Perhaps, but the change would be kind of visible. It would be trivially easy to require concurrent events to be associated with the key change, e.g. have an SVP send an email stating, 'I confirm the new hash key is $FOO' to half a dozen senior technical employees. The odds of all of them being compromised is vanishingly small.

Writing phonetically for meter:

foreach dollar testkey in foo{
while input is not empty { do {
test result equals (hash lookup in sequel)
}}
if (test result's good) return true;

I've absconded without your signing keys dozens of times already. And I'm bloody skint. :-)

Yes, yes it is. The very first sentence of the summary says so. I think you win some sort of /. prize for ignoring even that.

Spoiler alert: The story is set in Iran. Turns out the bad guys are actually helping people get around their own laws because they get rich doing it.

They are, pretty much everywhere else in the World. It's ironic that the Legal Information Institute, the first attempt to collect legal materials online, is based at Cornell, but it's severely limited in what it can publish, because most jurisdictions can't or won't agree with the idea that cases, legislation and regulation should be freely available to anyone, any time. Free access to law is considered by some to be a basic right. But not in the USA.

Elsewhere, we have thriving online legal resources, including CanLII, AustLII, SAFLII, WorldLII, CommonLII, AsianLII. And my own favourite, because I worked on it for a few years, the Pacific Islands Legal Information Institute. Ironic, isn't it, that Fiji and Solomon Islands should have easier access to their own laws and judgments than that shining city atop the hill?

Practically speaking, 'during Good Behaviour' means, 'You can't fire this person for any reason but malfeasance.' In other words, there is no term of employment. In other words, it's an appointment for life.

This is where I think a lot of people have misinterpreted Hawking's point, and the nature of the problem itself. Not indulging in aggressive behaviour doesn't imply passivity. 'Turn the other cheek' doesn't mean what a lot of people think it means. It actually means that making the aggression obvious and one-sided (by making sure that everyone sees the second shot) ensures that the problem becomes obvious and usually gives rise to social opprobrium.

As I'm sure a smart man in a wheelchair would know, there are a ton of other options available to a resourceful person to keep someone else's aggressive behaviour in check. A lot of it has to do with making it clear that there's nothing to be gained (and sometimes, a lot to be lost) from indulging in chest-thumping etc. Historically, 90+% of politics has actually consisted of finding ways not to resort to blows while still getting one's way. (And yes, recent American politics is illustrative—in the negative—because it shows us what happens when people subvert the political process.)

On the face of it, that's a pretty useful thing. There's a pretty big fly in that ointment, though, because the whole node.js development environment is still quite young. It's improving by leaps and bounds, and happily, people are learning from others's experience and mistakes. NPM, Grunt and a few other tools make packaging and deploying Node applications easier day by day.

So while developers—and sysadmins especially—have every right to gripe about Node as it stands, it's clearly in the ascendant. JavaScript as a language is increasingly useful as well. I happen to hate how laden it is with syntactical salt and pepper, but I can live with it the same way I learned to live with Perl: I apply a little discipline and a lot of white space. The reward is a relatively workable mix of functional, OO and procedural logic. JavaScript is increasingly becoming the awkward, weird-looking kid who's actually kinda cool.

My feeling is that within a few years, most new web apps will have a significant Node component on the back end, and Angular (or similar) component on the front end. By that time, I expect we'll be saying, 'If you don't know JavaScript, Node, Bower, Grunt and NPM, you're probably not a web developer.'

And Java can go fuck itself. :-)

1. It has excellent support for supporting large scale installations, including centralized management for those users who don't really want to think about that stuff.

2. Really great developer support from the vendor, including free high quality IDEs and code examples to solve pretty much any systems programming problem you'll have.

3. A large developer community, making it relatively easy to get bespoke software.

4. Fairly painless printer setup (I'm looking at you Linux).

5. A large pool of ready made software to choose from.