Even though the "conventional wisdom" is that the science of programming has entirely changed to consider security issues from end to end, in reality this does not appear to be the case at all.

I think this is a very interesting and valuable insight. The people doing the talking have completely sold everyone on a vision in which the coder keeps security in mind from the get-go, but the people doing the, uh ... doing ... are doing things the way they have always done them, and tacking on the security piece after the fact.

Is it that programmers in general simply believe that buyers are unreasonably paranoid? Or is it that planning for security throughout the process is too costly and time-consuming?

ME: Can you help me out here? I scraped a concrete barrier while trying to park my car.
REPAIR SHOP: Sure we can. That will be seven thousand dollars.

talented-musician/artist

Girls don't like poor guys.

I see what you mean. I cut out a bunch of text there and it shows. What I mean is that boomers looked at themselves as victims of "the system" and that attitude lasted long after they became "the system.

Boomers took a look at the structure of their culture, found it lacking, and abandoned all of it. They did not like Dick and Jane, and so instead of improving upon it, they threw it out, and Chaucer along with it. It remains probably the 2nd worst case of "throwing the baby out with the bath water" in civilized history, the first being the French Revolution.

Anything not meeting an immediate earthy need was discarded. It began with "what the hell do I need with Brahms? Brahms isn't going to get me laid." Before long it became "what the hell do I need with religion? Religion doesn't dazzle me like LSD does." Finally it settled into "what the hell do I need with regulation and social betterment? There's money to be made."

How can there be any wonder that our parents' and bosses' generation is so insufferably self-centered? I find it pertinent that we talk about this within a week of J.D. Salinger's death, as his Holden Caulfield can be very illustrative in teaching us about the kind of dysfunctional, disenfranchised individual who currently runs our world. As far as the Boomers are concerned, they have defined the culture through their rebellion, and discouraged us from absorbing the kinds of things that gave context to our surroundings. We had to find them on our own. The newest generation entering college now is so detached from context that they seem to be aliens in their own world. They are idiots of course, but I don't hold them to account for it. Their entire world has been scrubbed of context.

I'm in Generation X, and I don't pretend that we did everything right either. We made mistakes, like fetishizing exclusivity, and needlessly feeding the rage of others. Yet at the end of our troubled youth, we sat down, and we wrote about it, as a way of hoping to establish some kind of context. I am slightly comforted in knowing that the next generation, if they hope to understand us any better, will at least be able to read something by Dave Eggers or the like. What worries me is that the coming generation will not read any of it, because they are not interested, and will not leave anything of their own for posterity either.

Having just returned from abroad I can confidently say that the answer is "Er, sorry, no." Even if you have good grades and a valuable skill, there's still a possibility that you find your background as a dog walker grants you a dismissive understanding of evolutionary theory that exceeds that of biology PhDs, or that you will fight to the death for the human rights of a blastocyst. You're not worth the risk.

I swear to God, there is like 20 straight minutes of nothing but Wookiee language being spoken.

I was stoned when I saw it, and I think that made it even worse.

There is a kind of person out there who is absolutely sure, with no evidence whatever, that basic numerical logic can be applied to complex human phenomena such as government, philosophy, and peace of mind with great success. I suspect that they are probably correct, if your measure of "great success" is also measured purely by basic numerical logic, i.e. a few additional points of efficiency that amounts to pennies in the pockets of people who could have done without them. And what they get in return is the satisfaction of knowing that they have total and complete control over those few pennies, which will never be delivered into the hands of bureaucracies which are inherently evil for some reason. Good for them. I'm sure Libertopia will one day be a grand place full of happy people who are overjoyed by the glib and peremptory assholes who would control debate, but I dare anyone to determine how the end result is markedly different from a society utterly ruled by any other kind of fervent belief - see the delightful anecdote about what kind of things Haselton teaches his six-year-old daughter, as if there was nothing more to it than "government takes your money and kills children. Sweet dreams honey." I don't know how you're doing worse than this if you're sending your kids off to Jesus Camp. It's a kind of unquestioning faith in the unproven for which most churches would kill...and have.

Interconnectedness is a basic fact of life. There are human forces much stronger than the kind of processes you learn in undergrad logic classes. Some gracefully accept it. Some never grow beyond fighting it. If you are of the very solid and hardly movable opinion that what really matters in life, what's really going to change the world, is precisely how you argue points of logic and how you pick apart someone else's, you're decidedly in the latter category, in which case there's a lot less of philosophy there than there is pathology. It's for that reason that I look forward to my down-modding with equanimity.