I think the only part that I got interested in was Quorra becoming human. They could make a WHOLE movie about that, did you know? What does it mean to be human? Why is pain so awful? What are these things called emotions? Et cetera.

I expected to see more stuff about "the user has superpowers" that Flynn displayed in the original TRON (after all, he's the USER). But I guess they chickened out from being compared to Matrix just because the user can do things that programs can't.

Anyway, the 3D was awesome and I got out of the theater with a smile. It was a nice weekend.

In addition to salting the password, I design my systems to sleep for one second after each failed password attempt, and for 3 seconds before booting the guy off. That should take care of brute force attacks.

I was thinking more or less the same thing.

The point is that a good domain name system implementation needs to be secure against protocol attacks. DNSSEC secures it against hackers, but makes it more vulnerable to political attacks. Because DNS was designed to be centralized.

The problem with currently emerging alternatives is that they're designed to be decentralized, making them vulnerable to protocol attacks. However, a good p2p implementation would use an underlying hierarchy based on the anonymity of the name authorities, and they would be able to establish further authority points. But that protocol isn't even invented yet as far as I recall, and it would require a hell lot of thought and encryption.

In any case, more cryptographic security is better, not worse. If you want someone to blame, it's the inventors of DNS for establishing a US-based name authority. Oh wait, the Internet was invented in the US, by none other than the DARPA. Go figure.

I guess this is the time when the veil's opened and we realize that the web designed by Tim Berners-Lee, is dead.

The Internet has stopped being the land of free-speech as we know it. At any time that corporate or government interests are against free speech, they just hit the political off-switch. If someone decides to install internet routers and domain systems in another country, expect that country to be labelled "terrorist" and invaded by those with power.

Expect peer-to-peer information sources and services to be outlawed. Guess the cyberpunks authors got it right after all.

I read TFA, and they're storing the data in the Bacteria's DNA. I assume there is a minimum chance of this happening, but if somehow the bacteria mutate and reproduce, perhaps with horizontal gene transfer, I don't know what could happen to existing species. What if suddenly one gene is changed and suddenly harmless bacteria become harmful?

Seriously, have they done a study on the safety of this method? Worst of all, we're not talking about a species which can easily be handled and captured if it ever escapes. We're talking about freaking bacteria.

RTFA. (Or the summary, for that matter). The oil there is produced ABIOTICALLY. i.e. from chemical reactions that have nothing to do with dinosaurs, OR bacteria. That, and the bacteria found there don't produce, but eat the hydrocarbons.

That's what this is. When he gets arrested, the news won't say "The swedish authorities have finally captured wikileaks founder Julian Assagne, using 'rape' and 'molestation' to get an arrest order".

They'll say: "Wikileaks founder Julian Assagne has been convicted for rape. " Then they'll make a story of how corrupted wikileaks is and how its founders are a bunch of criminals. Of course, I'm sure Fox News will add some spice to please the masses.

Not if you send a repeater system of satellites using laser communi- ok, that's it. I need a life.

Sheldon Cooper would disagree.

Good point. We might persuade them to name it in Esperanto. Libera-oficejo all the way! :D

The problem with H.264 isn't Mozilla. It's patents. The Mozilla guys are just being cautious (remember Unisys' GIF patent?)

About your anecdote 1, obviously there's bad management. That's what project managers are for, you know, to keep track of to-dos and if any of them require contacting the client. Arranging meetings, etc. Have you arranged that meeting yet? No? Well do it, now. How many projects are there? Does the company have a list of todos for each project? You know, like using Microsoft Project (TM) to keep track of each one of them?

The company I currently work for has weekly meetings for each single project. Don't get me wrong, these aren't "meetings with powerpoing presentations etc.", but operational meetings. How much we've advanced, if there are any problems with development, unknown bugs, need feedback, things that really concern us developers.

  As much as those meetings seem to be a pain in the ass, they're necessary to keep the engine going. Sometimes I've found that my approach to a certain project was going in a completely wrong direction. True, it's good to let developers work, but don't give them the full responsibility for the project. Programmers have so many things to work in that we lose track of things like customer support.

In other words, if a worker ends up procrastinating and delaying a project, here's some advice for the company: YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.

Sorry if this is a bit off-topic, but sometimes I have to get these things out of my system.

Scrap that. We need to protect the internet FROM them!

I was just thinking the same thing. Take a look at this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_semaphore

In the stone age, you can have fire. So with a little animal grease or wood, you can have torches. SO far, so good, right? Now, make up a good semaphore code and easily to transmit numbers. Maybe you'd need to use three torches instead of two. Hey, with a little rope, wood you could make a mechanism to make the torches spell binary. (Up: One, Down: Zero. Perhaps you need a "ground" torch to show the zero signal).

So what happens when you can easily transmit numbers over a certain distance? Assume you have enough friends with semaphore towers. You could transmit numbers over a really long distance.

But let's not stop there. Assign each tower a unique number and certain flags for "give me your id", "acknowledge", etc. Now you got a fucking protocol.

Now invent some signs to tell the operator to give the message to a certain tower's id. Now give the operator a series of tables (you can provide them stone tablets or something) telling which towers can send a message to which towers. Congratulations, you just invented routing.

Given enough operators and towers, and train the operators to handle the protocols, and congratulations! YOU JUST INVENTED THE FUCKING INTERNET.

How's that for stone age?