UPDATE users SET password = SHA1(password) WHERE created_at <= '2009-04-01';

I hate angular brackets in HTML.

passwords created before April 2009 had been stored in plain text

UPDATE users SET password = SHA1(password) WHERE created_at

There. Did it for you. Won't prevent everything getting stolen, but at least you don't give away any more passwords reusable on other websites.

I mean... seriously?? So you have to check in your code if an account has been created before and after 04/2009, and do different actions to check their credentials upon that? Yuuuck.

Because they think for the future. Even a iron-screw-sized debris, if plunged against your craft at hundreds of meters per second, can leave a hole bigger than your fist, side-to-side. Depressurization of the environment is one of the possible issues that might happen because of it.

You really, really, really want to limit the amount of debris you leave in space, or you're gambling with Lady Luck. There's a big enough mess with all the satellites we put up there. A salvage operation would cost an awful sum of money. Think about going around in space searching for some centimeters-wide, potentially-harmful waste.

Pushing it in space might be romantic (agreed), but not very clever. The only good alternative would be to have it caught by another gravity well, so that it crashes on something like Jupiter. Actually, sending everything on the moon might be nice, if you want to use some scrap metal one day tomorrow to start building shipcrafts in space (sooner or later we will need to do it, if we want to push forward with space exploration).

While risk reduction is nice and desirable, there is a problem in risk avoidance. Risk avoidance (one of the traits Geert Hofstede identified as defining a culture) might bring economical stagnation and less breakthroughs in high-risk research, among other things — my country has a very high risk avoidance ratio, btw, and I can confirm this.

We are progressing from what is safe to be concerned about (kids playing with guns are still worrying to me, sorry NRA), to a society where you teach kids they should not climb a tree, jump the rope, or run along for fear of falling and bruising their knee. This, in the long run, will produce less competitive, fearful and insecure adults.

In my opinion, only useless risks are dangerous. TFA argues that by overprotecting children, you take away from them the ability to learn to assess whether a risk is worth it or not, and what are the outcomes of acting in a certain way. Nothing new into that. The *right* way to address *this* problem would be to watch over children while they play, so you — the experienced adult — can guide a child to avoid the worst outcomes while still giving them the capability of choosing what they want to do, and that is the core issue. Nobody has time anymore to play with their children, but that's what parents should do.

In other words, we learn from our mistakes, but we must be able to err in order to do a mistake and learn from it.

Overprotective parents are the worst kind; they actually prevent a child to grow and reason with his own brains. Incidentally, be wary about how you judge someone to be "fearful": for me, heavily armed societies are fearful societies. I would say people screaming "this will make a man out of me!" and jumping in the battlefield would probably be those NOT having any experience about small risks when they were children. Those experiences that would make them say "wait, if I do this I might pay these consequences" (growing up from: "if I punch my classmate in the face I get scolded by the headmaster", to: "if I punch a colleague at work, I might end up without job and in tribunal").

Actually, if they ran out of disk space, it's more like they had a bigger response than what they anticipated, so it's probably going quite well.

As for the "same mistake they've done several times earlier", are you referring to the undoubtedly failure of products such as GMail or GTalk? Or of Google Search, maybe? They seem to have been adopted pretty widely to me...

And as both a Facebook and Google+ user, I can't really say how you manage to state that privacy is worse on Google+ than in Facebook, where they introduce new options violating your privacy all the times and without alerting you (almost all weeks I found new checkboxes to uncheck in my privacy settings, not to speak of the scam/spam apps and the poor security record FB has). Maybe you can elaborate your line of reasoning? Else, it's just trolling.

Frankly, I am closing down my Facebook account, and I'm giving a Google+ a shot. In the past three days, friends in my circles on Google+ went up from being just 6 to about 40-50. I expect this number to increase. Deep integration with other Google products, such as GMail, will most likely ensure a big number of participants.

If Google+ fails, I won't at least go back to FB. There is a lot of social pressure to do so, but quite frankly it sucks. You use it because most of your friends do, not because it works well. The only thing I will miss is the capability of creating events among friends, but there are other ways.

They are streaming content to a device; in other words, calculation happen on a central server and your device acts as a (somewhat) dumb terminal.

It's the mainframe world of Multics again, only 30 years later, much more complex, and servicing trivialities instead that business critical apps.

The "cloud" has become a buzzword for many, but deep down it's just some central servers doing the grunt-work, and you displaying that data. The reverse of a decentralized, democratic and transparent system; more control to the companies, less control to the user.

And there is nothing bad about it; I also like CoffeeScript over Javascript, when possible. Not to mention the Vala language, that "compiles" in C.

If browsers do not support the syntax you like directly, there is nothing bad to ease your developer's work server-side, go with a DSL, and make it work in a browser as a standard-compliant code.

You sure do not expect that these changes first get voted on by the W3C, before they make road into browsers! That is my whole point, NOT to wait for them, but use a intermediate mechanism that benefit both the user and the developer, while respecting the outdated standard.

And while they are so slow finalizing the CSS standard, I use SASS and CSS 3.0. SASS is not about adding new features, just some basic common sense in the grammar, allowing for nesting, variable substitution, and another couple of sugary things.

Next step they'll finalize a standard on BASIC from the 80s. :-p

Actually, it's not exactly true if you are brute-forcing. If you have a nine-characters-long password, of which exactly one letter is uppercase (assuming you can determine that), you would have 8 lowercase letters (26^8) * 26*9 possibilities (because the uppercase letter can appear in 9 different places), so that would make it 9 times the time required to bruteforce an all-lowercase password. That's why they recommend you to use digits, special characters and uppercase letters; they DO increase a LOT the amount of work due to break a password). If you do not know if there *is* a uppercase letter (0 or 1 uppercase letters), that makes it 18 times harder (26^8 * 52*9).

Sony is becoming the bitch of the Internet. Every hole is getting someone through. Soon enough it will be too abused to be appealing to anyone. I already see mascara dripping from Stringer's face.

If you are really protesting about something related to WikiLeaks, why would you publish false information on a dead rapper? Why not something about what you are claiming your are for/against?

You are protesting against what you believe is false information, and then you do the same?

I am not condoning this act, they should be put under investigation and trial. But the logic of this act eludes me.

Sorry, I lost you here. I believed socialists countries like Sweden or Norway did not in fact buy votes from the mob; they provide good basic services to all people, such as education, healthcare, etc. What you are referring to is a part of populism and of lobbying, and has nothing to do with the fine socialist tradition we have in North Europe.

And if you think of socialism in a negative way, see it like this: I got to school for free, to the university for free (because of merit, of course), I get cured for free. I am more than happy to give back more than 50% of my income in taxation, because the services are all there were I to need it, or my family.

Contrast with the US, what you call "a socialist" country. As far as I know, if you get ill and you don't have insurance it's your damn business. Or look at the sorry state of the education system (I've recently seen a nice movie, "Waiting for superman", on the subject).

Really, that statement does not make sense, and is offensive to me. You seem to be stuck in the McCarthy-ist era.

PS4's hardware could be less impressive than the PS3 at its launch. I think Microsoft will really be able to put the screws to Sony in the next console war

It is not about how big your hardware is, it is all about how you use it.

Joke aside, the most important thing for a console is having games support. If all the games I like are made for another console, I will go with that, no matter if it has eight or twenty cores, and six or ten GiB of RAM.