Don't worry, in 20 years your only choice will be google.
Think that's hyperbole?
http://fiber.google.com/about2
I'm a big fan of google right now, but let's see how long "don't be evil" lasts once Larry and Sergey have moved on, and MBA brain damage is calling the shots.
Answer:
When either one does viciously illegal shit, they get away without punishment, and somebody else pays the fine!
Can we please choose a role model for children in CS who is not ethically challenged?
Zuckerberg may have escaped arrest when he stole passwords to build his hot-or-not website (he should have been arrested), but he was clearly caught red handed.
Combine that with all the dishonesty and contempt for individual privacy he has expressed, and I would feel like a parental failure if my kids turned out like him.
This is the first thing you learn if you study biologically inspired design.
Dont just mimic the form of the system. Understand what makes the system work (how it functions and why that is effective), and copy that.
Its like early attempts at flying machines that flapped big wings, but of course didnt fly. The important thing wasn't the flapping wings, it was lift.
There are important principles behind what makes the brain work, but its not as simple as building a neural network.
Figures - I write a dozen thoughtful posts that get no love, but when I take a brain shart on a post, that gets the mod points.
Shill much?
Two anonymous cowards with IDs less than 1000 digits apart write anti-open source posts at the same time?
A lot of this depends on timing in the industry.
When I entered college, the infosec industry was just about to take off. I got out just after the dotcom bust, so finding a job was hard. Many people at local infosec companies had gone there instead of college, and had 4 years work experience.
Several of these people were not especially good at what they do, but just having 4 years experience at those companies launched their careers. Most of them inflated their work experience and technical skills on their resumes, and have moved on to director positions at smaller companies.
I would expect a lot of these folks will not be able to adapt to a changing industry because they have no background in theory, or meaningful technical skills outside of their late-90s apprenticeships. But they certainly had a head start.
In a down economy, it probably makes more sense to go to school while (if?) Things recover.
Why do people seem to think governments are the only threat to our rights in this space?
Large corporations already watch and log everything they can about you. Not just your metadata, but what you do (deep packet inspection), where you are (location-based services), what you buy (sharing all your transactions with "affiliates"), and what you say (facebook messages, etc).
What's worse, this data is all legally their property (at least in the U.S.), so they can basically do whatever they want with it, sell it, store it, give it to the government in exchange for favors, or worse. AFAIK, you cant even demand to see what they are keeping on file for you.
Their capabilities are not just passive, either. They can control what services you can access (now that net neutrality is dead), gouge you financially with little justification (credit ratings are based on proprietary algorithms), open you to barrages of advertisement, trick you into legal commitments you dont understand (do you have $500 to have a lawyer review that EULA?), and guess what? Government provides all the tools to enforce all of this. And you pay for ALL of it.
As long as we are using analogies from EU history, the government is a neutered king who lives far away and you rarely feel his presence. Big Business is the nobility who owns all the land, controls all the food, hoards all the money, and controls your life on a day-to-day basis. Like an indentured servant, you have no choice to participate and hand over most of the fruits of your labor. What are you going to do - stop buying things and stop having a job?
I'll head off one criticism of what I'm saying. This is not conspiracy theory, because there is no conspiracy necessary. This is a system, and most of what I've said above is just legal fact.
Unlike your government, you can not participate in corporate governance, you can't request meeting minutes under FOIA, internal rules and policies are rarely published. You have no voice except your dollars (and many industries are so anticompetitive you really have little choice).
Maybe big business has all this opportunity but doesnt take advantage of it. Do you think so?
Just to give a little context for people who do not live around Atlanta:
Gwinnett County has been a traffic ticket mill for decades. This is not Atlanta - it is an exurb of Atlanta where all the racist, faux-Christian whitebread people moved a couple decades back. All it really has going for it is two major highways running through the county (I-85 and GA-316). Several people I know have had bad experiences there, and I literally do not stop in Gwinnett County anymore.
This is also the place where Larry Flynt was brought to court on obscenity charges, and shot by a white supremacist who confessed but never had charges brought against him (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Flynt#Shooting).
Please don't confuse Gwinnett with Atlanta. Gwinnett is a shithole that has only strip malls, a thriving prison industry, a growing international population, and an entrenched set of racist white people who don't like the new international population and want to throw them all in jail.
Worst of all, this place tattooed "GWINNETT IS GREAT" and "SUCCESS LIVES HERE" on their ugly ass water towers. Here's a picture I found via Google, ironically on a blog called "stuff black people don't like": http://stuffblackpeopledontlike.blogspot.com/2012/09/success-used-to-live-here-what-fall-of.html (I haven't read the blog posting, but I'm white and don't like Gwinnett, either).
Make no mistake, this cop was ticketing people for texting solely so he could take all the brown ones to jail. This is the Gwinnett MO: enforce traffic violations heavily, and try to turn every traffic stop into a drug bust or driving-without-a-license bust.
Here, take a look at what Gwinnett has to offer: http://www.gwinnettmugs.com/
As long as Nvidia keeps crippling double-precision performance on their (non-Tesla) cards, I'll keep buying AMD.
One of the highlights of the GTX Titan was that the card did double-precision floating point at full speed, just like one of Nvidia's Tesla products. That's no longer the case here - the GTX 780 performs double-precision at 1/24 of normal rate, just like a standard desktop GPU.
The only interesting exploit is one that hasn't been patched, right? So anyone who discovers, sells, or buys an exploit knows of a vulnerability and is choosing not to disclose it.
By not disclosing a vulnerability, you are allowing others to be vulnerable. It's hard to argue that this is ethical behavior...
Here's an analogy: what if, for every nuke the U.S. destroyed, a nuke disappeared from every other nuclear arsenal in the world? That's what it's like.. by keeping a vulnerability secret, it can be used against anyone using the software. By disclosing the vuln, everyone can patch, disable, or protect the vulnerable software.
Real Programmers don't eat quiche. They eat Twinkies and Szechwan food.
