At the end of the day, all programming languages are about abstracting things. If you are testing the intrinsic security of a programming language, you are in essence testing how successful the language's built-in data types, built-in functions, APIs, standard libraries, etc. are at mitigating risk factors, which is all about abstraction.

A language's intrinsic security is only as good as its abstractions.

There's no doubt that OpenSSL needs work, but they seem to be needlessly combining actual security review with "break every platform that I don't like." At a minimum, anyone else trying to benefit from this will need to unravel the worthwhile security changes from the petty OS wars crap.

I don't see this as a problem. Since OpenBSD is working on their own, for-themselves, branch, they can fix it any way they want. If they do a good job (as expected), the OpenSSL project can then backport their fixes into their project and integrate it to their hearts' content.k (If they chose not to, someone else can chose to fork and do it, and the two versions can fight it out for acceptance.)

This is how it works in the Bazzaar.

... as they keep saying about Jerusalem, it will go something like this: "Annexed by Russia in a move not recognized internationally."

I recently too a course titled "Ethics in International Relations" at a major college. (This was to fulfill a distribution requirement for an "ethics" class and the particular course had the bonus of also fulfilling an international affairs requirement.)

One of the first points made:
  * Which regions are part of which countries is NOT a subject of international ethics.
A fait accopli is accepted as is. (This was taken as a universal, part of the definition of the boundaries of the field (as taught), which otherwise studied many different, often conflicting, schools of thought.

I interpret this as follows: "International Ethics", as a dicipline, is an attempt by academics (and the rich people who fund them - such as Andrew Carnegie, who largely founded the field) to influence governments, primarily to improve their treatment of the people they rule and otherwise use force upon. ("Improved" being viewed throught the biases of the academics in question.)

In order to sway the behavior of rulers - especially those who are oppressing their long-standing citizens, recent conquests, or those with whom they are considering resolving a dispute with force, they have to appear non-threatening to the rulers' core issue: that the ruler is in charge. So they must strictly avoid challenging WHETHER the rulers rule, sticking to issues of HOW they rule.

So don't expect academia to support any move for self-determination by the people of an occupied region. The rulers that make the claim and have the power to enforce it will be passively accepted.

DO expect them to oppose such people arming themselves to assert a right to self-determination, or even anyone speaking in a way that might "lead to conflict" rather than passification and quiet (but mainly non-violent) suffering. Thus you see them supporting things like censorship of speech an arms blockades to regions of conflict - which are then selectively enforced and lead to "ethnic clensing" genocides by the side that more successfully evades them against the side that is now largely disarmed.

(Example on censorship: During the period where the Benghazi attack was being blamed on a video posted on YouTube, Sarah Chayes, a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote an op-ed for the L.A. times calling for its censorship.)

True but if you have any sort of investment, or get any interest from savings (that is not in a tax free savings account) then in reality you should. That's means most higher rate tax payers should be doing tax returns.

Yep all taxed at the lower rate of tax unless you declare that you are not a tax payer. If you are a higher rate tax payer you will be doing a tax return and have to pay the extra.

My 486 used SIPP memory... same thing as a SIMM but with leads soldered on them to plug in a header instead of a card-edge memory slot.

Dang. Typo broke the first, more-punchline-worthy, Schlock link.

I'm really begining to hate the keyboard on this new laptop.

This actually looks good to me. Most helicopters can be shot down with a rifle. They are huge engines with large fuel tanks and large, whirling blades, and it is not that difficult to get them to destroy themselves with their own momentum, height, or fuel.

I concur. Helicopters are a collection of single-points-of-failure, disasters waiting to happen. (Particularly the pilot - they have to be continuously controlled and crash almost instantly if anything incapacitates him.) Their vulnerability is justified only because their extreme usefulness oughtweighs it. With eight rotors I'd be surprised if this vehicle couldn't at least come to ground safely with at least two of them destroyed, and the multicopter approach has been under autonomous computer control from the start - made practical only by the automation.

I envision this thing's missions as being primarily extreme rough-country ground transport, with short hops to bypass otherwise impassible terrain, reach otherwise inaccessible destinations or targets, attack from above, or put on a burst of speed when time is of the essence. Think a truck-sized "super jeep" ala Superman. Being primarily a ground vehicle lets it perform longer missions and reduces its visibility and vulnerability compared to a helicopter.

Just because you CAN fly doesn't mean you DO fly all the time. As is pointed out in the webcomic Schlock Mercenary: "Do you know what they call flying soldiers on the battlefield?" ... "Skeet!"

The best solution for the court's display system would be to hard-wire it so they would not have to worry about WiFi.

Putting up routers with temporary internet access won't help them if reporters and whoever else is in the room continue using their own hotspot or ad-hoc network - people in the room might not like the idea of going through the public WiFi or having to re-configure all their own wireless stuff.

It may be "only one tool" but it is representative of the rapidly escalating cost and effort that goes with pushing fundamental physics to the next level.

Physics is not accessible to mathematics

This is very much still an active topic of discussion, actually, and certainly not as settled or clear-cut as you seem to think. You can start with Wigner's essay.

And just to provide the opposite viewpoint to yours, some people will of course argue that physical reality is mathematical.

The point was not about precluding discoveries elsewhere but how proving new theories and refining existing ones is thousands, if not millions of times more expensive than it used to be.

100 years ago, researchers could make fundamental physics discoveries in their garage. Today, further advancements in fundamental physics require things like the LHC. Fundamental science moved pretty far up on the cost and effort curve - much faster than any budget can keep up with.

Put another way, don't let perfect be the enemy of better.

Really, Greece less corrupt than Poland!!! You are on the crack pipe mate. The Corruption perceptions index 2012 has Poland scoring 58 and ranked 41 in the world, where as Greece manages just 36 and is ranked 94. Greece has the worst corruption problem in the whole of the E.U. including all the ex communist states. Greece can only dream of having as little corruption as Poland.