about those torture memos with all this swine flu brouhaha, haven't we?

Ok, over the last couple weeks, several stories have made their way into the news about cybersecurity.

These stories overstate the threat, and, in particular, only serve to loudly announce things which are already well known. For example, the fact that DoD systems are probed continuously by the Chinese. But! That's always been true. Where were all the alarming sounding news reports last year? Two years ago? Ten years ago? Where was Jay Rockefeller's Senate bill, S. 773, which aims to restrict Internet freedom in the United States in previous years? We can all expect the media heat to increase even more as the public is whipped into a frenzy of fear, and then comes to accept that we need the Federal Government to restrict our Internet freedom--for our own safety, of course!

As these stories come through Slashdot, we all bicker amongst ourselves as to how grave the threat is. Or where it's coming from. Or how we might combat it. It's so predictable. And while we're distracted with these irrelevant (although admittedly interesting in some cases) discussions, Senate and House bills are moving through our Congress right now which I consider to be "Patriot Acts" for the Internet. Nobody is talking about those, though.

We get what we deserve when we demand nothing at all.

I read a book not too long ago called Higher Order Perl, which highlights how natural functional programming in Perl is. That's right. Perl has pretty nice syntactical support for functional programming, too. The object-oriented stuff is bolted on, clumsily, in my opinion. But functional Perl is just as natural as imperative Perl. I've been writing Perl for eight years, although much less in the last few years, but this familiarity makes the transition from imperative (or what most programmers actually do, which is combine imperative and OOP styles, esp. in languages where the OOP part is bolted on, like Perl and PHP) to functional pretty simple. I had meant to use functional Perl as a stepping stone to OCaml and Haskell. But now I'm having too much fun with functional Perl...there's just no way this can end well... =D