Willi's point when he wants to leave his music collection to his daughters (computerworld, cnn dailymail yahoo).

Back in the days, Borland was a refreshingly sound and sensible manufacturer, trusting its customers (as opposed to others' love for dongles or code wheels or whatnot). If you are not familiar with Borlands's No-Nonsense License Statement, by all means read the full story.

This software is protected by both United States copyright law and international copyright treaty provisions. Therefore, you must treat this software just like a book, except that you may copy it onto a computer to be used and you may make archival copies of the software for the sole purpose of backing-up our software and protecting your investment from loss.

...

Companies do not set out to write good software. They set out to write good enough software, for some definition of good enough. I think that is the root cause of the existence of bad software as discussed in the article.

I think you also missed to include the corresponding XKCD reference for this :)

Jeff Atwood has an blog Working with the Chaos Monkey.

"a = a++" is undefined behaviour according to the standard (modifying a variable several times between two sequence points).

The phrase "Permanent Emergency" made me think of "war is peace".

The latter interests me: I'd love to read clueful arguments *for* the www prefix.

If you have your web server operate at www.example.com and not example.com, you will be able to use static.example.com for serving static content. As a user I can trust that content from static.example.com is safe to be included at www.example.com. This is simple and obvious, in contrast to sstatic.com for stackoverflow.com, yimg.com for youtube.com and similar mindboggling FTW name relations. There is no way I can deduce that bizarre-domain.com for website.com is not some kind of fishing/MITM attemt.

This is true to all sorts of advertising.

I tend to consider most advertising as an intellectual insult.

Interestingly enough, the study separates Catholic schools from other private schools. ... it seems like you have a better shot of being good at reason if you are trained by them.

Correlation does not imply causation. It might for instance be caused by children going to catholic schools are more likely to live in a family with two parents, and that that is a factor that will stimulate developing reasoning. Or maybe they have more siblings. Or it might be something else. Of course it could be that going to a catholic school is better for developing reasoning, but I do not think it is possible to conclude that without analysing the data set with that hypothesis as specifically in mind and eliminating the possible differences in the reference group and the test group (e.g. comparing groups with equal distribution of siblings, etc).